SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Hey Rocko - thank you so much for reporting your situation, yes, that definitely does sound similar.

I just can’t understand it, how people can engage in deception over a long period of time like this, keeping it secret from their spouse the whole time, how does they even make sense of that to themselves in their own mind?

I’m sorry you are still dealing with upset feelings about this. But I’m glad for you that being in the position you were, with no children, the proper pathway forward made itself clear to you.

For myself, after 18 years of marriage, and with two daughters that are nearing teenage, It’s not so cut and dry. I am three months in now from Dday, approximately, and still very much trying to figure out how this is going to work for us going forward.

My wife has been doing a lot of good work. Trying, at least ostensibly, really hard to figure out what was going on for her. But a lot of times I get a cynical feeling that all of this self-exploration work she’s doing is a just bunch of bullshit, and really, she just did what she did because she damn well wanted to, and thought she could get away with it.

Her one redeeming grace was that she came forward to confess to me. I literally had no idea any of this stuff was going on. I didn’t even suspect it.
I suppose her conscience actually got the better of her?…Or, as others have pointed out, maybe she was concerned I was going to find out on my own at some future point, and sought to circumvent the potential fallout from having her pattern of deception revealed through my own machinations, rather than through a confession (controlled by) herself.

…at this point, I suppose I will never know.

Hang in there! Don’t try and make sense of her actions! Escapism, fantasy, seeking validation, who knows? Human weakness and awful, hurtful choices happen every day. It would be great if we could diagnose the cause, but of course humans are too complex to have a simple answer. I doubt she even realizes her why’s at this point. But she needs to pursue that answer not only for you, but for herself moving forward.

I believe a WS confession is usually a positive, although you are right, we can’t truly know her motivation for confessing. The confession needs to be followed by actions, transparency, and remorse. It sounds like your WW is taking some positive actions. Right now, take care of you. Continue to heal from this trauma. And have a great Fathers Day! Good luck.

My H confessed (when he came home hours late and ignored texts and calls) and could not hide the fact he was out with the OW.

However he put me through hell for the next 6 months while he decided "what he wanted" which was basically me or OW.

So I too often wonder what the motivation is when the cheater "confesses".

You can change your future. You can't change your past.

R works fine if both of you do the work of building your M into what you want it to be and if what you each want your M to be is compatible with the other's vision.

Your WS's reasons for cheating are neither here nor there. What counts is your WS changing themself from cheater to good partner. You can't control that. It's entirely up to your WS.

So focus on yourself. At 3 months out, you're probably coming out of shock. If so, you can start to trust your thinking and feeling. You can start to figure out what you really want. Your main obligation is to be honest with yourself about that.

If you want R, test your WS, again and again. Give your WS ample opportunity to fail. If you want D, you can do that on your own. If you want to delay your decision, figure out what you need to make your decision.

MD78,

Small Town she probably thought someone say her and her AP.

I can't really give any advice on Reconciliation as her cheating was automatic termination from my life.

One word of advice is don't let any rage towards the AP impact your thinking and or actions. She was the one who vowed to forsake all others not the AP. I often say if I ran into the AP I'd buy him a beer and say thanks!

Side note:

Traveled to my home town for a funeral. Stopped at the local Mom and Pop to top of the gas tank before heading home. Looked up to see her walking in to the store. Didn't recognize her so much as I did her "cat like" walk. Climbed in the cab and gave my wife a big kiss.

Peace

I should just cut and paste I write this so often.

This will be in all caps to make a point you will pay attention to

First, STRESS IS CUMULATIVE!!!!! It means that there is a point of no return where your body begins to break down and there is nothing you can do to fix it. You can begin to have heart trouble or digestive trouble or mental trouble or arthritis. I have a friend who was told in her 20s that she had the markers for RA. Well into her 50s not a sign of it until her husband got very ill and she watched him slowly die for the next five years, constantly monitoring and nursing him. The next year that RA came on with a vengeance. Her immune system fell apart and then came back as gangbusters.

