Hello, everyone. I’ve been sitting on the fence for a while now, reading other people’s stories and hoping to find advice that I could use as well. I finally decided to jump in and share my story too, maybe someone will have advice for me.
I’m sorry this is such a long post – it’s a long story, and even summarizing it “briefly” comes out several pages long. Anyway I assume that my future posts would be shorter, but this time I have the whole long story to explain.
And so - H and I have been together for 40 years, married for 38. We have 3 grown kids.
About 30 years ago, H’s work started to involve a lot of travelling. It’s not just a job for him; the work involves training and mentoring of others in his profession, and he is considered a “big expert” in his field – very flattering for him. Due to the mentoring part, and due to the teaching of various communications skills that are part of the training he provides, some of the clients (especially the female ones) will sometimes ask him for advice on their personal problems. In most cases he helps them without getting personally involved, and has helped quite a few people in this way to solve personal problems or to get along better with their families or significant other.
But in some of the cases, he does get personally involved. It took me a long time to find this out, because over the years when I would see something that looked suspicious, he would always wave it away with a lame excuse, and of course I would feel like some kind of paranoid for suspecting an “innocent” H. Then, in May 2005, I got a call from the husband of one of our business associates, who had found email correspondence between my H and his W. My H and this guy’s wife had been having a PA for at least 6 months. I confronted my H, and I finally managed to get out of him an admission (on condition that I would not reveal this to OW’s H) that it had actually been going on for 5 years – i.e. practically the whole time that we had known OW. H claimed that this was the one and only time he had ever done anything like that, and I forgave him on condition that he wouldn’t do it again.
From time to time after that, I would sometimes encounter suspicious things, and H would again just wave it away with his lame excuses and make me feel paranoid. For example, in the spring of 2006 I discovered some personal emails between him and some of our female clients; he got angry that I was “snooping” (actually I had been doing some administrative tasks in our business email account and found these accidentally) and he claimed that there was nothing going on, he was just “talking to them in a friendly way”. The emails didn’t have anything explicit, but they did seem like they were on the way towards a developing EA. Or, one time I noticed a folder (locked with a password) on one of his USB flash drives. The folder was named after one of our past clients, with whom we still have occasional contact. I asked him, “why is there a folder here named after so-and-so?” and he didn’t reply, but just asked me very angrily, twice, if I had opened it. (Of course I hadn’t – it was locked!)
During this time (from 2005 to the present) I told H from time to time that I need him to be more open with me if he wants me to be able to trust him. He didn’t seem to care about me not trusting him – I suffered tremendously from the feeling of not being able to trust him - feeling stupid for not knowing about the 5-year PA (because if OW’s H hadn’t called me I would never have found out), and feeling both stupid for continuing to believe H, but paranoid for suspecting him – if you know what I mean. I’m sure that this feeling is well-known to many on this forum. From time to time I would try to talk to H about it, but he would deny everything and get angry at me for suspecting him. I told him that I felt like a ship drifting in a sea full of icebergs, never knowing when the next one would hit; but he didn’t care.
During the past few years, H started to have problems with impotency; and gradually this led to a SSM. He would come home from a business trip, and although we would spend time together in general, weeks could go by without him touching me in any way. If he did occasionally initiate sex, he didn’t always succeed. I did everything I could to be patient and encouraging, telling him that I realized that he comes home tired from all the travelling, and he shouldn’t be embarrassed if it doesn’t always succeed. I even told him that I wasn’t even asking him to “perform”, that even cuddling together was fine with me. But most of the time he didn’t even do that, and I just felt so rejected by him not even approaching me. (And in the meantime, I wondered – is he ignoring me because he is getting it elsewhere?) Eventually, I got him to ask our family dr for a prescription, and that has helped, although I still get the feeling that he thinks he is “doing me a favor” to have sex with me. e.g. when he initiates it, he doesn’t begin by approaching me or anything, he asks me (usually on a Saturday morning) whether he should take one of the pills. I understand that he wants to be sure I am “available” before he does it, because each pill is like $20 and we don’t want to waste them, but the way he asks makes it sound like he is only doing it as a favor to me. He says that of course he wants it too, but he is so “polite” about it – not insistent, like he used to be when we were first married.
