SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Male - in relationship for 28 years. 18 years ago (10 years into our relationship), my OH confessed to being unfaithful over a period of the preceding 5 years, with multiple partners. We stayed together, had two kids now in their teens. I've never got over it. I managed to conceal my true feelings, hurt, humiliation, inadequacy etc, and deal with it, until recently, but never really got over it. But over recent years I find myself obsessing over it, literally daily, 24/7 it's on my mind. And I can't help ask her questions, scrutinise her accounts of events, and often find implausible her accounts. It's dragging us both down, but I don't now what to do. Concede defeat, accept I'll never get over it, separate and free us both, or what's the alternative? I love my family, my kids in particular, family life looks happy. How do I make us all genuinely happy though?

I will be honest with you--in my many years of being here, and listening to other people's stories, it is extremely rare that the couples have a healthy reconciliation by avoiding the issue. I don't know if you tried to sweep your wife's affair(s) under the rug, but that is kind of the vibe that I am getting. One member used to use the analogy of taking a deep breath of poison....and holding it in for the next x amount of years without exhaling. In the meantime, it erodes, decays, and destroys the inside.

Be brutally honest with your wife. There is no statute of limitations on her infidelity. If you need answers to process thoughts, then that is what you need. And if your wife is really sorry for her past actions, then she will want to give you the answers you seek...even if it hurts. That is the difference between a spouse with remorse versus one who isn't---they are willing to put your well-being in front of their own. They want to help you heal, even at their own discomfort.

Is your wife willing to do this?

I try and discuss it, ask for details etc, but she just won't entertain it. Shuts the conversation down.I find myself now, 18 years later, digging for detail and finding inconsistencies. I never thought I'd feel like this 18 years later, that's 18 years since she confessed/i found out, nearly 28 together and 2 teenage kids. For the first time in those years, I'm starting to think maybe I should be planning an exit. Not now, it feels like a bad time to leave for the kids, but is there ever a good time/age? They're both in high school.

If she won't even discuss the issue, I'm afraid you have little choice but to plan your exit.

Ultimately, she betrayed you multiple times. Many people wouldn't have shown the understanding and grace you have by staying with her. Frankly, given this, she should be offering you absolutely anything you need to heal; she's the one who created the wounds.

Reflecting on the Past

Consider these crucial questions:

* What happened at the time of discovery?

* Do you feel she did any work back then to help you move past it?

* Why did you decide to stay?

* Was she truly remorseful back then?

* Did she have any consequences? Perhaps social fall out, or things you imposed on her.

All of these are relevant to your current situation.

Looking to the Present and Future

I'd also ask: Are you certain she's been faithful since? If you haven't gotten to the root cause of her serial cheating, it's generally unlikely that people just become moral and faithful without doing the necessary work. Especially serial offenders. Especially especially... If she had no consequences.

[This message edited by DRSOOLERS at 7:05 AM, Thursday, July 17th]

Welcome to SI, WandaGetOverIt

Your pain is felt and heard, for nearly all of us, at some level, are or have been where you are now.

….but I don’t know what t do. Concede defeat, accept I’ll never get over it, separate and free us both, or what’s the alternative? I love my family, my kids in particular, family life looks happy. How do I make us all genuinely happy though?

Conceding defeat is an option. Accepting you’ll never get over it is an option as well. Separating is an option many have taken, staying together is one as well. But having the power to make someone else happy, that is tricky if not impossible. I have little faith one can do the work for someone else.

Be kind and patient to yourself WandaGetOverIt for you and I think most of us, are all amateurs at this stuff.

Hello, Wanda. Welcome to SI.

Your "years later" story sounds a great deal like mine, but I am the WS. My BH (boyfriend at the time) and I were college students in an LDR when I developed a crush on the guy across the hall from me. Over the course of several months, I broke boundary after boundary and eventually developed a full blown affair. I finally ended things with the OM and realized what a terrible mess I had made, and I was tempted to hide it. However, this was at the height of the AIDS crisis in the US, so I realized I had to come clean to my BF because of the health implications.

