SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Thank you sisoon for the post. Very interesting, I looked up limerence, as I had never heard of it. Thank you for the information.

I love my husband.
I don’t have that fluttering feeling anymore of excitement, I don’t feel special anymore , and I don’t respect him like I used to.

I don’t know how to explain it but I know he is a flawed human like all of us but he hurt me deeper than I think anyone else can. He made me feel like nothing , lower than low and that isn’t love. When I was giving my all to him he kept taking and then giving to someone else.

I don’t know if I’ll ever be "in love" with him again, right now I’m striving to respect him and like him again and we will see what follows, maybe I’ll end up being ok with just that or maybe we will fall back in love again, I try to take it day by day.

He loves me more and I love him less now. Funny how that works.

I’ve been wanting to comment on this particular thread since you posted, but was trying to think of how I wanted to phrase my response. Here is my take on it.

I would say my entire life I had being "in love" as the highest calibre of love - there is no love more powerful right? However, infidelity has changed my perspectives (on so many things)… to me (now) being "in love" is to obsess over that initial affection and attention and how that makes you feel "in the moment." I think you can only truly love someone when these "butterfly feelings" are gone and you can appreciate who the person is standing in front of you, knowing they (like you) are a flawed human.

Loving someone isn’t necessarily a feeling to me, but an act of choosing to stay with someone regardless of having "lost" certain feelings. Even before my H’s A, I knew I wasn’t "in love" with him the way I used to be and I thought the towel might as well be thrown as I no longer possessed those butterfly feels. The love we had/have? for each other transitioned over the years to something more deeper and personal then "in love." My decision to stay and work on my M with my H is because (deep down somewhere) I know there is that deep love waiting to be rediscovered.

Thank you Groot1988, I agree with your statement, " I don’t have that fluttering feeling anymore of excitement, I don’t feel special anymore , and I don’t respect him like I used to."

I feel the same and it sucks! I actually feel the same with your whole post. He definitely loves me more than I love him. I sometimes wonder if it is fair to either of us to live like this, but the alternative is worse, I believe.

Your second paragraph was well said, Heartbrokenwife23. Thank you. I appreciate your thoughts. I am struggling because we are lopsided. He definitely, at least now, loves me more than I love him. I hope this love I have for him is enough to sustain the rest of our lives together. We are both 53. I hate that I don’t respect the man I married anymore. Thank you!

I feel the same and it sucks! I actually feel the same with your whole post. He definitely loves me more than I love him. I sometimes wonder if it is fair to either of us to live like this, but the alternative is worse, I believe.

This perfectly describes what I often find myself thinking

I didn't get the ILYBINILWY. What I got was "I don't love you. And maybe I never have". After 13 years of marriage and two amazing daughters. He then left his children and I for his new girlfriend, who he had know for around 4 weeks. I thought I was going to die of a broken heart.

I think it was the sudden abandonment of us, and seeing my girls utterly confused and devastated, that is what I cannot recover from. I'll never know because he hasn't done the work. My eldest (then aged 10), a normally very happy, innocent, immature-for-her-age, girl sobbed and said "I wish I was dead", when we told her he was leaving. Every part of my soul crushed.

We have been trying to R for over two years now, but he continues to make me hate him more and more, with his selfishness, his victim mentality, and his entitlement - that he never sees at the time and always has an apology at the ready after. I don't love him. I care about his wellbeing as the father of my children and someone I have known for a very long time. But he has brick by brick dismantled our home, our marriage and any feelings I had for him. All gone. And now he's really sad, and desperate for us to work. Well done, asshole 😞

I used to worship him and had him on a pedestal for years. I feel I gave him every part of my heart. In all of our years, I never thought about another man, sent a dodgy message or anything in the slightest. He was the apple of my eye, and no one in my mind could compete with the most wonderful man on earth. I felt so lucky and had such devotion for him. It's a shame he repaid me with years of lies, seeking validation from other women, an emotional affair whilst I was pregnant with our youngest and eventually abandoning his loving family for a near perfect stranger.

