SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

I talked about this today in IC as I continue to feel and explore and discuss my deeper emotions. I am flat out scared to death than I’m going to lose my wife. She is, pardon the obvious statement, my wife. She is the one I have been with for the last 19 years and always assumed I would die with. We’re raising OUR three boys in the way we always dreamed kids should be raised, in OUR house, in a city of OUR choice, with the lifestyle WE always wanted.

But then I got in the way. My horrible choices, my inability to talk and share and my ugly past have thrown it all under the bus and it scares me to think that our current separation is on the razor’s edge of being permanent. Our relationship has broken down entirely at this stage as I haven’t seen her in weeks. I’m not even granted a tiny little gaze as she stays locked in her room in the mornings and makes her exit when I am dropping off the kids. In the evening I get the text “I’ll be home in 20 minutes, please leave” and on and on the weeks roll by like this.

The next few weeks are going to be huge on all fronts. She turns 41 this Sat and has already told me she won’t be coming home for the evening. After that she takes the kids alone on a short weekend trip to see old friends. Then my father arrives for a few weeks as we prepare to celebrate my son’s confirmation in the church (I don’t even know if she is planning to attend). I mean wow, between here and mid-June there will be a lot of emotions.

So I’m scared and beginning to talk about it. I’m scared she will never talk to me again, never laugh with me again, never hold me again, never kiss me again and never smile in my direction again. All I see is anger and pain if I see anything at all. And while I have survived dozens of fears since dday – that of being a single parent, of facing friends and family once everyone knew about my LTA – this is different. This is losing my wife, the mother of my three boys, the woman who represents at least half of who I am as a person.

I carry a printed copy of “the lifeboat” in my bag so I can read it whenever I need to. It helps me to make sure no matter what my emotional state is I can still ask the tough questions, i.e. have I REALLY cleared out all the seaweed? etc. But besides the work I’m doing on myself, the real panic is that my wife jumped ship many months ago and simply hasn’t told me yet (she tells our mutual friends divorce is imminent).

I’m still thinking positive thoughts. We still have our monthly MC session as the only window left to our relationship and I still pray daily that if we have a new beginning, it will start in that room.

I'm going to suggest a slight alteration to your perspective.

If SHE is going to have a new beginning, you can help her in that room.

If YOU are going to have a new beginning, you can help yourself in that room.

Put the focus on her healing. Put the focus on your healing and growth as a person.

You listed those as Job 1 and Job 2 in your profile.

But this thread title suggests a different Job 1 is at play.

You have to trust that the best possible outcome will emerge from the two of you healing. That might, or might not, be a reconciliation.

Set aside expectations for the marriage and put energy into making yourself the best possible person you can be for all the important people in your life. Work to give your BS what she needs to heal.

The beauty of it is that if you two heal, the marriage has the best chance.

best luck to you both

Thanks Warpspeed...my therapist said something very similar this morning. Basically that marriage is a legal construct and to stop focusing on "the marriage" and instead keep focusing on my wife's recovery, my recovery and being the most caring husband I can be during our MC sessions.

Somehow I want "the marriage" to be bigger, more powerful than all that, like some overwhelming force that just wills us back together, but that just isn't reality. Thanks for your input and support.

Was your M a big enough force to keep you from cheating?

You have to change your focus, as long as you keep focusing on this, then you aren't focusing on changing yourself.

Hey PFH

As a BW, a 6 year LTA is mind boggling... My husband was also involved in a LTA. There is so much anger, confusion, doubt, shock.... I wonder who did I marry? How could I have children with a man capable of so much harm... And for what? What did you get out of your affair??? At 6 months out of DDAY... I'm looking for consistency in my husbands behavior. And to me I'm at 50/50 towards divorce.... It's that devastating the aftermath of betrayal... My husband knows that there are times I can't look at him. He's disgusting to me. A piece of garbage... Someone who willingly put my health at risk. Put our family through hell for his selfishness is something that makes me want to divorce him. And never look back.

Your wife is in so much pain. She walks around in pain. I do. I go to sleep crying. I wake up crying. I wish I could go to sleep and not wake up because waking up means I have to carry my pain another day... I wish I could tell you uplifting things but this situation is a living nightmare.

Praying for you and your family.

Keep at it. Focus on making your wife feel better. Buy her tickets to go see her favorite show with her best friend. Write her a letter telling her all the great things about her. Think of all the things you've done (destroyed her self-esteem, made her scared of the future, shaken her faith in the present) and figure out things you can do to make them just a tiny bit better. In the end it doesn't matter whether you stay married or not. What matters is that when you're on your deathbed, you can say that you hurt your wife terribly, but you spent the rest of your life trying to heal that pain.

Also, I recommend reading lots of SI threads where betrayed wives say how they feel. That's what'll really allow you to understand how you've made your wife feel, and that's what'll give you the compassion to try to fix her.

I'm in a similar position to you, and I really, really think it can be done. And when you think it cant, you just need to take a look in the mirror and remember that its your duty to heal her pain. Good luck!