Your entire body is thrown into what I consider a burning garbage heap. There’s nothing going on in your body that is healthy when you’re distressed. I’m so puzzled as to why people don’t get this. When you break a leg, you get it fixed, when you have your heart problems you go to the heart surgeon. Somehow we forget that the brain is a part of the body and it gets as stress stressed out as any other part of the body and the problem is it controls everything in the body so everything pays the price when the brain gets crazy. Please understand you are headed to that point of no return if you don’t figure out how to get your life back on track. The title of this forum is surviving infidelity. That does not mean reconciliation and that does not mean divorce. What it means is you get your life where it is manageable.

Your life should be waking up in a good mood and going to bed in a good mood. It means you have people around you who care about you and make sure you are OK every day. It means you discard people who are harming you, emotionally or physically. You can only give your wife so many chances and then at some point your body is going to be broken down. I hope I’ve scared you because I’ve meant to.

Second get to a doctor, if you have not done so, and get some sort of medication to get rid of the anxiety you’re living with. That’s the sign that you’re under distress.

Thirdly, talk to an attorney to look at financially what you do, married or single. You need to plan for the future either way.

Fourth, find something to do physically. I don’t mean running a marathon I mean, just finding something to do to move your body every day. Something as simple chair exercise or something else like jumping jacks. Whatever your body is able to do helpful is what you should be doing every day.

Fifth,if you don’t have a therapist, get one. You need a place to vent. You need a place to cry. You need a place to pound on the table.

Sixth, find some friends to hang out with. Believe it or not one of the very best things you can do is laugh so find some people that are funny.

Lastly, eat healthy, don’t drink alcohol, or take any drugs, other than those prescribed by a doctor. Get a good night’s sleep and if you can’t, talk to the doctor about that as well. Your body has to repair itself at night and if you’re not getting sleep, it’s just adding to the stress. Eat well-rounded meals every day. I’m not a one meal type person, but I hope you get off sugar if you’re on it. That stuff has no nutritional value and really is pretty powerful in how it can damage you. By the way, I occasionally eat sugar. I’m just not under stress right now.

[This message edited by Cooley2here at 8:17 PM, Sunday, June 21st]

Musical

I think one of the hardest things about infidelity-recovery is that in so many ways YOU are the taskmaster or foreman in your recovery. In your instance you decided and had the option of reconciling your marriage, so you aren’t only "managing" your progress, but also her progress and the marriages progress. That forces you to wear several hats, and each one might create and allow for different requirements and possibly issues.
To use a possibly relatable comparison, considering your username: A band leader might arrange the practice schedules in preparation for a concert or recording. He assembles a team of musician, he makes sure everyone has the sheet music and notes and knows when practice starts and when they are expected to deliver. At practice he might be expecting some proficiency but accepts the second practice will be better than the first and so on. If the drummer shows up drunk the second time or hasn’t learnt his music… it’s up to the bandleader to push him on or fire him.

Your role is comparable. Your wife needs to do HER work in understanding what led her down that path. She needs to know what’s missing in HER (note- not the marriage or in you but in HER) that made her think this was OK. You can’t do that work. But you can expect to see changes and results and need to have some tool or vision to evaluate progress. I think that with time her reason "why" will be extremely shallow: a need for validation, excitement on this progressing and never really thinking anything would be discovered or happen. Her aha moment will be when she realizes that she can get validation from healthier sources – including self-worth.

Then there is you. You are both the band leader and the guitar player. Despite having to arrange everything then at first practice you too need to have done some instrumental preparation. As husband/guitar you have your own recovery, and as band leader you have to do your best to ensure YOU are on track too. Two separate roles, but joint in the same person.

For example: In one of your posts you cast doubts about the reliability of the poly. THAT is you as a husband and man dealing with the pain and the frustration of your wife’s infidelity. It’s inevitable that in dealing with that pain you have a boatload of self-doubt and questions. At times like that it’s important that you assume the role of band leader and give yourself – the guitar-player – a talking to.

