My decision to tell her I was done was by far the hardest and most traumatic decision I ever made. She was remorseful, turned into almost a stepford wife trying to please me (which wasn’t good but that’s for another post, and after 5 years after her affair thought she was out of the woods.
She set the ball in motion, but it was my decision that we would never spend holidays as a family anymore. We would not travel like we planned, and I knew this would destroy her as ultimately this was her fault it all happened.
How could anyone feel good about that. Hearing her crying and begging, along with my daughters was awful. My dreams died that day too.
I think for some with serial cheaters who show no remorse it might be a happy day. But this wasn’t what I envisioned on our wedding day
WWTL your posts resonated with me. You know, I sometimes go over and read the posts in the Waywards forum, and the one consistent trait I see among many (not all) waywards is that many see reconciliation as a transactional thing:
"If I'm good, and I don't cheat anymore, and I rebuild my boundaries, and go to counseling, and learn to become a safe spouse again, and have lots and lots of hot porno sex with you, then you won't have any reason anymore to divorce me...now or in the future."
Well, it just doesn't work that way.
Waywards who delude themselves by thinking they are entitled to R because they suddenly start doing all the things they were supposed to be doing in the first place just astonish me, but then I feel bad for them too because they set themselves up by believing in an imaginary construct. Then we get to read the horror stories like yours, where the WS has done everything a WS can do, and three, five, ten years down the road the BS decides to leave anyway because they simply can no longer stomach what was done to them.
Reconciliation is an act of grace... a gift given to the WS by the BS. Nothing more or less. It is not a commodity that can be earned or traded, bought or sold, and no person on earth is entitled to it.