Anyway - last summer, when doing some housecleaning, I found some letters that H had received from some female clients in the 1990’s. One of them (the one whose name was on the locked file on the flash drive – I’ll call her OW2) had sent several love letters and a very explicit Valentine’s Day card, another one (OW3) sent suggestive pictures of herself, and another one just wrote about her problems with her elderly mother and her siblings. (I’m not sure whether the 3rd one was involved in an affair with him or was just one of those who occasionally asked his advice about personal problems.) After this I again confronted H, and he claimed that this was all ancient history and there is nothing going on between him and these women for at least 10 years. I pointed out that we are still in occasional contact with OW2, but he said that the PA between them was over a long time ago and the only contact between them now is for business reasons.
Of course, all this time H was very secretive about his email, never allowing me to look at it. (After I found the emails in 2006, he changed his password.) From time to time I would try to talk to him about this, and he would claim that it is just that his privacy is very important to him, because when he was a teenager his mother would pry into his personal affairs and tell all her sisters about it. (Another lame excuse.) And that there is nothing going on (of course) and I would need to take his word for it. In the meantime, I read a few self-help books. One of them was “Not Just Friends”, which had so many parts that I identified with. I tried to get him to read it too; after a lot of begging and pleading he agreed (unwillingly) to read a few small parts of it, but I could see that he wasn’t really taking it to heart, it was more like “ok, I read those pages (without paying any attention to them), will you stop nagging me now?”. I read DR about a year ago (I didn’t share that one with him though). Also I found some good articles online by Peggy Vaughan, about what needs to be done to restore trust after infidelity, and (again after a lot of begging and pleading) got him to read some of the main articles. But even after he read the articles, he didn’t change anything. Whenever I would try to talk to him about what he needs to do to enable me to trust him again, he would just listen without responding (like someone waiting for a thunderstorm to pass, so they can go back to what they were doing before) or he would claim that nothing is going on and he “doesn’t know what I want from him”. I told him many times, that a person who has nothing to hide, doesn’t need to hide it. But it didn’t faze him.
Then, this past Feb (after repeated discussions and begging and pleading), I finally got him to agree to show me his email. He gave me the password and I spent a whole night (after he was asleep) going through them. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack, but I’m good at research, and let’s say I found a whole pincushion. And it turns out that I was not paranoid. There were emails there from 2008 to the present, and even though a lot of messages had obviously been deleted, there was still plenty there. Including, at the end, a message to OW2, OW3, and a few others that “from now on please write only to xyz (a new email address) because I am about to allow my wife full access to this address.” (I think those might have been in the “deleted” folder.) Also there was a message to one of the women (I’ll call her OW4) arranging to meet the following week “at the same place we met last time” while he is on his way to his next business trip. (Just a note, when I had asked him regarding the 5-year affair that I knew about, why he had been unfaithful – he said it was because it was “so lonely on the road”. But in this case, he had been home most of the time for 2 months straight, first due to the holiday season, and then local business in January that didn’t require travelling. So this was going to be his first weekend away after we had been together for 2 months and he was already arranging someone else to spend it with.)
Until that time, I had assumed that he was just pursued by admiring female clients who idolized him as being “the big expert” and “the great mentor”, and that it was difficult for him to resist the temptation and flattery. But after reading the emails, I realized that in many cases he was the initiator – i.e. that he would start out by advising them on their personal problems, and gradually develop a personal and then physical relationship with some of them. Obviously not with all of them – most of our past clients didn’t ask him for personal advice at all, and some only asked for brief one-time advice; but this modus operandi of hitting on our clients happened with enough of them to have several PA’s going at any given time.
I was both crushed and furious, and I confronted H the next day, and told him that I was not willing to continue like this; my anger finally shook him up and he said he would stop “cold turkey”. He wrote an email to each of the current OW’s (those to whom he had written the previous day regarding the new email address – there were 6 of them) that the infidelity was causing an internal conflict for him, and he is breaking it off and returning to his wife. There was also another recent client with whom he had started to correspond in a sort of personal way, and he wrote to her saying that from here on they should correspond only about business (if at all, and as needed) but not about personal matters.
I checked his email for a few days after that (both the old one and new one – I insisted on getting the password to that too) and most of the women didn’t reply. But OW3 wrote a long email saying “I am shocked and confused. We no longer have a sexual relationship. What do you see as wrong about us? What has happened to make you say this after all these years?” and then she went on to bash me with accusations that are completely opposite to reality: “You were put into a very unfair situation in your marriage and you did the best you could to be responsible to your family and also remain sane. Your wife has never been fair to you and you shouldn't feel any guilt. From the beginning she picked through the marriage taking what she wanted and leaving you cheated and unfulfilled. A man can only be expected to endure so much. Most men would have divorced her but you stuck it out. Please talk to me. I care so much about your happiness and I am coming to you as your loving friend, since the sexual part of our relationship that you are feeling guilty about no longer exists.”
