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So when she says her eyes are open now, I don't think she means she suddenly discovered some new version of me. I think she means she is finally able to look back and recognize that the version of me she had created in her own head was not always an accurate one.

This is a waypoint that I don’t think my ex ever got to. She still to this day sees me as awful, allows her to avoid introspection. It’s probably a positive sign that she is starting this process.

If you don’t mind me asking, with the divorce date coming soon, what are the plans for that? Is anyone moving out? Is there any substantial change it drives, or is it just checking a box?

Staying in home separation and untangle financially. Otherwise staying focused on healing and seeing if reconciliation is achievable.

Before D-Day I would have confidently told anyone who asked that my wife wasn't capable of cheating on me. Turns out I didn't know shit.

You and me both, brother. I would have confidently bet my life on it. I'd be dead right now if I did.

I hear you and I agree. There's a difference between even "I'll never do that again" and claiming "I'm incapable of it now." Both of those phrases don't really land right for a BS, but the latter just feels like bullshit. You've already demonstrated that you're capable! More than once!

Yes, people can change. But confidently declaring that just several months removed from d day does not land at all.

I'd rather hear "I'm no longer willing to do something like that ever again."

The reason cheating is possible for people is their ability to lie to themselves and minimize risk.

I 100 percent didn’t have any idea of the real damage I was going to cause. I knew what I was doing was wrong, but until I saw that filtered through my husbands pain I greatly underestimated it.

This describes my wife very well also. I truly believe she severely underestimated the damage this would cause. As for the ability to lie to themselves goes, I just made a post about that in the reconciliation forum.

https://www.survivinginfidelity.com/forums/?tid=667422

I have no doubt that my ex-wife was stunned (for lack of a better word) by how hard her betrayal hit me. I find it hard to believe that anyone could possibly understand unless they've BTDT.

What you are describing from her in her eyes being wide open now was something I definitely experienced.

There were a lot of shortcomings in me that I projected on to him.

I thought he was unable to give me emotional intimacy. Now, I didn’t cheat or even think of doing so early in the marriage but ws do tend to justify your behavior by creating skewed narratives.

I felt he wanted someone to take care of his kids (my step kids) and to do domestic labor. Someone he had available for sex. My husband really is too notch in most things about being a spouse but it wouldn’t have been enough for someone who never truly saw his love. And there were many other erroneous things that once I had developed self awareness I realized I had either consigned, projected, or engineered into our relationship with my own set of issues.

But, I want to say that you do not owe her a reconciliation. No matter how much work she is doing or does. I can only tell you if the work sounds like it’s landing right. And it’s starting to. She will still have failures as well, because it’s a steep climb where she needs to go.

I am rooting for her - not for the purpose of winning you back but because whatever she does to improve will benefit the family you will always be together, even if it’s just improved relationship skills for coparenting or creating stability in relationships she may have in the future.

And I am rooting for your healing. It still may be some time before you reach clarity in terms of an outcome but you have a lot of clarity now for where you are in the journey.

What you are describing from her in her eyes being wide open now was something I definitely experienced.

There were a lot of shortcomings in me that I projected on to him.

Thing I have with your bringing up your experiences, @hikingout, is that your situation and your marriage beforehand, is basically NOTHING like his and his WW's. I even think by bringing up how it was for you so much, that you may even be giving a measure of false hope here. Even though I know that is absolutely not your intention.

It is extremely difficult for me to isolate one phrase, I am looking at the entire picture here. Gemmy has been lied to FROM EVEN BEFORE THE BEGINNING of his marriage with his WW. His WW has a history of saying nice things to Gemmy about him as a partner and then bad-mouthing him to her family. So yeah, just really cynical and skeptical here.

Gemmy, for starters, has your WW told her family the truth about her affairs yet?

[This message edited by WontBeFooledAgai at 3:14 AM, Wednesday, September 9th]

I can understand your point of view here and I appreciate the way you stated your response so respectfully.

I do think while our marriages are obviously different, it makes complete sense to me that her betrayal early on would keep the justifications going. Justification often doesn’t stop until the lies hit daylight, otherwise there would have been a confession and no subsequent affair.

I also have a close friend who also did the same thing- had an affair at the beginning of the marriage, and then 10 years later had a second one with our coworker who she eventually left her husband for. Later as she unwound that, her answer was the same—she’d minimized her husband all that time and it never had occurred to her she had been doing that. She told me well into the first year of her marriage to the ap so she really had no reason to lie.

