SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Hiking Out...

Thank you so much for your wise comments on this thread. I really hope OP reads them over and over and lets them sink in. It is a lot cheaper and more useful in the long run than going to therapist after therapist trying to find one who agrees with whatever is going on in her mind on that particular day. You have been through these battles before and came out much better on the other side when you listened to and followed the advice from the veteran posters when you first came here.

Elliebellie...

Hiking Out and others who have been where you are have given you some very valuable information on how to get through today, and then tomorrow, and then the day after that, etc. I know you don't quite see things the same as they do because your thoughts are all over the place and you are trying to survive minute to minute. That is understandable. However, I really hope you do not dismiss what they have told you just because their comments do not quite line up with your current thoughts.

My only advice to you would be to get away for a day or two where there are no distractions and you can be alone. Go back and read all the comments in this thread at least 3 times. By the end of the third reading if you don't find your thinking changing somewhat, particularly about how "wonderful" your AP is, then I would say that you should just inform your Betrayed Husband that you are filing for divorce.

I say that because, in my opinion, there really is no hope for the two of you. Over my many years on this earth I have seen many marriages that were damaged beyond repair by adultery. Some of those marriages were with 3 of my siblings... my oldest sister, my oldest brother, and my younger sister. All three of those marriages were so badly damaged by adultery they all just walked away. My two sisters walked away immediately, however my oldest brother did the "Pick Me" dance for almost 2 years before the blinders came off his eyes and he saw reality for what it truly was.

In my opinion, in your current mindset, there is no way your marriage can be repaired, or even a new one built from the ground up as you want. Again, that is only my opinion, which is coming to you from an internet stranger who does not personally know you or your Betryed Husband... just a stranger who wants the best for you two.

Good luck to you. I mean that from the bottom of my heart.

The reason it’s getting harder is the withdrawal started from just the other day. I mean you talked to him what, Tuesday or Wednesday maybe? You will need to sweat this out, remember the tools I mentioned because it really does help make it less painful.

Monday

Maybe we are distracting you from that I don’t know but it doesn’t feel like it. Try guided meditation to get centered, I remember my brain was a living hell around that point.

Maybe a bit. I felt more certain of how I felt when I started this post but then through talking about it got sucked back in to the good feelings I had.

Think of this as a process, get through this part of it and then think about the next step.

That's the plan :)

For now I am out, I have been in to much and I need to focus on my life a bit.

I understand. I think I need to take a break, too. Thank you SO much for your kind but stern words ❤️

[This message edited by Elliebellie at 2:43 PM, Saturday, June 15th]

I am not yet up to speed on your thread. I just started reading page 9. One thing you said stood out to me.

but I am literally repulsed and I don't want him to touch me at all.

I am curious when these feelings began since you two have children. It is a shame that physical touch is out of the question.

As you can guess my wife and I are old, and "burning desire" has not been around for a long time. However, there is one thing we do each and every day possible. We cuddle each night for 15 to 30 minutes before going to sleep. This is the one thing we believe that has kept our connection strong over the years when our sex drives began to wane. We have done this for many decades. It is the one time of day that both of us look forward to before going to sleep.

Is it even possible that you and your husband could "spoon" for several minutes for going to sleep. I mean that you could even be the Big Spoon and control the amount of physical contact, if any. You two would not be facing each other and therefore, it might be easier to say what has been on your minds.

Just a thought, FWIW.

However, there is one thing we do each and every day possible. We cuddle each night for 15 to 30 minutes before going to sleep. This is the one thing we believe that has kept our connection strong over the years when our sex drives began to wane. We have done this for many decades. It is the one time of day that both of us look forward to before going to sleep.

Is it even possible that you and your husband could "spoon" for several minutes for going to sleep. I mean that you could even be the Big Spoon and control the amount of physical contact, if any. You two would not be facing each other and therefore, it might be easier to say what has been on your minds.

My husband and I did have sex the other night, you havent gotten to that part yet. I wasn't repulsed but I silently cried throughout the whole thing. I kind of felt like a doll being maneuvered around for his pleasure.

I'm really trying to get that feeling back but the problem is it was gone before the affair and then I had had a sexual relationship with ap that was different from.swx with my husband so now I have an even bigger hurdle to overcome.

Thank you for letting me know. I will keep that in mind as I read the rest of your thread... it will help my understanding.

I will stay off the comments now until I get caught up to the present time. In fact, you have already received such good advice I don't see where I am adding any value at the moment.

Good luck.

Get and read those books that I and others here have suggested in your thread. If you take them in, they will all help tremendously I think.