The next time I saw my BF, I confessed to the sex and "I love yous," mostly expecting him to break up with me. I was prepared for anger, but not devastation. I immediately started trying to limit the damage. I decided that BF needed to know about the sex because of HIV, but he didn't "need to know" that it was a planned event on a weekend getaway. He didn't "need to know" that I spent almost every night in the OM's room, or that OM actually tried to propose to me in the last days before the end of the A. I convinced myself that these were irrelevant details because I had given him the highlight reel. The decision in front of him was whether he wanted to break up with me for having sex and love for another man. He knew that I had, so I justified hiding the rest.

It sounds like you have a deep understanding of how cruel and flawed this logic was. It's not possible for information to be simultaneously so inconsequential that it doesn't need to be disclosed and also so damaging that it could end the relationship. However, WS are excellent at that kind of pretzel logic. Meanwhile, my BF knew that OM wanted nothing more than for BF to put a foot wrong and drive me back into his arms. I was apologetic and supportive for a few months, and then I started to run out of patience, asking if there was any point in tormenting each other if he was never going to forgive me. BH panicked and rugswept, and a few months later, we got engaged.

There are many other details to how this evolved that I'm leaving out (the old timers here know what they are) so I can stick to the part that is most relevant to you. My BH did not recover as the years passed by. We got married, had kids, and built a life together, but all that unprocessed pain was brewing under the surface. It became particularly strong at times when he was struggling with something else in his life, like issues with his father or a period of job loss. Anything that prodded at feelings of loss, insecurity, or inadequacy ripped that wound open again. I was unaware of this. I knew he had periods of depression and anxiety, but I thought the A was in the rear view mirror as the decades stacked up.

In 2018, my BH decided that he couldn't hold it in any longer and started asking me questions about things that had never added up. He knew me well enough, especially after 30 years together, to know that I was not the type to suddenly fall in bed with someone else. There had to be more to that long ago story that I was leaving out. I panicked. I had spent those years burying the truth, trying to hide it from myself as much as him. The girl who prepared herself to be dumped at the time of the original confession was now a middle aged woman with enmeshed finances and three kids. Telling the truth felt suicidal, and so I doubled down on the lies.

I can't tell you what your WW is thinking, but I can tell you these things from my experience with my husband. You need and deserve all of the truth. Your pain is valid. If I had come out with the truth -- every last bit of it -- 35 years ago, then my husband would have had the agency to make an informed decision about marrying me. He might still have ended up regretting it, because it's impossible to know how the journey will end when you're just starting out. But until I finally let go of the outcome and told him everything, 8 weeks after he started asking in 2018, healing simply was not going to be possible.

I hope that you learn from the collective wisdom of SI and get the support you need. The most important thing my BH learned was to forgive himself for his pain. It wasn't water under the bridge, it wasn't irrelevant, it wasn't any of the self-blaming things he told himself about how long it had been or how young we were or how he should be over it. It was a chronically infected wound that needed to be cleaned out. Now he has a scar, but a scar is far easier to live with.

WandaGetOverIt,
That's not easy, 18 years! You could tell her you need 20 minutes a week to ease your pain and talk? Set a timer. I read somewhere (here?) that a woman and her husband sat naked, knee-to-knee, to talk. She claimed naked worked somehow. Maybe shorten up the time to 10 minutes if doing it naked.

Good luck. I rarely post, but noticed your name & mine (notOverIt) are similar.

"would have had the agency"

My EXWH took away my agency with his lies very early on in our marriage.

Had he been truthful and done the work to become a truly safe partner, things might have turned out differently.

If I was guessing, there is something fundamentally different between people who maintain long term lies with intimate partners and those who are willing to face the discomfort of honesty. I think both people doing the hard work gives hard-won results.

WandaGetOverIt

But over recent years I find myself obsessing over it, literally daily, 24/7 it's on my mind. And I can't help ask her questions, scrutinise her accounts of events, and often find implausible her accounts. It's dragging us both down, but I don't now what to do. Concede defeat, accept I'll never get over it, separate and free us both, or what's the alternative? I love my family, my kids in particular, family life looks happy. How do I make us all genuinely happy though?

