SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

But I also am feeling like I want to date other guys

^^Gently, that's called infidelity. Married people do not date.

If you want to date, please get a divorce first. Check out the Divorce/Separation forum, and you will understand why it is ALWAYS suggested to wait until you are divorced until you date. It will only complicate an already complex situation, and is certainly not fair to a third party AND your husband who will be giving his all.

If you want out, please get out. Don't drag your husband down any further. Living with a cheating spouse is emotionally traumatizing, you are just continuing his torment. Your husband deserves a wife who is 200% committed to the marriage.

If I have any sadness its for your BH. He suffers all this humiliation, degradation, lack of respect and rejection and still cannot to do what is right and end the marriage.

You have told him you don't love him, intend to move on your life and date other men. The next action for anyone with a shred of self-esteem is to file for divorce. He doesn't seem to have any value for himself, yet expects you to respect him. How sad.

Doing the right thing, even if you love your WS, is very tough. You have stated you have no regret or remorse, so its now up to your husband to end this marriage and move on with his life. Ironically, if he did that he probably would win back a lot of respect from you; maybe enough to make reconciliation possible.

Currently, I fear he will watch you date and have sexual liaisons with other men and still welcome you back eagerly if you decided to return to the marriage. Hard to understand having that little confidence and belief in yourself. Tragic.

The kids will stay at home with dad. He does not want to leave the house since he is not the one that had the affair. I totally agree and said I'd be the one to leave. I will still see the kids daily. Since we both work from home he is the one that gets them up and ready for school anyway.

I am just wondering how you feel about this? When my BH found out about my A, he kicked me out, and like you, I moved out of our home since I was the one who fucked up.....but I made it very clear that I was going to take my DD with me.

T/j:

When my BH found out about my A, he kicked me out, and like you, I moved out of our home since I was the one who fucked up.....but I made it very clear that I was going to take my DD with me.

This is interesting to me...because when I contemplated kicking my WW out, I made it clear that our son would NOT be going anywhere. The kids should stay in the family home, IMHO. They are already experiencing enough turmoil with separation, why would they change residences as well? The wayward spouse is the one who messed up, why would the kids go with someone who's decision making ability is, at that moment, decidedly flawed? Honest question.

When you married your BH did you feel you were settling or did you truly feel happy and in love?

If you felt like you were settling than by all means let the poor man go as he deserves someone who actual cares for him and didn't consider him plan B or worse.

If you did feel like you loved him then what changed and when?

I'm asking because some people cannot sustain their "love" which is actually a combo of lust and infatuation once the real world (bills, illness, misunderstandings, disappointment, and hardships) intrude. If that is you be ready to repeat this same cycle in future relationships over and over until you find out what is missing in YOU not your relationships.

But since you seem to be stuck in that mode again let the poor man go.

Confused,

I do have to admire the honesty of your expressed feelings on here, even if the level of selfish, almost narcissistic, behavior makes my stomach turn.

How can you honestly say you hope to one day be back with your H, as you admire him as the best father possible for your children?

What kind of self-absorption does it take not to see the monstrous nature of such a statement?

So after you run off to fuck any and every POSOM that strikes your fancy, you think it would just be peachy if he is there to cuddle and take care of you in old age?

I know this sounds a harsh, but what I really am trying to do here is see if you REALLY and TRULY understand what your own statements/words sound like.

Also, one of the other posters has raised a possibility that you need to give more thought to.

There is a real chance that you may lose one or more of your children FOREVER over this.

My paternal grandmother ran off with a POSOM when my dad and his brothers were little.

My dad never forgave her.

I still remember her calling begging for his forgiveness when she was dying of cancer in the early 80's.

And I also remember my dad coldly telling her no, and to stop bugging him and to concentrate on herself since she had so little time left.

I know it devastated her, but that is the price you pay for selfishly putting your own happiness before your young kids.

I feel no sympathy for what happened to her.

Are you prepared to possibly have a similar end to your R with one or more of your children?

You better think about it.

The damage you have done to their family and the emotional pain you have already inflicted with the selfishness of your A are going to be magnified greatly if you blow the M and family up completely so you can selfishly pursue fucking other men.

They will not forget it...you better hope they can forgive it eventually.

[This message edited by Dyokemm at 4:33 AM, March 20th (Thursday)]

Dyokemm,

Comments like that are completely uncalled for in this forum. BS's are not to lecture WS in this forum.

Still Confused

I dont think you have gotten "beat up" here. Most of the responses just do not think it is right for you to keep husband on hook while you date around. If you truly in a "mid life" crisis you are certainly going to like the attention from other men and since your children will not be living with you you will be living the "single life" All OK if you are DIVORCED. Just do it!!! If you are meant to R with husband those things do happen to people who are divorced. But it is selfish and disrespectful to just be a cake eater whether you want to hear it or not.

