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You are so strong for holding on for 3 years and still feeling like this. They say the easy thing to do is walk away. It’s been less than 6 months for me. I just want to feel better. 2.5 years more feels like torture. I don’t know what the use of holding on would be.

Maybe it's time for a scripted conversation with her, a sort of Hail Mary to try to get off top dead center. What I'm suggesting is a considered letter that explains carefully that you are not healed, that you want to heal with her, and what it will take to heal. You would print it out, but sit with her and read it to her, in person. You can then leave it with her to contemplate. I think the eye contact while you read this is important.

By the way, has she read "Joseph's Letter"? You can find it in the Healing Library. If she hasn't, you might include a copy of that with your letter.

What happened in year 1 was that, due to a combination of bad advice from you MC (and her mother), and you being confused and backing down in the face of pressure from your MC and Christian friends, the two of you, together, took the wrong path. You took a path away from the direction of healing. You took a path of rug-sweeping. As an unsurprising result, 3 years have passed and you are not healed. That is almost always the result of rug-sweeping.

Evidence here on SI suggests that, for most BS's, in most cases, the path to healing starts with 100% total transparency by the WS to the BS, about every intimate detail of the A. Indeed, this is the specific advice in the Linda MacDonald book.

There are three reasons for this. First is the "intimacy hole" that I discuss above. Currently, your WW and her AP share an intimacy cocoon that she has intentionally withheld from you. She is protecting their intimacy over your marriage. Those intimate moments were moments that she vowed in her wedding to share only with you. In ways, she shared greater intimacy with him than you, because he knew the truth of what was going on while she was lying to you and concealing the truth. No matter how painful those details, most BS's find that the benefit from the restoration of complete honesty outweighs the pain of the details.

Second is the mind movies. Until a BS is certain they have all of the details, their mind races around creating "what if" scenarios, many of which are based on the partial information that they do know. It's pure hell for a BS. A perfect example is your Sherlock Holmes deduction about the sexy panties. This is a detail about which you are very likely correct, but she has refused to corroborate it, leaving you flailing with your mind movies. They won't go away. This is a feedback loop that can only be stopped by transparency. Bottom line, it becomes impossible to heal if you don't know what you're healing from.

The third reason is basic decency and honesty. To facilitate her A, your WW lied to you and gaslighted you to an extremely cruel and wicked degree. The way a liar makes amends for lying is to tell the truth. The way a spouse makes amends for lying to a spouse is to give the lied-to spouse his own agency to make his own decisions about the marriage in light of the unvarnished truth. Disclosure at this level is the authentic, honesty that is the bedrock of what it means to be married.

I think you spell all of this out in a letter that starts with something like:

Dear Wife:

I think you have noticed that I'm having difficulty sustaining emotional closeness with you. I feel my love for you eroding, and distance between us increasing, and I am concerned that our marriage is at risk. I love you, I enjoy your company, and I want to save our marriage, but I cannot do it alone.

The problem is of course your affair. I say it that way because the problem is not me. I was injured by your affair, and I have not healed.

You made some choices in your affair, and in the aftermath, that continue to haunt me. For example, you decided to commit adultery with a man who lives in our neighborhood and has a son that is friends with our son. You also chose to do and say some incredibly hurtful things to me, both during your affair and after. Some of them continue to reverberate in my mind. During your affair, when my gut was telling me something was wrong, you gaslighted me and tried to make me believe that I was delusional. Afterwards, you answered at least some of my questions about your affair with "that's private" and similar responses, making it clear that you would not answer my legitimate questions about the affair.

Because of your choices, I am forced to now live a life in which encounter and see your AP several times per week; sometimes several times per day. Every time I see him, I am reminded that he has intimate knowledge about you, about sex with you, that I don't know. It leaves me wondering what that knowledge is. Some describe being traumatized by infidelity as being served a "shit sandwich". Part of the shit sandwich you have shoved into my mouth is the displeasure of seeing this man so frequently, and wondering about this, literally every day of my life.

