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it has been almost 2 years since dday1....then 9 more months of false r with ow2....now we have been attempting r for the last 7 months. he is doing everything in the healing library. it was only 7 months ago when i learned everything....the false r...the phone records...and the secret email account that knocked me off my feet.

the secret email account that i hacked into revealed his double life in detail....the dirty pictures of other women, porn, all the emails between him and the ow, and the online dating sites that he was a member of.

the way i let him know i knew everything was by emailing him a picture of the ow on his lap...and him kissing her. from my investigation, the physical cheating has been going on for the last 3 years with other women....but the online dating, porn...has been going on for at least a year after we got married. i was able to hack into his on-line dating account, and i see that he registered a year after we got married.

i cant help but wonder you guys is if my whole marriage has been a lie?

to me, it has been. he may have not started out actually having physical sex with these women on-line...but he was still cheating...cheating on me and the marriage with his cybersex, dating sites....and there were many of them.

in addition to that...it was only 7 months ago that i found out he is an alcoholic and a substance abuser...he just completed rehab.

so he has been fucked up...(excuse my language) for a really long time....i am sure way longer than before i even met him.

he seems like a different person now....and so i am with my ic...and my firm boundaries for r in place.

but, you guys...i am not sure how to process this....my whole marriage being a lie, you know? yes, he is doing everything he should have been doing all along now...but i am having a difficult time moving forward with all that i know.....

i feel like i have been duped...like we should have never gotten married.

can anyone relate to what i am saying.....i guess i am hurting AGAIN today....

I'm so sorry you're hurting, sri624. I can definitely relate. My WH cheating while we were dating. I, too, feel like my entire relationship with him was one big lie. I feel dirty, used and very gullible for believing all he told me.

Processing this has been so hard and I hurt for you. I have asked him so many times why he even bothered to marry me when his intent was to cheat the whole time?

We are in R, but if it turns out to be FR, there are no second chances. I feel that I have somehow betrayed myself in allowing an opportunity to R in the first place.

I see no reason you shouldn't feel "duped." You WHERE!! Perhaps your IC has some good methods for moving forward.

Just hang in there. We're here and we get it.

I understand. My H was cheating before we were married and I often feel like he duped me. We make the best choices we can with the information in front of us at the time. Really all we can do is move forward. Living in the past and getting upset because they pulled one over on us doesn't solve anything because we can't undo the past. I'm sorry I wish I had more wisdom to offer. Like someone around here says "we can't unfuck the donkey".

I'm sorry you are hurting tonight. We are over 4 years out and for some reason I have been hurting a lot lately too. No reason my H is doing everything right, I'm just still working through some anger I guess.

I TOTALLY get what you are saying sri624.

My WH has admitted that not once in our 25+ years of marriage had he even considered what I wanted or felt. Never. He admitted that all the years when he said he didn't have time to spend with me and the kids, he just didn't want to.

For 7 years prior to his A he was traveling the world on business, flying first class, staying in 4 star hotels, drinking, dancing, chatting up women and collecting phone numbers. We owned our own business, so all those extreme and unnecessary expenses was money that did not flow down to the family. It didn't matter to him. He felt he deserved it. He accrued millions of miles in airline travel and spent it all on upgrades for himself. He admits he not once considered taking us anywhere with him on that mileage.

Imagine finding out that 25+ years of your life were a lie. Imagine taking care of EVERYTHING in your marriage so your spouse could pursue his career unemcumbered with the promise of him finally spending time with you in retirement.

Then imagine he hits retirement age and you find out he is secretly engaged to a MOW and is days away from divorcing you, dumping the kids on you and starting his new life free of any responsibilities.

Yep, I am having a really hard time processing it all. A lot of times I get mad at myself for assuming normal emotions existed in a man who simply didn't have them. I projected my thought process on to him and just assumed he operated from the same moral place I did.

I beat myself up over it. But I have to stop and tell myself I have nothing to be ashamed of. I was a good person. I lived an honest life. I enjoyed my children, even if he didn't.

I get it, sri.

FWH didn't cheat from the beginning, but he was an alcoholic and addict. I didn't see it until many years into the marriage. During those years, he did many things that were beyond the bounds of his vows. I didn't know about them until after things fell apart on D-day.

Part of my struggle with deciding to R was whether we had anything to really base an R on. In the end, I decided that we weren't "rebuilding" we were making a new marriage.

Even so, for the first two years, I felt robbed of the first decade of our M. I still have moments when the contrast between FWH's old behaviors and his current ones hit me very hard and I grieve a little in that moment for what we could have had but didn't.

I don't have an easy answer, but what has worked for me is making a decision to move forward. I don't deny our past, and I don't minimize it. But I won't let it contaminate what we've worked so hard to build either.

