SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Gemmy, I think your plan is solid. It does for you exactly what you feel about the last 15 years.

I think it also will remove most of that fear that she’s staying because she would prefer nothing to change.
In this choice, you’ve forced change, whether she likes it or not. You are taking back your agency, self-respect and dignity. Once it’s over, she then must make the choice to put in the years of work to get you back, with no guarantees from you that it will work. Or the easier path and just fuck right off.
Either way, you’ll have a pretty good sense of your value to her, and that really is the most important question you need answered I think.

You are articulate and decisive. I can relate to everything you are saying. The piece that isn’t terribly clear yet to me is why are you so dead set on reconciling?

Anyone who has been here for more than a few years will think that a very strange question coming from me. I did the same for about 2 years. But the idea of divorcing first was not something I would have considered, so you are clearly in a different head space than I was.

Do you know for yourself why you are so locked into trying to reconcile?

But emotionally, I struggle with feeling like I may have become the practical choice instead of the deeply desired one.

I think one of the hardest things after betrayal is not only wondering whether they stayed but quietly questioning what they stayed for and whether you were ever truly central in the way you thought you were.
In my own situation where some of the facts and timeline shifted again months after the initial disclosure I have found that trust in motive becomes very difficult to settle because later truth changes not only events but the meaning you gave to them.I do not think this is overthinking but I think it speaks to something very deep in the aftermath of betrayal.

Gemmy.

You should be very proud of your 15 years very. You held up your end of the deal, I’ve read through your posts and to me it sounds like you held up your 50% of the M fantastically. Your WW is the one that didn’t hold her end of the deal. Yes people will always comment on your 15 years and it may appear she basks in the image but she knows, she knows what she did and what she’s done to you and your family, she knows. I’d say that’s a pretty shitty punishment.

Imagine waking up every day knowing what you did, you can’t wash that off, you CAN wake up and put the hard work in to change.

You get to be the judge of deciding if she can or is doing enough to change.

I used to feel exactly like you, sometimes it still nibbles at my heels but, I’m a damn good W and mother, always have been, I held up my side of the deal it was my H that shot himself in the foot. My feet are fine.

Gemmy, I’d much prefer to live with the consequences of his cheating on me than the forever shame he must live with. He sees the consequences of his actions on his children and their mistrust in others, how it forever changed me and the innocence of our marriage. I cant imagine living with that. If a WS is truly R material they will carry consequences forever.