It's like LA44 said.
My H turned into someone completely different. He had to ostracise me, his parents, his sister, his friends, EVERYONE in order to give steam to this affair. It scared me before I realised what was happening - you question everything about the person you married, even before discovering the A.
And when he made the EA into a PA, it got even worse. He had no one in his life but her. He nearly lost his job. He lost control of himself completely.
After NC, he said often he doesn't feel like himself. No shit, Sherlock. You AREN'T yourself -- or rather, I should add, he is a version of himself: one with no self-control, sense of consequence, destructive, no love, or compassion, etc.
He was drunk on excitement, on lust. He was absolutely addicted to the secrecy of it, as long as he could ignore the person it turned him into, and the consequences of it. It was a happy little Affair Bubble for him. That I burst. In a few different ways. Now he is having to face his life crisis, his anxiety and depression, all the personal demons he tried to ignore for years. And he has to look back at the Disgusting person he let her turn him into and face it as a reality of his decisions.
He is working to repair all the relationships he ruined. But I think he's still struggling with reconciling the person he let himself become in his darkest days, and who he thinks he is. He is very lost.
In the month I had moved out, every time I dreamt of him or tried to picture him or think of memories, I actually couldn't even properly picture him. My brain could not connect the man I married with the man he turned into. In fact, in most cases, I could only ever picture my ex (from years ago, who was a horrible emotionally abusive, destructive man that cheated on me in lots of ways and I put up with). I found that unsettling because my H is nowhere near the abusive disgusting person that my Ex was but I still found myself comparing the two.
(Of course, this is because his A started not due to me being distant, or any direct problems in our M - it started because of his emotional hangups and anxiety problems that he never had to face up to until I moved in. But I think the WS being 'drunk' on their A is pretty accurate for most cases).
[This message edited by selfrespect911 at 12:50 PM, March 25th (Tuesday)]