Unfortunately, during the first year after I caught you lying to me and having a sexual affair with a man from our neighborhood, we started down a path that was almost assured to prevent me from healing. We went down this path due to a combination of bad advice from our MC, from your mother, and from our so-called "Christian" friends. The path we took was a path of rug-sweeping. I know now, from personal experience, that rug-sweeping results in the affair festering like a cancer in the soul of the betrayed husband. This is exactly what is happening with me.

I also know that I cannot heal without knowing the full truth of your affair. You have said that you have given me the full truth, and I think you believe that you have, but in reality what you have given me is a big picture outline of the affair, softening the edges in an effort to minimize it. You have arrogated the right to decide, for me, how much "truth" I should receive. To heal, I need to be the one in control of that decision.

To be clear, I do not believe you when you say that you have given me the full truth. My imagination is still consumed with filling the gaps between the things you have told me. What I need, which is what I think many betrayed spouses need, is a detailed, day-to-day, exact description of everything that happened, as if I were a fly on the wall observing and hearing it all. Without that, my mind is stuck making "mind movies" about various details.

As an example, I know that you demeaned me to your AP (and that he demeaned his wife to you). I heard you do so, casually and cruelly, in the conversations that I recorded. I would expect your text threads to contain a lot more of the same. Further, I know that you bought sexy panties specifically in anticipation of sex with the AP, and wore them both before and after the sex you had in our house (and, I believe, in our bed). I have been able to confirm this by piecing together various bits of information.

[By the way, has she said where they had sex in your house if it was not in your bed?].

There are three reasons I need this.

[paraphrase my three reasons above].

As to the honesty part, I want to remind you that you have told me you wish you had never admitted having sex with the POSOM. That wish worries me. Why would you wish that you had lied to me even more than you already have? I am your husband. Is it your view that a successful strategy for marriage is to lie to your spouse about difficult issues?

Also as to the honesty part, there is an unfortunate hurdle to this. This exists because of the initial rug-sweeping followed by the passage of time. You refused to let me read your text messages, and by now you have replaced your phone. The messages may be unrecoverable. I need to be honest and let you know that I am not sure I can heal and stay in this marriage without reading these. In refusing to let me read them, you were protecting your intimacy with your AP over your marriage to me. It was an additional insult and injury from your A that I have struggled with ever since. The wondering about what they said consumes my thoughts, sometimes to the point where I cannot think of anything else. This is your doing, so I leave it to you to come up with a solution.

If you are thinking of doing something like this, I think you need to have an ending. I've thought of two, but you should reason this out in advance.

"It's not my intent to try to force you to reveal anything you're not comfortable revealing. But you should know that, from my perspective, what you have been doing is harboring a private intimacy with another man that you shared during our marriage."

"I do not know whether I can heal and move beyond this so long as you continue to do this. I will have to keep listening to my heart and follow its lead."

or, stronger:

"You are free to continue keeping your private intimacy to yourself, but not as my wife. I will not be able to continue in this marriage if you feel that you prefer to continue withholding this from me. It is your choice."

[This message edited by Butforthegrace at 8:32 AM, August 18th (Sunday)]

You can divide cheaters into several categories. The first is the one who is never completely committed to the marriage and cheats to leave. The second is the one who has no boundaries and cheats off and on throughout the marriage and any other relationship. The third is one who genuinely falls in love with a coworker or some other person in their life. The fourth is a narcissist or possibly a sociopath who has no ability for empathy. The fifth can be a one night stand. The sixth can be a sex addict. You get my drift. No two stories are alike. The reason yours is so difficult to get over is because that behavior of hers is in a category that I think the most appalling. That is the one that plays with peoples’ ideas of what is true and what is false. What is real and what is unreal. That means that you are questioning your own sanity. That means you are questioning reality. It is cruel. There is no excuse for it. I think that is why you have never gotten over it yet. The absolute cruelty of her behavior toward you says so much about who she really is. I am sure trying to fit the behaviors she did with the person she claims to be just doesn’t work.

Couple of thoughts.

First, not sure it matters, and the definition clearly has some fluidity, but a LTA is generally 2+ years (give or take) .

