SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Good for you AAS!

I've just received notification from the mediation service that the total cost of mediation will be £1400 split between us. I have previously explained to WW that her insistence to do this rather than meeting to talk like adults over coffee is money that can't be spent on the children. She doesn't care.

Why is she so reluctant to talk to me, converse with me and allow us to act like grown ups? 19 years being best friends to each other and she can't even talk to me anymore. It wasn't me that cheated and left. She did.

My ego is boosted and I now know that I am a catch. I deserve better ...

It is kind of a shame that it took attention from these two date partners, to convince you of this. It is a mistake to place our value into the hands of others, any others.

Atse,

I know what you mean. I knew I was a catch whilst I was happily married but the revelation of the affair and the subsequent lies and marital re-write by the WS makes it easy to doubt that belief.

I was purely 'reminded' that I am a catch. I can now be confident of this.

That's what I meant

It's better that you do mediation with professionals and not just the two of you sitting across a table in a restaurant.

You need to have a third party there as a witness and as someone that will be able to protect your interests. And, the process will move along much more smoothly as opposed to trying to do this on your own.

Don't be surprised if mediation doesn't work and you end up having to spend even more money on lawyers etc.

But, for now- the mediation-expensive or not is progress.

I suppose you're right.

What I do know is that STBXWW has more anger for me than I do for her

I imagine she sees the following as good reasons to hate me:

1) I discovered the affair much sooner than she expected

2) I accessed her work email and uncovered every dirty little email they ever sent to each other.

3) The circumstances of the discovery and my return to the family home resulted in her abondoning the home so I now have it.

4) I filed for D straight away

5) I can afford to buy it off her on my own as it is not worth as much as she thinks

6) I put her POS on the floor and humiliated them both.

7)The Police have not arrested me or even cautioned me.

8) She has been called out on her lies by my solicitor.

9) She has been forced to provide consent for the 10 day French holiday.

10) I am fighting much harder than she thought I would for contact with my children.

11) She ridicules me for having my friends and this forum as a support network. (She doesn't know which forum). It makes her cross that people have sided with me.

Basically, you name it she finds a reason

It just suits her to keep you and her as enemies because it allows her to feel like what she is doing is justified. If you two were able to sit and talk over coffee, her guilt and regret may set in and she is probably deathly afraid of that. There has GOT to be some part of her that wonders if she made the wrong choice so she is probably ensuring that her choice was right by angering you, keeping you this angry person. How can we be expected to be anything BUT angry?

It is so unfair and you do not deserve any of this. I'm so sorry...thinking of you.

Jesus H Christ on a crutch. Your soon to be ex-wife is a piece of work, mate. I echo the suggestion from Jewlz. She keeps running and moving and weaving and doing everything she can to avoid casting her gaze inward, because she knows when she does that she'll see a steaming heap of nasty shite. She fears she'll never be able to recover from that.

Major respect to you for going totally balls of iron and taking her on to protect your boys. Well done!

WhooHoo! AAS & Abondad! Congratulations!

I think your list is spot on AAS.

Major respect to you for going totally balls of iron and taking her on to protect your boys. Well done!

Pretty much.

AllAtSea

I've been reading/following your situation for a whole and why it is terribly sad that this has occurred, I have a query:

Throughout, you have painted a picture of you having a pretty good, stable married and family life...only it contravenes almost in a polar-opposite-esque way of what you wife considered it to be.

I'm confused as to how/why you could not see certain cracks/signs/problems in your marriage that she obviously could see and decided to leave you...such a massive discrepancy between two people's opinions.

Was there nothing that was going on that even now, you look back and think, "Yeah, I can see things happened that probably built up to the point where she looked around for something else"?

Or, is it a case of this OM totally rocks her world like never before?

RB46

[This message edited by RichieBlue46 at 7:38 AM, July 16th (Tuesday)]

Richie,

I have spent many a sleepless night scrutinising every criticism she's made about the marriage. Any points that she has made which have some truth in them have been exaggerated beyond belief and most of that is several years out of date.

I can honestly say that we had a wonderful friendship and marriage and we got on great. I do know that she had never worked with a young, dynamic assertive alpha male before who was good at his job and her type. I honestly think there was a perfect storm which coincided with an increase in workload. Swept away.

I'm confident that the marriage was good.

[This message edited by allatsea at 9:52 AM, July 16th (Tuesday)]

RB46, not sure if trolling but it's called cognitive dissonance. It's pretty common for people who need to dehumanize someone else to rewrite their history with that person. Sometimes there are other factors at play like a worsening mental illness or a substance abuse problem.

Richie,

The other thing to remember is that she didn't actually have an affair becuase she was unhappy in the marriage. You have made the assumption that affairs are a symptom of a bad marriage. She chose to have an affair because she wanted to. Nothing more and nothing less.

The marital rewrite happened afterward. Text book behaviour.

I have spent many a sleepless night scrutinising every criticism she's made about the marriage. Any points that she has made which have some truth in them have been exaggerated beyond belief and most of that is several years out of date.

I can honestly say that we had a wonderful friendship and marriage and we got on great. I do know that she had never worked with a young, dynamic assertive alpha male before who was good at his job and her type. I honestly think there was a perfect storm which coincided with an increase in workload. Swept away.

