SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Thank you for your comprehensive response Mrs W. Feisty and sarcastic is most endearing, particularly to a Brit. Well done.

Also thanks to BraveSirRobin and hikingout for your insightful input. Two more examples of outstanding posters on this site. It would appear that I am the exception that proves the rule.

My wife and I are setting off early to London tomorrow to see Strictly Come Dancing (Dancing with the Stars) live this weekend, having received a most welcome invitation from the BBC earlier this week. So hopefully my battered ego will have recovered by the time I post again.

Thank you for your support NotSureAboutIt, much appreciated.

The point I have been so inadequately trying to make is that it is the perception that Mrs W. is creating by her perhaps careless statements that is the issue to me. I really don't think for one minute that she actually had any positive views for the OM once she got out of the fog, as it were and realised the impact her relationship with him had on her loved ones. Well hopefully not anyway.

I lost any positive feelings for him pretty early after DDay. Maybe it’s because I found out he was really married even though he told me he was divorced. Maybe because I found out I was just another feather in his cap.

How much energy are you putting into figuring out why you lost positive feelings for om?

If I had written the quoted sentence, the subtext would have been, 'and I'm not putting any energy into figuring out that particular 'why.'

Just curious....

Frankly, I can understand a minimal level of positivity toward aps. I can understand being unwilling to do as much as tell an ap the time of day, but I also think it's healthy to recognize they are fellow human beings.

[This message edited by sisoon at 11:39 AM, October 19th (Saturday)]

How much energy are you putting into figuring out why you lost positive feelings for om?

Not much. I did closer to DDay, but I don’t really think about him anymore and haven’t really outside of SI when I get asked about him or anything to do with my A.

My A was all about self-validation and feeling special and the AP was the person who provided me with that. I got a very big shock right after DDay when I found out he was not just married but also in MC and I found it out from his wife. I was angry and hurt and shocked. I thought he loved me. And I found out he had multiple affairs and was still married and I was just another piece of A to him. So that affected my feelings at the beginning. The fantasy bubble burst and he was just another middle age man whom I otherwise wouldn’t have paid attention to in any way except with this man I ruined my life over him. And that affected my feelings even more. And then seeing all the pain that Walloped was going through and understanding my own selfishness in what I did in causing that pain, and of course understanding the lack of morals I had and he had in having an A, that affected it even more. It’s a combination of all of that. But at the very beginning, I was definitely that aware and right from wrong was not in my head. It was mostly anger and shock that affected how I felt about him and I think I was lucky in a weird way that I got shocked like that and “woke up” pretty quickly.

...but I also think it's healthy to recognize they are fellow human beings.

Sisoon's post struck a chord with me that I hope may be productive in the efforts to rebuild 'intimacy'.

I remember watching a very average TV movie many years ago, and hearing a piece of dialogue that had more profundity and quality to it than the rest of the movie.

"You cannot love what you do not respect".

I believe that is true.

And when you think about the process of compartmentalization that many waywards describe using to enable them to cheat, the act of playing God with other people's lives and putting them into various separate cardboard boxes to suit one's purposes shows a huge disrespect for them as people or as human beings with equal value to the person putting them into those boxes.

My belief is that before intimacy can be rebuilt, other factors need to be rebuilt, and that respect is the most significant.

And what I am talking about here is not what a wayward feels about their spouse or children, but how the spouse and children think - and more importantly believe - the wayward person feels about them.

In a way, it is the same as the thing many waywards say about their affair partners: "I did not love my AP, I loved the way they made me feel about myself".

So think about it; how do you think your actions in having the affair made - and make - your husband and children feel about themselves?

Do you think it made them feel valued, loved, respected, and protected? Or did it make them feel like you took them for granted, with no obligation to treat them as if they had any value, or any rights to be respected and protected?

And if you made them feel like that about themselves, or believe that you felt that way about them, can you see why you need to be working to prove that they have value to you, and more importantly than that, that you now have enough respect for them that you will never again mentally move them around like chess pieces or put them into boxes like an old pair of sneakers being stored in the garage?

The point is that you cannot jump from sending a message to your family that for several months you felt they were objects to be moved around to suit your whims, and not worth defending from a sexual predator, to a dynamic of mutual value and respect, which is an essential requirement to exist before loving intimacy can be built.

It ain't gonna happen.

