My husband's M.O. changed--so for many, many years, I thought we'd beaten the odds, and reconciled.
Then I found out that what I knew about the first infidelity was only the tip of the iceberg. That was a different d-day, and occurred 12 years after the first.
Again, I laid out boundaries for R---and he pretended to go along with them. This time, I felt a huge disconnect. He was furious. (How DARE I expect him to deal with stuff he'd "stopped doing" a dozen years ago? He'd been "a good husband," damn it!)
He sure showed me. He had a full-blown affair (rather than his typical stranger sex with paid partners), complete with I-love-yous and vast sharing of personal information about me (much of which was untrue).
Shortly before I learned of that infidelity, I knew something was up. I started digging and learned of at least 2 ONSs. This discovery, and the "transparency" that followed (in quotation marks because he scoured all accounts...only the idiot left one email exchange with in the trash; his VERY FIRST action, when I confronted him, was not to comfort me or ...anything. It was to run to the computer and delete that message permanently. Yep.)
After THAT discovery, I learned he'd cheated pretty consistently throughout our marriage. He'd had a massive heart attack in 1999 (the terminal d-day was toward the end of 2101), and was quite disabled---and we had had sex together SIX TIMES since 1999. His meds and illness "made it too hard." Most disabled men I know strive to maintain a sex life. They engage in other forms of touch and find it important to themselves and their partners.
I got nothing.
Turns out, he was handing it out elsewhere. The risk of sudden cardiac death jumps astronomically during extramarital sex, in a man with disease as advanced as his. He just didn't care---if his body had to be lifted off an Adult Friend Finder hookup, he just didn't care.
But I did. After an embarrassingly long six months of pretending R was even possible, I threw in the towel very shortly after my suspicions of personality disorder were professionally confirmed.
My entire adult life, through 2012, was a lie. All of it.
How did I get through it? This will sound very trite. I surrendered. I gave up things I cannot control. (This was so central to my healing that I have the word "surrender" tattooed inside my left wrist now.) I learned to breathe. (Really, it was biofeedback training in IC.) I went NC and, though I had a few lapses, I learned that it was vital to my well-being.
When I see him now, it's like seeing the stranger he is. He was always a stranger.