SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

i found out my h cheated on me a few years ago with a yoga instructor/former stripper...while i was pregnant. i put him out....took him back for all the wrong reasons a month later. he did some of the things in the healing library...but not the most important ones. for example, he refused to give me access to his phone records. i was weak and in denial..and "let it go." he was cheating the whole time.

9 months later, i discovered a dirty text...found out he had been cheating on me during our "reconciliation" with another woman 15 years older than us...met her on-line.

we separated again...this time 3 months. i let him come back...and he is now doing all the right things in healing libray.

since then he has gone to rehab...yes, he is a substance abuser, mc, ic...and all of that.

it has been 20 months since he has been back...and sober. he is trying so hard.

but i am stuck....all the lies told during the false r seem to make it especially hard to move forward.

not sure if i even love him anymore, you know?

To me the false R seemed so much worse than the original D-Day, because I thought I was going insane. WW would say things that literally made no sense and I thought I was the one that was confused. She said "I just need some space" when she was in the middle of secretly texting the OM and I felt so alone.

She'd say things like "what about an open marriage" and I didn't realize that that is code for "I'm having an affair and want to feel better about it." This from a woman who gets uneasy talking about basic sexual topics.

It made me doubt every part of myself. And all because I thought looking at her email and texts would be invading her privacy.... Argh.

I think false R lengthens the whole recovery process. In your case, 9 months more of horrible lies.

We've had a good R, and even so, 20 months into it I still felt a lot of grief, anger, and fear.

Being uncertain at this point sounds like you may be on the plain of lethal flatness. Maybe the thing to do is to have faith in yourself - you will get through it.

I'll say this, though, it doesn't make sense to quit R now because sometime in the future you may decide you want to end R.

I think that false R is so very hard because they knew the consequences to us and still, they chose to inflict the same pain, to make the same choice.

Yes, I know it is not about me but it sure does feel that way. I keep hearing that voice in my head, "if he loved me, respected me, cared at all, he could not have possibly watched me suffer and then just as I was starting to recover done the exact same thing again"

I do know that it is because of him, who he is, not because I am not enough but because he is not enough.

We are currently separated, D is filed. He says he is different now. I do not trust and I don't know if I ever will.

That is on him too. The words don't have a whole lot of meaning. Actions are the only thing that will matter to me.

What are those actions??? I don't even know yet, I don't even know if they exist.

The first time I was doing everything I could to show him the way. He did not want to see it.

This time it is all up to him to show me that he deserves for me to consider giving him another chance. It is up to him to figure out how to do that. It is up to him to learn what works. It is up to him to prove to me that he is driven, that he cares, that he understands, to dig into himself and recognize and change the parts of him that allowed him to betray himself and cause such damage to me.

For me now, I just watch very carefully. I keep myself safe. I protect myself from him by knowing that I don't have to decide anything until I am ready. I am working on me.

The hardest part for me was letting go of control. If he did not want to R in a real way there was nothing in the world that I could do about that. I can only respond to his actions in a way that is healthy for me.

I hope this helps. It is hard. It hurts and every day I have to remind myself that I will be okay no matter what he does because I have the choice to allow him in my life or not. The only one I can control is me.

Hard, hard lessons.

I have to agree with Cantaccept here. For me, discovering the A was difficult enough. To be dragged through a year long false R was devastating, doubly humiliating and completely insulting. Honestly, if stbxh had put half his energy into the recovery of our marriage that he put into taking the A underground...I think we would be walking a very different path today. Stbxh just continued to lie, deceive and betray...I'm not even sure why since I offered him a divorce when I discovered the A. But no...he wanted to reconcile, to work on things, to prove he could be the husband I deserved. Instead he just continued to prove what a POS he really is. My wake up call came when AP contacted me at work to rub my nose in the fact that he and she had been together all during false R. I filed for D immediately. Stbxh continued on for a while to get me to change my mind, but the day after he signed the divorce complaint he moved AP into our marital home. They've been living "happily ever after" since. False R is a nasty and degrading bit of business. Tread carefully.