SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Catwoman - yep. Could not agree more.

I think you handled this very well. Your topic title says it all. It is a hard discussion. I’m sure it was painful for you BH to hear, but less painful than if you didn’t give a plausible thought out answer.

The fact that your BH is asking the questions means he is invested in hearing your answers to help him figure this whole thing out

My EX had none of the things that her AP brought to you. He made her feel wanted in the beginning, but after just demeaned her and made her feel shitty about herself. At least that is what she says.

The sad thing in my case is she threw away our marriage for basically nothing. I also was the opposite of your BH and would never have asked that question past a few months out cause I didn’t care what her answer would be. That’s why we are divorced and you are reconciling

Waitedwaytoolong,

Well, if the AP had started treating me bad, I kind of feel like that would not have mattered. Treated good, bad, the results are the same. I still threw my marriage away for nothing.

I am sorry to hear about your situation. Sometimes this is a dealbreaker. I am not convinced this is not a dealbreaker for my H. I am thankful he is able to try, and I think parts of it he does seem to understand. (More the problems I had, the whys, my broken way of thinking - the affair, no I doubt he will ever understand it)

I think what was weird about the conversation is how calm it was. I have thought about it all day, and it's unsettling. We've had a lot of hard conversations, but the other times there were tears, and breaks, and snide remarks, etc. It will be interesting to see a response from him once he's had a chance to process it. I am not sure that the calmness equates to better, I am actually worried about what it means. The plain of flatness people speak about? Was it a closing argument to something he is considering? It's taken me all day to put my finger on it. I don't think I would revise what I said because I tried to be truthful. There was this one point where it's like something clicked, he believed what I was saying. But, I can't control the outcome, I believe I am doing everything I can to make amends.

I wouldn’t read to much into the fact her was calm. It was a discussion he brought up and was prepared for. Didn’t sound like a trigger brought it on.

I was in a perpetual plane of flatness. While you are there you don’t care enough to ask questions.

My wife and I had a similar discussion recently. Must be something in the SI water...

Anyway, when I asked "Why AP?" she couldn't come up with a good reason in her own mind. To me, that spoke to two things. First, her wayward mindset at the time, having rewritten our history and viewing me completely opposite of who I am and who I had been as a husband & father. Number two, she was in a very vulnerable place and the AP was an absolute predator. I'm not excusing any of my wife's choices, but he was far from innocent in all of this.

Someone on another thread was questioning the use of the word "predator" but it fits the MO of the AP to a T. In speaking with another friend who knows the AP, he told me that he "wouldn't let that SOB within a hundred yards of any female I cared about." This friend knows the AP socially and says that he walks into the bar/club, finds the most vulnerable woman he can find, and makes it his goal to sleep with her that night.

But back to the discussion that my wife and I had...

She said that she couldn't honestly come.up with a single reason why she would have truly chosen him over me and our family. Not one. Not money. Not looks. Nothing. And yet, she chose to set the house ablaze, watch me try go out out the flames, then jumped in his truck to ride away, only to come back after I had it all out out and nothing was left but ashes.

She had her escape. She went down a very dark path. But in the end, she turned around and has only now TRULY owned it all.

Hikingout, I hope that these discussions can be beneficial pieces to your overall R efforts with your BS.

This is a cop-out. How much more can you trash your spouse than having an affair?

While I get what you are saying here there are a LOT of BS over on the other boards who struggle most with the foul way their spouse spoke about them while they were in the affair.

It's not commendable that you didn't speak ill of your spouse - you still stabbed them in the back. But at very least you didn't stab them in the back and then rub salt and vinegar into their wounds.

At least that is what I think the point of stating that was by the other WS's.

"Why AP?"

I have had that talk with my husband before and the answer was so banal it was laughable. Because she came on to him and he thought she was "trustworthy" (aka he thought she was 'clean' and that she would keep his lies quiet) and that she was okay with playing second fiddle to me.

She could have been any woman who hit on him, didn't want a "real relationship" (lol she did end up wanting that of course- she wanted them to leave their spouses and run away together ), who would settle for crumbs and who he suspected didn't have an STD. She was the opposite of special.

That was a revelation to me at the time. Not only did the affair have nothing to do with ME, it also had nothing to do with HER. It was all about him

I came to a sad but freeing conclusion today about this. My BW has asked me often what the AP had that she didn't, what was so special? I had always told her it was nothing physical (which is true) but I couldn't figure out the answer.

Today I figured out that the AP (who is as big of a coward and blame-shifter as I am) allowed and enabled me to fall deeper into the victim mentality fueled by this selfishness. And I take responsibility for falling for it and allowing my brain to accept the comfortable bubble of superficial "happiness" instead of taking ownership for the depression and problems around me.

The difference is that I never want to live that way again. Ignorance has not been bliss.

