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BS keeps saying that he wants to resolve our issues, but I honestly don’t know what "resolve" means to him anymore. He expects me to keep talking about our problems, but I genuinely don’t know what he wants us to discuss all the time. Then he gets upset because I don’t initiate those conversations. I’m not avoiding it intentionally — I truly don’t understand what is expected of me.

Do you do occasional check ins? Even if it's not a current topic, I know I appreciate when my wife asks simple "how are you doing/feeling" questions, or "do you have any questions for me?" That kind of thing. Even if I don't always have much for a response or questions just knowing it's on her mind and a priority for her, too, let's me know she's not trying to rug sweep or wait for it to blow over.

Is there anything specific? I saw your other thread, and had a thought, but couldn't participate.

[This message edited by Pogre at 3:44 PM, Thursday, May 21st]

He may expect you to constantly be working on becoming a safe partner, even now so many years later. Are you reading any books on infidelity? Listening to podcasts? Seeing a therapist? Journaling? Does he know you're posting here? All in all, he may just want you to initiate conversations about your breakthroughs, your challenges, etc, on the path to healing yourself.

Y'all using Gottman?

some issues can be resolved, others are permanent and you just cope.

My husband refused therapy. From his perspective, he did not deserve what happened. We lost everything, while the OP lost nothing. I think he sees therapy as another loss — like admitting defeat again.

Yes, he knows I post on this forum. We check in constantly (at least it feels that way to me). We are now working together, he knows my whereabouts at all times, and he has full access to my phone, social media, and everything else.

His view is that it is "too little, too late." He believes these are things I should have been doing from the start, not now as some kind of consolation prize.

He also does not believe I have told him everything, and honestly, I do not know what more to tell him. He asks questions that do not have simple yes-or-no answers, and then says I am avoiding the question. For example: "What were you thinking when you drove to the OP’s house?" Or, like I mentioned in another thread, the issue around calling it a "mistake."

It feels like every word I use is heard differently than I intended. Eventually, it always comes back to the same point for him — that I chose not to come clean in the beginning.

Do you initiate conversations or check ins?

Are you an open book?

Do you show up every day to make amends?

Do your action match your words?

Are you going to a counselor?

Read the book How to Help Your Spouse Heal from Your Affair by Linda MacDonald. It will help you understand the situation a BS is in.

My husband refused therapy. From his perspective, he did not deserve what happened. We lost everything, while the OP lost nothing. I think he sees therapy as another loss — like admitting defeat again.

If you broke his leg, would he refuse to see a doctor?

I agree that the *marriage* isn't responsible for the affair, and you both need to address that first. But unfortunately, marriage issues still exist, and he wants to work on them. At least that was your claim in the first post.

Even if you don't go to therapy, "seven principles for making marriage work" is a great book to use for addressing issues. That said, it's NOT an affair recovery book. So maybe you guys should start with "Not Just Friends" or "How to Help Your Spouse Heal from Your Affair". Read it together, talk about it.

Yes, he knows I post on this forum. We check in constantly (at least it feels that way to me). We are now working together, he knows my whereabouts at all times, and he has full access to my phone, social media, and everything else.

His view is that it is "too little, too late." He believes these are things I should have been doing from the start, not now as some kind of consolation prize.

He also does not believe I have told him everything, and honestly, I do not know what more to tell him. He asks questions that do not have simple yes-or-no answers, and then says I am avoiding the question. For example: "What were you thinking when you drove to the OP’s house?" Or, like I mentioned in another thread, the issue around calling it a "mistake."

It feels like every word I use is heard differently than I intended. Eventually, it always comes back to the same point for him — that I chose not to come clean in the beginning.

Well there isn't a time machine. You can do your best, but this kind of damage can't always be repaired.

My husband lied about his affair in 1977 until 2024. I knew something wasn’t right.

He confessed to other things and other affairs during the interim, like when I had a D-Day in 2005. He continued to lie about the affair in 1977. He also hid another affair in 1978. It’s not like we haven’t discussed it. It’s just that he would not come clean to everything I felt I needed to know.

I needed details. Instead he chose to stonewall me and gaslight me, telling me I was crazy. Nothing happened yada yada. For decades.

So I understand where your husband is coming from. He needs to know the truth of his life, and he doesn’t think you’ve given it to him.

So maybe what’s expected of you would be for you to write it down. Give it to him. Give him the details about what you were thinking, what you were feeling, and what you were doing.

On DDay he realized he woke up in a new life where all the characters are the same, but the storyline is completely different.