I was really crushed by this, because it is the complete opposite of the truth. For the past 38 years I have been a loving, devoted and faithful wife, but H did not always reciprocate. And for the past 30 years, my “career” has been, to promote H’s career; to raise our children and take care of our home and family when H was on the road most of the time; to manage our office and also to be available 24/7 for anything H needed (such as – “my car is making a funny noise, can you find a dealer in the next town on my route, who can fix it right away?”) Not to mention emotional needs, if he was feeling down or discouraged or upset about anything, I was always there to encourage him and cheer him up. I was always everyone else’s “cheerleader”. But nobody was ever there for me. If I needed encouragement or cheering up, most of the time he would criticize me for “always getting depressed”. (Ok, sometimes he would say things to cheer me up, but I couldn’t depend on it like he could depend on me to do it for him.) So everything she was saying there was the exact opposite of the truth – I had always been there for H, he had not been there for me. If anything, I am the one who was “put into an unfair situation” and who was left “cheated and unfulfilled”. I had given everything for him – all my time and energy, while he wasn’t there for me physically or emotionally, often criticizing me and making me feel worse when I needed encouragement. And the way she patted herself on the back for being a “loving friend” – what had she done for him at all? As if her giving him occasional free sex was such a big contribution, compared to my 24/7 loving and constant attention to all of his needs. I confronted H about this, and he said that he had never told her anything about me that would make her think these things (yeah right!) and it was all her imagination.
Anyway I insisted that he not leave this hanging, but would write to her saying it wasn’t true, and he did – he wrote: “My decision is not because of you. I got up this morning and I saw the light, and I decided to make my life a lot saner and complete. My wife has been a very good wife, partner, and friend to me and I am very sorry I didn't act accordingly. I plan on doing my best to save my marriage... I love my wife and I care for her and I am terribly sorry for the way I acted. I wish she will forgive me. I wish you the best, just that I cannot be for anyone other than my wife. Please accept my decision and forgive me as well. Also, please consider this email as the last one from me, as I cannot go back to the way I acted."
After this she wrote again, but we agreed that he would not reply to her anymore.
In the meantime, OW2 also wrote, saying "I am sorry for the problems that I know you must be going through right now. It must be really bad. Take some deep breaths. You will get through this. You will come out on the other side stronger and better and wiser. I care about you and want you to be better." (Actually a letter like this could be taken either way – e.g. a friend could write these same words to encourage H to rebuild our marriage. But I think that OW2 is saying the exact opposite, i.e. she means that I am “the problems he is going through” and she is the solution. Even though I have met her and spoken with her as a friend, before I saw the letters she sent H in the 90’s.)
Since that time (in Feb when I went though his emails and we had the confrontation), H has agreed to talk to me a few times about the past, and answer some of my questions. But on the other hand, these conversations are few and far between, and nowhere near the amount that I need. When he is travelling and working, he puts in long days and is really exhausted in the evening, and I know I can’t impose on him then, even for important business questions. And if he comes home for a week or a weekend, he doesn’t really want to talk about it, and how can I jump on him with these discussions and “ruin the good feeling of being together”? Sometimes, if I even ask to have another discussion on the topic, he gets angry, claiming that I am “just trying to make him feel guilty”. Even though I have explained to him repeatedly that this is not the case, I am not “trying to make him feel guilty” but just trying to make sense of what happened, and to undo decades of deception by learning the truth. Or, he asks “why are you always rehashing this?” As if the few discussions so far could possibly be sufficient to undo years of damage, and why can’t I just let him sweep all the rest under the rug? And even if he finally agrees to talk about it, he “stonewalls”. He claims that he “doesn’t remember” or he answers in really general terms that don’t really answer the question I asked.
Also, even though he let me see those past emails, how do I know that I can trust him now? For all I know, he might have opened another new email account and still be corresponding with these women, or others.
