SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

I was in IC yesterday,and I asked him how I could protect myself from my wife betraying me again.

He pointed out that I am now more aware and observant and I would notice the signs this time.

I have seen this repeated in various places.

I think it's true for waywards that had significant and negative personality changes. Such as becoming more distant, or angry, or what not.

In my case the year year she was betraying me was one of our best years in our relationship. We were happy. Having TONS of sex. We spent quality time together. Went on long walks talking, etc.

She would betray me with him in the afternoon, come home, give me a big hug and tell me she loved me.

In retrospect there were subtle signs she was cheating. Just nothing very concrete or highly noticeable.

So I'm struggling to trust any positive signs now. When she tells me she loves me, my mind is like "okay I like this more than the alternative, but she could also be betraying me again because that's how she acted during that time"

Has anyone dealt with a similar situation? How did you convince yourself they meant it and you could trust them again at some point?

First thing I had to do was learn to trust ME again.

You are asking really good questions, that’s a good sign.

When you look back, you will see some of the clues you missed before.

And, based on the questions you are asking shows a new level of vigilance — and you will likely have this level of keeping your head on a swivel regardless of the path you choose moving forward, R or D.

I am glad I am done with blind trust, it is not a healthy approach to any relationship.

Awareness of what can happen will eventually lead you to verifiable trust of your surroundings. I don’t mean playing detective for the rest of your life, but learning enough about whoever you are with to understand the distance or subtle signs better.

Subtle signs may be all we get, but we do know them.

My wife never left, never wanted to leave, her A was the classic have her cake and eat it too type of deal, so I get it.

She would betray me with him in the afternoon, come home, give me a big hug and tell me she loved me.

In retrospect there were subtle signs she was cheating. Just nothing very concrete or highly noticeable.

This remains one of my greatest fears. That I’ll not notice some of the subtle signs and it just keeps going. Can I ask what those signs were that were there but easy to overlook?

First odd sign was her libido went through the roof. She had never been like that in our entire twenty year relationship. It was fun, but odd for sure.

Second one was she kept making little comments like "if we ever got divorced, I think we would be the parents that work well together"

I am very sensitive to people's moods and i noticed right around when she started her affair she often seemed distant, distracted, or down when nothing was going on. I Constantly asked her what was wrong, and she always had some excuse. Oh I'm tired. Oh my stomach is upset. Oh a work thing is bothering me. Nothings wrong why do you keep asking!? Etc...

That's the manipulation and gaslighting.

I was suspicious of her affair partner. She would tell me little things he did such as he put his hand on her leg for example. I told her I didn't want her around him. All talk of him ended when her affair started. I thought it meant she was keeping her distance. Turns out it was the opposite.

The final one that caused me to confront her (I didn't consciously know or suspect an affair, just something like a flirtation) she suggested i go get a girlfriend.

I didn't understand when we all of the sudden had an open relationship. I confronted her about it and she admitted to her affair.

I think "the truth will always out".

For me, it was learning to trust myself….as old wounds said. I am much more sensitive to emotional distance than I was pre D-Day. When there is a bit more distance in the ebbs and flows of relationships and life….I am quick to question it both in myself and my FWH.

One example. My fwh will occasionally say off hand, that I’m very sensitive. Of course, I’m very sensitive to him. I can cry at a supermarket commerical. I used to take in that comment and think that maybe I was too sensitive. Nope, not anymore. I’m allowed to be as sensitive as I am. I can be self aware and look deeply into the whys of what I’m feeling….but I honor my own feelings and gut instincts much more than pre-A.

Looking back there were so many signs that I picked up on and listened to him lie about during the A. He too became very attentive during the A.

There were no warning signs. Not one.

This is going to sound bizarre but I had a very vivid dream that in X date my H was going to tell me he wanted a D. No reason given in the dream but I started paying attention to things.

Nothing was off. If he wasn’t very very late coming home from work one night (of course I confronted him and he did admit he was cheating) I would not have known.

There were no red flags. 🚩

Interestingly enough— I never told my H about my dream. And on X date he told me he wanted a D. He claimed he just didn’t want to be married anymore.

That's interesting because I had a bad dream about a month before D-day where I came to my own house, and had to knock on the door because I didn't live there any longer. A man opened the door, I came in a couple feet like a guest would, then the man went to get my wife from the bedroom.

It felt horrible, like I had been replaced by the woman I loved.

Unfortunately that process was well underway with her LTA.

There's a part of us that knows something is up, and I think that part was trying to warn me.

Hot Stove?!

as a child - very likely you touched something hot enough to cause pain
Hot stove? Rock near edge of a campfire? Piece of glass tubing in chemistry class?

Once you became familiar with "HOT" you started thinking about somethings to carefully consider touching.

So it is with getting effed over by a cheating spouse. Even if you ditch them the first time, you will be more attune to such behavioral clues when you start with another person.

I was in IC yesterday,and I asked him how I could protect myself from my wife betraying me again.

What do you mean by 'protect yourself'? Are you talking about keeping her from cheating or feeling pain if she cheats? Or something else?

You can't prevent her from cheating. If she cheats, you can't prevent the pain.

IMO, the best protection you can have is the protection you give yourself by having faith in yourself. You're healing now. You'll heal again if you need to.

What is your W doing to heal? What help has she sought? What help as she taken in? I'll say this: my W is going through a tough period now. She looks a lot like she did during the A. She has more tools now than she had in 2010, and I'm not worried. I'm confident she has closed up some vulnerabilities to cheating. I'm equally confident that she might have vulnerabilities that are still unknown. If someone attacks those vulnerabilities, I'm confident I'll be able to deal with it.