I hope your husband is getting some therapy, because in your state of mind he is in for a lot of misery if he continues to tolerate the arrangement you seem to want. You wil never know how you REALLY feel until he is no longer available and waiting hoping for you to work this out of your system. If i were talking to him, I would tell him to immediately start the paperwork for a D, and to face the fact that he may need to move on with his life without you. He will never feel better with no control of his destiny. If your cheating hurt him now, imagine what he is going to be going thru wondering each night who you are with.

Good luck yo both of you.

I do think you need to decide, and soon. It is not reasonable to expect to have your husband standing by as a safety net while you sow your oats and see what's out there. I would suggest you make a choice because you can't have both and the longer you take to decide the more unfair it is to your husband.

As for the not feeling love for your H like a wife should...can you describe what that love would look like if you DID love him like a wife should? What does that mean to you?

I want to know if anyone else has felt this way….either a WS or BS. Where you just didn’t have those feelings and hadn’t for a long time. I don’t want to stay together just for the kids. I want to be one of those happy couples, and I think we all deserve to be happy. I think many people hang on to a marriage because of fear or finances. Finances aren’t the issue, it’s more fear for me. I’m afraid to mess up my kids, regret my choice etc. I told my husband that once he starts dating Im sure I will get really jealous and maybe that will make me see him in a new light

I'm a BS, but would like to respond from my perspective in my first marriage. I had known my first husband for years when we started dating (over half my life, in fact). We got along well enough. We had fun. When he asked me to marry him, I did. Not because I felt crazy in love with him, but because he was good enough and I was getting older. All my friends were married and most had kids. I didn't want to miss out on that. I overlooked that he was a very angry person and that he often took his frustrations out by demeaning me. I wanted to make my marriage work. When I got pregnant, my response was 'oh shit', because I knew that my child deserved more than the dysfunction we had. I tried and tried, but I just didn't feel what I thought a spouse should feel. And, I got tired of being emotionally beat up. When my grandfather died, I finally acknowledged my unhappiness. I wanted to move out. I did - to our rental, next door. We did not divorce and we both dated other people. He continuously tried to get me to come home, I didn't give him any intentional hope. I told him ILYBINILWY. He knew I was dating others and that they were staying overnight (or I was staying with them). We had family meals together once a week. Every time he with out with someone, I felt jealous and hurt, and I told him, but I made no move to give up my 'single' lifestyle. My exH is an ass hole, but during that time, I was too. The damage I did to that already damaged man is a ridiculously painful burden. I justified it in every way you can, but, if I had it to do over, I would do so many things differently. By choosing to not divorce him, I gave him hope that I would come back. By playing family with him, I gave him hope that we could be saved. I crushed him so that I could have a back-up plan in case what I was doing didn't work out. I encourage you to be brutally honest with yourself from the get go. Did you ever really feel about your H the way you think a wife should? Do you really think you could ever feel about him like a wife should? Is he the future you really want of just a back-up plan in case you can't find something better? Can you live with the additional burden of knowing that you continuously chose to rob him of happiness for your own comfort? I'm really not trying to be mean here. I really do understand what you're saying. Please take some time to self reflect and then make a decision that is in line with what you know to be true before you start dating other people and do even more damage to your husband, your marriage and yourself.

Well said, MusicLoving Mom.

I'm afraid the OP here is just going to do what makes her feel happy. Unfortunately, this poor guy is going to be abused until he "mans up". Sorry to have to say that.

Very few people have mad passionate love for every minute on a long term marraige, once the kids and all that stuff starts to happen. Some work thru it, some of both sexes have the "mid life crisis" when the single life looks better. Thats where she is, all the advice here will probably not change that, so I guess the ball is in his court. He has to decide how much pain he wants to take. Hopefully, it will not destroy his children or his job.

Wish he was on the board. He needs the help more.

--Following up on what bionicgal said about your sounding numb and flat. That's what I hear too, and I really identify with that. I also identify with your wanting to be honest, while being aware that others would see it as just running away from your responsibility to be more loving. Maybe you just never loved your husband, but maybe you never developed the ability to give and receive love in general. Do you have good friends? Can you take in your children's love? It is striking to me that you would seem to thing that being in the house during the day would be enough for your children, which makes me wonder what kind of love you received as a child.

I would like to suggest that you, with your IC, look into the possibility of your having a dissociative disorder. That is my own diagnosis. I suggest this because in earlier posts you described having trouble knowing what you want and making decisions all your life, entirely apart from your marriage or infidelity. If you are not in touch with your own feelings, it can be impossible to be in touch with your husband's feelings, and so to feel remorse. At least, that was the case for me. I didn't "get" how my husband would feel being abandoned by me during my affair, because I had no template for how it would feel to be really connected to a caring other. (This was because of my own childhood and FOO issues, NOT because he wasn't expressing love and caring.) Until I dug deep and actually FELT my childhood traumas (still a work in progress), I was also flat and numb. Your seeking an MRI indicates that you know your thinking is off. I would just suggest looking for the origin in psychological as well as possible physical issues.

