SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

I think Pogres advice is real good.

I admire your honesty Moonshot, it's good you are honest with yourself.

It's always a difficult situation to fear being alone.

I'm sort of in the same boat, I'm 40 and feel the same way. I have a fiancee who has cheated on me before, I'm trying to figure out if she still does.

A big part of what keeps me in the relationship, and trying to make it work is... at 40, will I ever be able to build something special again, with what we had? (We've been together for 8 years)

Thank you Sharkman,

You’re still doing the same thing. (I say this with love, you’re in a crappy enough position that even an anonymous internet poster shouldn’t be hitting you with 2x4s)

You’re explaining why she cheats, why the OM works for her, why her guilt pushes her there, why he needs her to be fun and sexy. None of that changes the facts. She is still fucking him, still planning a future with him, still using you as the safe place to land when he’s done with her for the night.

Stop analyzing her. Stop explaining her. Stop making her make sense.

I appreciate it, and your patient repetition of the main points is probably why I needed to come to a forum like this before handling the affair. I need to hear it, because I've spent a lifetime engaging in exactly those thought patterns. I'm an engineer. I want to diagnose and fix. This is not that situation.

The 180 advice is super useful. I need to take a deep breath because I am overwhelmed. I haven't eaten well in a week, and I'm visibly losing weight. Before reading 180, I probably would have been angry, self-righteous, and all the things it says not to be.

reidhbear - thank you for your encouragement. I feel your pain, as you know. I wish you all the best!

Hello all,

Update for those who are interested. I gave WS a variation of the sandwich speech, and that initially worked well. She went NC, blocked his number, and deleted it as a contact. She permanently deleted all archived messages to prevent her from recovering his information while drunk. She removed him from social media contacts. All of this was immediate. The OM tried to contact me to ask when someone could come pick up her stuff at his place, but I told him to donate it or throw it out.

WS confessed that everything I had suspected was, in fact, 100% true. She talked about being scared she had become so caught up in an infatuation that she nearly threw her whole life away. She was upset with herself for how much she had hurt me. So far so good.

Then we went out to dinner, and much of the conversation was about her trashing OM. This felt good and cathartic at first, but it was also a sign that she was getting fed up with him anyway. She mentioned that the last thing OM had sent her was a cryptic text about needing to "work on himself", so it seems he was breaking up with her. I can imagine that had I confronted WS a couple weeks ago, her turnaround might not have been so fast.

WS talked a lot about how she felt that she and I had trauma-bonded at the beginning of our relationship. We had both left abusive prior relationships. Our respective bio kids needed lots of help when they were young, mine in particular. My ex-wife re-engaged in a custody battle that took years to resolve at the beginning of my new marriage. My WS and I never had a honeymoon because our kids were little and I was drained of funds from legal matters. My WS concluded that we hadn't really dated properly back then.

(Note that in my mind this is actually false. I hired sitters, and we went places. What I did learn was that it was hard to do much more than spontaneous dinner/movie dates because her capacity for planned events was unpredictable. I remember one time I had planned an evening around a concert by her favorite band, Social Distortion, but we never went because she was hungover on that day. It wasn't a surprise; she knew about it for weeks. I concluded back that I'd have to improvise.)

WS stated that she didn't really know how to have fun with me. This is interesting because she didn't do anything special with OM that she could not do with me. The only thing I can't do is sing songs I wrote for her at open mic night, which was the hook that got her in bed with OM the first time. I think what she really means is that she doesn't know how to have fun with someone who isn't drinking and isn't able to be out until 1 AM on a Tuesday because he has work the next morning.

She said she wants to fall in love with me again. This really kind of ground my gears. There is an undercurrent of shifting the blame on me. I lived through those same things. I don't need to learn to fall in love with her. I never stopped loving her. I never stopped taking care of all of her needs. I stayed faithful. I'm not saying I'm perfect, that I don't need to address my role in her unhappiness, or that I don't need to consider how our relationship might change as we approach empty-nest status. However, the initial vibe really seemed to be that the work of repair is mostly upon me. OM is gone now, so who's gonna fill this hole of boredom now?

So the hard work begins. We're not out of the woods. We're not even halfway into them. But I guess we've started the journey.

I’m glad the Sandwich speech had the intended effect.

You’re right though - she needs to be the one leading the effort. Remember the point of the sandwich speech. You’re getting out. She needs to be doing everything to keep you from divorcing her. Don’t take D off the table (ever).

Make it clear that just deleting OMs contact information does not mean you’re reconciling. Make it clear that she has destroyed the marriage and she needs to figure out how to fix it. I’d tell her you don’t want to be married to someone who sits around nursing a hangover waiting to be entertained while you clean and cook and parent. Perhaps therapy might do her some good.

You may want to start a thread in Reconciliation, a lot of the folks who’ve done it successfully don’t visit here much because it’s triggering.

Her first steps need to be to start IC with an infidelity specialist and also to start in with AA. I would make these things non negotiable for trying to rebuild with her.

There are many other necessary steps but this is the starting point. Let her know that if she wants a chance at a life with you it starts AFTER she has started these items.

Moonshot

Seeing as how my "Sandwich speech" idea seems to have helped then maybe I deserve that you take the following into consideration:

A lot of what you share indicates that alcohol is abundant in your wife’s world…

I have extensive experience of dealing with addicts… Both professionally as a former LEO but also in personal life with close family members and friends, and as a volunteer helping young recovering alcoholics.

I wonder if your wife has a substance abuse issue – or in plain words: Is an alcoholic.

Hear me out!
The old vision of the drunk sleeping in the alley or your aunt that always created a scene before passing out at Thanksgiving is NOT typical of someone dealing with substance issues.
My wife’s best friend is a former/recovering alcoholic with over 20 years sobriety. We were shocked when she told us she was entering rehab, because we had never noticed anything. She would drink maybe 6-10x a year, but the problem was that when she started she couldn’t stop… She would enter a mode where she seemed fine, but had little control over her actions and impulses. More likely than not, she woke up beside some man other than her husband… (Ironically, they divorced some years later because of his affairs…).
She told us that she goes to female only AA meetings, and that her behavior is typical of the women there.

There are plenty of definitions for alcoholism. I personally think that one can differentiate between the physical addiction-based alcoholism and the psychological type (although I think most have both…) and think a good base definition might be "you might be an alcoholic when you drink despite knowing your drinking is likely to cause more pain than any joy it brings you". Basically – if I know that going to a bar will make me do something that will cause me, my wife, my kids… pain but I still insist on going to that bar… I have issues. Even if it’s a one-time per year event.

Ask yourself very honestly: How important, regular, often… do the two of you drink?
More importantly – how often does she drink?

Seriously consider that the both of you enter a temporary sobriety pledge. Like – "for the next 30 days we want to be totally present to focus on our marriage and therefore neither of us will have alcohol in any way or form for that period"
Then evaluate how hard – or easy – committing to that pledge was.

FWIW… I also think quite firmly that an alcoholic will always prioritize their drinking over anything else. This is why I arrested both dad’s and mom’s that were drunk when picking up their kids from daycare. Her ability to commit to that pledge will tell you a lot about priorities.