Im not sure what the difference is between being in love or just loving someone. But I do think so long as you still have any kind of love for your WS, you can reconcile and love can grow. It can certainly be enough. Take it from someone who doesn't have that 😘

[This message edited by WhiskeyBlues at 8:07 PM, Wednesday, November 13th]

Groot1988 everything you write feels like it could me me 😢

I don’t respect my WH, I don’t think I love him and I most of the time don’t even like him. I thought I told him some of this, but I’m not sure I really have. I’m just waiting to see how I feel in a few more months or so bc I’m only 7 months out. We had only been married not even two years when he started his first affair and so our marriage quickly deteriorated- I just had no idea why- so we don’t have a huge foundation of love to work with.

Oh, I also meant to agree that the fucking irony is that he is sooooooo in love with me now. I do just keep saying "you mean now?" When he says he loves me or says promising things to me 🤮

I've always asssociated the concept of "being in love" with the butterflies feeling, getting happy when seeing, stomach lurching when you think of them, and a fair amount of unconditional lust. This seems like an emotion that, like all emotions, comes and goes, even in a LTR.

The idea of "love" as a permanent fixture I see as a set of decisions, conditions, shared history, and loyalty, none of which wax and wane like emotions do. This idea seems more akin to a value, almost like a deeply held religious belief, which is attached to the identity and doesn't change regardless of what happens or what one is feeling in the moment. This permanent love doesn't carry as much in-the-moment emotional capital, but its upheaval can be far more traumatic and repercussions long-lasting, because of its integrated nature.

Both of these can have different gradients of quality and strength. Neither of them relies on the other, and one can be present whilst the other entirely absent.

Dandelion2024 I’m so sorry to hear about your H affair(s)? so soon after marriage. I hope you are seeking some counseling or guidance. If you are not in love anymore nor do you like H, make a choice that will make you happy. I am struggling with this same thing and we’ve been together for 34 years, married 27. It sucks!

There seems to be a trend with wayward spouses loving the betrayed more now than before…. Is it guilt love? What he/she might have lost love, or I’m an idiot love? I have been thinking of asking my WH why he loves me. If I learn anything interesting, I’ll post about it!

Mindjob Thanks for the post, interesting thoughts. I’m worried that my come and go love has mostly gone. Can I consider him a friend and live out the rest of our days together? To be determined….

IDK ... I think some sort of love can come and go, but I doubt that's the kind of love that can sustain an M that I would want. Perhaps one way to say that R can work is:

At the end of the A, my WS realized she could not and did not love herself or her ap, but she did realize that she got a glimpse of love - of herself and of another - with me. She decided to make whatever changes she needed in order to learn to love herself and me.

The focus is best placed on 'She decided to make whatever changes she needed to make in order to learn to love herself and me.'

I do think there is a difference. The feelings of being in love and loving someone. I realized at the end of my M I felt nether towards my xWS. The ironic part is that a lot of WS's will proclaim the "I love you but not in love with you," and then when the WS decides they want R and feel in love with BS again the BS feels not in love with the WS anymore.

Have I told my WH that I don't love him the way I did in the beginning?

Yes, I did.

I felt he needed to realize that when we first were married, he HAD my true love and devotion. When he decided to cheat repeatedly on me, I lost that "feeling" of true love.

I do love him, but I will NEVER be able to say I love him like I did the day we were married. I will NEVER be able to fully trust him, and YES he has lost my respect. He has to live with that, just like I have to live with what he did to us. It hurt him to realize this. The truth in the aftermath of his lies and horrible way he treated me is the truth I must live with daily. I think he got the better deal!

12many24give, yup, yup, agreed. I’m so glad that others feel the way I do. I can never love him like I did. He killed that love. I too feel like WH got the better end of the deal. It is sometimes why I question why I am R’ing with him. I know he thinks about it, at least he tells me he does, but I KNOW he doesn’t think about it as much or like I do. Thanks for your thoughts.

Gently, you're less than 2 months out, possum. Your thoughts and feelings will change rapidly over the next few months and more slowly after that, though I don't know how they'll change.

I've thought about this a lot during my 59 years together with my W. Relationships, even great MS, change over time. They MUST change; otherwise they wither and even die, even in the absence of a traumatic event like an A.

My feelings for my W have changed. It's been 14 years since the A. I sure didn't want it to stay the same.