Maybe that helps?

(((sri624)))

You're not alone, sri.

Something I wonder, and something H helped me realize is, with some (many?) serial cheaters, they still feel and therefore act single even when they're in a relationship.

That baffles me. Why get into a relationship if you still feel single? It must be a different value system. Perhaps there are people who see relationships as commodities, or solely for the benefits - "hey, I have a spark with this person, might as well be in a relationship - that person's kinda hot too..." - rather than the reality of truly getting to know and support and love another person. Perhaps the relationship is seen as an achievement or something that helps your life rather than as a way of life. A shallow understanding of what a committed relationship is. It's not just a thing; it's two people.

I think there are a whole lot of folks who don't take "relationship" seriously. Like I said, a different definition of "relationship". LOL I keep misspelling is "realationship".

thank you guys for responding to me tonight...i cant sleep thinking about all of this. my wh and i had a long talk tonight. he sensed i was sad and wanted to talk. so, i just opened up and told him how i felt. i told him that i feel like our whole marriage was a lie...and that it hurts me deeply. that i saw that he registered on these dating sites a year after we got married...and there were many. i said..."why would you even marry me? i mean, you obviously didnt want to be fully committed to me. we obviously didnt want the same things. and with the other women you slept with...it is a double life you were living....you couldnt have possibly been happy. and when i look at you in those pictures with the ow, you look happy...like you are having a great time. it has been 7 months of the 'new you' and how am i supposed to compare that to the rest of the marriage? i feel like i was living on another planet...and dont know you really at all. i feel so humiliated by you...everyone knew what you were doing except me. even your whole family...and yet you allowed me to be around them and talk you up in front of everyone...when you were cheating the whole time? it is so hard to move forward know the truth about you...and our marriage,"

that is what i told him tonight. he told me the he has always loved me blah, blah, blah....and how he unfortunately and stupidly went through all of this crap to really understand what he had at home...and how much he wants to be married and faithful to me. he was sorry that he put me through all of this to finally grow up and get clean and sober...blah, blah, blah.

i have heard this all before during the last 7 months.

and you know what hurt the most...but i guess i needed to hear the truth. he told me that our marriage was a lie...and that he had been a jerk for most of the marriage. he sadi he wanted to "own" that and take responsibility for his actions...and prove to me that he is a changed man.

not sure how to process all of this.

what you all said did help me though....it really, really did.

Honey you are far from alone.

I KNOW my M was a lie from the outset and I still wonder if it still is.

So I too am having so much trouble moving forward.

But you know what? You have a right to feel that way. I sometimes think I too should just move on. But how I feel is how I feel. No amount of logic can change that. I try to talk myself around it all the time. I say to myself "That was then and this is now" and lots of other glib phrases like that. I read the wisdom on SI and think "I have to feel better". But I mostly don't. It is what it is.

Besides. Who gets to make the rules about how we should feel? No one. There are no rules.

So if you feel like shit, you do. If you feel like your M was a lie, then you have every right to feel that way. What you feel is right.

My advice: Stop fighting your feelings.

I don't like my feelings, I wish they were different. But they aren't. I try to deal with them but it is so fucking hard.

So I suppose I sound like I'm a fountain of advice ?

I wish I was. I wish I had the answers for us both.

so he has been fucked up...(excuse my language)

No I won't excuse your language. I like your language. I always like calling a spade a spade.

So no answers. Just empathy.

You aren't alone and you aren't nuts. You are normal and have every right to feel as you do.

BIG HUGS

Laura

sri, I am with you in thinking my whole M was a lie.

My WH was screwing around when we were dating. I feel like he said his vows without the intention of ever following through with them.

He started cheating again right after we got M. He continued doing it for the next 5 years and 10 months and then spent the next 5 years lying to me about it.

So, yes, I understand the feeling that the whole M is a lie. Because mine was.

But, I will give you the perspective of my WH, take it for what it's worth...

He claims, when I tell him that our M is a lie and the whole thing IMO is invalid, that our M was not a lie. He claims that, yes, he did lie about that one aspect of our M for almost 11 years, but everything else was the truth. He says the happy times, the sad times, they were all real.

Of course, I disagree, because had I known what was really going on there probably wouldn't have been an M. I was young, only one child, and more capable of throwing in the towel and getting a D. But that's not how it worked out, so here I am.

Perhaps for those of us who have spent years being deceived by our WSs the key is twofold:

1. Allow ourselves to feel the pain of the deceit. Acknowledge it so we can move on.

2. Ask ourselves what we are going to do to protect ourselves from this kind of deceit in the future. What are we going to insist on going forward? I guess what I am saying is some how we have to take the bad moments and turn it in to a learning moment for ourselves.