SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

IH is there somewhere where I can read your story in its entirety - what happened, what did she do, how did you find out, how did she react and now what is she doing. Sorry, I would like to get a better understanding.

Getting through infidelity is really hard, and second-guessing yourself along the way adds to the sandwich de caca that has been served.

I’ve thought some about how I got here, so tangled up for so long. She’s given me many reasons to believe in her, including confessing the affair to me with no real risk of discovery. She genuinely and truly is working on herself, has been for a while now. But she could not be mistaken for a "model former wayward" either. Call it breadcrumbs or maybe she just had a crazy amount of shit to wade thru, all Shashank Redemption like.

I write here a lot, I have no doubt it’s messy following my story. But I am trying to do the best I can by my kids, myself, even her.

How did her prayer retreat go?

Do you view that as positive or not?

[This message edited by straightup at 9:07 AM, Monday, March 11th]

Working on herself as fine but if she’s not expending effort on working on the relationship than she’s still just focusing entirely on herself and her needs/wants.

So many BSs—myself included— wait for the WS to heal themselves in the hopes that we will eventually get our turn. And then our turn never comes.

How did her prayer retreat go?

I don’t really know. But I’d like to.

Do you view that as positive or not?

I do, she is retreating to her faith (and I mean that in a good way), and I can’t but see that as positive. But it’s no silver bullet to me, it’s not as if she ever declared that she was abandoning it in exchange for shit head.

IH is there somewhere where I can read your story in its entirety

My story is scattered around here in many long threads. And for as much as I’ve shared, I kind of prefer that small blanket of privacy. I have no interest in my kids ever finding this. If you want the Cliff Notes version, maybe PM me and I can catch you up.

[This message edited by InkHulk at 6:49 PM, Wednesday, March 20th]

Working on herself as fine but if she’s not expending effort on working on the relationship than she’s still just focusing entirely on herself and her needs/wants.

So many BSs—myself included— wait for the WS to heal themselves in the hopes that we will eventually get our turn. And then our turn never comes.

I know this is a possibility for me, and I’m sorry it is a reality for you. It’s a long, grueling, fucking awful road to come back from this, and I’m sure that BS’s an WS’s step off at varying parts of the journey, and I have no judgment for them in that.

I carry as many of your stories as I can in my head and heart, reminding me of possibilities and hazards. When I asked you about yours, it was never to invalidate your perspective, but to better integrate it into my process. Thank you for sharing it and all the warnings, they are valid, this is a hazardous path I’m on.

You might need to give OG some pointers on how to be inspirational without the downside.

[This message edited by SacredSoul33 at 4:39 PM, Monday, March 11th]

LOL SacredSoul... I just shot coffee out my nose...

Womp womp.

How is it at all fucking possible to have this much fun talking about infidelity???

Well, like Dolly said, laughter through tears is my favorite emotion!

If given a choice between laughter and tears,
I'm choosing laughter any day

Working on herself as fine but if she’s not expending effort on working on the relationship than she’s still just focusing entirely on herself and her needs/wants.

I rarely post on IH's threads, but I just want to say that if a WS doesn't figure their shit out they aren't ever going to be worth much to their partners.

It's a weird and hard thing to balance for sure.

But a WS going deep into themselves is probably the only way to authenticity.

I don't think any betrayed should lose sight of that. You can't ask someone to figure out their why's and transform how they love and relate and then bemoan that they spend time doing it.

Again, IH's and every other betrayed spouses needs have to be addressed as well. But somedays it's about you and somedays it's about me. That's just how it goes.

IH holds the trump card. He can end it if her journey is too slow or not meeting his standards. But I'm not convinced that a WS doing a deep dive on who they are and what they have become is detrimentally selfish. It has to happen.

My grandmother, 10 years gone now, was the biggest influence on my character. She lost my grandfather in her mid 60s and then rampant osteoporoses set in, making a veritable hunchback of her. She became depressed, cursed her bad fortune, was a misery for a couple of years, and crawled her way out. When my parent’s marriage imploded she was there for us more than anyone else. She lived to her mid 90s, almost blind by that point, happy and beloved.

My grandmother used to say age either makes you worse or better, or something like that. She had seen both. She had chosen the latter.

I view religion the same way. It can be a powerful force for keeping the blinkers on. It can be a powerful force for the exact opposite.