I don’t want to throw away a 40-year marriage. If not for the multiple A’s, I would want to stay with H because I do love him and he has a lot of good qualities. I want to save my marriage and I want him to be faithful and to reciprocate what I have given him. I want him to be supportive and encouraging towards me, as I have always been for him.
But I just feel so discouraged. While he has his admirers and fans (all of those adoring clients, both those with whom he had affairs, and those who just admire and flatter him), I don’t have anything like that – all I have is him, and sometimes I just feel so discouraged and worthless. Even though I know, logically, that it isn’t so – I know that I have done a lot of amazing things in my life, both for our immediate and extended family, and for our business, and for other people in our community. In recent years I have also been doing tutoring, helping school kids with their math and science homework, and I know I have done a lot of good in helping the kids feel better about their abilities. So I know, logically, that I am not “worthless”, but I just feel that way when I think about how for all these years, my own husband was so nice to all those other women, and often not-nice to me. He doesn’t hesitate to yell at me if he’s not satisfied with something, but I’m sure he never yelled at them. And in the emails, he wrote a lot of romantic things to them, that he never said to me. (He claims that he “didn’t mean it and just said what they wanted to hear”, which I don’t believe, but even if that were true, why didn’t he do the same for me?)
There is nobody among my friends or family with whom I could share these feelings, because I can’t tell them the real reason I am feeling down and upset. Not just because it would shame him in our family and community, but also because most people, like my friends and family, who have not experienced infidelity, assume that infidelity equals divorce, and they would not be able to understand why I am not abandoning the marriage immediately.
So I really have nobody to talk to about this, and nobody to encourage me, unless H is in a good mood and “kindly” says some nice things. And even when he does, he says it in such general terms, that I get the feeling he is just saying it to pacify me, not because he cares. Then there are the other times when he is not in a good mood, and he gets angry at me for “rehashing the past” and I just feel so attacked. I have spoken to a DB counsellor a few times, and she has really helped, but I can’t afford to have conversations with her as frequently as I would like.
So I finally sat down and wrote out my story, and maybe someone here will have a good word for me, to help me get out of this bottomless pit. (And no, I don’t want to take medication, as a matter of principle I want to use my mind to feel better, I don’t want to be drugged into feeling that way.)
Yes, I know the usual things, such as GAL, and I am doing that, and it helps somewhat. But it’s not enough to help me quickly enough, and I’m just feeling down and discouraged in general. I don’t feel depressed all the time, it comes and goes, but when I do start to feel down, I just feel so unwanted and undesired and worthless.
I must admit, I only got about halfway thru your long post, but I think I pretty much got the gist of it:
Your husband is a serial adulterer, and refuses to end this behavior and be fully transparent with you (at least without you hounding him about it).
The question is, what are you going to do about it? What are you WILLING to do about it? You do realize that his current attitude about it all is because he's pretty much been able to return to the marriage each time in the past, without any real consequences from you, don't you? I mean, you'd cry or get angry or beg or plead, but I'm not seeing where there's ever been any real meaningful consequences for his destructive behavior. Because of that -- and because he's probably a narcissist personality to begin with -- he's developed a VERY strong sense of entitlement and even INVINCIBILITY, and I highly doubt he even thinks he's in danger of losing anything meaningful to him at this point.
What ARE your true, core dealbreakers? -- your "N.U.T.S." as it were? I like to call them "My Boundaries of Personal Integrity," and with most married people, one of them is "I will not live in an open marriage," or "I refuse to share my husband" or "I refuse to make a priority someone who treats me like a convenience," etc.
Without these, you will find yourself adrift, like the proverbial "frog in the pot of boiling water" story, and then suddenly you wake up, look back at your life, and say to yourself "What was I THINKING???"
Put another way, would you have even CONSIDERED marrying a man like this, if you knew he was capable of this? Now that you ARE married to him, why should you tolerate it now?
I would seriously go to C for the both of you. This will show you how serious he is about staying with you. If I were you, I would also say that this is a good time for you to stay scarce. Since he's had so many affairs, his paranoia about you having one will be at an all time high. This is what's going to be the catalyst to get him to stay.
I now you want things to go quickly but it doesn't work that way in long term relationships. There are issues he has that took years to build up. They can't switch overnight.
M-43 W-40 2D - 9 and 5
Emotion, yet peace. Ignorance, yet knowledge. Passion, yet serenity. Chaos, yet harmony. Death, yet a new life.
