I'm sorry I haven't figured out how to use the quote feature. I consider myself pretty adept technologically but I can't figure that out.
A number of questions have been asked of me, so I thought I'd answer them....
1. Has she acknowledged her A as being her fault 100% or does she still try to put Pre-M issues into her reasoning?
Answer: No. She verbally says "this 100 percent my fault." But then she follows that with all of the pre-marital issues leading up to it. She always has, from the first moments after discovery.
2. Have either of us done IC?
Answer: No. We did MC for awhile. It was quite expensive. We're not low-income by any means, but you can rack up quite a bill. That said, this past year, I've brought up several times I want her to do IC to figure out why she did this. She hasn't taken any action.
3. What has she done to be a safer partner?
Answer: Accountability. Letting me see her calendar. Giving me access to her phone and accounts. Checking in with me all the time. When the affair was going on, it was difficult to get her to even answer the phone during the day.
4. How does she have any certainty that your take on sex is...immature?
Answer: She doesn't. It's just a bulls*t line she's used out of anger. Everyone on this thread knows which marital partner has the immature attitude toward sex, and it's certainly not me. I brought that up because I feel it demonstrates wayward thinking, lack of remorse, disregard for my pain, and a sense of entitlement.
NOTE: In addition to this, something I forgot to mention is that in several conversations it became clear that her view of marital vows is different than mine. I believe marriage is a sacred covenant. She believes marital vows are conditional and contextual. She's said "we both have violated our vows in different ways" but wouldn't elaborate. She said my view of marriage of as a sacred convenant was black and white thinking, sanctimonious and judgmental.
5. Does she express remorse to you? Do her actions match what she is saying?
Answer: Yes and no. As you can see there's a lot of water under the bridge here and a lot of pent up resentment, anger, sadness etc that I'm carrying around. She has written to me and said to me how sorry she is, how badly she wants to be with me, how attracted she is to me. Does this bear out in her actions? Yes to a degree. She is constantly physically affectionate (something she didn't offer before in our marriage), she wants and initiates sex frequently (although lately that has tapered off considerably because the wheels come off in the middle with my mind movies). She does many acts of service, keeps the household moving along, plans trips, wants to do things with me. She has also said some very hurtful, wrong-headed completely f*cked up things that I've shared here. Not too long ago, she wrote to me that she was "sorry for my contribution to the status of our relationship" - this sanitized, cold statement sounded like a press release from a communist news service, and I felt it was horrifically revelatory of what she is really thinking inside.
6. Have you ever simply straight-up told her bluntly that you don't believe she has given you the full truth?
Answer: Yes, repeatedly. She has held firm that she has. I made the mistake early on of revealing too much of what I actually knew and how I got that information. This is why the texts, and her refusal to let me see them, hold such an outsized presence in my mind. She's also told me that it was a terrible mistake for her to admit to sex and that she should have taken that with her to the grave. I had to drag this admission out of her weeks after D-Day. I believe this is implicitly admitting she hasn't given me the full truth.
7. Has she offered to do anything on that point? Like write out the timeline?
Answer: No. I've brought up the idea of writing out a timeline numerous times. Her answer is that she's told me everything.
8. "ask you what she can do to help you heal. Has she ever asked you that?"
Answer: No, not that I can remember.
9. "I’d bet $100 she has used the term “mistake” at least once in her effort to minimize and bully you into rug-sweeping."
Answer: Yes. I guess someone owes you $100. She has said this repeatedly. "It was a horrible, f*cked up mistake. An awful mistake. A one-time crazy mistake. I'm not that person. Why can't you please, please forgive me?" That's almost verbatim. Said usually while breaking down in sobs. This had a profound impact on me in the beginning and I only wanted to comfort her. It doesn't do much to me now but then again, we haven't really talked about it in awhile.
10. "have you ever spoken to the POSOM about the A? Has he ever apologized?"
Answer: No. I see him around town a lot. This usually results in me staring him down for uncomfortably long moments. I'm bigger and have a lot more muscle mass than him. He also habitually carries around a boot knife, a pocket knife and a loaded concealed gun on his person. I trigger so hard when I see his vehicle, so bad that now just the same make and model of vehicle causes me to irrationally hate the poor driver. Once about a year or so after D-Day he approached my WW and tried to threaten me. She says she cut him off. She didn't tell me about this encounter right away.
NOTE: Something important as a sidenote. For a long time, during our conversations about the affair, my WW would get angry and say something like "If you had just let me talk to him" - this was usually about the fact that our two young children, his and ours, are best friends and in the same class in school (still are) but now can't be on teams together or have playdates.
11. What does her minimizing tell you about her?
Answer: This question answers itself.
12. "Where is this guilt coming from, do you think?"
Answer: Mainly it has to do with the devastating impact I know a divorce would have on my kids, how shocking and horrible it would be for our extended family and couple friends. We have done a good job of keeping this in the dark.
13. "what has she said about whether and/or how long the A would still be going on if she wasn't caught."
Answer: She claims she was exiting out of it. The one conversation I heard contained a lot of revealing information and one part of that was how freaked out both of them were about how smart I am and how I was onto them. So I do believe it was winding down. On the other hand, I feel that if I hadn't intervened and blown the doors off it, there's a good chance it could have reignited or they could have had sex again. She claims both of them viewed this as a fun romp, a diversion, and neither were interested in leaving their marriages.
14. "It seems like what she was trying to engineer was a circumstance where she could cavort with him almost openly and cudgel you into submission via hyper-aggressive gaslighting, to the point where you were seeking therapy and medicating yourself."
Answer: I agree. This is one of the central issues that has made any recovery so difficult. She accuses me of exaggerating this point, especially when I say "you would have had me crawling around on all fours, like a submissive drugged out dog." It is also a central brute fact that worried me I was married to a narcissist. But she doesn't ACT like a narcissist in other areas of her life. One of the doorways for her affair was that her AP was jealous that I had a wife who was such a good, nurturing mother to her children. He wanted that, and felt it was lacking in his own marriage (this is all pretty biblical if you think about it - those divinely inspired writers knew what they were talking about). So it's confusing.
15. "You know and I know why she refused. It's because the texts would have revealed a depth and profundity of her adultery that is way more profound and painful than the ersatz version she is trying to get you to believe."
Answer: Agree 100 percent. She has a lot of rationalizations for not letting me see the texts. The most laughable is a combination of "there's nothing there" and "it would just deepen your pain."
16. "If your WW is a Perel disciple..."
Answer: I wouldn't go that far. She's read Perel and said it was "helpful." I said she's an apologist for adultery, and WW responded that "that's not accurate, you haven't read her so you don't even know." On one point though I think you are right: Reading Perel gave her a self-justifying rationalization for her adultery. It allowed her to let herself off the hook to some degree.
17. "What Thumos do you want to wake up and look at in the mirror when you're 60?"
Answer: I ask myself this all the time, pretty much every morning when I'm shaving and looking at myself in the mirror.
[This message edited by Thumos at 10:53 AM, August 16th (Friday)]
