Originally Posted by Yail
You are looking at your H as if he is your H. You are seeing someone you may or may not be with in the future, and you are trying to figure that out, and how he fits into that role you see him in and if he is doing the right or wrong things.

Who is this man in front of you? Who is this person, ignoring ALL titles (husband, father, friend etc.) and your titles as well. Who is this real person in front of you with emotions and a life as deep as your own?

I say stop looking at his actions as things you should respond to, and try to see who this person is with fresh eyes every day, and try to learn something new about him through your observations.

This is harder than it sounds for me, I think. So much of my reason for standing is about H's role as the father of my children, and what it would mean for them if we split up. That was my driving force all along and I was able to manage/shove down a lot of the feelings I had about what the infidelity meant for me personally, because I was so fixated on doing everything I possibly could to protect them from D (and selfishly, to avoid giving up any time with them).

It was also the part that I could understand the least of H's actions. I could see how the A could have happened, given the issues with our R, H's personality, how good it must feel to have an AP who is head over heels in love with you and thinks everything you do or say is AMAZING. I think I shared when I snooped and found some text threads early on, before it was something serious (I think he moved it over to WhatsApp when it became an EA) and she was just pushing every single button for my H-- listening to a podcast he was on (which I was guilty of never doing), wanting to set up a call to ask him for career advice, sending flirty selfies. Gross. But also... understandable.

What I never, ever understood is his willingness to pursue the A to a place where it could have affected the children. I'm reading on some of the newer LBHs' threads about that same bewilderment, that a parent would do something so drastic to a child and pretend it is NBD. Yes, I know children are resilient and they'll all be just fine if you handle the situation appropriately... but for most kids, this will be the biggest disruption of their lives. What he will say is that-- he didn't do it. He got to the very edge of leaving. Had a great apartment secured. And looked over the edge and decided he couldn't do it. And he's here now. (He says this to me a lot. I'm here. I'm here. I'm here.)

He thinks it is not really fair for me to be angry with him for something he actually didn't do... but I am angry, angry that he considered it, angry, really, that he put me into a place where I had to consider it too, and build out custody plans and rethink what retirement might look like and worry about health care and imagine what my life would be life if my girls didn't jump into bed and snuggle with me every single morning. These things were never on my radar screen of things I needed to worry about. It feels like a wound to me, a hole inside, that I had had to come to grips with the idea that my girls wouldn't have a HOME anymore, but mom's house and dad's house. (Again. I'm not trying to say these things are not perfectly okay and kids don't deal with this perfectly well and two Christmases isn't better than one... I am just saying it was really hard for me to wrap my head around it, and I think I would have been perfectly happy in my life to never have had to think this all through.)

So.... peeling back those labels is hard. The husband/friend labels are easier, because the things he did are not things that a husband does, or a best friend does. But the father-of-my-children label will be hard for me to get around (possibly because if that label was taken away, I don't know that I'd still be here.)

He wants this of me, btw. He wants me to listen to him and understand him as a person today, not the person I met 17 years ago. I know he thinks I stopped seeing him as a person a long time ago. I told him that when I had that breakthrough in Feb 2019, the weekend away where I got my sex drive and love for him back, what happened that weekend was that I saw him again as a person, not just the husband-father labels I'd been slapping on him, and that somehow dissolved all the built-up resentment I'd carried for years.

He's actually been angry about that experience, in fact, too little too late-- that finally I was ready to reengage with him sexually after he had moved on (I did not know about the A at that time), and he felt like the weekend was one where we got a lot of stuff out in the open and were moving towards D. This continues to be a source of difficulty for both of us, resolving how we had such different takes on this one shared experience.

So I will work on this and think on this. We talked last night about setting some ground rules of engagement though nothing about what those might look like, whether it is we don't talk about R stuff at all for another couple months or we do set aside a regular time to talk and what topics are OK for now and not OK (I am not OK talking about his feelings for AP, still). Maybe we do end up having some non-A related conversations about each other, not our R. I honestly don't know if he is capable of doing the same for me-- understanding ME as a human being, not the mother of his children and impediment to his A. (Blu, you talked about this earlier, and I truly don't know his capacity on this front, though it makes me sad to say that.) Truth is also that this whole experience has been so encompassing for me, I feel like I'm in the process of re-figuring out my life in light of this knowledge and how it has affected and changed me-- so I don't know that I can talk about who I am or what I want outside of the context of the A and the trauma I feel like I'm still experiencing, to some degree. I don't believe he's in a place where he really wants to hear and understand that part, how much I've been hurt, yet.

Originally Posted by Steve85
May, hang in there. It is very difficult to get over infidelity, even when we think we can. I've told about an uncle that cheated on my aunt when I was young. She struggled with it for years. Still does and it has been over 35 years! I think what happens is we see the OP as competition, so our competitive nature kicks in. We aren't going to lose to another person taking our spouse!

Then when we win, we are left with the after effects. Dealing with that properly is important. I forget, are you in IC?

I am, have been since July; H now for almost two years. The IC though just is running into some trouble with our insurance and is pausing sessions (she was going to pause anyway over the holidays as she doesn't have child care). So no IC at least through the holidays and may need to find someone else.

Wooba, Blu, Gerda (yay!)-- thank you also-- I will respond more later to your thoughts as I need to chew on them a bit more.

xx M


Me (46) H (42)
M:14 T:18, D9 & D11
4/19 - 12/19: series of escalating BDs
9/20 - present: R and piecing