Second, I disagree that it’s hard for a WS to “love bomb” for long periods. My WH is an excellent love bomber - has been our whole M, and most certainly did it the entire decade of his PA. IMO, it is not to be relied upon as any indicator of remorse or empathy or any of the shit a WS needs to do to become a safe partner. And neither is the (limited due to text withholding) access to her calendar or electronics. It don’t mean shit.

What I’m not finding in this thread is how (or what) you are doing for YOU. There’s a lot about what your WW is/isn’t doing. It takes two to R. Even if one were to take all of your posts with the proverbial “grain of salt“, it does not sound as if your WW has demonstrated even the bare minimum to be considered “R material” . And you somehow seem to feel guilty for that… for not accepting the mere crumbs of accountability or honesty that she’s willing to provide. And for not being OK with the additional bullshit (stealing panties? Destroying texts?) she’s dishing out in the years post dday.

She wants to minimize and rugsweep and manipulate the situation - and YOU.

So what do YOU want to do about that? You cannot change her. You cannot force her to grow empathy or honesty or humility. The ONLY thing you can change is you.

I get that you want to stay M. Most of us do. I get that you want to keep some semblance of normal. You can say it’s for the kids, but I’d bet it’s also for you. This shit us scary as hell. But once a WS starts the slippery slope to an A, there is no more normal - we just don’t know it.

It’s super hard- I’m S and struggle with it almost every day - but I’d consider trying to emotionally detach as much as you can. Try to live life w/o any consideration for your WW- any decision you make is just for you and your kids. That emotional breathing space can really help get some clarity. Some can do it while going about their day to day routine. Some need IHS. I couldn’t do it while living together, so I asked WH to move out. Wish I’d done it a year ago- not to punish him or spur him into change, but to give myself a chance to let my heart breathe and to focus on me. If by some unforseeable miracle the proverbial light bulb goes off for him, great. In the meantime, I’m figuring out what I want for MY life.

This isn’t about her. It’s about you and the person you are, the parts that need healing, the things you want to change in yourself - for yourself. I’m a child of D, and it was a relief when my parents finally did it - and they still can’t coparent. I do think the more resentment that builds from a WS’s entitled billshit AFTER dday, the harder it is to recover and the harder it is to let go and co parent effectively.

You’ve done this for three years. If nothing changes, everything stays the same.

You cannot change her. You can change you.

Godspeed

This is all excellent perspective and I want to thank everyone - no reason to stop. Keep it coming. Just wanted to say thanks.

My biggest piece of device is to do whatever you need to in order to get the answers you need. Having this fester is the absolute worst thing you can do. I built up so much resentment over 4 years that I went from where you were which was things were ok, to I’m GTFO right now.

I didn’t have many unresolved question, but had anger that I didn’t address.

Like you, we still had some really good times. I also still loved her. But trust me, that won’t be enough if you have unresolved anger at this point

She needs to know how you feel, and that her marriage isn’t on the firm footing she thinks it is. I regret not laying that track with my EX. Don’t make the same mistake.

Remember a few posts up when I suggested you consider the Thumos you stare down in the mirror in 10 years if you stay married. I realize it probably goes without saying, but you should also ponder the Thumos you stare down in the mirror in 10 years if you D. For example, as you're about to attend the graduation party for your youngest that you and your then XWW have jointly planned and executed. She may show up with another man. You may show up with another woman. Will you feel relieved? Wistful? Wish you had a Mulligan?

What I’m not finding in this thread is how (or what) you are doing for YOU. There’s a lot about what your WW is/isn’t doing.

this goes back to the quotation of Bigger's words.

Start with you. Forget what your W is or is not doing for a while.

What do you want? Is it healthy for you? For example, why would you want your old M back, when it holds the seeds of infidelity?

If you want R, what are your requirements for R? How will you know if your and your W are meeting your requirements? Are your requirements healthy for you, for your W, and for your M? What are her requirements?

Once you've got those things pinned down, and you still want R and think R is possible, then bring your W into your thinking.

Is your W willing to sign on to your requirements? Are you willing to sign on to hers?

What do you want your M to be? What does your W want? Are your wants aligned?

If you and your W agree on what you want your M to be and commit to doing the necessary work, R is possible.

If you don't have the alignments and commitments, you will be choosing between D and an unsatisfactory life. That's your choice.