1) Marriage counseling - you both really need to see a good counselor, if he won't go, that might be a dealbreaker for me. He's gotten away with this for so long, he might not take you seriously unless you take some action, but the first step would be to insist on counseling.
2)See if he will attend SLAA (sex and love addiction) twelve-step meetings. He'll actually find out he's not unique, others struggle with these same issues and CAN be helped (I have a good friend who goes for her love addiction issues, but she has mentioned guys who are there for exactly these kind of sex addict behaviors).
3) Start reading about sex addicts yourself (Pia Mellody has some good books). I don't know for sure if this is your H's problem - maybe he's just a jerk or a narcissistic sociopath - but reading more about these things may help you figure out what you're dealing with.
4) Take charge of your finances. Make sure you know where every penny is, the status of every credit card, etc. Men who are addicts in one arena, may be hiding other things as well such as gambling, credit card debt, etc. Make sure you protect your financial future.
5) This is not about you. Your H told those women whatever stories he thought would get them to sleep with him. He would have been long gone if he'd actually wanted to be with one of them.
6) Think carefully about your own life - if you don't feel confident to tackle it on your own, what can you be working on so that you get to that point? I am not suggesting that you give up on your marriage - but no one should stay simply because they don't have a full life on their own. Develop your full life, with YOUR friends, doing activities YOU like - then you can decide whether your H still fits into that, and whether he's willing to do the HARD WORK to keep you in his life.
7) From here on out, trust your instincts. He's been gaslighting you for so long - now you need to start trusting yourself.
thanks to everyone who replied. I feel a lot better knowing that you are out there and I am not alone - sort of like after a wound is bandaged. I know that it will take a while to repair/heal, but at least I know it is in the process.
Starsky - those are good points about the "N.U.T.S". I will start to work on that.
also very good point about the "entitlement" and "invincibility". I need to find a way to show him that this won't work anymore. but on the other hand - I really am timid about it, because I know that if we would split up, I would be alone (I'm 59 and not getting any younger) but he would be surrounded by admiring female fans, regardless of his age.
MrB - I will look into counselling. but due to the logistics, it might not be possible. also, in the past there were times when he agreed to go to counselling, but wasn't willing to take any advice! just to try to convince the counsellor why he was right and I was wrong! I can't imagine him behaving any differently now. if he did accept a counsellor's advice, that would be great, but it is so out of character for him. he is accustomed to telling people what to do, not to be told.
KML - thanks, I went to the library yesterday and got some books by Pia Mellody to look through, although I don't know if he is actually "addicted". it's what I thought when I first saw his emails in Feb, but after some reading (e.g. www.recoverynation.com) I think he is not actually "addicted" and doesn't need a 12-step program, he just needs to learn how to keep his hand out of the candy jar. more like what you and Starsky wrote about him being narcissistic. I would also say "spoiled", because he wasn't like this when we first got married. I think it happened gradually due to being surrounded by admirers.
I'm the one who does the bookkeeping for our family & business, so I am able to keep track of our finances. unless he has a credit card that I don't know about? how could I find out? on credit reports, they "encode" the information and it's difficult to know what card they are referring to. same story with - maybe he has a cell phone I don't know about.
but since our credit reports always come back ok, I don't think he has any outstanding debts.
I am not so much concerned about him leaving me for someone else, because he seems to be a "cake eater". he knows very well that none of them would be the efficient 24/7 support system that I am for him. (and on the other hand, there is a limit how much I could boycott him on this, because often it is necessary for our business. but I could limit my help to things that are necessary and not just for his comfort.)
I will pay more attention to the things I enjoy doing that don't require his presence.
one of my problems is - because of his long working hours, we are able to talk or see each other only according to his schedule. so I need to be available when it works for him, not necessarily when it works for me. e.g. to be available to talk (usually by phone or IM if he is travelling) when he finishes work for the day, before he goes to sleep, exhausted, at 7-8 pm. or, if he cannot come home for the weekend, sometimes he wants me to travel to where he is. and it is nice that he invites me, but sometimes it is a hassle for me to travel like that. my feeling is that if I "make myself scarce" then he will use that as an excuse to get the companionship from someone else (as he has done in the past). I am glad that he "wants" me, but I shouldn't have to feel that I am replaceable if it is not possible or convenient for me to be there for him. I never tried to "replace" him with someone else when he was away.
I don't post much anymore....and I am usually upbeat, but your story hit many cords with me. It definitely sounds like your husband has a sexual addiction problem to say the least. The key being is it is HIS problem.....not yours.