I have no advice on whether you should stay or leave. Your husband has to decide whether he believes you are working to get to where you can decide to reconcile or not, and you have to decide if you are willing to face the pain that will entail, either with him or in divorce. I do believe that seeking passion by dating others will not give you what you are looking for. "Falling in love" is well known for feeling like being on cocaine, and like cocaine is something you develop a tolerance for and need more and more of. Its purpose is to bring you in relationship with someone you can develop a deeper relationship with. Then, as someone said in their tagline, you can choose to fall in love with that person over and over again to maintain that excitement. But to do that you need to get in touch with your own passion, not expect to get it from someone outside of yourself.

I don't know if this will be any help to you or not. I do want you to know that someone understands part of what you are feeling. I hear you struggling to do the best you can while being numb. I hope you will make emerging from that numbness a goal for yourself, and not depend on your husband to jolt you out of it by rejecting you or someone you might date to rescue you from it by "giving" you passion.

Wishing you all the best in persevering with your healing and getting to the point where you can experience intimacy with yourself and others.

I want to know if anyone else has felt this way….either a WS or BS. Where you just didn’t have those feelings and hadn’t for a long time.

I have always believed divorce was wrong, but for several years I searched the Bible looking for a reason that made it acceptable, the only one I found was infidelity. Since that wasn’t an issue at the time I resigned myself to a loveless M.

When I found out about WH’s A, I was scared of my future & what would become of me since I don’t have a job & was unable to support myself.

In an effort to save my M I started writing WH a simple note or giving him a card, every day without fail, even if I didn’t feel like it. Some days were easy, some days were hard, but I always dug deep to find something positive about him or his actions. Unfortunately, it affected me more than him. It reignited my feelings for him that had been buried for years, and made them stronger. I started to want him & love him more each day. I continue to long for him to love me the way I love him.

I do still love him and our family but just feel like I don't have the love that a wife should feel. It's a very comfortable life, but it's not filled with the love I desire and want. I dont know if it ever can be.

Maybe you could get a notebook & do that for your H. If you don’t want to give him false hope, date the pages, but keep it to yourself until you start to “feel it.” then share it with him. Give it at least 3 months.

But I also am feeling like I want to date other guys.

Can you put that on hold until the final decision is made about your M?

I would like to suggest that you, with your IC, look into the possibility of your having a dissociative disorder. That is my own diagnosis. I suggest this because in earlier posts you described having trouble knowing what you want and making decisions all your life, entirely apart from your marriage or infidelity. If you are not in touch with your own feelings, it can be impossible to be in touch with your husband's feelings, and so to feel remorse

I have been following this "story" too and have thought this about dissociative disorder as well plainsong. This isn't "stroke" related as Confused earlier posted. An MRI isn't going to find this, but a good psych will.

I have also written several times that I hope you direct your BS to SI and that he gets himself into IC. As Badhurt writes,

Wish he was on the board. He needs the help more.

Well....I don't know about "more" but he does need help and wouldn't it be generous of you to direct him to a group of people who would have his back.

[This message edited by LA44 at 12:23 PM, March 20th (Thursday)]

I don't usually post on this forum (or anywhere much lately) but I have been thinking and thinking about you since I read this. My SIL, a WW wife, expressed the same thoughts to me. She does not know that I know about her affair (my MIL confided in me), nor does anyone in the family know of our troubles. Anyway, I like my SIL a lot. I believe she is a good, but confused and troubled, person. About 9 months after her DDay (which was after mine, and which again, she does not know that I am aware of), she was alluding to troubles in her marriage which had come to a head earlier that year, and that they were trying to work things out. I asked if they were in MC, and this is what she said - she has resisted going, because she knows that it will come out that she does not - and hasn't ever - loved him the way that he loves her. That she knows that he envisions a full life together, and she is pretty sure that they will separate after all the kids are out of the house. It broke my heart on so many levels. As a BS, it terrified me. My greatest fear (on a visceral level) is that my H is only reconciling to keep the family together. I felt so sad for my BIL - he is far from perfect, but he deserves to be loved and to know how his wife feels. And I felt sorry for her - she also deserves to be happy, whether with him or someone else or by herself. And I felt sorry for the kids, because I do not think her ambivalence has been lost on them.

I know that all of the responses here probably feel harsh to you. And you probably feel that everyone wrongly thinks that you are a terrible person. So I guess the point of my post is that someone I care about and like very much is in a similar position to you, and I wish that she would be given all the advice that you have been. I don't think that you are a terrible person at all, but I do think that you need to open your eyes and see the bigger picture. Only then will you know what is the right thing to do.