If I were in your shoes, and I looked back on my life and saw just how much shit I had done wrong, like you have already said here, I would be spending a lot of hours everyday reading. Counseling with the right person will help. But it’s still just a few hours each week at most.

I just answered my mental health check-in questions from my therapist and my depression and anxiety went from mild and moderate to minimal so i guess that's good. Part of me wonders if it was bc I've been thinking about being on my own all day. Husband was back to his usual criticizing self so I started daydreaming about being single and it gave me a little bit of a boost.

[This message edited by Elliebellie at 2:36 AM, Sunday, June 16th]

Ellie,

First, your good feelings didn’t come back from your post. Especially considering how much you have been called out for everything. Most likely they came back because you didn’t block AP and he reached out to you not even 6 days ago. Since you refused to block him, did he contact you again?

Your BH just caught you cheating on him
and you’re complaining about him "criticizing" you….and imagining yourself single. Like I said in just about every post since you admitted your refusal to block AP I have said that it’s all a sham to go forward with R.

You are not cut out to do what it actually takes to even attempt a meaningful relationship. If you can’t even hold yourself accountable to
Do the most basic first step, and then to get so riled up because your BH isn’t being nice that you can only think of leaving, just do it. It only gets worse from here. You have no idea what is in store for you if you actually try and R (until you block AP at the very least, then you haven’t even tried , you are lying to yourself and BH if you think otherwise), you are going to have to deal with a lot of pain, anger, real and not so real attacks. You can’t handle these small things, then stop wasting time.

No one reached out to me. I'm not "all riled up" I'm just remembering what I don't like that my husband does. My anxiety has been way down and I'm connecting the dots and wondering if it's a sign bc I'm imagining being on my own. If it's better that I don't think out loud here then I'll not I just don't have another applicable place to share my thoughts rn. Sorry.

You can drop self pity act, there are many here who are actually trying to help you, myself included.

he caught you cheating on him in his house, after denying him intimacy for 3 years.
And you’re thinking about the things you don’t like about him, same kind of thoughts that got you in this mess in the first place.

You’ve gone from how great full you are to
Have a chance you didn’t deserve and wanting to do anything to help heal your BH and not hurt him anymore, to he’s not being nice to me and I want to be single, in like 48 hours.

I firmly believe that AP got in touch with you again.

He did NOT get in touch with me and I believe he won't. I have ups and downs. Rn I have the feelings I've had for most of the marriage. That I'm stuck and just want to GET OUT. Either way, I did something reprehensible so what does it matter if I stay or go? I feel like I'm being talked into staying bc I said I want to try but rn I don't feel like I want to. Is it even the right thing to do for my husband anyway? I've stayed only for the kids all this time. It isn't fair to him. Maybe the fear has worn off and I'm seeing I really don't want to be in this marriage. I'm sorry. Ik ppl are trying to help and I do plan to read the books but I just don't see how I'm going to magically want to be with someone I've questioned being with for 20 years. And the fact that my anxiety is down. Idk... Some ppl just aren't supposed to be together. It feels forced and artificial to force it bc I had an affair. He wanted to have sex last night and I just couldn't. I got all those anxious/irritated feelings I used to get when he'd try. I feel like I can't keep doing this to him. It's ridiculous and cruel. I feel like mc and all that is just going to help him maybe not be mad at me if I do leave and that sounds selfish on my part. Like I've said before, I was half out the door decades ago but I stayed bc i didn't want to be divorced and a failure. Adding kids just made leaving more difficult. Ap was just a wake up call that i am that far gone. It was a fucked up cry for help to get myself out so I wouldn't have to make the decision. If I really wanted to be with my husband I wouldn't have done it. I firmly believe that. I think all the affair did was make me realize I could be in a relationship with someone who didn't belittle me. Sorry I keep harping on that. I realize it pales to what I did, but I did endure it the entire marriage and it sucked.

[This message edited by Elliebellie at 2:04 PM, Sunday, June 16th]

Do whatever you wish, I have never said you had to stay. I only said that if you’re going to attempt R you will fail because you’re more loyal to your AP than your BH. I stand by that statement. Refusing to block AP, still having sympathy for him and thinking fondly of him means you can’t R with your BH, at all. That isn’t fair to your BH. Since you just can’t even do the most basic step to even attempt R, yes you should probably leave.