The band leader goes from emotion to logic:
Poly’s are considered anything from 70-95% reliable. The people that can pass a poly are a) those trained to do so (not your wife), b) people dealing with non-threatening questions (like college students taking the poly as part of research and getting a slice of pizza as a reward and no serious impact if fail), c) psychopaths, narcissists etc that don’t discern between right or wrong or have no empathy (does that sound like your wife?) or d) a bad operator (sounds like you got a good one…).
So basically, YOU as the band leader have to talk to YOU as the guitar player and reason out the issues: Believe the poly and move on from THAT issue.

Not telling you to subdue emotions nor ignore red flags. But don’t get stuck in some negativity. Remember you always have the option of leaving this gig, or if the drummer comes to the third practice late, drunk and unprepared – fire him. Be that your wife, the MC or your IC. Yes it is positive that she came forth and confessed on her own, yes it is positive that the physical aspect was limited, yes it is positive that she seems to have been truthful.
Your band leader recognizes that but your guitar player has a hard time doing so too.

Your third role is managing the process of the marriage. Sort of like the band leader can’t only get the drummer to learn his part, he also has to make sure all the others are on key on time and know what to do. Don’t ignore or forget this part.
I want to make one suggestion: Find time for you two – and maybe all four of you – to go out as a family. During a difficult time the wife and I started taking half hour walks every day. Sometimes we talked, sometimes we walked. But we spent time together. We also went to the same gym at the same time, despite having completely different programs at the gym. The issue was just to spend time together. Even if not a word was said, or if all the conversation was about the issues, or if we spent it moaning about relatives. Together.

--
A short example of how I dealt with my issues back in the days:
I was miserable. MIS ER ABLE. Yet I had to go to work, and at that job carry a weapon and interact with people that were in general… miserable. What I did was this: In the parking lot outside the station I would turn off the engine of the car and sit for maybe 10-30 seconds. I would tell myself that for the next 8-12 hours I was Bigger the LEO – not Bigger the scorned fiancé wallowing in the pain of the separation and the infidelity. I would tell myself that for that time I was not allowed to think about my misery.
Strange thing is that it worked. Occasionally – especially the first weeks/months – I would catch myself looking at a radar gun but thinking about how sad I was, but when I caught myself I would mentally give myself an order to move on. I then started assigning times to when I allowed myself to "wallow" in my misery.
Same when I went to bed. I would give myself 20 minutes once the lights were out to fall asleep. If I caught myself lying in bed thinking about my misery and I passed the 20-30 minute marker – I had a list of chores. Spend an hour cleaning the bathrooms or detailing your vehicle and next time you close your eyes you are definitely not thinking about your misery.

What I learned from this process is a couple of things: You can control when and how you think about your issues. I would still feel miserable despite not thinking about her and what she did – but at least I wasn’t thinking about her. I also learned that although you can sort-of push the issues to better fit your timeline, you always had to deal with them. Only I could maybe do so at times that were more convenient.

MusicalDad,

sorry you're still hurting and going through all this.
The advice you're going to get from me should be taken with a massive scoop of salt.

Work on yourself, fix all the parts of you that weren't great before.
If your marriage makes it, you'll be a better spouse. If it doesn't, you'll be better relationship material for someone else.

The fact that she ADMITTED to the affair without you knowing about is no small thing.
Sounds like this punk a-hole psychologically manipulated your wife into an affair, and it's actually very disturbing how seemingly easy it is to do to someone. He's a POS and will absolutely be punished by God for destroying a marriage covenant, whether you get him fired or not. His time will come.

You sound like a down to earth, level-headed kind of guy so I'm betting you've already read a bunch of books, articles and videos on why our wayward spouses have affairs and why they protect their affair partners.

I suspect that even though the affair was short-lived, she probably started having feelings for this guy, which would be completely natural - I mean, they were making out, so there had to be something there.

I don't say that to be a dick, but to let you know that it's going to take some time for those feelings to go away and there is absolutely NOTHING you can do to fix that. You've got to let that part go, somehow. She has to work on that, nothing you can do.