It is not my intention to create hope, the truth is he has hope or he wouldn’t still be here evaluating her. I simply believe that one thing can do is say yes that tracks wit what I know ir experienced or no it doesn’t, and there have been things she has done that I have said doesn’t track. This one does for me, I understand why it would not for someone who hasn’t experienced the ways ws lie to themselves.l to keep from feeling bad about what they do. It’s part of the coping with cognitive dissonance.

It is not my intention to create hope, the truth is he has hope or he wouldn’t still be here evaluating her. I simply believe that one thing can do is say yes that tracks wit what I know ir experienced or no it doesn’t, and there have been things she has done that I have said doesn’t track. This one does for me, I understand why it would not for someone who hasn’t experienced the ways ws lie to themselves.l to keep from feeling bad about what they do. It’s part of the coping with cognitive dissonance.

Sure, I understand and again I know your intentions are good.

Gemmy may also be looking for a PERMISSION STRUCTURE to D as well too though.

With that said, the story of the woman who left her BH, really did sting for me reading it. I mean, good for her if she eventually became a better person, but at the end of the day a man was used as an emotional punching bag all these years and then left cruelly. That matters and always will matter. I mean, it is probably not any comfort to the BH that she finally became the wife she was supposed to be--for the guy she left him for. I hope the BH is doing well and has moved on with his life. And that his XWW has done what she could to at least apologise and treat him as fairly as possible in the D.

[This message edited by WontBeFooledAgai at 2:46 PM, Wednesday, September 9th]

Don’t want to threadjack too much- I liked her husband a lot. I used to try to coach her to have a better marriage and I didn’t know about the affair until the marriage imploded. He is doing well today and while she was my friend (we are no longer friends) I have to say I think he is better off without her. I used to think what she struggled with him about was nitpicking.

So again, it’s not a statement about what I think he should do. I don’t know that answer, but I have faith he will come to the best conclusion for him.
End t/j

Fair enough @hikingout, thanks for updating.

So when she says her eyes are open now, I don't think she means she suddenly discovered some new version of me. I think she means she is finally able to look back and recognize that the version of me she had created in her own head was not always an accurate one.

I understand why hearing this feels like progress compared to outright vilification, Gemmy, but I urge you to look at how inherently dangerous this framing still is.

What you are hearing as an admission of flawed perception actually leaves a dangerous loophole wide open. It implies her decision to cheat was dependent on your performance and her subjective assessment of your character. If her fidelity relies on maintaining a favorable view of you, what happens five or ten years down the road when life gets heavy, resentment creeps back in, or she inevitably builds up another unfair caricature during a rough season? Does the threshold for betrayal open right back up?

It sounds less like an evolution into "cheating is fundamentally and morally disgusting" and more like a reframing: "Well, if you were the awful person I had built up in my head, my actions would have been justified, but turns out you weren't that person."

That isn't a foundational shift in basic morality. It is merely a correction of facts.

What you need, and what every betrayed spouse deserves, is a partner who is diametrically and morally opposed to cheating. You need someone who refuses to betray you not because you are a top notch husband who successfully proved her negative projections wrong, but because betrayal is completely incompatible with her own core values as a human being. If I over a course of years come to believe my partner is a horrible person. I would either address this with her, request counselling or ultimately leave. Note how none of these options include betrayal.

Obviously, none of us on an online forum can see the complete picture of your wife’s internal work. But based on the snippets you’ve shared here, she has not achieved that level of baseline morality yet. She is still managing and untangling her justifications rather than discarding the entire framework that allowed her to justify it in the first place.

You deserve a morally upstanding partner, Gemmy. Don't settle for someone who is merely recalculating whether you deserved the damage she caused.

Your original draft gets your point across, but it has several typos, a few slightly awkward phrases, and tone elements that could be tightened to make your argument more compelling and thoughtful without sounding overly aggressive.

Here is a polished, higher-impact version of your response:

@hikingout

Perhaps you can expand on this:

I 100 percent didn’t have any idea of the real damage I was going to cause. I knew what I was doing was wrong

I can understand not being able to fully envisage the exact depth of your husband's trauma—pain that severe is difficult to fully grasp until you see it firsthand. However, surely you had consumed media, read books, or watched movies where betrayal and the destruction it causes were depicted? Did you not have friends or relatives who went through the trauma of infidelity? These are genuine questions for my understanding, not rhetorical.

Perhaps my perspective is unique because I witnessed the fallout of cheating firsthand at a young age. But even setting that aside, it feels like society and media make the devastating impact of betrayal pretty explicit.