Me too, me too, me too. Down to the dynamic assertive male at work. Down to the total martial rewrite (notwithstanding the usual normal marital problems).

Here is an interesting revelation I had over the weekend as I pondered the details of her rewrite: every single example she has come up with of my shortcomings, or incidents that made her angry with me, all share one common element--me saying "No" to her. They were/all manifestations of her not getting what she wanted, which was very rare indeed, since I catered to her every whim, and did literally everything for her. I treated her like a princess. And I did so with pleasure, since I loved her so much.

Now it all makes sense. She is angry with me because in my divorcing her, it is the ultimate form of "NO!"

Can you relate?

I just want to add that I was happily married, even though I had valid complaints about my H. He admits to being happily married and had NO complaints about me. Yet he was the one who cheated.

It was all about his issues.

Allatsea and Abbondad I want to commend you both for how you behaved and wish you much future happiness.

[This message edited by catlover50 at 3:16 PM, July 16th (Tuesday)]

I agree with previous posts...although we have a few dynamic issues (conflict avoidance, codependency) the dynamics were not always out of balance.

My WH rewrote history at first to qualify why he wanted a D (he left out it was be of OW at the time) but has since admitted freely that the issues we had were not major or insurmountable.

He also denies talking bad about me to OW saying "Even if I had anything bad to say it wasn't any of her business."

I considered our marriage happy and comfortable and chugging along through the daily stress. I know it wasn't perfect, but it was much better than many of the marriages our friends have.

Being in a happy marriage does not protect people from infidelity-never has and never will. Which is one more thing to consider when deciding between R and D. Where is the safe risk? There is none.

RB, the reason looking for "cracks in the marriage" doesn't tend to go down too well here is that it tends to be interpreted as blaming the marriage, ergo, the BS's fault. But I kind of agree with you that some form of re-writing on the BS's part might be useful. That is, that maybe there were signs in the other person's behavior that the BS might be able to see in retrospect.

In my case (to make this more concrete), I had a pretty idealized sense of my WH. Sure I saw weaknesses, but, hey, no one's perfect. I interpreted his weaknesses in the most positive light. Now that I look at it more skeptically, I interpret these as more malign, and I also get a bit angry about ways that I allowed myself to accept less than I should have.

This is relevant to AAS in the sense that he may want to look back on his marriage and see emergent signs of the sociopath she is now. His story is currently "everything was fine until this f***** POS bastard came along". But truly, this monster was inside his wife all along.

I guess the next question is -- what good does it do for him to look at his marriage in this light? Is it too early and are his feelings too raw for him to be re-assessing things? The poor guy's got enough crap to deal with. The stress and pain has to be killing him.

This is for him to ponder. I do know, in my case, it was helpful to re-write the marriage in a more realistic way, and to recognize my own part in it. (I'm not blaming myself for his A one teensy tiny bit -- I never have. But I do see how I papered over his personality weaknesses -- not that I could have done anything about it -- and could have been more assertive about some things myself.) I think it might be healthy for AAS to see his WW in a more realistic way, and start transferring his anger from the OM to her. I still sense a bit of a pissing match going on between him and the OM. (That seems to be a pretty common thing among male BSs, though.)

I mean all of this kindly. I have nothing but respect for the truly awesome way that AAS has handled all of this, and I hope none of this is taken as criticism or anything he could have done differently or better. We're, all of us, only human. And who EVER thought we'd be living this crazy nightmare?

I do know that she had never worked with a young, dynamic assertive alpha male before who was good at his job and her type. I honestly think there was a perfect storm which coincided with an increase in workload. Swept away.

The other thing to remember is that she didn't actually have an affair becuase she was unhappy in the marriage. You have made the assumption that affairs are a symptom of a bad marriage. She chose to have an affair because she wanted to. Nothing more and nothing less.

The marital rewrite happened afterward. Text book behaviour.

This makes your situation even worse.

Wow.

I mean, I look back past when my wife wanted a separation (and immediately paved the way for her OM) - my 8-year marriage was pretty 'toxic' - almost from the 6-month mark: arguments, fights, verbal, mental and emotional abuse from each other...but we were so closely-bonded as 'soul-mates' we carried it on. We actually are on speaking terms now, and we both agree that a) how did we ever manage to keep it going and b) did we actually, ever truly love each other? (The latter is very painful to accept).

My wife's OM - its not hard to see why she had her head-turned: single, firefighter, physically 'well-built' and to be honest, contrary to what I thought all along, seems a nice guy afterall.

No competition given what an idiot I was so for so long...just coasting along liking the idea of a house, attractive wife and 2 kids

There's a part of me...no matter how painful, that says "let her go to him - she deserves better than what I gave her and what I am to her"

But your situation sounds just crazy and horrible. To have someone you thought was your true love and had a wonderful marriage and life with...just up and leave for another guy and then try and crush you...something not right there.

AllatSea

The key now is to focus on your future.

Stop trying to understand your wife.

She is a selfish person. As selfish as they come.

There is no doubt in my mind that your future is looking brighter without her.

And I always say "Revenge is a life worth living".

Go show her every day what she is missing.

Enjoy your vacation with your children.

HM64