This truly resonated with me. I am approaching antiversary number 3 of Dday and I still have this gnawing feeling that somethings are not adding up. It is on my mind like all the time, like there is some untold pieces that she thinks i "don't need to know". It is honestly killing me inside and I don't know what to do with it. If I bring it up and question it, I am going to feel like she is still lying, and then I have the mindfuck of 'what if she is actually telling the truth'. Then I feel like something maybe wrong with me. Of course when you get the truth after a million lies, how are you to know the truth is the truth.

BraveSirRobin

In 2018, my BH decided that he couldn't hold it in any longer and started asking me questions about things that had never added up. He knew me well enough, especially after 30 years together, to know that I was not the type to suddenly fall in bed with someone else. There had to be more to that long ago story that I was leaving out. I panicked. I had spent those years burying the truth, trying to hide it from myself as much as him. The girl who prepared herself to be dumped at the time of the original confession was now a middle aged woman with enmeshed finances and three kids. Telling the truth felt suicidal, and so I doubled down on the lies.

Do you think you would have ever confessed this on you own? What was it IN YOU that finally changed to make you spill it all.

WGOI, you’ve been heard.

Right now you are not in control, she is. She has something that you want, and that puts her in control. If you want it desperately, that puts her an even more control.

So how do you take back control? You do it by giving yourself a choice. At a minimum you have three choices, you can continue to live in pain, you can deeply accept that you won’t know the full truth and stop rolling in the manure of the affair, or you can divorce. You control these choices completely, she has no play in it.

Right now the easiest path, and by that I mean, the one that takes the least work, is to just live in pain. The alternatives are so much harder to achieve that they don’t even feel like a choice.You should fix that.

The way to fix it is to aggressively move towards a divorce. See a lawyer, understand your rights, understand the possible outcomes, and draw up the papers. Do this even if you don’t want a divorce, because what you really wanna do is you wanna give yourself choice.

When you are now sitting on the fence, when you put yourself in a position that it is just as easy to jump back into the marriage as it is to move towards a divorce, or to just stay on the fence watching and waiting, then you are in complete control. You know that whichever path you now choose it was your choice.

Work to put yourself in the position mentally where you are OK staying or going. Where you can ask your wife questions, and if she doesn’t answer the questions that’s OK because you are OK going. Again, you are in control.

Sending strength!

She’s not interested in talking about it because she knows you won’t leave and you’ve proven that to her it seems time and time again.
She should want to talk about it because she knows it would help with your pain, but she doesn’t care about that. For me, that’s plenty enough to leave the relationship over.
Pretty easy decision making here. Don’t do anything and you’ll stay in this static position you are in.
Get to work on filing a divorce and she may change her tune pretty quickly. If she doesn’t, that gives you a pretty clear answer to how much she really cares about you.

Do you think you would have ever confessed this on you own?

Not a chance. Bear in mind, I had sold myself on the narrative that I had confessed. Newly arrived WS will often focus on the ways that we are different from the stereotypical wayward, and my self-congratulation was "At least I told the truth." Because I had volunteered the worst aspects of the A, I gave myself credit for integrity -- even though my BH's struggle to cope with my lies and omissions was the reason I arrived here at all.

What was it IN YOU that finally changed to make you spill it all.

Letting go of the outcome and accepting that even if the truth ended my marriage, each of us would survive it and eventually build something new for ourselves. From reading the posts of BSes here, and the resources SI offers, I grew to understand that no one can heal when they're forced to live inside a lie. I had to accept divorce as a possibility, and to look beyond it to a future I didn't want but that nevertheless could be created with integrity.

[This message edited by BraveSirRobin at 10:05 PM, Friday, July 18th]

The problem with rugsweeping, is it just leaves the knife in your back.

You get stabbed in the back, and you asked your WW to take it out and she said "no, it'll hurt to take it out".