Why did we have our affairs? For me sometimes I go deeply to answer this. Other times I keep it on the surface. I joke……my AP approached me and offered me ice cream. My reply………”why sure I’ll have ice cream. I love ice cream”.

My ability to compartmentalize was tested and challenged like it never had before. I figured that there were parts of my life my W didn’t know much about like my professional development, my fitness regimens, my hobbies, my closet drinking…..I could just add to that list by keeping a compartment for AP. The parts of my life with my W that intersected were strong. But there were parts of her life that I wasn’t that interested in. While we are soul mates there are things we don’t always share. I looked our marriage it like two circles that overlap but not completely. We shared what overlapped and what didn’t we didn’t share. I convinced myself that I didn’t want to know everything about my W so why would she want to know everything about me. That’s too much of a burden.

HO, we are of similar ages and kids are older. I sometimes wonder if the home “nest” gets frayed when the kids leave the house. The marriage is tested when the need to protect and nurture the kids is reduced when they’re no longer in the home each day.

I know, I’m rationalizing. Why we have A’s will remain mysterious to me. For certain it has given me a great chance to see what is amazing about my W. My AP is way in the rear-view mirror. I wonder how much backbone I have if someone offers me ice cream again though.

I wish you and your H the best to keep at the hard work. I see light at the end of the tunnel

We talked some more. He said that he found comfort in the fact he could tell that I was being honest. He said he can tell I am doing everything I can. He says he logically knows that I don’t want to be that person anymore, but that I was and he wonders how to frame it in a way that we can stay married. I told him that it isn’t fair to ask him to twist himself into a pretzel and be unhappy. He said that he isn’t unhappy all the time and that he is willing to keep going to see where he can land with it. He says he has a had time throwing it all away when he was always happy before and can see progress and the possibility that we can have an even better marriage. He doesn’t want me to think he is over it or forgiving but he said he told himself if I could be transparent in the question and that he could see it he would commit to another 9 months. He said by then it will have been twice the time as now and he can see how he feels then. It’s interesting we both delay decisions with time frames, I did that too early on so I understand it’s a way of taking the pressure off himself to decide something. I told him that was fine with me but that I still understand it could be a dealbreaker and I will not hold him to keep timeframe if he changes his mind. He said he knows and that the timeframe is for him. I not only want him to be happy but if this is going to work it’s because we both want for it too. We agreed and understand each other. Had a nice dinner and some massage and cuddling before sleep. I feel at peace this morning and am lookiing forward to the rest of the weekend. I know this doesn’t mean truce or that hard days are not to follow but I feel encouraged by the great communication we have had this week.

Captain Rogers - gently, I think your wife is honest in that she doesn’t see it now but I do believe that she knows what it was while she was in it. I think she is holding out if you want to know what it was then. You are a very compassionate man and a wonderful husband. I see it in every one of your posts that you are full of grace. I am sure your wife is sorry but I do feel that she knows the answer to this question. Maybe you need to phrase it differently if you want to know the mindset at the time.

Lucky- empty nest and aging played a part. I think the type of thinking existed always. Not in affair form but in other forms. For me most of my good feelings and self worth came from taking care of my family. They filled that hole inside of me. Rather I filled it with trying to make things perfect for everyone

All the time. Then I tried to fill it with the A. Now I am trying to fill it with healthy stuff and patch the hole altogether. So it wasn’t the reason it was precipitace to change one unhealthy habit to another. It wasn’t that taking care of people wasn’t healthy it was the level of perfectionism that I was trying to reach to be able to feel worthy of them. Luckily, that landed alright, they all think I was the worlds best mother and wife. Hopefully they don’t feel they have to follow in my footsteps in my quest of perfectionism. I am vigilant of it though and encourage them to try new things and not fear mistakes. All of it is eye opening, I actually feel like I have hatched....a new life form coming from something broken. If you don’t address this without IC, reading or working on this more than just your own will, I do think you are right to worry what you might do in the future.

hikingout,

So this....

He asked...tell me why you thought you were compatible with AP/what he brought to the table that made you have strong feelings for him. And, tell me what makes you think now that you aren't compatible with him and why you don't have feelings.

Let me play out a different scenario and approach to answering this question. So as Waywards we learn that we are broken. That we are deeply flawed. If that indeed is the case aren't we just affairs waiting to happen? I ask you this....with all the good introspection you have been doing.....if your AP hadn't come along and say a half year down the road a similar or maybe even a very different fella came at you with the flirty advance.....wouldn't you be ready to go for that?

If it is indeed about just us then is there a way to redirect his question? Its not about AP at all.

A silver lining in all this mess that I'm finding is that now I'm experienced with the A, the fog, and the disaster that it is. In the future, I think, though I am a proven cheater, that I am actually better defended to repeating now that I have lived the quicksand that an A is. A seemingly never ending downward grip that takes hold of us.