What you CAN do is be the best version of yourself. Be emotionally stable. Work on your communication skills and boundaries. If you f*ck up, admit it and apologize.

One final note - you're going to read lots of stats about how long it takes to get over an affair. I would advise you to ignore all of them. While most affairs are shockingly similar in how they play out, everyone's timeline for recovery is different. You'll never forget the affair but your timeline is your own. Some people recover quickly, some never recover from it. The ones who recover quickly don't usually come onto forums and revisit. The ones who never recover from it often do, so keep that in mind.

Praying for you and wishing you all the best.

this punk a-hole psychologically manipulated your wife into an affair

She’s not a victim here. She’s a grown-a** woman fully capable of making her own choices, and she did. The OM made precisely NO vows before God regarding OP. OP’s wife, on the other hand, most certainly did. She’s 100% responsible. Let’s drop this "poor damsel in distress" view of women….

I know it's not a popular idea when you just find out...but get divorced. It's a rare couple that comes out unscathed from this fucking SHIT STORM of an affair. I tried R, but in the end couldn't get past the sheer stupidity of it and my own humiliation. NO WAY was I gonna allow such an event to stain what years I have left.

Sounds like this punk a-hole psychologically manipulated your wife into an affair

No way. No one accidentally has an affair. No one can be manipulated into an affair. WS's willingly and eagerly engage in affairs. Why? Because they are selfish inconsiderate self absorbed aholes UNTIL the affair is discovered and THEN they realize, usually, they were acting like selfish inconsiderate self absorbed aholes.

Never make an excuse for someone having an affair. There is never a justifiable reason

Hi everyone, I just want to thank you again for all of your amazing insights and input here, it’s so incredibly valuable to me as I try to navigate this, confusing, illogical, and deeply painful situation.

Fareast, thank you for your input, but I think I countervail from the point you expressed because it is very important to me to get down to the bedrock motivations within my WW that emboldened her, or let her feel entitled to embark on this escapade.
Part of that is because I want to try to be aware of her possible intrigue triggers going forward, and be able to pay attention to signs of danger developing so that I can at least not be so grievously blindsided if her behavior were to come back. However, I don’t think I would be around if she did…I don’t think I can stand this another time.

The1stWife, thank you for sharing part of your story, that must’ve been so painful to go through that six month Where your WH was trying to figure out what his priorities were, either the AP, or you. You have my respect for getting through that time without losing your mind. I don’t know if I could make it through that. my WW has expressed remorse since the very beginning, and it has been difficult enough for me to get my heart straight, I’m still working on it every day.
As to your final question about what causes people to confess cheating, I’m still trying to understand what may be plausible reasons for this. This is compounded by the fact that my WW’s AP broke it off with her only a few days before she chose to confess to me. Apparently she was emotionally distraught during that time, and was reaching out to a friend for advice because she couldn’t deal with the pain of being dumped by the AP.
Why then would she choose to confess to me almost directly after this time?
It seems like that would be a very risky move to take for someone who is already suffering from great pain of loss of their illicit relationship at that same time? This and many other factors are boggling my mind at the moment.

Sissoon, thank you for the reminder to take care of myself and engage in self-care. I have continued with my IC, which is helping a lot, and I’ve also started working out again, which is making me feel a lot better physically and giving me a little bit more pride in my appearance. I’ve also been watching my diet and have slimmed down somewhat to a more healthy body shape. and I’m focusing hard at work and trying to make headway there to continue providing for my children. I have been giving my WW many chances to demonstrate that she is mending the error of her ways, and she is mostly succeeding along those lines so far. We still have many more challenges to navigate, this is a work in progress, of course.

Rocko, the motivation you posited for my WW’s confession: this seems plausible, it’s quite likely she may have been afraid that someone had seen her and the AP, or she may have been afraid that I would find out through my own machinations somehow, that she may have failed to hide her tracks convincingly enough, she might’ve sensed an impending doom that I would sniff her out eventually. I’m still trying to reckon with this.
As I mentioned above, she confessed to me only a few days after the AP dumped her, which seems like crazy timing, I would’ve expected her to marinate for at least a couple weeks, maybe even a month, before coming forward to reckon with the increased risk of letting the cat out of the bag to me… Something is awry here. I’m going to investigate further.

