Clearly changing oneself can go negative or positive but either way people typically revamp themselves after an affair comes to light. I don’t mean only the betrayed but also the betrayer as well. Because of the challenging counsel that I have received here, I find myself asking; shouldn’t the result of our transformations that exist now, in this moment, verses what was in the past determine how I view and act towards my wife and she me?
I’ll be frank, for far too long I have lived and related to my wife with one foot sternly placed in the past and the other firmly placed in the current. In doing so, though I didn’t understand or consciously mean to I had one leg moving backwards the other leg forwards leaving me painfully split, stuck, living, dying, loving and unloving my wife depending on the time zone I was operating.
In an odd way, we have traded places and am I now the "unsafe" partner?
The bottom line is, if I want to live in the past then the kind thing for me to do is to divorce my wife. If I want to fully move into the future with her, which I do, then I need to embrace her as she is now, not then, allowing the ongoing, reconciling process to move ever forward.
Asterisk