You know everything that happened, every detail, every word that was said, every feeling you had. Your husband does not know that information. He wasn’t there with you. And the insecurity that goes along with wondering, how does my partner feel about me, what did he say to other people? What did they do togetherthat caused intimacy between them and why did I lose my own relationship because of it, are hard questions to grapple with.

Some of my husband’s affairs happened decades ago, but they were new to me when I found out on D-Day just a couple years ago.

For my husband, it’s not news. He’s known about them for decades. He’s known every detail. Meanwhile I lived oblivious to many things.

So what you view as old news, let’s move on, is news to your husband and very new and painful.

The fact that you called it a mistake is troublesome. It was choices. Purposeful choices that you knew would cause harm if discovered. That’s a betrayal and it’s hard to get over it.

I don’t even know what to ask my husband anymore. I suppose I could ask him for a healing balm to put on my heart. I just don’t know anymore, because I look at him sometimes and I think this is a person I love and other times I think this is a person who chose to purposely hurt me. And it’s very difficult to strike the balance.

The level of selfishness by waywards is something I don’t understand. But then you top it with trickle truthing and lies. It makes it just that much harder to rectify in one’s own mind. I can’t understand why he did what he did, and along the way, I have tried to let go the why. It crops up from time to time. And it thrusts me back into waking up into that new world where all the characters are the same, and the storyline is completely different than what I thought I had been living.

I’m not sure that it takes a specified amount of time to work it out in the mind of the betrayed, but it does take a wayward spouse who is willing to repeat this cycle over and over and over until the insecurity goes away and thoughts of the future begin to take its place.

Your husband needs to be asked what he thinks he needs. Because it sounds like you don’t have a clue what he wants from you and that means you haven’t been talking or listening - one of the two, or maybe both.

You might be checking in asking are you OK and, he says yeah I’m OK. But he’s really not.

Because he’s exhausted from the emotional toll that has happened to him. He wants YOU to initiate it because he can’t anymore. He’s exhausted, he is spent, he’s empty.

And that’s because he has tried to explain his pain and his thoughtsevery way he possibly can and to soldier on, but it hangs in his heart and it sticks in his throat.

And the worst part is he wants you to take the lead in healing but that hasn’t happened. My husband did this, and it made me feel like he really didn’t want to do anything because he wouldn’t actually DO anything. He wouldn’t initiate conversations, he wouldn’t go to therapy, he wouldn’t sit down and work through some things I found in books, he wouldn’t read anything on his own, and worst of all he just sort of hung around, waiting for me to be the person who figured this problem out.

I ended up leaving for three weeks until he figured out that he had to do this because I wasn’t going to anymore. I wonder if your husband has had that kind of thought.

So maybe you should sign up for marriage counseling and go alone, I did that. I did that because my wayward husband refused marriage counseling.

So I went alone, and ultimately, he realized he needed to join me if he ever had a freaking prayer.

Sign up, go alone and maybe fix what part of you isn’t seeing why he can’t talk about it and move forward and explain it to you anymore. Ask that question.

And maybe when he sees you making this kind of effort, even after this long, he will understand that you do love him and that you do want to fix this relationship.

[This message edited by 5Decades at 5:10 PM, Friday, May 22nd]

So maybe you guys should start with "Not Just Friends" or "How to Help Your Spouse Heal from Your Affair". Read it together, talk about it.

Or get the audio versions and listen to them together. That's what my wife and I did. You or he can pause if something lands or hits home and discuss it in real time. I think both of those books were very, very helpful for both of us.

Or, like I mentioned in another thread, the issue around calling it a "mistake."

This is what I had a thought on. Just erase the word "mistake" from your vocabulary in regards to the affair and replace it with "the most terrible choices/decisions I ever made." That's more or less what my wife says, and it doesn't make it sound like an "accident."

As far as the other issues go, it just kind of comes with the territory. For me it's only been a year, but the fact that my wife did tell some lies and minimized some things for that first month I can't help but wonder of there isn't more that I don't know about. It's a consequence of not getting the whole truth from the start. All you can do is be honest and transparent going forward. Over time, hopefully, your consistency can start rebuilding trust again.

What did you tell him about what you were thinking as you were driving to OP's house? Were you excited? Scared? Both? Or are you still trying to shield him? All you can do is just be honest. Don't shield him. He wants the unfiltered truth. I heard some rough stuff from my wife, and some of it hurt pretty bad, but when I had some time to process and absorb, alongside with observing her words and actions now, I at least appreciated that she trusted me enough to tell me the unadulterated truth.

*ETA:

You mentioned that years later you came here and realized that not disclosing everything was a bad thing to do. When did you come clean about everything to your husband? Was it recently, or was it a long time ago?

