SurvivingInfidelity.com Forum Archives

Again I warn this is a vent and it very much might trigger BS and WS alike. What I'm about to say are feelings and opinions that have building to a breaking point and come from my personal experience.

I am thankful I never loved my AP. I am thankful that the image of living with him that I forced myself to picture made me cringe and face what I was doing. I am disgusted that I ever associated feelings of empathy of liking towards him. To be honest what I liked was the attention because when I first met AP I disliked him intensely. Everything about his personality was the opposite of what I liked in people in general. XSO believes I was manipulated in large part and taken advantage of. I have refuted this because my choices are mine to own and manipulation lends a certain credence to not taking responsibility.

Now that brings me to my thread topic. There was a time where xSO insisted that I was manipulated I would tell him no and he insisted it was the truth. There was also a point where he had to hear me say I felt emotion for AP and I refused. The most I would say is I liked him to a time even when that wasnt really true. Because I didn't like him, I liked the ego kibble, I thought those were amazing. XSO needed to hear me say these things so I thought I could say them and he must be right. No he wasnt. Through all my digging I know one truth and that is that only I hold the fucking truth about my feelings and emotions. No one can tell me how I felt or how I was thinking or what my emotions are. If I say I did not love someone then that is how I felt. If my betrayed partner is asking me a question and I am trying to rebuild truth and I am honest continuously but they are saying no that's not true you felt this, this is how I know you felt. No no its not and while I am digging for my truth and whys someone trying to force me to admit something untrue is not going to do anything but screw me up more.

I apologize if this triggered or angered anyone but another post triggered me and I was tired of holding this in. Did not want to t/j so here I am. Again this is my personal opinion based on my personAl experience. I have every thought that xSO wanted me to admit this because he was projecting his admitted love of his EA partner onto me. He has never insisted on me admitting these things since he confessed that. YMMV.

Unagie,
We have had kind of the same experience in reverse, but my H has felt the same frustration and anger as you in regards to his feelings not being validated. Sometimes I (as a BS) think he should have felt x, y, or z in a particular situation because I am projecting how I imagine I would have felt. This makes him very angry. . . that he is (ironically) trying to be honest, and sometimes I have a hard time accepting it.

In his situation, my H had to believe he loved the AP to do what he did. (He didn't, that is the crazy making part of some affairs.) The alternative is what you describe - neither are better or worse than the other, just different. For me, part of building a healthy marriage is truly seeing the other person's point of view, whether it makes sense to you or not. I can not imagine feeling like I loved someone after 2 weeks of secret emails. Your (ex?)husband cannot imagine you having a relationship without feeling a connection. But, as hard as it is, we have to realize our spouses are not just an extension of us. Fully recognizing our separateness is one of the most painful aspects of an affair, but perhaps also liberating in a way.

Maybe in a sense you were just smarter -- almost all waywards who feel like they "loved" their APs during the affair, come to realize they really didn't. So, maybe you just weren't as able to deceive yourself about it. Or, maybe you just didn't need that justification/rationalization to get your kibbles.

Hope it helped you to write it all out.

[This message edited by bionicgal at 1:55 PM, August 8th (Friday)]

I totally agree with you on this unagie. It really gets to me sometimes when I read that a wayward HAS to have felt this way because the BS can't imagine it any other way.

Bionic said it really well, our spouses are not extensions of us.

Bionic said it really well, our spouses are not extensions of us.

I've lived my life being treated as an extension, an additional appendage for another person. It never even occurred to me that part of what I'm struggling with is this exact issue still. I wish I knew how to respond in an enlightened way when that is what goes on in my head and heart.

((Unagie))

You are completely right. I'll qualify that by saying sometimes it takes some digging or prodding for a WS to figure out their honest feelings. But once we do, then that is the truth. That is the point that both partners should work from.

I answer on ICR questions for WS. So many "new" BSs feel like your xSO. That something has to be a certain way, because that is how BS would have felt in a similar situation. I think that attitude hinders healing of both parties.

When the BS starts to wrap their head around the truth, like bionicgirl for example, I think it helps them both.

Unagie, being told how you feel must be very frustrating.

Being that I am the BS, let me assure you this is very frustrating for us, also. For myself, it is almost compulsive, questioning my FWH feelings as well as my own. I seem to loose track of anything that might make sense to me Just plain lost and attempting to rewrite my history. When it comes to "LOVE" vs "Kibbles" this to me is a double edged sword. My FWH is emphatic that there was no love at all, like you it was kibbles. If he loved his partners(it would hurt even more) but, I place a higher value on love, so in theory our marriage had more value. "Kibbles on the other hand I do not place any value in, lickely because I do not really understand them in my personal experience. So, betraying our marriage for something that has no value...well, makes me feel our marriage had even less than no value to him.