The question then really becomes what are you going to do about for YOURSELF? Can you live in this world where your husband has an issue. And this issue goes way beyond just a general affair....it is almost a sickness.
I see the similarities to the man my wife had her last affair with. The look for a specific personality type that is also looking for advice. Then the page gets pushed a little bit each time to see how far the seducer can go....a slow process and very thought out. This is often accompanied by statements about how bad the cheaters spouse is...How horrible they feel in their marriage, etc. Basically laying the blame for anything that happens on the unsuspecting spouse. Of course then their is the other half of the affair who has a whole world created in their mind that isn't the truth, but they will believe it.
What has happened with my wife's OM...He begged his wife to return home, played the reconcile game, and within three months was prowling for another woman. This continues to this day were he has even called my wife again....among others.
IT is a sickness by the sounds of things and in the end you need to protect YOURSELF.
Ok, here is an update – and some journalling, I guess.
First, I don’t know if H’s problem is actually an addiction, or just a combination of narcissism and doing what he feels like with no regard for my feelings. But even if it were an addiction, I can’t see him ever participating in a “12 step program”. It’s not his style. Just as an example, when our dr told him he needed to change his diet drastically due to high cholesterol, he went and did that without outside help. I helped him figure out a workable diet based on our dr’s recommendations, and he has stuck to it, even though he had to give up some of his favorite foods. But I can’t see him ever participating in “Weight Watchers” or any other “program”. It’s just not his style to “join a group” for something, and the “12 step programs” also involve the humiliation of admitting the addiction, etc. He would never do that even if it was an addiction – and, I’m not even sure it is one. So we will have to scratch the idea of a “12 step program” as “maybe a good idea for some, but wouldn’t work here”.
On the other hand, counselling could work – but only if he would agree to actually follow the counsellor’s recommendations. The only question is how to get him to do that. i.e. – 1) to agree to counselling, 2) to follow up and actually participate in the counselling, and 3) to actually do what the counsellor recommends. My feeling is that if he would do all that we wouldn’t even need the counselling - because he wouldn’t do any of that to begin with unless he had already decided to completely abandon his previous behavior and make our marriage (and me) his priority. And in many ways (as shown by his stonewalling when I ask him questions about the past) he is certainly not there yet.
Anyway, update for this weekend – on Sunday morning I am going to be driving a few hundred miles to a national park, where I will join other amateur astronomers in showing a solar eclipse to the public. This is something that I have been planning for a very long time, because there are only two solar eclipses in the US in this decade – this one, and in 2017.
I have been active in our local astronomy club for about the past 10 years. We often have “star parties” where we bring our telescopes to a school or other public place, to show beautiful sky objects to people and explain what they are seeing. And I really enjoy it, first of all because I find astronomy to be fascinating; and also because it’s really rewarding to see people’s enthusiasm when we show them these things through our telescopes. You see teenagers saying “wow!” and adults telling us that this is the first time in their life that they’ve actually seen a galaxy, or Saturn’s rings. And people have also told me how much they appreciate that besides showing them these things, we also explain what they are seeing in the scope.
But H has zero interest in astronomy. So if he happens to be at home on a day when our astronomy club is having an event, I need to choose between going to the event, or staying home with him – because he certainly isn’t interested in coming to it. And that is sometimes a difficult choice, because he travels so much and isn’t always home. In fact, in some cases he might have travelled very far to be home with me for the weekend, so then it would really be rude for me to just go out and leave him alone. But, the astronomy events are the one time when the focus is on me. Usually the focus is on him as “the big expert”, and I am “wife of the big expert, helping out in the office”. At an astronomy event, I am one of the “experts” explaining to people what they are seeing in the sky.
Now, this weekend, H wasn’t planning to be home. He was supposed to be driving a long distance to get to next week’s job location. But that job was cancelled for next week and postponed to a later date, so H has an empty week. (For simplicity, I’ll talk about L1, the place where he was working last week; L2, the place where he was supposed to be next week; and L3, the place where he needs to be right after Memorial Day. L2 and L3 are pretty close to each other, but both are pretty distant from L1. All three are quite distant from our home.)