Having a crappy marriage didn’t make you cheat. You say things like "if I really wanted to be with my BH i wouldn’t have done this". That’s a cop out. If you really didn’t want to be with him you would have left. Don’t let yourself go down the path that the state of your relationship determines your loyalty. Loyalty isn’t a negotiation. It’s not nuanced. You’re loyal or you’re not. Nothing makes you stay loyal other than your own integrity. If it’s bad you leave. It really that simple. Sure now that you have three kids and 20 years of history to unwind it’s much more complicated to leave, nothing is stopping you, but you.

It seems like you might be getting frustrated with the responses and advice here. I do think you need to make a decision on if you are going to be all in on the marriage or not. The "grace" to waffle on this point goes to the betrayed… anything less is cruelty.

I got all those anxious/irritated feelings I used to get when he'd try.

Have you spent enough time mentally digging into yourself to find the source of these feelings? The lazy path is to believe he is the cause of them. Are you expecting him to be a mind reader and holding something against him that he doesn’t even know about? Is it pulling up junk from your past? I definitely don’t believe you should have sex if you’re not into it. As a BH, I absolutely don’t want uninvolved, uninterested, duty sex. It’s almost worse than being rejected. But you can help him not feel rejected IF you look deeply enough to understand what you are going through AND communicate that to him. The problem might be that you simply reject him with no explanation or worse turn it into his fault.

Which brings me to this.

but I stayed bc i didn't want to be divorced and a failure

I firmly believe part of the huge issue is your seeming inability to hold empathy for anyone other than yourself and marginally your AP. You have expressed more empathy for the looser AP in these 18 pages than your husband. You drop little tidbits that show you are concerned about your image and how things affect you more than anything. It is VERY common on the betrayer side. That was my wife for years. You don’t seem to be able to articulate very deeply the pain this has caused your husband. Why is that? Based on your other comments, it could be because deep down you don’t believe sex outside of marriage is wrong. You don’t believe vows and commitment is all that big of a deal. Maybe like my wife, you convinced yourself that your husband wouldn’t care anyway. Unless you can get to where understanding things from his perspective is more important than your own feelings (and you seem to put far too much trust in your own feelings) I don’t think you will make much progress. But of course the first step is deciding and committing to a path out of infidelity. And that path may be divorce. Then you can have as much sex with as many (single) guys as you want and we will not consider it cheating.

Not choosing is a choice.

Ellie, we are definitely NOT trying to talk you into reconciliation. You completely misunderstand if that is what you are hearing.

First, you stated you are considering it, and we are letting you know the table stakes.

Second, what we ARE trying to talk you into is decency. Be honest, be self consistent, break this addiction. Those things you are going to need to rebuild your life no matter what path you take.

Third, we are concerned for your husband. Most of us talking to you have been in his shoes, and it is so much worse than you understand. You developing that decency helps him heal too.

The path of R or D, that is completely up to you, and honestly either is an honorable choice. What is decidedly dishonorable is stringing your husband along, saying you want to R while secretly not actually wanting him (like you are now), or God forbid continuing the affair (like you are now).

At the very least be honest with him and tell him you don’t know if you want to try to rebuild and why. Don’t give him false hope, that is a despicable thing to do just to keep your options open.

At the very least be honest with him and tell him you don’t know if you want to try to rebuild and why. Don’t give him false hope, that is a despicable thing to do just to keep your options open.

I did tell him that. I said that here from the beginning. I said idk if i want to stay in the relationship bc of x,y,z and that's when we decided to do mc.

You don’t seem to be able to articulate very deeply the pain this has caused your husband. Why is that? Based on your other comments, it could be because deep down you don’t believe sex outside of marriage is wrong.

I admit I don't have a lot of good influences, as evidenced by my 2 friends and also the culture here, but I do envy those couples who seem so in love and respectful and would never hurt each other and will probably be together forever so I do want that. I don't want to have these feeling of wanting someone else/something else. It's tiring and unhealthy.

I’m not going to get sucked back in so much again, going to enjoy Father’s Day, but just say this (again): MC is not going to fix anything if you aren’t honest and acting in good faith. It sounds like another act by you of putting the responsibility outside of yourself. These are your decisions to make. Your husband had already shown you that he is willing to go to IC to improve himself, and he is giving you a shot by not jumping ship. You have that info. Now you have to decide what you want. Your husband can’t do that for you. An MC can’t do that. You must decide.

Just don’t string that man along, that is all I ask.

Happy father's day!

[This message edited by Elliebellie at 5:22 PM, Sunday, June 16th]

I do envy those couples who seem so in love and respectful and would never hurt each other and will probably be together forever so I do want that. I don't want to have these feeling of wanting someone else/something else. It's tiring and unhealthy.