Cooley2here, thank you for your supportive recommendations, as I mentioned above I have been looking after my health a lot more carefully in more recent weeks and I’m already starting to see some good benefits. I’m also thinking a bit more on the legal front as you mentioned, about the possibility of a post nup. this might be a good move because I sense that things are still highly unstable. It will also solidify for my WW how serious her transgression really was, and let her know that I’m really to the brink of considering all options at this point. Perhaps that will even help things be taken more seriously in her own healing process, which is still very much in its nascent phases. I don’t do drugs or alcohol, so no worries there.

Bigger, wow, the allegory you proposed of a band leader, wearing the various many hats of managing his band, as well as being a player in the ensemble, it’s almost poetic. I myself have quite a musical history as you may have deduced from my screen name here, and I can definitely resonate with the concepts you are putting forward. Something tells me you must’ve been in a musical capacity in your life at some point? you make a really good point about curating ‘a diet of the mind’ and only allowing the descent into miserable contemplation of the nasty underbelly of this whole filthy situation at certain intervals, so as to confine the amount of damage it does to us, and to leave us bandwidth for focusing on the essentials of life, which can go neglected if we spend an inordinate amount of time simply licking our wounds.

But bigger, there has been a bizarre plot twist in the area of the veracity of the polygraph, buckle up:
The operator, who has some 25 years in the business, told us at the end of the session that my wife had passed the questions with no deception indicated. However, a couple weeks ago I reached out to him and asked him to send me the written report that would have accompanied our session (he never provided this on his own, which also surprised ). He wrote back and said that there is no written report available, there are no notes, test results, or anything else of a documentary nature that he can offer me. He stated that he simply didn’t take any notes. This seems very strange. I now have a worry that he may be some kind of charlatan, how could it even be possible that he has no written documentation to accompany a session like this? I’m trying to consider my next move on what to do with this individual. he should be able to accompany his verbal statement with a record of the test results, his personal notes, other observations, etc. Something is wrong here. And that is only contributing to my doubt of the veracity of the entire examination process.
I remember my wife ‘was on pins and needles’ as we were waiting for him to announce the verdict… perhaps she was sensing that he might have been about to say that she was lying… Perhaps she was actually relieved when he said that she was not. So what exactly was going on in that appointment? I get a bad feeling thinking about it. And this gentleman has been less than cooperative over email, which only heightens my suspicion further. I’m going to continue to pursue this in the weeks to come and hopefully can get some traction here.

jeremy99, I agree with your assessment if the AP, the guy is an absolute piece of shit to go after a woman who is obviously married, and has a family, but that’s exactly who he was, a selfish asshole.
I agree with you that he will be judged before God someday. Or perhaps karma will pay him back in his own coin at some point in the future.

However, as other commentators have asserted, I do place the primary culpability squarely on my WW. She was the one who made ongoing daily choices for 2 1/2 months to continually renew her pursuit of this idiotic young boy and inappropriately go outside of our marriage.

Your point about my WW developing feelings for this young man is well taken, this is a theme that has been coming up to me in my ruminations lately.
she likes to represent that everything ‘meant nothing to her’ but then why did she continue on for months with him…
I think the depth of their connection was much more than she is comfortable to admit. I’m going to explore this theme further.

Thank you for the comments around taking my time to recover, I can already tell this is going to take a very long time, and to be honest, I still am not sure that we’re going to make it, and while I want to, I also have to be real real about whether or not at length I feel like I can even bear The disgrace of what I’ve been through here. I’m trying to figure that out for myself.

gr8ful, I absolutely agree that the primary capability is with my WW. However, the AP knew full well that she was married with children and a family. He does have at least some culpability here IMHO. But I think I agree with you that the primary fault is with my WW.

