SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

I hope you enjoy my incoherent ramblings. I’m too inconsistent for a journal so this is kind of me scratching that itch. A lot of the active threads on the board right now are either depressing or make me very angry right now so hopefully this isn’t like that for any of you.

The bullets on my story:

- DD 17/8/2006
- I’m the BH, rugwept after a few MC sessions.
- The trigger train left the station and lost it’s brakes late - - July ‘23
- Wife and I agreed to finally deal with it in September when it was clear that I was going to be an unregulated mess ofnemotions until we did.
- I now have a timeline, she’s in IC.

One of the hardest things about R, is even as it goes well I struggle with self doubt. My view of my marriage has been irrevocably altered and the grieving process for it is too…uncharted?

I have gained much long-awaited truth these past 3 months. That’s good because it lets me put the brakes on my overactive storytelling brain. I have resolved some of the questions about the affair that have tortured me since 2006. Communication in my marriage is noticeably improved. My wife is demonstrating empathy around this affair where before only shame, stonewalling and deception were to be found.

Overall, I’ve been rewarded by this process. I get a bit sad when I think about how many years were suffocated by the elephant in the room but I have much to be grateful that answers were even still possible to get.

One problem with undoing a rugsweep, particularly one this long, is you have to go back and face the music on the parts you skipped over. The grieving I intentionally avoided in the interim years has been hard. I don’t grieve well, I never did.

Another mental battle is the "good enough" question. Am I? Is my wife settling for kind-of-attracted, sort-of-happy and almost in-love? I don’t subscribe to the "unfulfilled needs" thinking but I also know that a satisfied person is hard to tempt. At one point she was easily pulled away from me, is she missing stuff from me? Would she tell me if she was? I can only hope so.

I have come to realise that I may never really feel "plugged in" to my W’s life. She has demonstrated over long years that she has the ability and the tendency to manage my perception of her life when she isn’t right here with me and to keep much of her inner world secret. She hasn’t really trusted me with the intimate details of her life for most of the marriage and has a tendency to manage what information I do get. I have to evaluate what part I play in failing to get that trust. I'm rebuilding here, some of the changes that need to be made are going to be mine to make.

I also worry that my pleading for honesty 5 months ago, where I warned that I needed her to be totally open with me about the infidelity this time around wasn’t taken seriously by W in time. I warned that she probably needed all the truth she had left to really build a new foundation of trust and that any TT or withholding risked "running out of truth", leaving me always wondering if I am still having my perception managed. Unfortunately I got some lies in November and I have to admit I haven’t been able to shake the doubt. My suspicious mind can find reasonable doubt in anything now I cannot prove conclusively. This is a curse I don't think I'll ever be free of as long as I live.

I’d love to hear from anyone that dealt with R well after the actual affair happened. What things were hardest for the BS and how did you resolve them? Did your WS change so much you let go of the uncertainties that currently still tug at my mind?

My WH lied about a PA since 1977. I had suspected and questioned it back then, he told me nothing happened. When he had another PA that I caught him in 2005, he lied about the one back long ago, too. Also lied about several others I knew nothing about.

This recent EA I just discovered, I told him he had exactly zero chances to tell me the entire truth. One lie, and I walk.

I finally have truth.

I think the wayward partner has to know and fully believe that the betrayed partner will absolutely walk away, and never look back, unless the entire truth is told.

My husband finally believed this. And I finally meant it.

Unfortunately I got some lies in November

If you’re still getting lies, your WW is not remorseful, and you are not in fact in R. You are still in white-knuckle limbo.

You said your wife was now empathetic. How are lies compatible with empathy?

My wife is definitely remorseful. She's in IC, reading and applying what she reads, posting here, reading here, checking in on me etc.

I really don't want to paint a picture that she hasn't been doing the work. If that was the impression I made in my OP, it was due to brevity and one-sidedness.

I want also to clarify: my issues largely stem from the rugsweep having me in bad patterns and living in my head for many years.

On top of that there are aspects of the disclosure that are an ongoing process because putting it together this long after required a lot of work. Dealing with things properly is harder when you do it so long after DDay.

Another mental battle is the "good enough" question. Am I? Is my wife settling for kind-of-attracted, sort-of-happy and almost in-love? I don’t subscribe to the "unfulfilled needs" thinking but I also know that a satisfied person is hard to tempt. At one point she was easily pulled away from me, is she missing stuff from me? Would she tell me if she was? I can only hope so.