You acknowledged that you knew it was wrong. What did "wrong" look like to you in that moment? Did you view it as something trivial—like sneaking twenty dollars out of a parent's wallet, where it's technically wrong but seemingly harmless?

Knowing something is wrong while claiming ignorance of its impact feels like a contradiction. It is far more likely you recognized the potential damage and buried that awareness to give yourself permission. I see that as distinct from ignorance, even if you couldn't fully picture the exact scale of the trauma you must have knew the damage to some level.

[This message edited by DRSOOLERS at 12:08 PM, Wednesday, September 9th]

Dr.

I will answer, but I don’t want to derail this thread. I am not sure my answer is helpful for decoding Gemmy’s wife but I do feel like it may explain that people are not binary, they are complicated and full of contradictions. That’s everyone, not just waywards.

Responding to your first point:

I agree her position is not grown to where it needs to go, but it has evolved from where it was.

Becoming self aware isn’t a bomb that goes off and you are suddenly good at it. It comes in steps and phases.

For where she is, she is admitting She created justifications around the affair that created a lie she built on over time. The lie wasn’t just to other people, it was to herself. I experienced the same. It’s a good step she sees it but no one is suggesting it’s a final step.

2. I knew it was wrong AND I believed he wouldn’t care so much. There are multiple layers to this a wayward covers themselves in. Here were mine:

A. It feels good, and he won’t find out.

B. If he finds out, he stopped loving me long ago (or in my case settled on marrying me because he needed help with his kids and wanted someone to take care of domestic things and as an added bonus liked sex so he knew that would be a steady reliable thing)

C. We started our relationship as friends and then friends with benefits, and then friends with benefits that experimented together with other people. He had seen me with other men, and it never bothered him.

D. I am not sure I want to be married to him anymore anyway.

Now, of course all this is bullshit. They were things that I told myself. That were not at all relevant.

A. He did find out because I told him. I could not conduct the marriage further and keep the lie.

B. He never stopped loving me, I just wasn’t able to receive it because I saw love transactionally and to earn love I tried to be the ultimate wife at whatever cost to me. This fear of abandonment I held wasn’t rational and only stifled my ability to grow as a person.

C. Ethical non-monagamy doesn’t eliminate betrayals. If I had really been that confident-why didn’t I just ask him before doing it?

D. When faced with losing the marriage I learned I deeply didn’t actually want that. I wanted connection, and it wasn’t him blocking me from getting it, it was me. I had given up hope I could have that in this marriage. I needed to change in a way that allowed me to vulnerable to have it with anyone.

As for books and movies, very rarely do they depict a realistic version of infidelity. It usually reads more like a side quest where people learn things and it’s tidied up and put a neat little ending on it. I thought he would be upset or mad.

And let’s not forget the fuel that keeps this fire going—-entitlement. After all I had done for him I felt like I deserved some happiness for me. I also thought he would not maybe want to give up his maid, steady sex. (The kids were grown- so needing me to care for them no longer applied)

As you can read I was really jaded—-dead of heart. And that is a common outcome for people who disassociate, which is how I coped with life. Google "common outcomes of disassociation", I do not just invent this stuff.

I think Gemmy’s wife has lied to herself, her beginning to see it may or may not help her recognize the ways she betrayed herself and blocked what could have been a strong marriage. She has an emotionally intelligent husband, loyal, who loves being a father, seems like he may also be a good provider, and truly loves her. She robbed herself of that as much as she robbed him of what could have been. And now she is facing the natural consequences of that.

It’s a lot to unpack and unwind, but if you can admit you were the problem it will be easy to admit that you also should have been able to be faithful through hard times. In fact you can recognize your part in creating them. Will she do that or has she? I can’t tell ya. But she at least seems to be in the right direction in this one little corner.

I don’t believe she deserves an award or a reconciliation on any of that. I am merely pointing out a couple good signs, without forgetting all the bad.

In fact I am of the belief that she could do every single thing right from here on out and it still may not matter to the outcome of their marriage. But it will matter in the outcome of the relationship they need to have for their children. It may also have an impact on the emotional stability she can provide them and herself. After all a ws is human and they should not give themselves a life sentence from something like this—they should give themselves the gift of healing. It starts with being honest with yourself, not meeting the benchmarks of all the ways they need to see themselves or heal. That takes time.

[This message edited by hikingout at 2:11 PM, Wednesday, September 9th]

Agree with hikingout.

