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Hi, I'm the BS in my case (now divorced 6 years, so I am far on the other side of it and try to help when i can). These sounds a lot like what my ex said to me, and he was the WS.

My WH was not "into" my marriage, and it sounds like your H is making excuses and looking for a way out.

You have been here 5 years. To rebuild the marriage, it would take both of you. He doesn't sound like he is into it. Some of the things he has said to you sound taunting and downright cruel.

If he decided to forgive and reconcile, he needs to actually make an effort, be it through counseling or starting over with you.

Yes, having an affair is wrong, but some of the things he is saying to you equate to emotional abuse, and that is also wrong and cruel in a marriage.

Cissie,

I feel you so much, my husband treated me like I was just a just there to please him, my needs did not matter. It sounds like your husband is the same. But it also sounds like you have loved him very much despite all of this, both pre and post A, and you want to stay with him. You sound like you want something to help you cope or even draw him to you. I have been on this journey just one year longer than you and still have to put up with this crap too.

I decided to do things for myself, I was always waiting for him to change, and realize that he loved me again, wanted me again, find me attractive again but he just didn't do it. I realized that it was up to me to find my own happiness. What did I do, I have started to do things to make myself happy, I have started getting my hair done regularly, buying nice make-up, working out, I have even done a few things to make me feel extra sexy, you can use your imagination there. But I felt like when I did something nice for myself he was like oh she is having fun, how dare she, but he was interested and drawn to my new found happiness. I am not saying everyone of my changes got him, but most did, the waxing and working out definitely did.

But what I am trying to say is that people like us are naturally happy go lucky, people like them they like to suck the happy out of us, we need to restock the happy on our own. Find your inner happy again, and don't let them drain it all the way. Easier said than done, I know

Hope that helps!

Hello, BS here. I didn't see a stop sign and some of the posts on Cissie's thread have touched my life.

Some realizations have occured to me over the course of the last year and a half that WS has been gone and that's the detatchment aspect of what we go through.

So much advice is given to us about letting go of the actual person who wronged us. It seems that break up advice in general dotes on that aspect.

However, one of the most difficult things for me has been to detatch from my marriage itself or being part of a couple (I see them everywhere now) and allow myself to have thoughts of a future as a single person.

Likewise, realizations of who my spouse either hid or became have helped, though keep the grief at surface level. I choose to think he became this different person rather than think that my whole adulthood and marriage was a lie.

Another thing that helped for detatchment purposes is the understanding that WS is simply not the person I thought I knew and is in fact so vastly different, that what I knew about him may not even be reality. So my wishing for R was for someone I don't know anymore.

Being in limbo (I also call it purgatory) basically only helped me pretend that he might come back, but really it's been harmful to myself. And it helped him continue to not face reality and keep the disrespect and decipt going. And remembering what he's out there doing, while I and DD suffer, helped push me toward the reality of D.

Cissie,I understand this is the wayward thread, but I hope you won't forget thinking about yourself as an individual person, for it sounds like you may spend a lot of time not doing that, as I did. And when I let myself turn towards me, I was horrified to understand the amount of...crap I had been put through by WS and basically allowed by hovering in purgatory.

My situation has a list in it that is a duplicate of the one you wrote and basically, my WS didn't want to bother with monogamy anymore and wanted to make his porn addiction real life, but didn't want to tell me. He had the madonna thing going towards me or I was more a mother figure for that stuff, but he didn't talk about that, either. He simply said, "I can't be me around you.", but I just about begged him to be real with me.

Some of what he said and says now just sounds like media-based lines, tv, books, movies.

I guess just don't forget about your own life, if you feel you've done everything you can to try R and still get a brick wall. I am sorry. It doesn't seem like you're being treated fairly and it seems like you're trying.