Thank you all for your replies. I don't have much time right now but when I get a chance I will try to answer some specific questions that were asked.

I know that dating is probably the worst thing for me right now. This is not hidden from my husband at all. We've talked about it and he knows and is not happy about that possibility. I totally get it, I wouldn't be either, which is why I'm hoping to not be tempting in. I know I need to work on me before I start to get even more confused.

It is his choice to stay at home with the family, which I do support and agree with, but it makes me have an awful lot of free time which is not good. My hope is to stay busy, work out, volunteer or anything to keep busy.

I will miss my kids dearly, especially not seeing them before bed. But this is something that I need to do in order to get some clear thoughts moving. I do not want to drag my kids through them but taking them with me or one of them or anything. I want to keep their life as normal as possible. They will not know any details of why I'm moving out, just that mom needs some time away to sort out her thoughts since she has been up and down so much lately. Or something along those lines.

My husband is an amazing guy. I'm just not in love with him right now. I honestly dont have many things I can say about him that bug me though. That he does too much for me? Maybe that but that's pathetic too. I get it. I'm a cake eater and all my life everyone has let me have the cake I guess and I take it. You can say spoiled brat or whatever but its because you don't know me. I was a very hard worker, very ambitious, not one to complain, but one to make changes. Because my husband is the way he is I guess I started to become lazy and let him do too much for me, then I started to resent it and saw how lazy and pathetic I had become. Not that I was sitting aorund eating chips but just not motivated. I think part of me has just been missing for so long, in that time I fell out of love with him and it's made me wonder when the last time I really felt connected with him was.

He does go to IC. It's not helping a ton. I think if he did the 180 on me it would have helped but who wants to tell their spouse to do that? Well I sort of did but doing some of the stuff myself, of which part of that is me saying I should move out.

I told my sister yesterday and it went pretty good considering. Hard to do but I needed to.

I think once I am gone my husband will start to see things more clearly. When I am here he just sees me and wants me. I do worry that by the time I figure things out he may not want me. My affair was very intense and a lot of bad stuff for him to absorb, including bringing AP to our house, bed etc. These are not easy forgivable things and I have a feeling my weeks are numbered as far as him actually still wanting me.

but what to do? I am trying to listen to my heart. even though it's tough. My sister told me that she admires my strength because it is harder to leave then it is to stay and she hopes that hte outcome will be positive for all.

Ok I better go but again that you to those that responded. I do not feel you are beating me up, you've had a lot of good advice and information and I will be reading it through again later today when I get a chance.

I just did this test and I scored a 3, well below what it says for dissociative disorder. From the questions it seems like someone with multiple personalities and not remembering actions etc. I think I compartmentalized the affair and am having trouble showing remorse because of it. Not sure though. I felt little guilt during teh affair also. to me it seems to point to the fact that my love for my husband is not all there or it should bother me ALOT. I dont know though.

I had been gettign a lot of headaches the past month or so and some numbness in my left arm. Thats why the MRi is being done. Xray the other day showed a reason for numbness. My actions and me laughing sometimes instead of crying just makes me think what is going on in my brain. I dont want anything to be found but this is so out of character for me.

***link removed due to possible virus..

[This message edited by SI Staff at 7:52 PM, March 22nd (Saturday)]

confused, this startled me into responding:

Because my husband is the way he is I guess I started to become lazy and let him do too much for me, then I started to resent it and saw how lazy and pathetic I had become. Not that I was sitting aorund eating chips but just not motivated. I think part of me has just been missing for so long, in that time I fell out of love with him

Is it possible you fell out of love with YOU? It's very hard to love someone when you don't love yourself...

it is harder to leave then it is to stay

Hon, I disagree with this. It is so much harder to stay and look at your husband and children every day and remember.

I also see you have a child that is thirteen; I don't know if this is a boy or a girl but my mother-in-law left when her daughter was thirteen and it was awful for the daughter. The daughter decided to stay with her Father because she wanted to stay in the marital home. She said it was a horrible time for her not to have her mother at home. Sometimes, you need to put your childrens' happiness before your own. I don't mean to preach or hurt you by saying this; it is only because you sound like the type of mother that will be devastated five years from now if you discover that you made a mistake by leaving and your children were hurt by it.

Sorry, not Dissociative behaviour but Sociopathic behavior. Don't be alarmed by that. I know it sounds very scary. It is essentially an anti-social behavior and many people (1 in 25 Americans) do possess sociopathic traits. I noticed a handful of these traits in all of your posts.

You might want to go to www.psychologytoday.com and do a search on that. There was an article in the last year about this topic. It is a reputable magazine and may put you on the right path.

And if you find it in your heart to lead your H to SI, I am sure he will find some comfort and direction here.

Good luck.

[This message edited by LA44 at 3:03 PM, March 20th (Thursday)]