[This message edited by Pogre at 5:14 PM, Friday, May 22nd]

I agree with the comments above.

This stood out for me though:

He believes these are things I should have been doing from the start, not now as some kind of consolation prize.

That's very true. It's the reason I believe the WS can't make up for the betrayal.

The only thing that's left for the BS is deciding whether or not being a good partner from now on is sufficient to rebuild the M. Your comment says to me that your BS may not think it is enough.

In addition, to the suggestions above, I suggest asking him if he can see you having a great life together. If he doesn't, why stay together?

Whatever his answer is, I urge you to follow the suggestions above (adjusted to his answer), because I think your best bet is to work to start/continue to change yourself from betrayer to good partner.

Besides all the great advice given so far, I assume you’ve given him a written timeline of the entire affair and everything that went on? Have you also suggested that you take a polygraph to help prove he knows everything?

What your BS is probably trying to "resolve" is not just the affair itself, but the shattered sense of reality, safety, and emotional connection that came with it.

When a betrayed spouse keeps wanting to talk, asks why conversations are not being initiated, or seems unable to "move on," it often confuses the wayward spouse because from the outside it can look repetitive, circular, or impossible to satisfy. But to the BS, these conversations are usually not about rehashing for punishment. They are attempts to answer a deeper emotional question:

"Am I emotionally safe with you now, or am I still alone with this pain?"

That distinction matters.

A betrayed spouse often does not need endless problem-solving discussions. What they are usually searching for is evidence of sustained emotional engagement without them having to drag it out of you. They want to feel that the betrayal lives inside your mind too, not just inside theirs.

When the BS keeps initiating conversations, it can create a terrible imbalance where they begin to feel like:

they are carrying the entire emotional weight of the recovery,
they care more about healing than the WS does,
the affair occupies their mind constantly while the WS only addresses it when prompted,
and that if they stopped bringing it up entirely, the WS would gladly let it disappear.

That last one is especially painful.

So when you say:
"I genuinely don’t know what he wants us to discuss all the time,"

what he may hear is:
"If you don’t bring it up, I won’t think about it."

To a betrayed spouse, that can feel emotionally devastating because their world changed permanently. The affair is not a topic to them; it is a trauma that rewired how safe they feel in their marriage, in themselves, and sometimes even in reality.

Many BS are not looking for "the perfect conversation." They are looking for signs like this- spontaneous accountability, emotional curiosity, empathy without defensiveness, acknowledgment that the pain still exists, reassurance without irritation, and evidence that the WS is actively trying to understand the damage without being managed into it.

Sometimes what the BS truly wants is incredibly simple emotionally, even if it is hard psychologically, "I need to know you care about my pain even when it’s inconvenient."

A lot of wayward spouses unintentionally approach reconciliation like this, "If he needs to talk, I’ll talk.". That is how my WW approaches it. Then we BS feel like if we need to tell you what we need it becomes forced and untrue even if that is unwarranted.

But many betrayed spouses are longing for:
"You matter enough that I think about this too. I don’t wait for you to suffer out loud before I engage."
That is why initiation matters so much.

Initiating does not necessarily mean:
"Let’s dissect the affair again for three hours."

It can look like:

"I’ve been thinking about how much this must still hurt you."
"How have you been feeling lately about us?"
"I know healing probably feels lonely sometimes."
"Is there anything weighing on you today?"
"I realized something about my behavior and wanted to talk about it."
"I know I haven’t checked in emotionally enough."
Those moments communicate presence. I wish my WW would do this and would add many drops to both the safety bucket and the trust bucket.

What many BS are secretly terrified of is not just the betrayal itself, but emotional abandonment after the betrayal. They fear becoming the sole caretaker of the wound while the WS quietly waits for enough time to pass. This secretly haunts me.

And here is the difficult truth:
The BS often does not fully understand what "resolution" means either. I know I don't.

Because betrayal creates contradictions:

They want reassurance, but struggle to trust it. They want honesty, but honesty hurts. They want closeness, but closeness feels dangerous. They want the conversations, but the conversations exhaust them. They want healing, but they also mourn who they were before all this happened.

So the process can feel confusing and inconsistent for both people.

But usually, underneath all of it, the betrayed spouse is asking:
"Will you emotionally stay with me inside this pain, or will I be left carrying it alone?"
That is often what "resolve our issues" really means.

Not perfection. Not endless confession. Not magical words.

Consistency. Presence. Initiative. Empathy. And emotional partnership in the aftermath of something that shattered trust.

If reconciliation is going to work, the BS needs to eventually feel that healing became "our problem," not "his problem that he keeps bringing up.". I only speak about the "resolution" I crave.