SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

My marriage is dead, realisticly it has been for years. It's my doing. I've spent months bombarding my wife with words, no positive actions, though plenty of negative ones.

Most nights I sit and write a message to her, some I send most I don't. They do nothing for her, they are just more words. For my part I'm trying to work on myself. I've reached an acceptance, of who I am. That this isn't some thing happening to me, this is what I did, and what I did to her.

The messages I write are the things I should have learned, the things I should have understood and said when they mattered, when they might have helped her. She's moving forward on her own.

I still want to send her these messages, want to show her I'm growing, but the part of this that is letting go is the acceptance, the acceptance that it's too late. She has already suffered, the cuts were made.These words are about me. I forced her to find her way without help and support, without an ounce of remorse.

So I'm putting this message on here. I don't really know why, I think I needed to do something with it. Needed to do more than just write it and delete it.

I needed to somehow take some ownership of these words. Feel free to read them, or not.

"In the days after you found out the depth of sadness you felt must have been unbearable, the disbelief, the despair, wishing it wasn't real and knowing it was. Not being able to share that with me because I refused to be there with you, refused to sit with you in your pain, the pain I had created.

You gave your life to me, we both had issues with intimacy and vulnerability, you described it once as something like "we were never both all in at the same time ", Still you trusted me, trusted me with your love and your vulnerability, trusted me not to hurt you, but more you trusted me to be there with you when you were hurt.

I remember when I told you, the disbelief, the sadness and the shock was so evident on your face, I watched you struggling to comprehend what was happening. Your heart broke in front of me in that moment. And I still ran.

I failed you, when I refused to help you heal by avoiding questions, burying what was happening under talk of my problems, when I ignored your pain, when you needed to hear the truth, when you needed someone to hold you, to be in your pain with you, when you needed someone to talk to. When you laid awake at night and needed someone to be there with you, to offer comfort and support and I did not do it.

I did this to us, I made those choices. Every choice I make affects us, even now there isn't an us, every choice affects who we are and were.

I buried my head so far in protecting myself that I chose me over you at every turn, that was not love, is not love."

She has already suffered, the cuts were made.These words are about me.

Letting go of the outcome is always a positive thing in my opinion. It allows your concentration to move past getting your way (we all want things to go our way at some point in time, it's human nature) to what things need to happen. We sometimes will manipulate and not even mean to, or recognize that's what we are doing. We want to be persuasive and get the other person to see things our way.

The power of really seeing it their way, loving them enough to do what's best for them and not for us...this is all good growth. I am sorry that it took getting to this place to move that forward. Same for me in a lot of ways. While I was coming along, when H asked for a D and we went in-house separation, I had a similar epiphany to what you are having here.

I know it's a very sad time, so many emotions to process. At the same time, there is a lot of opportunity here for true change and growth. And, in the end she can still benefit from it in some way. Whether it's in the form of co-parenting, the experience of the divorce, or even in a possible new beginning. Hard to say. But, your focus is right, keep your head down and keep working on you. It's work that you will never regret and you will carry that into any future relationship, with her or with someone else. You will be a better man for your kids. Focus on the harvest as much as you can. Keep posting. I tell you I still post so I can examine my thoughts, it's a very good thing to reflect on where your head is at.

On this day in 2016 I blindsided my wife by saying I wanted to leave our marriage. On an evening, out of nowhere I uttered the words "it feels like we are just going through the motions " she agreed, and asked what we should do about it, she was instantly ready to talk, to work, to fix. She trusted in our bond and knew we would always be together, she trusted in us. But I wasnt being honest, she didn't know then that what was really driving me to say it was fear, I had been having an affair, and I wanted to run away from the consequences. I told her I wanted out.

She was crushed, and I let her be. She thought it was because of her, I gave her reasons like I didn't want to be in a sexless marriage, that I couldn't stand the broken relationship with my parents. I gave her lies. I was running, trying to hide from what I had done. I wasn't running to the AP, I didn't want her either. But I now knew I could be wanted by someone else, and that gave me the (false) confidence to run from my problems, if I ran from the difficult things I wouldn't have to be alone forever.

Such a load of bullshit, she had her heart broken, her trust broken, her marriage and family broken, because I was a coward and threw her under the bus to save myself.

It was all a lie.

All the suffering she has endured, the second heartbreak of discovering my affair 3 months later. She told me once that if she had known about the affair then we would have been over there and then, if I had been man enough to tell her then she would have three years into healing by herself now, instead I kept it quiet another three months and after that she fought to stay, she gave opportunity after opportunity to see if there was something to save and she got another two years of pain.

This is the truth of what I did. I made choice after choice to prolong her pain.

I need to remember this truth, remember how cold, callous and cowardly I am capable of being so that it doesn't ever happen again.

No advice here, but i can relate on some of the things you said. Just sending you encouragement to stay focused and process your feelings as there is always something deep waiting on you to find it to heal.

Hi again ChangeMe1,

I'm sorry you're hurting. It's so hard to bear when the consequences are crashing down and all our defenses are in shambles. We must, at long last, face ourselves as the villain in the story of our own lives and the lives of the people we cared about. It. sucks.

And yet...

It is during these difficult, seemingly impossible times that we have great chance to awaken. We have the chance to take stock. We realize we've squandered the time that we had, we took people for granted, and as a result some paths are closed to us. The future will not be the one we hoped for, no. But the future will be. And at these times we have a chance to conceive not necessarily of the situations we will find our future selves in but who we will be as we face them. How we will relate to them. What tools we will bring to bear to deal with them. In short, your focus will need to be on future you.

What kind of person will future you be? Will he be authentic? Will he be a person of integrity? Will he be someone on whom others can rely? It's really up to present you. Realizing how badly you have used your time up until now, and owning that, is important. It seems like that's what these messages you've been posting are about. But what's going to matter to future you is what steps are you taking today to identify the thinking that got you to this point and what are you doing to change it.

The marriage may not be salvageable, but you definitely are.

Proceed with conviction and valor. Best to you from this EvolvingSoul.