Hmm. Well I see where you are going with that, Lucky. I don’t know the answer to that, there have been opportunities over the years, never turned my head. That’s why my husband asks why him? Maybe the vibe? Didn’t have the same vibe with the others. But that doesn’t make him special, there was just a personality click in this situation. Doesn’t mean that I think of him fondly, but more it was a perfect storm -timing, opportunity, and yes a vibe. Knew him for years and years.

Regardless, you are right. Wouldn’t do an A again. It’s a bottomless pit of despair for all involved.

Lucky - BW here - your comments about being a flawed A waiting to happen are interesting. I think that situation is very true for my WH. Like most other waywards I read about WH had such a deep need for constant unwavering happiness and external validation, that anyone who could get close to him and provide that could have been able to lead him astray. Even worse he saw himself as such as a good non-broken man that he didn’t do anything to shield himself from an A either. He just said, “I’ll never cheat, so why worry about it”. That lack of self protection and introspection was his ultimate downfall. As a BW it is a hard truth to swallow that I doubt in the long term I could have stayed as positive and ego boosting as he needed to stay faithful as life got in the way. One of the big changes I have needed is for him to think about dangerous situations, appreciating sadness and its value in life, learn to accept criticism and hard truths better, and communicate with me about the deeper parts of life instead of focusing on superficial happiness.

hikingout, Thank you for leading by example. I hope you and your husband can work things out and heal your relationship. You are going through such a difficult thing and you're doing the work. I wish my husband could and would do the same.

Burning house, thank you. I hope he does. If it helps I was a complete clueless jackass in the early months. I still can be but really trying not to. There is hope. And if he doesn’t, there is still hope for you to have happiness beyond him. Best wishes.

Hiking thank you so much for sharing. As a BS that has no chance and or desire for R with my STBXW who is likely never to know true remorse I think a post like this one is actually very helpful for me to read through. It reminds me that not all people are the same and losing faith in one for awhile doesn't mean we should lose faith in everyone forever. I am hopeful that both you and your H will have good things ahead.

To add to the discussion itself and in reference to the concept that you and other WS are not who you were when you had the A. I wanted to say that your BS will want to know this (and I don't doubt that's it true if you are truly remorseful). However, I would be cautious in how you approach it since they may feel you are trying to disassociate yourself from your previous actions. I know first hand that there are pieces of all of us that can be broken and repaired and even some parts that can disappear or appear over time (usually only with great effort). The sum of the parts of us along with our previous and present actions are the whole of what I believe a person actually is. So if some of your parts are new or fixed or gone well I can accept that you are a different person than you were previously.

As a BS trying to picture myself in the conversation you described I can imagine a few things I might be looking to get out of it. I would want to know why the version of yourself that had the A had the capacity for A in the first place. I would have difficulty with this because after having been with you I would have had an already existing picture of who that version of you was at that time and finding out how that version was different than what I pictured would be a difficult thing to get my head around. I can see where this gets even trickier because you would be trying to convince me that you were providing insight into two different versions of yourself at the same time. So assuming that you would be telling me as honestly as possible who you believe the version of you was when the A actually happened I would also want you to be convincing me about how you know that the version of yourself today is different and why. I would want you to be sure that you understood a small portion of what your actions had done to me. I think most of all I would need to know why this new version of yourself was different from the previous version. It would be vital that you expressing your remorse for what your actions did to me and explain how that version of you failed to consider this before or were able to disregard the consequences of my pain and proceed as you did and also explain why you feel the new version of yourself would not be able to do the same. However, I think helping me to try and understand why there is no longer a part of you that would now do what you did during the A for yourself (as in taking me out of the equation like you claim happened during the A) would be very important as well.

All of such a conversation would be complicated by the fact that the deception around and involving the A makes the very act of talking about who you where then likely to bring up the feelings of betrayal caused by the A again and thus make me less likely to trust what you are telling me now. In that light, I think it makes sense that this is a conversation that will likely need to be revisited many times to come to an understanding.

I think that convincing your BS of who you were once is going to be the most difficult part (and none of it is going to be easy). In your efforts to show and prove to your BS that you are now the person you say you are you have the benefit of being able to show with your actions that you are speaking truthfully. In the effort of trying to show your BS that you are being truthful about who you were during the A well the actions of that version of yourself were, of course,very deceptive and there's no way to go back and change that. My head hurts now.

Mr. Magnolia,

These are all good thoughts to go over.

In this particular discussion I think that he was lookiing to know if it was really over in my mind. He wanted to see progress on how I view the AP and how that changed. His most tormented aspect is that I told the AP that I loved him.

