Hi, I'm looking for perspectives from people who have been in a similar situation, particularly where the betrayed spouse initially wanted reconciliation but the unfaithful spouse wasn't sure whether they wanted the marriage.
I'm a man in my mid-40s, married for 12 years, together about 16, with three children. D-Day was a few weeks ago, and it came as an enormous shock which has devastated me.
My wife had an emotional/sexual affair with someone we knew. From what I currently understand, the relationship developed emotionally in the early Summer and became physical around August. It wasn't a years-long affair. The explicitly romantic/physical part seems to have been relatively short, they had sex a few times and kissed a few times. My wife said she had, and still does have, feelings for him.
There's quite a lot of context to what happened before the affair, and I'm trying hard not to minimise my own part in the deterioration of our marriage. My wife had been very unhappy for some time. We had become disconnected, there wasn't much affection or fun, we argued, and she felt criticised and controlled by me at times. She also felt overwhelmed by the mental load of our three children and the household and that I wasn't listening when she was telling me she needed more help.
Looking back, there were things I badly failed to hear. Earlier this year she was very explicit about how overwhelmed and unhappy she was, and I didn't respond in the way I wish I had. I can understand why she's now angry that it has taken the possibility of losing my marriage for me to make significant changes.
I'm in individual therapy as well as couples therapy and I'm trying to work seriously on my own behaviour rather than simply saying I'll change. I'm also very conscious that a few weeks of behaving differently during a crisis doesn't prove lasting change. However, the part I'm struggling enormously with is her explanation of the affair.
She says that by the time the affair became physical, the marriage was effectively "over" for her in her head. She had emotionally checked out and believed we no longer really had a relationship. From my perspective, however, I had absolutely not been told that our marriage was over. We hadn't separated, hadn't agreed that either of us could see other people, were still living together as husband and wife and parenting our children together, and we'd even had sex relatively shortly before the affair began. So I experience what happened as straightforward infidelity and a profound betrayal. She seems to struggle with that framing because in her mind she'd already concluded the marriage was finished. She acknowledges she didn't communicate this to me in any shape or form, but still does not view what she did as cheating.
She has acknowledged that what she did was the wrong choice and that we should have officially separated before she became involved with someone else. But I don't yet feel she fully understands or accepts the betrayal from my perspective. She can become quite defensive when we discuss it.
At the same time, she isn't currently saying that she definitely wants to leave. She has ended things with the AP and says she isn't going to see, speak to or message him. She has said she needs him out of the picture so that she can work out what she actually wants. She is continuing couples therapy with me.
She has also said things along the lines of being "getting to the point where I'm thinking, okay, let's try," but that when I pressure her for answers or keep asking where her head is, she feels overwhelmed and backs away.
She still has feelings for the AP and seems to be grieving the loss of that relationship which is extremely difficult for me to witness. At the same time she is very angry and resentful towards me about the state of our marriage before the affair and understandably doesn't yet trust that the changes she's seeing in me will last. So we're in a strange situation where I'm the betrayed spouse but I'm currently the one who is certain that I want to attempt reconciliation, while my wife is the one deciding whether she wants to. Emotionally, that feels completely backwards.
Part of me thinks: You had the affair. Why am I auditioning for my own marriage while you decide whether I'm worth staying with? Another part of me understands that she'd emotionally disengaged from the marriage before I discovered the affair and that I can't force her to suddenly want the marriage just because D-Day has happened.
Our couples therapist has encouraged me to stop pushing for certainty and give my wife some genuine space. I'm trying to do that now — no asking about the AP unless something new actually happens, no repeatedly asking whether she's decided, no monitoring, and no trying to persuade her to reconcile.
That's incredibly difficult because uncertainty is probably the thing I'm struggling with most. My brain constantly wants information and reassurance. I'm also conscious that repeated questioning is making things worse rather than making me safer.
I have a few questions for people who've actually lived through something similar:
If you were the BS who wanted reconciliation while your WS was unsure, how did you handle that period? How long did you tolerate the uncertainty before you needed a decision? Did giving the WS space actually help them move towards reconciliation, or did it simply prolong limbo?
For anyone whose WS initially justified/minimised the affair by saying "the marriage was already over in my head" or something similar — did that mindset ever change? Did they eventually come to understand the affair as a betrayal independently of whatever was wrong with the marriage beforehand?
If you successfully reconciled, did genuine remorse/accountability come immediately, or did it develop later once the WS had got out of defensiveness/shame/affair fog?
How much information about the affair did you ultimately need? I'm not interested in graphic sexual details, but I feel I need a reasonably coherent timeline and understanding of what happened, when feelings developed, when boundaries were crossed, and whether there's anything significant I still don't know. At the moment my wife feels she's answered enough questions and gets overwhelmed by them. Did you park those questions temporarily and return to them later?
Finally, how did you know the difference between giving your WS reasonable time to make a huge decision and accepting an unfair situation in which you were effectively auditioning while they decided whether to choose you?
I'm aware people may tell me I'm crazy for wanting reconciliation at all. Maybe I am. But we've had 16 years together, three children and a huge amount of shared life. Despite everything that's happened, I love my wife and I don't want to end the marriage without finding out whether we could build something very different from the relationship we'd allowed it to become.
At the same time, I'm beginning to understand that reconciliation can't ultimately consist of me changing while she evaluates me. If we do decide to try, I need it eventually to become two people actively rebuilding — me taking responsibility for the ways I hurt her before the affair, and her taking responsibility for the affair and helping me recover from the betrayal.
I'm only a few weeks out from D-Day, so I also recognise that I'm probably trying to get answers to things that simply can't be answered yet.
I'd particularly appreciate hearing from people who were actually in this BS wants R / WS is ambivalent situation — including people for whom it ultimately worked and people who eventually decided they'd waited long enough.
Thanks for reading, and if any of this resonates I would be so grateful for any perspectives, insights or shared experiences.