I can’t get sucked back in either because you need time to process what has already been said and all that will happen is frustration.

But, what you just said contradicts how you have been in your relationship with your husband this entire time.

You read it as he is wrong for you. And I don’t doubt that can be true.

But you went into this marriage saying you didn’t think you could be monogamous. You walked all over his feelings doing this with other people he didn’t want you to do.

What I have learned is this: our relationship with others is a direct reflection of our relationship with ourselves. You are a middle aged woman who has never worked on her commitment issues or her emotional intelligence. You just kind of Willy nilly believe everything you think and feel without knowing how to challenge yourself on it. This is very childlike.

So, what I will tell you about the conflict between what you say you want and what you are actually willing to do are at odds with each other.

No relationship is perfect. No person we marry is perfect. The art of marriage is to keep deepening your understanding of yourself and the other person. The feelings of bonding and commitment and satisfaction comes from working through things as they come up, making it through hard shit as a team, enjoying the good shit as a team.

You don’t want the marriage because you never invested in it. And it really could be too late for you to start, I get it. But we value what we invest in. You do not value yourself or your marriage because you don’t know what that investment is, nor do you want to make it. All you want is someone to make you feel good because you do not know how to do it for yourself.

And that is what you should be focused on. Until you make that investment no relationship will have great value to you other than when you are in the infatuation phase where you can extract all the good feelings.

I value my marriage above all else today. Because it’s been easy? No. Because I have worked on myself, and on it and the investment came through seeing the value of that work and why deep joy and connection can be derived from being 100 percent all in.

I already told you when dday hit I didn’t feel that way. I felt ambiguous about my marriage. I was definitely fence sitting. But I had enough insight to say "you know what, so have nothing to lose here by working on myself and seeing how I feel after some of this work is done. I am going to do this with integrity, because integrity is going to be an important part of who I want to become and I am going to see where it goes"

And then every day I did the things that aligned with my goals. I examined all my thoughts, and I read books and watched podcasts and I studied. I practiced learning what I wanted and I practiced asking for it. I learned how to have hard conversations.

Today, my marriage is my greatest external comfort. My greatest external security. My greatest source of external joy. But I have those things internally in spades. If it went away tomorrow I would grieve but I would be okay eventually because I have good coping, I have a moral compass, and I know what I deserve and am worthy of.

I don’t dismiss that maybe you can’t have that with your husband. I don’t know you and even if I did I couldn’t tell you what’s right for you. But I can tell you that your thinking is as faulty as a leaking bucket, your character is weak, and you are acting on teenager like whims that are going to lead you to results teens get that they have to learn from.

Change happens when the pain of being who you are is greater than the pain it will take to change. And I just don’t think you are there. Your character and vision for yourself is too weak, so you are not uncomfortable enough being where you are to acknowledge the thing you need to work on is you.

I don’t believe for a minute now that you don’t want to leave for the ap. As the time passes your anxiety is going up that you will lose the opportunity with the other man. Every day that passes your withdrawal lies to you even more. You have to be strong enough to stop the cycle so you can work on yourself, but I just don’t think you are in enough pain to do it. You are in just enough pain you want it to be easily cured by reaching for the artificial shit that you have always held on to because you are someone who values fun above all else.

I think it’s going to be years before you are ready to acknowledge that what drives you doesn’t serve you well. And that’s okay, maybe that’s your life path and there are things that have to happen and be endured until you are forced to address it. And honestly, I know people that never happened for.

For me, the reason I did so much work didn’t start with the burning desire to save my marriage. It started with the burning desire to get myself out of pain and knowing that the only true cure for it was to look deeply at myself and start making changes. That meant I had to stop looking for the cure in the poison of all the external things I was reaching for to make myself feel better temporarily.

Happiness is an inside job, Ellie. When you fix what’s broken in you the perception you would have about all this shit will change greatly.

I think what you are responding to in this thread is that we keep reminding you to stop hurting your husband and stop wanting this shitty guy who thought it was fine to poach someone else’s spouse. But true change doesn’t come from that. It comes from not wanting to keep making the same decisions and swimming in the same problems that you bring on yourself because you are tired of the pain it brings. But I think you are just going to keep reaching for life rafts thatcan help you forget the pain and get instant gratification of feeling good. That’s completely up to you. But it’s a band aid.

[This message edited by hikingout at 6:25 PM, Sunday, June 16th]

And you can Venmo the $15 to

@hikingoutknowshershit

[This message edited by InkHulk at 6:15 PM, Sunday, June 16th]