So now you have never healed and the wound is festering.

That's just a little analogy for you.

I don't know what steps you have taken in R. Did you work through any books? IC? MC?

What has she done to make recompense?

Did you DNA test your kids?

I have no idea what levels of assurance and doubts you are even working with.

Ugh, this post is me.

It’s been 11 years, it’s me.

I feel you. I’m moving towards quiet quitting/maybe divorcing? Not sure, but shits pretty awful at the moment.

I have no wisdom here. I do think that my marriage has been WS centric the entire time, though. We worked to fix his shit, then worked to white knuckle his shitty impulses and white knuckle his shitty anxiety disorder and ADHD.

Frankly, I need the marriage to be all about me at this time. It’s a small amount better, but not sure how much.

I’m acting out in my own ways (sports car, tattoos, plastic surgery, the entire midlife crisis minus an affair). Feeling cute, I might divorce him later. Not sure.

Maybe try this on for a bit? It feels less sucky than being there to help my spouse. But it’s still crappy.

I have no insight for you. Do whatever the fuck you need to do to make life suck less. And when you have your answer, let me know and I’ll add that to my midlife crisis.

Good luck to you. This shit sucks.

Wanda, I think sometimes this comes with age. I was just looking up someone I grew up with and just discovered that her daughter in law, who was a young woman when I knew her over 50 years ago....just died. Gave me a turn. She was in a nursing home. The time passes, but in many ways it doesn't. I can still remember sitting across the street as a small child watching her mother in law, who helped raised me being brought out dead in an ambulance. Sad, sad day, but I remember it so well. It was a couple of months before JFK was killed and I remember that like yesterday too. These things that mark us, in pain and joy, especially pain, don't go away. They're part of who we are. We get caught up in the machinery of life, raising kids, working our asses off, taking care of sick parents, working on the house, whatever....and it's always busy. And then you get older, maybe retire and it all comes back. You're probably not as old as I am by quite a bit but we often shove things down and do the business of life, but there comes a time when things slow down and it all comes back. Maybe something triggers it or maybe we have more time to think but this was gonna come up soon or later because it was never resolved. It was never healed, it just stopped being talked about and it became part of the background noise like a soft drone you stop noticing. Well, you notice it now so this is the time to deal with it. It's not gone, and it's not in the past, it's sitting right there in your heart. If your wife won't care about this because she's embarrassed or doesn't want to acknowledge how bad she was, that doesn't change that it's in your heart and it's not gonna go away. You can't make it go away and if you ignore it, it will come up again. It poisons you and your relationship with her, and other things too.

I think people need to be active in their own lives and deal with things actively. If she won't talk tell her you HAVE TO TALK ABOUT THIS and you want answers and explanations and understandings. You want to drain all the poison out now. If she will NOT do that, then I would frankly file for divorce. You are not going to be happy and you can't make others happy, until you heal this. YOU have to heal. You can't keep being fake for everyone else. If they can't take the real you, with your pain, sorrow and memories, then they don't love you anyway. Be real and authentic for yourself. If she can't take it, go for the divorce. You don't have to go all the way through, unless you want to, but she needs a shock and she needs to learn to respect you. I don't think she ever has learned that lesson. It's time she did.

Wanda, here is the brutal truth…people never get over insults, which feel like body blows. Cheating is an insult because it is usually a lie that you know nothing about. When you try to get answers you get shutdown. You have never gotten over that insult.

Are you two equal in your marriage? If there is an imbalance someone is not getting their basic emotional needs met. I assume it is you since this issue is what you appear to agonize over. If possible you might find a therapist whose expertise is helping victims like you.

The one thing you will never get an answer that fixes your pain is WHY. People cheat because they want to. If you look online you will see people arrested for shoplifting who have money to pay. It makes no sense. To me cheating makes no sense. If a person is miserable it is time to change what is doing it. If their choice is to cheat or leave they usually use cheating. There is a behavior that shows up all the time with cheaters. They act like they hate their SO. They were so happy until the new person shows up. Then, bingo, they "were never happy", "you didn’t support me" etc. They demonize the person they used to love. Or they are not marriage material because they have faulty attachments. New sexual partners are more important.