Sometimes, the value of our marriage becomes measured by his actions and feeling during the As.

My FWH would help me by reminding me that I am not seeing it from his broken perception. Sometimes, this helps me to adjust my perception.

Hope this made sense..not always good a writing my thoughts

As a BS I know I will never understand the A, and I guess that is why we can't believe that our WS didn't love the AP because if they didn't them why would they be happy to throw their BS away for someone who meant nothing!

Thanks for listening guys. TG and bionic that is it exactly.

guess that is why we can't believe that our WS didn't love the AP because if they didn't them why would they be happy to throw their BS away for someone who meant nothing!

Because and this doesn't make it any better the WS doesn't throw away their marriage for the AP. They throw it away for themselves and their selfish wants. Many waywards will say the A could have been with anyone because the reason for it was internal not because they truly wanted the AP. I know that was it in my case. I'm sorry for your pain.

Unagie, this is the first time I have seen someone explain this phenomenon.

I did not love my AP I loved the attention. I would never have wanted to stay with him, I had no respect for him. It is my shame that I did not have more respect for my marriage.

My BS created his own version of what happened.
He assumed that I must have fallen out of love with him, and fallen in love with the AP. He also thought that it must be a sexual affair. It was in that we had kissed and done some heavy petting, but I never did a BJ or had sex.
In a sense, it was worse than that, as I thought I was using the AP to fill my need for attention. I did not consider at all his wife and family. It was fine when it was flirtation chatting, but then he wanted more, and I felt obligated (go figure) to meet privately.

I had got pregnant before we got married. I lost my chance to further my education and get a professional qualification. My BH was busy working on HIS higher degree and I was lonely and handled everything very badly. I was too young, too immature and too stupid.

So even now, he thinks that there was more, and we are where we are, which is a kind of limbo, with the regular threat if I do not improve, he will become even more distant, and get on with his life without me.

There is nothing more frustrating and deflating to me then when my feelings aren't validated or I'm told that my feelings are "wrong" or that I can't possibly feel that way because that person wouldn't feel that way.

This is applicable to both WS's and BS's. If I expect my FWH to validate my feelings, I, in turn, must validate his. No one can tell another person how they feel or how they "should" or "couldn't" feel and no one can know how someone feels better than the person experiencing the feelings.

I don't think that this it is always a function of projecting the feelings that we would have felt as we picture ourselves in that situation, "It must have been love," but I do know for me that the very idea that my husband leveled me to the ground and risked losing the love and respect of his children to participate in a relationship where he did not feel love, respect or anything positive was unfathomable to me. I just kept asking, then why did you go back there if you are not feeling good about the interaction? How could you risk it all and value me so little for feelings that were NOT excitement, passion love, etc.
To explain that you were willing to throw it all away NOT for the affair partner, but for yourself and your selfish wants, that the affair could have been with anyone because the reason for it was internal rather than because you wanted the affair partner is such a GREAT way to explain it.

I think that wayward spouses often feel unvalidated because when they explain something about the affair and how they were feeling, the betrayed spouse is so clueless about how any of this could have happened in the first place that we are so ill equipped to make any sense of it. And when a person has been traumatized, the natural response is to work it and work it until sense can be made of it to a reasonable degree and the person's head then goes reasonable quiet and the issue can be shelved in a way. I can understand how that repeated need to figure out a way to make sense of things can be viewed as invalidating, but it is our own confusion and terror trying to work through it to make a version that is accurate, AND makes sense to us. Maybe in some ways that is impossible, but your explanation of how a person could throw it all away for a person that you actually DID NOT LOVE really does make sense. Thank you.

I have waffled back & forth since Dday as to which I would have preferred, whether he loved the OW or didn't. I know in my heart regardless whether he did or didn't, either way he choose to throw away our union. It doesn't matter to me what his intent was at the time of the affairs, because the outcome would have been the same upon my discovery of the affairs. Which would be a broken marriage. Which is when I have to remind myself of who my WS is today, not who he was during his affairs. Simply put, who he is today is a man trying to glue back together the vase that he pushed off a ledge & broke. He is also today a man who is trying to come to some understanding as to why he pushed the vase off the ledge in the first place.