So last week he was in L1, and this weekend he was supposed to be doing some very intensive driving to get from L1 to L2. But now he doesn’t have to go to L2, so he has a whole week to get to L3. Our plans for Memorial Day weekend are, that I am going to travel to L3 and we will spend the weekend there together, because if he would come home for the weekend, he wouldn’t be able to get to L3 in time. He needs to be already there.
So yesterday when he finished last week’s job, he wrote to me – “I was thinking, since I don’t have to drive to L2, I can come home for a day or so before heading out to L3. I wouldn’t be able to be home for the weekend, but I could get there by Sunday afternoon.” (This means – he is offering to drive an extra 1000 miles, just to spend a day or two with me at home.)
But I told him – Sunday afternoon I will not be here. I’ll be at the national park showing the eclipse. (Ordinarily, I would not have replied that way. If this were an ordinary star party, I would have cancelled and said, “ok, if you are coming, I will stay home”. But this is an eclipse! I have been planning my participation at this event for the past few years.)
So he said, “Ok, have a good time, I’ll just start driving to L3.” I told him – just a minute, if you were willing to drive home, why don’t you drive to the national park and see me “in action”? Suppose I played a musical instrument and was giving a concert, would you stay home because you’re “not interested in classical music”?
He wrote back right away that he will be happy to see me “in action”; he thanks me for the invitation and was even thinking of suggesting it himself, before I wrote about it. So I am going to be at the eclipse star party at the national park, and he is coming to see me there!
Now, this might seem like something small. But basically he offered to drive about 1000 miles out of his way, just to spend a day or two with me at home; and he then revised that to drive the same long distance, not only to spend a day with me, but to also participate in something that is important for me, and not important at all to him. In fact, even somewhat boring for him, except for the fact that I am involved. So I guess that’s worth something.
On the other hand, counselling could work – but only if he would agree to actually follow the counsellor’s recommendations. The only question is how to get him to do that. i.e. – 1) to agree to counselling, . . .
TT,
First of all, I think your stargazing stuff is WAY cool!
Regarding the above quote, you don't "get" people to "do something." That an ULTIMATUM, and it's controlling. You can only let them know what YOUR boundaries are.
A simple example would be to say "I forbid you to see this other woman!" (ULTIMATUM)
Instead, you should say (if this is indeed true, which is why I wanted you to do some soul-searching about what your core values are): "I cannot remain in a marriage where my husband is still having contact with someone with whom he's had an affair" (or whatever). That's a BOUNDARY.
since I last wrote, H and I have had ups and downs. sometimes he is “nice” to me (e.g. if I pretend nothing has happened in the past, and don’t ask him about it, we can have good times together). and sometimes he is just not nice to me. sometimes he can be reassuring and sometimes just hurtful for no reason.
the problem is, I still don’t know whether I can trust him. he says he is not seeing any other women – but he also said that in the past, when he was actively having multiple affairs. so how can I know if he is telling the truth now?
he still refuses adamantly to answer my questions about the past. I haven’t pressured him about it, because I realize this is a sensitive point with him. (some of what he did with the OW’s was apparently “kinky sex” and he is embarrassed to talk about it. or at least that is what he says. anyway I am not pressuring him on that for now.)
instead I have tried to concentrate on at least getting empathy from him – with mixed results. again, sometimes he will be reassuring, and sometimes say things that are very hurtful.
last week we finally had a conversation about what I am feeling, and he said some nice, encouraging things. I want to be reassured by this, and I want to be able to trust him, but how can I be sure about it when he is away from home so much and has so many opportunities? since he travels for his work, there is no way for me to know (short of hiring a PI) if he is spending the weekend alone or with a “guest”.
while thinking about this, I went back and looked at one of the IM conversations we had in the summer of 2011, soon after I found the old letters from several OW’s. here are some of the things he said at that time:
“I am more than happy to share my life with you.”
“I am really willing to cooperate with you to rebuild the trust between us.”
“I also want to fix our marriage. I love you and I respect you.”
“I am willing to share with you more about myself.”
“I want us to go on into old age together.”
“I really want to do my share to put this stuff behind us.”
when I wrote "I am willing to forgive the past, as long as I know that it is all in the past and not continuing”, he replied "Yes. Just in the past."
so that’s reassuring, right?
the problem is, I later found out that when he wrote those nice things, one of the OW’s was right there in his RV spending the weekend with him.
even though I have access to his email account and cell phone records, he could easily have one (or more!) email accounts and cell phones that I don’t know about.
so how could I possibly know if I can now trust him?
