How can it ever be ok again? How can I respect myself if I act like everything is ok? How can he respect me if I don't respect myself?
Pearl,
I can empathize with your struggle, I really can. Based on my own experience, I would only tell you:
1. You don't need to act like everything's okay in order to reconcile.
2. He WON'T respect you if you don't respect yourself.
3. Agreeing to reconcile and work on the relationship does NOT necessarily have to equate to "Pearl doesn't respect herself."
How can it ever be OK again? Here's the secret:
IT CAN'T -- not within the paradigm of the OLD relationship. That one's dead, and while you both did things that made it ill, his decision to have an affair finally killed it.
But you CAN build an entirely NEW relationship, one that's based on a "new Pearl" and a "new xBF". Whether or not those two are compatible remains to be seen. But thousands of others have done it. It requires a ton of hard work and forgiveness, but it CAN be done, and the BEST news is, that many, many people report that the NEW relationship is far better than the OLD one.