The Who I was versus who I am is another area being addressed. Obviously it is all me. One of the major areas we have been concentrating on is what aspects of me were wayward before the affair. She was Always there. The behavior just changed in how I was coping. When we got married there were self worth issues. I always got my self worth by things I accomplished. Trying to be perfect. Throwing myself too far into anything I did. People pleasing was my addiction. If anyone was displeased I had a disproportionate reaction.

The children grew up and my husband was in the midst of starting a new business. I started filling the hole with other things. Went through cycles of different things. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I couldn’t be filled up. I was disillusioned with myself, my life but that was buried and not recognized.

Anyway, since that time I have learned to stop people pleasing. That who I am is enough and I am still worthy of love. There have been lots and lots of thoughts I have disected. I am trying to be very mindful of my motivations towards everything. So, wire by wire I am learning new patterns. This is the part H says he can see. The part with the AP, it was hidden and I think it was a check on that. We have literally had this conversation tens of times.

But it’s all the same person, just the acting out was different. The other forms were actually not so bad for the marriage, other than the conflict avoidance. I have to work on that every day in all aspects of my life.

I do believe that I am changing for the better. H agrees but is obviously in wait and see mode. Anyway, I don’t have a point other than to say I believe I have to reconcile all three women - before, during, and after. Work in progress.

Fair enough and I think the different people argument kind of comes down to either your only personal pov on what makes a person who they are and/or perhaps just basic semantics.

Having once had a worldview and attachment style that was to put it simply incompatible with having happiness in my life I have spent the better part of the last fifteen years working to alter those parts of myself so that I could be happier and healthier. Those parts of me that were holding me back from my goal, in the beginning, are no longer truly a part of me past the fact that they existed in my past and are part of the path that lead me to where I am today. Those parts were there for a reason for sure and I needed them in order to survive at one point but once I realized that they had outlived their usefulness and were no doing much more harm than good I was able to slowly and willfully let go of them. It's the way I survived to this day actually. I'm probably not doing the best job of explaining it (always a struggle when I try :)) but every once in awhile someone seems to get it at least a little bit.

hikingout,

I know I’m late to this conversation, but this thread has so many sad truths in it. It’s so strange that there is a common theme that a key reason why we fell for the AP was really less about him but instead mostly about how he made us feel about us. Maybe that’s not so strange actually. An A is really all about selfishness so I guess it’s not so surprising that my focus was all on how I felt and what I needed. My AP just gave it to me. And I don’t doubt that he reflected back to me either.

I had similar conversations with my BH but pretty soon he stopped asking about the AP and what I saw in him (beyond sex questions, but that was more about me than my AP). He understood that my AP really could have been anyone.

Another thought is I agree I threw away my marriage for absolutely nothing. Even though I’m still married, it’s not nearly the same. But I don’t know if there’s any help to that or if it’s any better if I threw away my marriage for something, whatever that means. My AP is someone I have no feelings for and would never want. Maybe that’s a comfort to my husband. But then I caused all this pain and years of suffering for nothing. So in his mind, how much could I have valued my marriage if I was willing to throw it all away for something so worthless (even though I did t think of it like that during my A)? And that’s just one torture that my husband had to go through. Because even the comforting answer, which was true, was still horribly painful.

Hi hikingout,

His most tormented aspect is that I told the AP that I loved him.

The feelings we had during the A were most assuredly incredibly intense. While I never told my AP I loved her I was frequently asking myself during the thick of my A what is love? Is love this incredible yearning I have for this other person that is not my wife? Because if it is then I sure do love this other person. But wait, hello, you're just this bat shit crazy chick that I'm banging. That can't be love. But it was sooooo intense.

While I give you a gentle 2 x 4 for having confessed this I really understand what you were feeling. If it wasn't love then what was it?

Mr. Magnolia - I do think I follow you. If understanding properly, you are saying that you changed who you are in many ways so you understand what I am saying about efforts to change. And you are right, change is change it’s all hard but worth it when changing your life to be healthier. Point a to point b, it was all you but point b is who you are now. Did I follow?

Mrs. walloped- univerasal truths of a wayward in reconciliation. You are right, it could have been anyone there isn’t something special about the ap. It’s all textbook reactions of a mind in an affair. My husband seems to be at the beginning of understanding this. Doesn’t make it better and it’s hallow, but it doesn’t make it less true.

Lucky- I am a little confused about one part of your response. I have said that part here so it’s not a new confession. And of course when I confessed I told my husband this detail. In fact at the time of the confession I still thought it was true. Now I know it wasn’t. Love is respect, caring about a person like you do yourself and many times putting them above you. The A doesn’t have that. You don’t truly love anyone while you are in an affair. What you have to know about your spouse is you loved them before and you can again, but in the A you are only thinking of yourself. Everything else is suspended. I don’t need a two by four, I am clear that I didn’t love the AP nor did he love me. But I did say it and that part now has to be worked through in the reconciliation.