SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

It's been years since I've visited or posted anything to this site. When I discovered my WW's affair she did almost everything right immediately. She did a lot of hard work and she feels awful about what happened. We reconciled, had a second kid, and by the end of year four I felt like we were in a good place again. I forgave her and I love her.

But it still hurts. I've never felt that small, afraid, alone, and unimportant as I did when I found out. And I've felt that way to a lesser extent on some level ever since. I don't have a lot of close friends that I want to confide any given the problems they are dealing with in their lives and since I left for college, I'm pretty much an afterthought to my family, unless they need something from me.

The past year has been rough, I've had to travel a lot for work, sometimes for a week, sometimes for a couple of months, in addition to long hours at the office. She's had to work a lot too, albeit with fewer business trips than I've had to take. And so when we are together or find time to talk on the phone when we aren't, the conversation revolves around the kids, our employer (we work at the same company), scheduling and household details. Even after all the work we put in during the preceding 4 years, I've begun to feel like my WW is at best a close friend and at worst just a roommate. My marriage feels like it's an agreement between two people to survive and raise children. The only time I've felt more alone is when I found out about the affair. I acknowledge that I'm a bit of a pessimist, but if I play this out in my version of a crystal ball I worry we will be two people staring at each other with nothing to say in an empty house when the kids grow up.

So I think about divorce now, leaving her even though I do love her so I can either 1) be alone and therefore have a justification for feeling lonely or 2) find someone who might make me feel less alone. I recognize the latter impulse is probably something that triggers affair behavior in some people if they are too afraid to divorce but too lonely or sad to make a healthy decision . I don't intend on committing that mistake.

Do any other people feel like this all/some of the time after multiple years have passed? I didn't expect to be here in a bad place after the few good years we had after the affair. Other BH perspectives would be helpful in particular, but I don't want to exclude anyone who has advice or thoughts that would be helpful. Thanks.

There are actually a few people on here still that are in the process of leaving now. One person handle is waitedwaytoolong. You can read his profile or his threads and see he also decided to divorce. I don't know the name of the other person. I also read about a guy on another site that stayed with his wife for 8 more years and then left her.

Your right sometimes it takes us a while to get to that point. I stayed with a serial cheater for 10 years. In our last year together I really pushed ending the marriage. She begged and begged for another chance. I caved and it gave her just enough time to line up the new guy. I thought I was a idiot before but when I figured out she was cheating again I just couldn't do it.

I am sorry your suffering. Have you tried to talk to her about how your feeling? Have you considered getting into counceling?

C

Devil's advocate - perhaps this is what a lot of marriages go through - even the ones without infidelity. Meaning marriage is work.

A lot of couples realize once the kids are gone that they have nothing to talk about. That they had just lived for the kids and the marriage was dragged along, barely surviving

Can you two get into MC to see if this is something that can be worked on and reversed? I'm not saying it is, of course.

I'm just thinking if you moved on, you might find yourself in the same boat with someone else, because marriage is work and this is a pretty normal thing for couples to go through.

Best of luck.

I think findingjoy makes a valid point only difference being that without infidelity an empty nest isn't necessarily burdened with a white elephant. The couple can look back on the life together and bask in the glory of having raised the kids and survived the trials and tribulations of married life. Betrayal is not a trial we sign up for. Poverty, poor mental or physical health, test through the kids ; those are the things we are psychologically prepared for. I wonder how the twilight years feel for the marriage rocked by cheating. That is a loss of innocence that in my book justifies ending the union. No amount of working on healing blah de blah can cover the fact that the betrayed was replaced in the marriage. Sorry. Feeling kind of bitter.

I understand the loneliness you are talking about. My stbx didn't need to tell me , his actions verified that I was alone in the marriage. It sucks . Sorry you are hurting. But it's completely understandable. Sometimes when the folks here say things like what has your spouse done to help you heal etc. I'm just reading what has your spouse done to make you suspend disbelief. Sanctimonious trickery.