Clint, thanks for your stark and unequivocal stance. Yes, this is something I’m evaluating for myself, at this point, now that the initial!stabbing pain of the shock of being blindsided has subsided somewhat, I’m struggling with horrible feelings of humiliation as I contemplate how filthy this entire escapade has been, and I’m trying to determine whether or not I can stomach swallowing that for the rest of my days on this rock.

WB1340, you’re absolutely correct, betraying spouses are simply selfish assholes that are just trying to take advantage of a situation and get some pleasure for themselves.

However, this is a Segway into a much deeper topic. As I go through the resources on the Internet that are available dealing with the topic of infidelity there appears to be a primary bifurcation that attempts to make sense at the escapades.

The first option is along the lines of what you suggested, that betraying spouses are simply selfish assholes who don’t give a rats ass about the well-being of their family, or their spouse, and through a sense of gross entitlement, simply go after whatever it is they want with some other person, and they don’t give a damn about the cost of the fallout of those choices until they are discovered.

However, the other explanation chalks up this kind of behavior to some type of reaction to a deep childhood trauma that the betraying spouse must’ve suffered as a young person, whether parental abuse or neglect, or even sexual abuse, or even being bullied. Things like that. Apparently, this creates an avoidant personality issue within the person that they then act out on their own spouse, and instead of working on the marriage, they seek escapades with strangers as a way to experience thrills and numb themselves to the pain of the trauma that they are still experiencing at a subconscious level.

I’m trying to understand the calculus between these two flavors of explanation?like, was my WW’s decision to cheat based mostly on hedonism and opportunism, or was there some deep childhood trauma that caused this, and if so, what percentage of each of these motivators could’ve been the operating factor? For example, was at 60%/40% hedonism over trauma, or the reverse?

Team, I need your advice on this next point, this is where the plot thickens a bit. It actually gets pretty wild here.
As I’ve gone into discussions with my WW around the reasons for her affair, she claims that she felt she needed to hide and deceive because she has a pattern of hiding and deceiving throughout her whole life. She has shared details with herself about herself to me that were extremely surprising. Some of these are even mind-boggling. I was curious what you guys thought of this.

For example, she reported that she has a pattern of hiding food and then gorging herself on it when no one is around.
She also confessed to me a secret kleptomania where she steals small objects from the stores and gets a thrill out of it. And here’s the most disturbing one: she had a lot of drunken sexual escapades in her early college years, and she doesn’t actually remember the details of many of those (I suppose chalking it up to the alcohol).
But in her earliest sexual experiences were towards the end of high school, and before college, and here’s the thing that blows my mind: *she does not remember to whom she lost her virginity!!!!nor the circumstances of that. !!!

She has a few different Sexual experiences in her mind of things that happened, but she can’t tell which one of them was the first, and she feels like there might be others that happened, which she simply can’t remember???

This absolutely blows my mind, I’ve never heard of someone ever being able to forget how they lost their virginity.
How is this even possible? I’ve been researching on the Internet and I can’t find any resources around this, it just appears to not be a thing.

So now I’m confronted with whether my WW is simply lying about her sexual past, or if she literally can’t remember, and if she can’t remember, what the heck could this possibly mean about the way that she regards sexuality with men, relationships, etc.? She’s in the process of trying to unpack this stuff with her she’s only been working with for a couple weeks now, and so far there hasn’t really been any progress on this. The entire thing is a crazy mystery.

I simply can’t imagine not being able to remember losing your virginity!

I have a strong instinct that whatever is causing her to engage in all of these strange secret deceptive practices is somehow tied up in her inability to remember early sexual experiences.
The common thread with all of this stuff is hiding information, deception, moving in the shadows. I sense there’s something nefarious that happened in her past. SA? Criminal behavior? I don’t know.

I’m not trying to judge her or demonize her. But I want to understand what the heck happened here. It seems to me like it’s possible the explanations and motivations for this go way, way back for her. I wonder what the IC may discover as they work together.

If any of you have any similar experiences to report, it would be very helpful to me.

As always, if you’ve made it this far, thank you so much for your patience.