What you have to do is make your husband and children feel - with conviction - that they have real value to you, and that you now feel more respect for them as human beings than you demonstrated during your affair.

It does not matter one iota if you read a statement like that and feel, "I never felt like my husband and kids were worthless! How dare you!" What matters is how THEY feel.

Your affair was all about you.

The recovery has to be all about your husband and children, and what you are doing to prove to them that they matter to you more now than they did during your affair, and proving to them through your actions (not words) that they would not be fools to believe that.

What your husband is really saying to you when he repeatedly says, "How could you?" is actually, "Why didn't I matter to you? Why did I have no value to you? Why was I not worth saying 'no' to your new lover for?"

It is for you to figure that out, but if you want to rebuild anything approaching intimacy with your husband, you first have to lay down the foundations upon which it has to be built, and the most crucial foundation is making your husband feel without any doubt whatsoever that you respect him and his right to be treated as a human being with value and worth, rather than a gullible, trusting idiot to be put in a compartmentalized box, with the lid taped shut while you frolic with another man in another compartmentalized box.

If you really want to restore intimacy to whatever is left of your marriage, stop playing God and putting other human beings into boxes.

It makes them feel like crap, and it makes them doubt the value that they have to you.

Until you can make your husband and children believe that your feelings about them are now radically and significantly different to the dismissive way you treated them during your affair, true intimacy cannot be rebuilt, because you will be trying to build a castle on sand.

When you are rebuilding, respect comes first.

Intimacy comes after that.

You cannot put a roof on a house until the house has been built. And you cannot build a house until you have laid the foundations for it.

Work on making your husband and children feel that you respect them, value them, and that you will never again make them less important to you than a serial sexual predator, and that will make them feel more like being open and trusting you.

[This message edited by M1965 at 8:00 PM, October 19th (Saturday)]

I haven't skimmed through this whole thread to see if anyone else has already brought this up.

Everyone else seems to be covering most of the other possible emotional relationship possibilities.

Another very real possibility that might also be contributing to a number of the relationship changes might be aging related issues that regularly start to occur to couples in your age range. Extreme stress often seems to trigger and exacerbates some of these aging health issues.

Some of this sounds like there might be the possibility of low Testosterone hormone levels.

I dunno if walloped and his mrs are struggling with this, but I think every BS feels this way at some point, and is something every WS needs to understand (and I apologize if this is a t/j):

it is the same as the thing many waywards say about their affair partners: "I did not love my AP, I loved the way they made me feel about myself".

So think about it how do you think your actions in having the affair made - and make - your husband and children feel about themselves?

Do you think it made them feel valued, loved, respected, and protected? Or did it make them feel like you took them for granted, with no obligation to treat them as if they had any value, or any rights to be respected and protected?

And if you made them feel like that about themselves, or believe that you felt that way about them, can you see why you need to be working to prove that they have value to you, and more importantly than that, that you now have enough respect for them that you will never again mentally move them around like chess pieces or put them into boxes like an old pair of sneakers being stored in the garage?

The point is that you cannot jump from sending a message to your family that for several months [or years or decades] you felt they were objects to be moved around to suit your whims, and not worth defending from a sexual predator, to a dynamic of mutual value and respect, which is an essential reqIt does not matter one iota if you read a statement like that and feel, "I never felt like my husband and kids were worthless! How dare you!" What matters is how THEY feel.uirement to exist before loving intimacy can be built.

It does not matter one iota if you read a statement like that and feel, "I never felt like my husband and kids were worthless! How dare you!" What matters is how THEY feel.

Again, my impression is the wallopeds would not be in R if Walloped did not feel re-respected (? Or respected again?). But I also wonder if that feeling/memory of disrespect could become part (or the result) of any trigger? Again, I’m not nearly as far along in time (and my WH hasn’t demonstrated he is “R material), but I know that I am now very triggered by others’ disrespect - it can feel VERY immediate and intense, and things that used to be an annoyance or short-lived anger, can now send me into much deeper and darker places, bc it engenders the same feelings of dday. IOW, I could see, for example, someone at work treating me poorly, and then basically “taking that home” to my WS because that “feeling” if disresoect and devaluation has now become directly associated with Dday and my WS. It becomes yet another painful emotion entangled with the A, even when the cause is wholly different.

Just a thought.