[This message edited by RoadtoPerdition at 3:17 PM, October 4th (Wednesday)]

I've begun to feel like my WW is at best a close friend and at worst just a roommate. My marriage feels like it's an agreement between two people to survive and raise children.

that is how I felt about my marriage before my wife started her affairs.

and now 2.75 post dday.... I find myself feeling pretty much the same way about the marriage.

and I think..."Jesus...have we learned NOTHING????"

looking back, and I even articulated this thought to my wife, looking back on our marriage pre affair ...we both felt this way...yet neither of us did a thing to change anything.

my goto was "well this is how marriages are supposed to go after kids"

her goto was "I love you but I'm not in love with you"

then her coping mechanism was cheating...

my coping mechanism was shutting off emotionally

point being....years later.... after everything we have gone thru from affairs, disclosure, recovery...etc.... I can see how easy it is to fall back into those old patterns....the thing thats different now is...that we are both aware of the disconnect.

so being aware of it, perhaps you can now be in a place to make a change and try to do something about it.

I know that in my case, and in my wifes case, before she started the affairs, we chose apathy....neither of us made an attempt to break out of the roommate marriage.

if you love her.... perhaps a good heart to heart conversation would be prudent

just my 2 cents

I said the exact same thing about feeling like we were just roommates before infidelity. I agree with the previous posters who said that these feelings of loneliness and times of disconnection are part of marriage. And part of growing is realizing that a. marriages take work to nurture and b. our spouses shouldn't be expected to fulfill all our needs.

And I think it's easy to then blame infidelity on things that are wrong with the marriage. My husband asked me at one point why every argument we had ended up dredging up every hurt of the past 20 years. You current problem doesn't actually seem to be infidelity related and even if you find someone else, at some point you will likely find yourself feeling disconnected from them.

Why not talk to your wife? Tell her you feel like you two are disconnected and want to work on it. Schedule weekly dates, even if it means just putting the kids in front of a movie and getting takeout and playing cards. Take a little getaway. Consider trying to change both your work schedules. My husband has mainly stopped traveling. He still has to sometimes but has a decent amount of control over it. So he chooses not to for the good of our marriage. Yes, there was infidelity in our past. But we are now choosing to look forward and put our marriage first.

I told him the other day that I felt like we needed to reconnect so we are talking about getting away for a weekend. I don't think the disconnection is in any way related to the infidelity. I just think life gets busy with kids and work and all the other stuff.

You said you love her and she worked hard. Why not try to work on the marriage before looking for someone else to fill that emptiness because in the end the only one that can fill it is you, so You're likely to be disappointed.

I'm also a BH in a similar situation years later.

I find it very hard to make myself vulnerable to my WW even years later. I am not deeply connected to her anymore. If she left tomorrow, it would be a minor inconvenience. I would not be emotionally shattered nor would I grieve her absence.

Henry, are you disconnected because you are holding something back because of the A or have you just grown apart because of life, work, etc.?

What are you doing to feel more comnected to her?

This is something I've been on the look out for, now that I'm 3 years past my first DDay (subsequent DDays were when other APs were revealed but no longer in contact with). Year 1 I was "over the moon in love" with my fWH (and he with me) when we both realized how close we were to losing each other (despite a really shitty marriage pre-A).

Year 2 settled down and I had more moments of clarity and ability to look down the road into our future. And I didn't always like what I saw. The intensity couldn't last forever, and our old patterns were returning in some forms. We worked to correct them, but there is a LOT of work yet to do.

Year 3 was a struggle, since it was less about Affair stuff and more about the lousy partnership we had. It was time to "go big or go home" in working to improve our communication and ways of dealing with conflict. And we had a lot of conflict related to his affairs left to deal with.

So here we are. Planning to find a new MC and begin that process again. BUT, what is different now is that we are talking about our problems, naming them, pointing them out. We aren't burying our head in the sand like before. This is improvement. And so on we go. My advice is that maybe you need to put more effort on the marriage stuff, Henry. We are returning to some of our earlier books (Conscious Loving is one that we got lots of mileage from early on), turning off the TV most nights just to look at one another and chat. We are working to be better as a couple than we were before. And it's work. And we've gotten to a point where we know we need help moving away from where we are currently stuck.