IH’s wife should, by rights, be out of chances. But I really do hope she uses everything she has to hand to climb back up. L

TheEnd:

I rarely post on IH's threads, but I just want to say that if a WS doesn't figure their shit out they aren't ever going to be worth much to their partners.

Generally speaking, this is true, but in InkHulk’s case, all his WW’s efforts are completely self-focused and she’s doing very little to help InkHulk or even meet him halfway. Ever since Dday, InkHulk has been trying single-handedly to save the marriage. What little progress she has made is almost entirely due to his efforts.

InkHulk, I’m confident that if you decided to tomorrow to stop talking about your feelings and never speak of the affair ever again (eg, rugsweeping), your wife would be totally cool with that; furthermore, whatever "work" she was doing on herself would completely stop because she would no longer need a pretext to avoid rebuilding your relationship. She would love nothing more, I’m sure, than to return to the comfort of the status quo.

If it turns out that I’m totally wrong, awesome. But the only way you’ll find out for sure either way is if you let go of the outcome.

[This message edited by BluerThanBlue at 3:13 AM, Wednesday, March 13th]

IH is there somewhere where I can read your story in its entirety

This question crossed my mind again last night and I had the thought to give a pointer back to my JFO thread. And then I laughed when I realized with all this discussion of song lyrics on this thread that I titled my first ever thread "Another One Bites The Dust". 🫅

This question crossed my mind again last night and I had the thought to give a pointer back to my JFO thread. And then I laughed when I realized with all this discussion of song lyrics on this thread that I titled my first ever thread "Another One Bites The Dust".

As I came in somewhere in the middle of the "InkHulk story" I was compelled to go back and read this initial thread. I just read it over lunch. Wow….seeing your initial naïveté (how do you paste and respond), pushback on Polygraphs (that ironically led to that inevitable "more to the story" disclosure) and also your first encounters with HF and WBFA was truly fascinating. It was also somewhat heartbreaking in that without even knowing how the story would turn out, it was pretty easy to see how it WAS going to turn out…..I’m truly sorry you have been and still are dealing with this mess.

BUT the biggest irony of all for me is the guy who hates "Rock Opera" used a Queen song as his introduction! They literally have an album titled "A Night at the Opera" and that includes the most operatic rock song of all time (Bohemian Rhapsody)! Hmmmmm…….

It was also somewhat heartbreaking in that without even knowing how the story would turn out, it was pretty easy to see how it WAS going to turn out…..I’m truly sorry you have been and still are dealing with this mess.

While I appreciate your sympathy, I cannot align with the idea that my fate was sealed from the beginning. That is too close to an "I told you so" for me to take laying down. My wife and I have both had choices to make from them til now. You can add my story to the log book, but it is not just a Groundhogs Day tale.

BUT the biggest irony of all for me is the guy who hates "Rock Opera" used a Queen song as his introduction! They literally have an album titled "A Night at the Opera" and that includes the most operatic rock song of all time (Bohemian Rhapsody)! Hmmmmm…….

What can I say, I’m a complicated man.

While I appreciate your sympathy, I cannot align with the idea that my fate was sealed from the beginning. That is too close to an "I told you so" for me to take laying down. My wife and I have both had choices to make from them til now. You can add my story to the log book, but it is not just a Groundhogs Day tale.

Sorry to be unclear. I DON’T think your "fate has been sealed from the beginning" and your overall story has yet to have an ending to it (although you may feel headed in a direction in your heart and mind). I wasn’t even around then (and as fate would have it, I was in the midst of my own multiple D-Days, trickle truths and outright lies at the EXACT same time) so I have NO place to say "I told you so" about anything within your journey to date. Even when I see tragedy coming and the victim doesn’t, saying "I told you so" is not a place I like to go.

What I meant was in the "episode" contained within that initial thread had a "predictable outcome" (things had been going on much longer, 1 instance of sex was a lie, the old HS acquaintance didn’t "just happen" to be in the Hobby she pursued, he was the REASON she pursued the hobby, etc.). Unfortunately, I have learned this by similar things happening to me and reading countless other stories where this same plot with slight variations continues to unfold to this day. And though we all have unique stories with multiple decisions, plot twists and turns, it DOES sometimes feel like the plot of one shitty movie (Groundhog Day) on endless repeat when one reads these stories on here! You’ve seen them yourself and much as people try, sometimes the "train has to go off the tracks" for the BS to truly understand what they are facing. That what I meant by being both heartbreaking yet predictable.

I hope this provides some clarity on where I was coming from……