I think that's part of what Oldwounds means by learning to trust himself. What helped me learn I could - and had to - rely on myself were things like support from my therapists, posts on SI, and changing my self-talk from attack-self to nurture-self.

You can do the same. You're stronger than you realize.

One inherent freedom of being a human being is revealing or concealing as much as you want about what is going on internally. Some are emotional open books and struggle to conceal, but some are excellent at hiding even their emotions.
Just like you can’t truly "affair proof" your marriage, there is no fool proof protections here besides refusing to love again. People are amazing, and people are dangerous. I personally couldn’t get into a relationship with someone that I perceive has emotional responses that seem out of sync with everyday events, I suspect that disconnect is a sign that people are not open books and have the ability to hide it.
I would also just say that the fact that your wife’s changes were in the direction of more affection strikes me as a huge mind fuck. If things get better in the relationship, that could cause you to pull back because that is your warning sign. And that is not a flaw in you, it is a consequence of the way she gaslit you. It’s not your fault if the damage is too great.

Affair proof a marriage? Not sure it’s possible.

I think there are people who would absolutely cheat if they knew they could get away with it. And I think most cheaters do believe "the spouse will never know".

Sadly the "do the right thing" mentality seems to be missing for so many people.

I affair proofed myself. I got my post nup, vehicle, bank account and exit plan ready to go.

Well, my husband was doing on line dating and had a long time EA with an old ex gf (long before we met) who is very long distance. He would send her gifts that were nicer than he got me and say things to her (text messages I read) that he never said to me. I had somewhat different reactions - I kind of find out about both things at the same time. I found out about the online dating when I was trying to fix his computer one night as a surprise. I got the surprise. He left screens up and there was one after another. I hit the roof and raised hell with him. He was scared and contrite and promised not to do it again - and I don't think he has. I checked for a while and never found anything else, and he never met any of these women anyway. I don't think he sent any money either. It was all fantasy for him, I think to relieve his fairly miserable reality at that point of caring for a severely demented father.

I don't think he's gone back to any of that, and it ultimately didn't bother me as much as the EA, because that was a real relationship, although LDR, with a real person and he was sending gifts and such. Not a lot of money but much better at that time than he would give me. I didn't say anything to him about that, I just kept reading the messages to see where it was going. It didn't seem to be going anywhere and his behavior towards me improved anyway so I stopped giving a shit and stopped monitoring. It took a couple of years or so to get to that point but I did. I've asked him about this person a couple of times and he tells the basic truth but not his attachment to her but as long as I don't think it affects me, I don't really care. I did lose all romantic and sexual interest in him from these experiences and have no desire to get them back. He doesn't seem to care so that's okay. I'm fond of him and love him as a friend, and I'm stuck anyway because of financial and health reasons, but I don't see any point in digging or bringing it up. We're both old and this is as good as it gets for both of us, I think. I mostly kick myself for doing or not doing various things when I was younger, with him or without him. I take responsibility for this, but not blame because I had a very bad start in life and it was enough just to get out of the poverty and abuse I was raised in, but I made a lot of wrong decisions - or I could have made better - so I take responsibility for those but I think I did the best I could at the time. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

So, sorry to be long winded but there were NO SIGNS of any of this before I found out accidentally on the computer and phone. I was shocked, I really was, it seemed so out of keeping with him, but I guess he developed an alternate persona for this kind of thing and my guess is that's what your wife did. Developed an alternate persona, if that makes sense, to keep her A life and her married life, separate. So she's one person when she's out on the street, and another at home. This is more common than we realize. People develop alternate personas sometimes. Someone who does this, I don't know if you can spot it except by evidence you come across, which is being the dreaded Marriage Police.

At some point, if you decide you want to be with someone, for whatever reason, it comes down to whether you are willing to trust them again and if you want to keep investigating. I decided it was worth it to me to trust him again, and to stop investigating - that doesn't mean there aren't triggers occasionally, that's inevitable, but that was my decision. If I had money and better health, I probably would have left back then, so there's that. There are "practical" factors at times and I never fault people for having them. We can't all just stomp off and leave - or we could but it might be worse.

Because most of it was fantasy and not actionable, and I'm not really in love with him anymore, I don't really care. I'd care if he was planning to dump me or do something behind my back financially or otherwise, but if he has his little secrets, I can't bother being the Marriage Police to root them out. It's not how I want to spend my time. But that's how I took charge of my own life situation such as it is - we all have to take charge of our lives as much as we can and be active about what we want, what we will or will not put up with, what the consequences might be, what the boundaries are, etc. If you don't have any obvious signs of bad behavior, you have to decide what YOU WANT and how you want to live and if this person makes you happy now or you're reasonably content, because if you are....maybe that's as good as it gets.....and if you're not, you have to make changes.

I always advise people to take what action they can in their lives instead of waiting for the other person to do things and letting the shoe drop and then finding out about it and reacting. Set up your boundaries, what you want, don't want, will not accept, in your relationships and when you see it going awry - confront. Remember, the ultimate action you can always take is divorce - be sure you understand everything about divorce in your area, scope out a good lawyer you might use, and consider that you can always pull the plug if you want to. You have to be the one to assess what you want and what is acceptable or not to you, and that has to be based on her behavior. Unless you want to spend your life digging and checking and being the Marriage Police.