But making the conscious choice to work together is what I see as missing from your situation at this moment. Am I right? If so, what can you do to move you and your marriage toward where you'd like it to be? And what is your wife willing to contribute?

Henry, your post describes, almost word-for-word, how I feel most of the time and in fact I've posted the exact same thing in the past (close friends at best, roommates at worst). In my case, this is 7 1/2 years after D-day and divorce, 5 1/2 years after the start of reconciliation, and 3 years after remarriage to each other. We do love each other but we are very disconnected due to a variety of factors: his emotional unavailability and disinterest in emotional intimacy, our opposing work schedules and thus rarely seeing each other, and a very young child (and a child-centric marriage) and another on the way, which will make two under 2. I have the exact same fears that one day, after our children are grown, we will have nothing to talk about and nothing in common anymore if we keep on this same path of letting "us" slowly die.

I decided to call it quits after about 5 years. My wife like yours was very remorseful, although we did practically everything wrong the most damaging was rugsweeping. I raged for the first year, but after that we just went on with our lives.

Our marriage however was damaged. It looked great from the outside, but i had such a sense of resentment that I could never overcome. She tried the best she could to re establish closeness, but deep down I was just so pissed off. There is a thread here about winning and losing. I never could get over the fact that I lost so badly. I was accused here of letting my pride blind me to the love I had for her and there is a lot of truth to that.

The good news here is you don't seem to be suffering the way I was. You forgave her. I never did.

It feels like you are experiencing what almost every couple after many years of marriage and kids are. This is way more easy to overcome than the affair baggage.

The two scenarios of why you would leave are not true reasons. It doesn't feel like you want to or need to. I would do some MC, date nights, a vacation alone, and some long discussions.

Divorce is not fun. My wife is truly a mess right now. She knows that she destroyed out family for a few weeks of fun. I don't feel great, especially reading a story like yours where you forgave and I couldn't, and feel some responsibility too. Breaking up a family is not fun. Not cheap either.

Doesn't sound like you want to really quit.

I agree with NTV.

What have you done to change things?

You have to work very hard to maintain an M if one of you is a road warrior. Can you find a job with a client who is located in a place you and your W will like? Can you both find non-traveling jobs in your home city?

I did 2 2-year stints as a road warrior. It was fun, and I did things I could not have done with a single company in a single place, but it was so fucking wearing!

Our M was strong, though, and we had no kids at home, so weekends were enough for the 4 years.

Or, put your M on hold for a few years, if the road beckons too strongly - and both of you commit to finding things to talk about and do when you get off the road.

Or, D now. Seems a big waste, though.

What are you doing to feel more comnected to her?

Sometimes that's just not possible. Infidelity creates barriers. And not all of them can be broached. Maybe there are some he cannot overcome.

We get that way, and absolutely that is how it was before his big breakdown and A. I was looking for D, and he was gong to end his life. Tomato tomahhto?

So now that we have this old history of existing this way, and a fucking pickle in the road of life....feeling this blah way sucks big time and makes me think D too.

But then, we reconnect. We go out, we do crosswords together or a board game. We have three young kids, 11,7, and 18 months. We became NOT KID-CENTRIC. Wow, this was a big one. Big big big big big.

Did I mention big?

I say try some experiments in psychology first.

Get kid updates via text or email.

Phone calls - do you need to talk business? If so, during business hours only.

At night - make it special. Take one night a week and ONLY focus on you two. Play a game, go out, FaceTime and play heads up, take back the magic because if you did forgive her and deep down want to stay, then it does take two. Maybe she needs you to show interest first?

I'd bet if you try the above she will respond in kind. Give it a month or two. What's another month or two?

Oh!!!! And cuddle!!!!

When survivors of abuse want to relearn that touch is good they start out slow. Hand holding and hugs, sitting on the couch together...

Slow things down. Touch is very, very powerful, and does not have to be sexual. It's just love.

Last one - sorry! What are your respective love languages? Talk about them and talk about how you each give them to the other. Do you want to? This can go far too. Ok. Super duper done. Truly. I mean it.

You mean it?

For real

Are you sure?