^^^
I have been on your train for a long time (1999). Champion rug sweeping. Just over a year in R.

I too struggle with this. Brought this up in IC. He asked me, "do you feel like you settled?" WOW, was worth the session charge that day.

You are "good enough". I know the self doubt you have. You and your body are a lot older. You want to please her-great, a good husband should want that for his wife.

How about her pleasing you? What would make you happy? And tell her-write her a note or email-so you can go back to it and revise, and bring back up if you don’t get what you want. I think the documentation is better than verbal, so she does not hear the small stuff and miss the big picture. She can read the email over and over.

The proper question- "is she good enough for me?"

@goingtomakeit, thank you for the thoughtful response.

I have communicated what my wants are from my W. I assume they are fairly typical of BH's, sadly they are entirely things that are overshadowed by the affair, probably permanently.

From my marriage I have wanted respect, loyalty, trust and to be trusted.

Above that I used to and have hoped to return to feeling genuinely desired, as if I was a first choice object of her desire. Through my work and personal communication with other men I am aware this is an experience many men either never have or have rarely in their lives. Most women enter adulthood with this for a confidence boost but most men have to work extremely hard for a fleeting feeling of being desired.

When you get married you think at least this one woman has you as #1 in her sight. When a smooth talking dickhead peels her off and gets hot pursuit from your wife it shatters this illusion. This other guy was not only more sexually appealing to your wife, he was so much so that in a short time he captured her interest such that she betrayed you to get eith him.

None of this is helped by relationship coaches and psychologists promoted in the media, particularly female ones saying things like "don't take back a cheating woman, she'll see you as weak and never respect you again". Who do you believe, them or WW's that say otherwise?

Doubt. That's the enemy and so many aspects of the affair such as TT make ignoring that doubt irrational. You want to but you would be an even bigger fool than you felt at DDay to do so.

^^omg^^ exactly this!

My situation is similar. Cheating occurred 2015. I was aware they were too friendly and he had hidden a dinner and took far too long to get her reassigned away from being his secretary (she was forced out eventually due to meeting up with him to talk and me reporting it to HR).
Seven years later he revealed it was physical cheating. We had rugswept the incident. For the last year and a half have tried to recover. I also now have a timeline. I also still got a few lies — the last about a year ago. I have watched him come out of a fog but there are still moments when I fear he may slip back into fogginess. He has dropped many bad habits but I still see the avoidance at times. I still harbor persistent fears that there could be more I don’t know. What if it lasted a little longer than I think, what if he said things to her about me (he denies any insults), what if there were feelings (he denies this). I believe he never TOLD her he had feelings (just because the communication was so limited and there is a lot of evidence it was Friends With Benefits situation). But that doesn’t mean he didn’t THINK he had feelings for her.He says he used her for the hookups and had guilt about taking advantage, though she was offering herself up readily. It all still haunts me. I think the protracted nature of the trauma has left me deeply wounded. My healing has plateaued and neither of us is handling the lack of trust well.

I am finding the current situation incredibly difficult though neither of us has given up.

You’re right about the good enough worries. They come and torment. If we were madly in love and having sex all the time would this really have happened? It all hurts a lot still. I am hopeful more time will help but it feels like we are stuck and possibly causing more damage to the relationship.

I wish you well in your recovery and would like to hear more. It helps to know you are not alone in all this.

So, today at my suggestion my W posted in wayward side about her progress as a sort of giving back and to encourage waywards to engage more over there and a very angry BH (I assume but they have no story and no skin in the game I can find) ignored the stop sign and attacked.

My W is doing the work. This kind of thing isn't helpful. Every wayward isn't every BS emotional punching bag either. If that's all someone came to a place like this to do, they should really do some self examination, IMO. I bet they have made decisions they aren't proud of in life and would not appreciate if strangers attacked and shamed them while they were actively and vulnerably working on their flaws.

I invite such men to put up or shut up. Tell us your story so we can give you the tough love you seem to love to hand out even when or where it is explicitly not welcome. I'll wait.

T/J - UANL, I've alerted mods about the post. Once you hit 50 posts, you'll be able to use the PM feature and can them PM the Mods. You can also create a post with the title Mods Please.

End T/J