I've had to step back for a minute to try to figure out this thread. Let me start by saying that I agree with every word of Hellfire's post. Nothing in this scenario justifies 15yrs giving up custody of her children. At the same time, it's far from the first time I've heard hyperbolic demands on SI, and I've never seen it turn into speculation that the BS was a cheating, abusive psychopath. CT argued that of course 15yrs kept lying about the BJ, because she was afraid he'd react badly if she told the truth, and it turns out she was right. This made me feel like I was in some Twilight Zone version of SI. Since when do we mitigate lying because the WS only did it to avoid the consequences of the truth? Since when do we say that a BS is a douche or an insecure wallflower for feeling the pain of betrayal?
So I've developed a hypothesis. Usually, our membership tries pretty hard to validate that cheating is cheating, and whether it's physical/emotional/cyber doesn't create a hierarchy of pain. However, we all have our own private opinions of what makes one affair worse than another. Some of us could forgive a drunken ONS as long as there was no emotional component. One BH posts routinely that he couldn't have cared less about the EA aspects of his wife's affair, but he'll never get over the kinky sex. Most of us have probably eyerolled someone's story at some point in our years here. But usually, we are able to put these things aside and meet the BS where they are, even if we don't entirely agree on the severity of the offense.
The problem for OP's BH is that her affair intersects several common "less than" cases.
1. It happened before they were married. We have many posters who tie the severity of an affair to the violation of formal vows. It's one of the reasons that an unmarried arrival in JFO is almost uniformly advised to run. Dating is just an audition for marriage, so you're supposed to be lucky that the betrayal happened before things were "real."
2. OP was young. This is the prefrontal cortex argument, that no one that age can be held fully accountable for their actions because they lack impulse control.
3. The trickle truth didn't follow a typical escalation pattern. The BH already knew "the worst," that there was a PA with penetrative sex. A standard TT escalation goes from "it's not what you think" to "ok we just kissed once" in a sequential rounding of bases until the confession of the final score. The BH here knew OP and AP crossed home plate before he proposed, so some members may feel the intervening sex acts fall under the umbrella of that offense.
4. It was a long time ago. Because the BH has been aware of the affair itself for a decade, some members may believe the statute of limitations ran out on his right to relitigate specific offenses.
Not all members will agree that these cases reduce the severity of an affair, but there are enough of them to predispose a significant subset of the site to have that private eyeroll. So when that BH, in a triggered state, crosses the line on the custody issue, he doesn't have the same deep reservoir of goodwill that a more typical BH would have. Because his pain is seen as less legitimate, he is expected to behave more rationally; when he can't, he's cast as nefarious rather than traumatized.
My problem with this is that all the exception cases I listed also applied to my own A. If anyone thinks I don't know about those private eyerolls being applied to my own situation, I do. We both do. It's one of the reasons he rarely posts. But I can tell you honestly, he wasn't ramming his pain down my throat as an abusive asshole. He had the symptoms in van der Kolk's "The Body Keeps the Score" for years before either of us read it. And if you read about PTSD, you learn that you can't get free of it with time, or traditional therapy, or bootstrapping. My BH hated himself for being unable to recover, and I can't tell you the kind of damage it would have done to him to read a thread like this about himself after D-Day.
15yrs, you do have to protect yourself. There's really no way to know what the effect of your lies, gaslighting and TT will do to your BH's psyche long term, especially if he has a Wormtongue whispering in his ear on another site. You have to renege on your offer. My guess is that over time, he'll realize for himself that you should never have offered and could not honorably deliver. But for the moment, I can see why he's triggered by you promising something and then taking it back, like you have so many times before. That's just one of the many poor choices you made that you now need to pay for by enduring his distrust and contempt. But you cannot pay for it with your kids.
[This message edited by BraveSirRobin at 9:51 AM, April 30th (Friday)]