Again, it’s a matter of time and process. I have no idea where gemmy’s wife will be in 5 years. But there was zero chance that she was going to be at BSR level by this time in the journey. It’s a matter of watchful waiting. If they are progressing and the BS wants to attempt R, then so be it. If they plateau in a bad spot or regress, we can draw attention to that too. They can’t be expected to perfectly get it immediately.

I hope she ends up getting it.

It sounds like we all broadly agree that Mrs Gemmy (corrected) still lacks a full understanding. Whether she will eventually get there is up in the air; with that in mind, it becomes a question of how long you are willing to wait. Only Gemmy can answer that. Personally, I couldn't imagine myself waiting around for three to five years for someone to internalise something so fundamental. Something I thought was pretty basic. Realising that infidelity is deeply damaging, immoral, and destructive shouldn't require a groundbreaking revelation, regardless of how she perceives you at a given time. If she has issues with you as a husband or partner, cheating is never a response for a good person.

[This message edited by DRSOOLERS at 4:47 PM, Wednesday, September 9th]

R requires patience from a BS, no doubt. Their budget on that matter is entirely their prerogative. The best you can hope for is growth, but there is no obligation to stay even in the best case.

Edited to remove quoted material taken down.

[This message edited by InkHulk at 5:47 PM, Wednesday, September 9th]

I se the 3-5 years as a constant evolution. Both for the bs in their healing and the ws. The first year is really just recovery—everyone getting orientated to where they find themselves, processing grief, lots of hard communication, introspection.

Year two is harder for some people, better for others. The exhaustion of the first year is truly setting in, there is a new normal to be accepted, you start to realize it’s truly a marathon.

I don’t think it’s the same level of intensity all the way through.

I don’t think we should drag morbs into this-but I see she has evolved since she has been here. And I think she has worked hard to get where she is.

[This message edited by hikingout at 3:37 PM, Wednesday, September 9th]

Sorry, meant Mrs. Gemmy / Gemmy respectively in the above, corrected. Wish I could blame AI, I do use an assistant often but that was just a sheer oopsie.

No offense meant.

[This message edited by DRSOOLERS at 4:51 PM, Wednesday, September 9th]

Your correction made me reread your post. I meant to comment in this as well:

Personally, I couldn't imagine myself waiting around for three to five years for someone to internalise something so fundamental.

It sounds as if you imagining the ws is spinning their wheels about not cheating for years on end.

What takes so long is they are identifying and correcting years of patterns that allowed them to cheat. If you picture the cheating as it actually often is—a symptom of a set of problems deficits a person doesn’t have the self awareness to understand so it manifests various unhealthy behaviors- there is a lot of work just in the identifying.

It’s dealing with lot of unhealthy coping—-for me that was things like disassociation, escapism, people pleasing, etc.

Developing the ability to connect more deeply (because often that’s the root of what a ws is seeking but they look for it in in the form of cheap validation) -for me it was recognizing there was an underlying toxic shame that I had to dispel and learn to believe I am worthy so I could be less self protective and feel like I deserved to take up space in a relationship to the extent that naming my needs when they aren’t always convenient to meet.

Establishing a stronger relationship to my values rather than just following what I had been taught as right and wrong.

Learning elements of emotional intelligence and practicing it until you have created a deeper emotional maturity.

Relationship skills- effective communication, conflict resolution, holding space for someone else…

And honestly I could write so much more.

What a ws has to do to become whole is often a major overhaul of many maladaptive core patterns that developed in childhood. It doesn’t mean they don’t have any great qualities, there is simply a reshaping that has to be done.

I honestly think it’s not hard not to cheat after seeing the pain I caused. And for me personally, there had not been any inclination before despite other opportunities.

I needed to become a version of myself that was whole in her own. It allowed me to be far more prepared to provide a much more enhanced version of marriage that made it possible for him to say "this is what I want despite what you did" Now, some of these things weren’t completely absent of course -just in varying degrees of deficiency. as

There was simply enough of an absence that is got to hard to keep living in that paradigm I had imprisoned myself due to my lack of self awareness. Instead of digging in to fix it, it was far easier to believe that my marriage and husband just didn’t make me happy. They weren’t supposed to—they were supposed to enhance the life and happiness I built for myself.

So again you are trivializing a whole lot of work that happens over those years. Rather than someone just internalizing some basic stuff. And if I am honest, some these things I still work on and have to be vigilant over.

I hope this wasn’t too much of a thread Jack but I think Gemmy sees at least some of this as what he needs his wife to do.

[This message edited by hikingout at 7:27 PM, Wednesday, September 9th]