SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Hi everyone! It’s me, the guys whose wife had a roughly 2.5-month affair with an ugly, 20-years-younger-than-her grocery store cashier. (I hope you’ll pardon my less than charitable description of that individual; I guess I am still venting off lots of anger about the situation….)

I just want to thank all of you for all of your amazing, insightful advice, your personal observations, and for sharing some of your experiences. Your sensitive and intelligent input has been so incredibly helpful to me as I have reckoned with this most challenging emotional debacle of my life, 48 years to date.

Dday for me was only on Monday, March 30, so it’s been just two months and 8 days. Things still feel very fresh. I have a good counselor with whom I have been sharing so much, and getting lots of assistance and insight.

My WW has done, I believe, her best to authentically reconcile, from where she currently sits, but still has not yet been able to find a counselor who specializes in infidelity issues for betraying spouses. She is putting a lot of time into it, calling and emailing batches of counselors a few times weekly, but no one she can find seems to have availability for new clients…So, work on that front is still very much ‘in progress’ for her, and she has lots of work to do.

I want to reach out to all of you to pick your brain about a challenge I have coming up. I would love if you might share thoughts or observations or advice.

Our 18th wedding anniversary is coming up this weekend.

I am feeling a lot of things right now.
But I think the main thing I am feeling is that I don’t have the emotional or spiritual strength to engage in any kind of celebration or recognition of our anniversary this year.

I still feel so profoundly outraged, so viscerally betrayed, and sondeeply hurt by my WW’s 2.5 months long affair with his young man from the grocery store. It is all still so fresh and hurtful, and I just don’t feel it would be authentic of me to celebrate our anniversary this year.

I hope that by next year I might feel differently, if our reconciliation continues to go well…

But right now everything just feels much too fresh and I feel that if I participated in any kind of celebration or recognition of the day, I would be coming from a place of emotional falsehood, or fakeness, and I just do not feel capable of doing that.

I was thinking of maybe just going out to do something for myself that day, like taking a long bike ride on a bike trail somewhere, maybe grabbing some coffee at a café and reading a book, or practicing classical guitar, which I like to do….Something like that.

I was just curious what you all might think about my doing something like that?

In addition to, and as a part of, my own self-care, I feel like the anniversary might be an important time for me to use the date to make a symbolic statement as to how deeply wounding my WW’s affair has been for me, to sort of underscore that understanding for her. And again, on the flipside, I feel that it would send the wrong message if I were to engage in some kind of fake or half-hearted celebration with my WW, so soon after what she has been doing with her AP.

Thanks for any thoughts you might have to share about this. I don’t know how any of you might’ve felt (those of you who have managed to reconcile), when your very next wedding anniversary came up, directly following Dday.… Did you somehow find the strength to celebrate with your WS? Did you take some other symbolic action to help bring a greater realization to your WS? I did you somehow use the day to somehow progress your reconciliation efforts?

I would be open to any insights you all might have. Again, thank you to all of you for being so supportive and encouraging, and above all for being real, even when that means telling me things that I might not like to hear. I’ve never been through something like this before, and I’ve been probably making a bunch of mistakes as I’ve gone along.
Your input has helped me fix a lot of those.

Thanks again to all of you, truly.

-MusicalDad

I tried to reconcile for about 2.5 years. My first dday was 3 days *after* our 25th wedding anniversary, so it was nearly a year later that the next one rolled around. Like you, I did not feel like celebrating it. R was not going great at that point (dday4 happened about 2 months before), and it would have felt totally fake to me. And then STBWX ended up getting sick with Covid that week, so doing nothing wasn't a problem.

Here's what I wrote the morning of that day: "I don't know what to say about today. I don't have a lot of regrets in life when I look back, but my current state of mind is that 26 years ago today, I made a very big mistake. Possibly the worst mistake of my life. I don't know. It's 5am and I can't sleep and I'm feeling numb."

The following year (so 2 years after dday1), I told him I didn't think there was anything worth celebrating. I knew I wanted out of the marriage at that point, I just didn't know exactly when I was going to file. Last year (3 years after dday1), we were in the midst of negotiating our divorce settlement agreement.

Be authentic. Do what you need to do. That's much better for R in the long term. What your WW did was incredibly selfish. She can sacrifice any desires she has around the anniversary, or at least, that's what she should do if she wants R to have a chance at success.