Prayingforhope - I have read many of your posts before and I can really see how hard you have been trying to change and be a better person. It is inspiring but I worry for you. I am afraid that if you D you will feel you lost.

I’m still thinking positive thoughts.

I am afraid all of the positive thoughts that you are hoping and praying for involve getting back to the marriage that you once had. I think you need to see the positive things you have done so far and think about positive things that may come even if it means you may no longer be married to your wife.

Your wife may no longer be your wife at some point in the future and that is not your decision right now - As are sometimes a deal breaker for some BS and no matter how much work and effort a WS puts in that cant be changed.

You and your wife have had kids together though - kids are a lifetime commitment. Your kids will mean that you always will have a relationship on some level with your wife, it just will maybe not ever be the same as you once had. I think you should focus on that relationship as parents more now and not your relationship as a married couple. When you have MC, you may have to look at it more as PC (parent counseling).

As I said at the start I have read your other posts. Often I feel you are given advise such as you should try to do this or that for your wife to ease her pain. Or I read a BS tell you that they wish that their WS did half of what you have done (by the way I wish my WW had done even half of what you have done). My advise to you though is you need to do the opposite of some of that advise - you may need to detach and find other positive dreams to focus on.

You need to let your wife go, focus on your relationship with her as a parent of your children and most of all keep working on you. You have come so far, I would hate to see you look back and see all that you have accomplished as a failure because that couldn't be further from the truth. You may have more to improve but you are on a good path, I just hope you can see that.

Thanks ReunitePangea, I appreciate you taking the time to share that with me, and unfortunately, I know you are right. I realize something more every day - my wife and I are becoming strangers. She is living her life apart from me, I'm doing the same at her request, and because of the trauma of dday, those are very different lives than we ever had before. We're not the same people we were and by the sheer lack of contact, by the distance between us, I am already letting her go whether my heart wants to or not.

Thank you for your support because your bigger message is not lost on me and I think about it often. No matter where my relationship goes with my wife, I am a different person. My friends, my family, my co-workers and most importantly, my children see it and feel it and I'm never losing that. I like who I'm becoming, but of course I wish the tragedy didn't have to be so overwhelming for me to get here.

Thanks for your good wishes.

Wow. I read your profile and it could be my WH's, with a few tweets here and there. But of course, I'm a different person than your wife is, so a different approach may be needed, based on her personality. and I'm kind of worried about her, too. Is she getting therapy to help her through this?

Having said that, at 6 months I was still deep in the anger stage. I remember sending WH profanity-filled texts about what a bad person he is. (And I really don't swear much.) what helped was seeing genuine remorse on his part - for what he did to ME, not just what he did. Any discussion of why he did it, if it went on for too long, was confirmation that he was a selfish, self-obsessed asshole who couldn't see beyond himself to see how much he had destroyed ME. Pretty much everything he did at that stage was judged harshly. He literally could not do anything right.

In my view (once again, take this with a grain of salt), what you might want to do is to find unobtrusive ways of expressing your remorse. Flowers with a note, "I am an idiot, I hate what I've done to you." Maybe write a letter/ letters saying pretty much the same thing. The key is to not give in to anything that could be interpreted as "I'm doing so much, therefore I deserve for you to make an effort." The message should be "I will support anything you need to do to heal." "I get that you hate me, and you have every right to. I failed you in the worst way possible." Be prepared for her to fling these things away. But keep doing it.

Good luck to you. FWIW, we are now nearly 2 years past DD, and things are going well, but I still don't feel the love. Still working on it.

a long term affair is an animal of a different color. Your wife will begin to compare her timeline to that of the AP to try and make sense of her reality. You have robbed her of 6 years of her life. Nothing is real to her. All of her memories she experiences as fantasy/fiction. Buying tickets to a favorite concert will do nothing because she will sit there staring blankly while he mind sifts through the memories of those 6 years trying to determine what was real and what was false.

Years of an affair with the same person? Your wife has been stripped of her safety, identity, memories, dreams for the future...consider that. Perhaps someone has an idea for helping her identify times when you were 100% involved with her not thinking of your AP or checking in with the AP.

BS here...

You've received done great advice here.. I realise that you want to get "the marriage" back.

But, very gently here in all likelihood your wife does not want that marriage back. Right now, all she can probably see if 6 years of lies and betrayal. To tell her you want that back would be a huge insult.

Could she want a 'new' marriage with you absolutely. Focus on healing you. Give your wife what she needs to heal her...

But let go of getting your M back in the sense that it was (if that makes sense). Good luck. Sounds like your willing to do the work.

Pfh,

Is she helping her healing by getting IC?

Trying to do this without help is extremely difficult on a good. Having someone who knows you is the difference between reading a map to get to your destination and having a friend advising where the landmarks are and what streets to avoid. The route is the same but you avoid fling in the potholes and can keep moving forward toward a destination.

She needs help to get to her destination for the kids sake!