SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

It's been about five months since my DDay. It was right before Valentine's Day, can you believe? Not that it matters or anything because we've never made a big deal about Valentine's Day. This year it was right after I found out and he made such a big deal about it trying to make me happy.

Anyway, last month we had the worst fight ever. I mean....it was brutal. I screamed at him and just absolutely raged at him. It was like a hurricane of feelings welling up inside me for the last four months and it just came POURING out. It was terrible, the things I said to him. I told him that I had lost all respect for him that a wife should give to her husband. I told him he was disgusting to me and I'd never look at him the same way and that he had DESTROYED our marriage. He just sat there crying and took it. He didn't try to defend himself. He told me that I needed to work through these feelings and he wanted to help me, but he had no idea how. I had no idea how either. After that was finished, it was like...I felt so relieved. Like this huge weight had been lifted off me. We've gotten along so well since then. We haven't had any fights. I've been a lot more patient with him. I've even been a lot less depressed. Because of that, I'm regaining control of my life. I'm back in school, I'm keeping up with the housework (the house had gotten REALLY bad while I was so depressed) Our marriage feels better, stronger, than it has in months. It doesn't feel the way it did before I found out. It'll never feel like that again, but we're doing so, so much better and I've felt happy.

My husband is leaving in a few days for a month of army training. He's going with his unit and I won't be able to see him. We've been through this before and it's hard (we have a three year old, so it'll be even harder) I'm noticing now that I'm depressed again. I hardly eat, I have terrible headaches, I have to take medicine to help me sleep, I have so much tension in my shoulders and back. I realized today that I'm scared of him leaving. We've been doing so well and I'm regaining SOME of my trust, but there's that little niggling voice in the back of my head whispering "What if he does it again?" There are women in his unit that find him attractive. I don't want to say anything to him because he HAS to go and I don't want to dampen our last few days together with mistrust and accusations--especially since he hasn't done anything. Yet? I don't know. I hope I can pull through. I just want to be happy again and be able to move through what happened....

Sounds like my situation. It's so hard to trust when you have NO reason to. My husband is military as well and is leaving at the end of this month for 3 months of co-ed hotel living. He's a serial cheater and I know he will cheat. It makes me sick. I thought of putting spyware on his phone and computer but I asked an attorney and it could be illegal to plant spyware in a device that could record anything I'm not privy to know. So...I will not be doing spyware. Not that it matters. He WILL cheat.

Hi Bookworm,

You have every right to feel what you do...paranoid, anxious, and suspicious. It sounds like the two of you were making a little progress and I want to encourage you to be honest with him. You've said that he has to go, but that doesn't mean you don't acknowledge how this will be hard for you or that he shouldn't try to make it easier. If the two of you can communicate about these things then more trust will be built. Maybe there are some things he can do regularly to help you while he is gone? Like check in with you or email? I don't know what kind of online access or phone access he has during this training but there must be something possible. You also need to work within yourself to answer the question "what if he does it again?" It sounds like you are offering R but if he cheated again would that be a deal-breaker? Does he know that? And, can you be accountable to that?!? Please talk to him because you are slipping back into post-dday behaviors that aren't healthy (not eating, not sleeping, etc)!

He won't have access to his computer or anything (Thank goodness), but he will still have his phone, which is essentially the same thing. He can't keep in touch with during some of it, but sporadic phone calls are what I'll be able to expect. He had previously told me that everything would be completely transparent--he would give me complete access to his texts, emails, and Facebook account, but I haven't actually taken him up on it. I feel like since I told him I want to stay in this marriage and make it work, I have to kind of FORCE myself to trust him. I don't want to keep punishing him and torturing myself, and I feel like if I keep going through his stuff, it reinforces to both of us that I don't really trust him. I'm not sure that this is the most healing thing to do. My grandfather had an affair when my mom was a young child and my grandmother stayed with him, but spent the rest of both their lives hating him and punishing him for it. It was such a traumatic thing to see (no matter what he had done in the past, I still loved my grandfather very much) that I'm terrified of doing the same thing and losing our relationship even if we stay in our marriage.