In every case the bs is left wondering what was wrong with them that made their partner cheat.

You need to get yourself into therapy to deal with a wife who shuts you down and a life you no longer enjoy.

You need to look after your health. Eat healthy, get plenty of sleep, don’t drink.

If you need help for anxiety see a dr. Don’t self medicate.

[This message edited by Cooley2here at 3:58 PM, Friday, July 25th]

Hey OP, sorry you are here.

Betrayal is a significant psychic wound, one that IMHO no one fully heals from, even if dealt with properly. It's like losing a limb. It never grows back, but with the correct prosthetic, some functional can take its place.

Now, unlike some here, I'm in the evolutionary psychology camp and believe that our primitive brains run the show, something they are ill-equipped to do in our modern world. So you mind (modern prefrontal lobes) and your body (lizard brain) are in conflict. This causes stress, at least it did for me.

Two books that I would recommend are Cheating in a Nutshell and The Art of War by Sun Tzu. The first comes up here occasionally but is criticized by some for being purely anecdotal. It's not as thec uthors cite the studies they sourced. Sun Tzu's work, although dense, will show you how to think strategically rather than wishfully. Looking back, I'd say he was the first to present the idea of game theory in a round about way.

Cheating in a Nutshell was valuable because it gave words to what I felt but was incapable of understanding during my most traumatic moments. It told me that I was normal and so were my feelings and responses. It helped me work through the pressure to forgive and take the higher road because that's what good Christian men do. Instead, it helped me process and understand.

I'm not going to tell you what to do, but I am going to tell you what I did. After Dday2, I gave my WW 6 months to prove to me that she had what it took to fix what she broke. I did not tell her this, as she is performative and transactional by nature. She would have worked to the deadline and then immediately reverted, and I wanted real change.

At the end of 6 months, I took a solo trip after which I asked a simple question, a shit test. She did not only fail the test, she failed spectacularly and I told her I was done. I don't regret this.

I am 7+ years from dday and finally divorced. The journey has not been easy and the price not insignificant, but I now have peace in my life. I pictured my life as very different, but instead, here is where I am.

Looking back, I could have stayed if she did the work, but if I'm really honest with myself, I would never have been able to fully love her again, not the way a husband should. I would never fully respect her nor would I sacrifice myself for her. I would have just learned to live with it, plodding through a life of quiet desperation and resignation. And that just isn't good enough, at least for me.

I hope you find your way. You've suffered for a long time and your WW seems content that you do. My only question is do you think that is a loving thing for a partner to do to the one that promised to love, honour, and forsake all others?

I'm sorry you've been going through this, especially for so long.

IMO, you have several options besides giving up, and I hope you don't give up. Keep this in mind, though. You followed a path - rug-sweeping - that a lot of people recommend. It's not working for you. The fact that you took a path that doesn't help as much as you hoped is no reason to beat yourself up. Just pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and find a new path.

First, and most important IMO, is processing your feelings. You are not humiliated and inadequate. Your W - not you - failed as a human being and as a partner. She did so because of her own issues, not because of any issue with your or your M.

You're suffering, though. She caused it, but she can't cure it. You have to address your own pain. My reco is to work with a good IC to get help releasing your pain and rebuilding your sense of self.

To get happy together, I think your W needs to get remorseful - - answer questions without blame-shifting or minimizing or gaslighting - and she has to show she's changed from cheater to good partner. One way she can do that is to talk about her As, answer your questions honestly, and support you in your grief, anger, etc. Check out these threads to read about remorsefulness:

1) https://survivinginfidelity.com/topics/586809/beyond-regret-and-remorse/
2) https://survivinginfidelity.com/topics/324250/things-that-every-ws-needs-to-know/.

Those threads give pretty good pictures of how a remorseful WS acts.

