It’s been almost 18 months since D-Day. Reconciliation has been a bumpy road, but my WH continues to work really hard on his issues, and we’ve had some genuinely good stretches in between.
What’s really getting to me, though, is the collateral damage from his affair. I’ve talked about some of it here before: friends have pulled away, he left the community where we used to spend a lot of time together, etc. But unfortunately, that’s not the end of it.
My WH’s son is getting married in the summer of 2027. He knows about the affair and he and I have been in close contact in the weeks after D-Day. At some point this year, he and his fiancée came over to our house and told us that, among other things, they had looked at a wedding venue that’s very close to the house where the AP lives. The moment they mentioned it, my body went straight into a panic attack before I could even process what they were saying. Once I had calmed down, I explained to them what had happened and why I wouldn’t be able to go there. Of course, they had no way of knowing that she is living right next door, and they were understandably very shocked.
After a longer period of no contact, my stepson reached out to my WH a few weeks ago and told him that they had ultimately decided to go with that exact venue. After that phone call, my WH came to me and said, "I can’t celebrate my son’s wedding in that place if you can’t be there because of something I caused."
He has since told his son that we’re both very sad about it, but that we won’t be attending.
My WH and I have talked several times since then about whether he might eventually regret his decision and end up resenting me for it. Every time we’ve had that conversation, he has stood by his decision. So eventually, I let it go.
And then all hell broke loose.
My stepson’s biological mother sent separate (!) letters to both my husband and me. She accused him of failing as a father, and accused me of being the b*tch behind all of this and that I was keeping him from attending the wedding. There’s currently no contact between my stepson and us either so we do not know whether she wrote those letters on his behalf. My feeling is that he has also decided that I’m the one to blame, or at the very least that he’s extremely angry with me.
Shortly after he told us about the venue, I wrote my stepson a long, very personal letter. I told him that our relationship matters to me, that our door is always open, and that I also hope he can acknowledge that the trauma symptoms I’m dealing with are real, even if he doesn’t understand them (which is something he apparently told my husband). I never got a response to that letter either.
My husband keeps saying, "Let them. None of them knows what our life actually looks like right now." He would like to meet with his son and his son’s partner any time soon and talk everything through. I think that’s a good idea, but I don’t want to have to be there.
I’m feeling so incredibly helpless and sad that I have to carry all of this on top of the pain of the affair itself.
Will this ever stop if I keep trying to reconcile with my WH?