If your WS gets remorseful, it's possible you can rebuild your M, if you want to. If she doesn't show remorse, I think it will be very difficult to stay with her happily, but you may be able to create a modus vivendi.

The key, IMO, is your healing. You look like you're drowning in pain. I'd bet that getting effective help in starting to process the pain out of your body will bring the fastest and biggest payoff. Once you start that healing, you'll free a lot of energy that you'll be able to use to make better decisions for yourself.

Cooley2Here - some great observations about not looking for the WHY. I don't think we can ever really understand the WHY - if we could, we'd be cheaters too. It seems to be 3 basic things to me - the opportunity arises, there's mutual interest, it's gonna be a big secret - no one will ever know, right? So they do it. Or maybe it's a halfway thing between being married and getting a divorce - there's some dissatisfaction on their part with the marriage (not that they'd tell you) or with life in general. Maybe they just don't like being married - getting married is different than BEING married. So they're getting older, Hollywood and the Nobel Prize didn't happen, grey hairs showing up, life seems boring - have an affair to liven things up, it's better than just leaving, right - no one will ever know, right? And then there are the folks who want perpetual validation or they just love chasing something else. They might also do this with jobs, or houses, or drugs or booze, too....nothing is ever good enough, they get bored easy. These are personality problems. A BS can't solve any of this shit. You can't solve what you don't know, what is deliberately hidden from you by someone sneaking around, and you can't solve another person's basic personality issues. The specific WHYS don't matter as much as some people think, to me, it's more like how could you do this, think this was okay, you wouldn't get caught, and if you did get caught, nothing would happen? Many people are just built this way, it's part of their wiring.

I never bothered considering the whys - some were obvious to me. My husband wanted a fantasy life to relieve stress. I can understand that, I watch anime myself....but understanding the WHY didn't make any difference and I don't know if it really does. Once you know they are capable of this, you know they are capable of this. Anything they say against their spouse is bullshit even if it's true because that's not why they're saying it. You have to decide if you CAN get over this, and it's okay if you can't. That is a perfectly fine outcome and choice. That's your right and many people just can't. I saw someone today who says she just couldn't go back to what they had, it was never coming back. That's true for many - I actually think MOST people, but some struggle through as they think staying gets them more than leaving. Everyone has to make a choice about what's best for them. You have to focus on what's best for you, not your spouse, not the kids. This is a heart centered decision, to be the most real and best you, you have to do what's in your heart.

T/j. BondJaneBond, that is the best response ever written on this site. You separated issues and help bs understand personality traits. Help bs see why, at the end of the day, their decision about their happiness is paramount. Children who see happy parents do better.

One of the issues no one ever talks about, but I consider it one of the most important things that happened to newlyweds. There is euphoria at the beginning of a marriage. Everyone is high as a kite. And then one of those people crashes back down to reality. The problem is the other person is still in the heavens, waiting for their spouse to come back up to that joyous place. It can’t happen. Once you deal with the reality of your marriage, you’re there. At that point, sometimes the left behind spouse starts making a doormat of themselves to try to keep the person they’re married to madly in love with them. "Madly in love" is a ridiculously overused term that means absolutely nothing. People who are in euphoria are living in make believe. There’s a sexual component to that as well. Whoever lands with a thud first looks at the person they’re now married to and starts asking questions, probably internally. The person left behind panics because they see the difference. This is body language talking now. If both of them are mature they can weather this. The second one should then understand that the marriage is now based in reality and they have to deal with it realistically. If they are still trying very hard to live in La La Land, the other spouse is going to start backing up. That’s when a marriage is so out of balance that sometimes it never gets right again. I do think when people marry too young they often don’t have the skills to get through this first part of marriage, and then for the rest of it, they are out of sync.

We only know what is shared here but for a bs to be this unhappy this long says a lot about all the hidden conversations that are never articulated. The body language, which, in my opinion, is close to 90% of our communication, is telling two people they are miserable being stuck in their ruts and have no idea how to get out. I so hope OP can find IC that will help him out from under this blanket of misery.