Right now, your W is not a candidate for R. To become one, she needs at the very least to:

Take responsibility for her A, at a gut level;

Commit to no more lies;

Commit to answering your questions fully;

Commit to keeping you informed of location, activities, and companions at basically all times;

Commit to change from cheater to good partner.

*****

You're not likely to heal from PTSD without help. Your W is extremely unlikely to make the necessary changes without IC.

IC usually costs less than D.

*****

You mention you made mistakes. What are you willing to do to correct those mistakes?

*****

You mention your MC minimized your emasculation.

Your emasculation is in your head. It's within your power to end it, and only you can end it. Are you willing to do that?

Don't get me wrong - I know it's immensely difficult not to feel as if you've been emasculated (or defeminized, for betrayed women). But that sense comes from messages that one takes in uncritically from the outside and turns against oneself. But it's work you have to do to heal.

*****

I personally like the following a lot more than the MacDonald book: https://www.survivinginfidelity.com/healing_library/reconciliation/what-every-wayward-spouse-needs-to-know.asp?

I recommend asking your W to read and discuss it. There's a lot of wisdom in those pages, IMO.

*****

I'm really sorry your W cheated. I'm even sorrier that she has not become remorseful yet. I'm still more sorry that you're stuck.

One of the major unfairnesses in this is that you can heal, but you have to work to do that. But it's a fact.

So take heart. Know that you have it within yourself to survive and thrive.

"Before You Say Reconcile." By Fighting2Survive

http://www.survivinginfidelity.com/forums.asp?tid=406548

Way too many betrayed spouses "jump blindly into R." They focus on the goal, rather than the process. I know. I was one of them. Many of my SI friends did the same thing. In fact, it's a very common mistake.

To me, infidelity is a deal-breaker. My wife broke the deal. End of story. Thirteen years of marriage and a few more before that suddenly ceased to matter to me. And I mourned the loss of that marriage and the woman I believed I knew. Like anyone else, I was heart-broken and devastated. My whole world was falling apart and it seemed there was nothing I could do about it. Except divorce.

I joined SI to find out if reconciliation was truly possible and, if so, how to go about it. I never started a thread in the JFO forum. I was looking for specific answers to specific questions. I poured myself in to R (as well as this community). It was a goal, something to be achieved and then, of course, life would carry on, better than it was before, stronger, healthier... a slap-fucking-happy marriage.

What I didn't pay enough attention to was me.

I lost myself.

It took me well over a year before some of the advice I'd been receiving from SI members (like sisoon) finally started to really sink in.

I heal me.

Focus on you and your healing. Step-back and detach from your WW. Let go. Forget about reconciliation and marriage, truth, justice and the American Way, forgiveness, love, sex, squeezing the tooth paste tube wrong... fuck it all, brother!

Have a revenge affair!

With yourself.

Live your life. Deliberately. Authentically. Find your own joy, because ultimately we are all responsible for our own happiness. People can add either joy or sorrow, but they cannot make us happy or miserable (despite their best efforts).

Find your own peace... with yourself, with the world, with the Universe, God, Allah, whatever.

The world is still a beautiful place and time is still a precious gift.

Let go, man.

Let's go Blues!!!

I had an epiphany of sorts about your situation. I revised my proposed letter to incorporate this idea, but thought I'd make a separate short post.

The pain a BH feels from a WW's adultery come from the sum of the individual choices she makes. In your case, among other things, she chose to have extramarital sex with a man from your neighborhood, who is the father of one of your son's friends. A man you therefore encounter almost daily.

Another choice she made was to gaslight you cruelly during this affair, making you believe you were mentally ill.

A third was to refuse to share details with you when you asked, post-affair. She responded to some/many of your questions with "that's private", or other answers intended to deflect and/or non-respond. In other words, she protected the cocoon of intimacy she created with the AP against your marriage.

As an aside, it beggars the imagination that she has said she wishes she had never confirmed that they had sex. Is it really her belief that the key to a healthy marriage is lying to her BH even more than she has already lied to him?

But back to my point. Every time you see the AP, which is often, you are reminded that even now he continues to share an intimacy with her that is withheld from you. You look at him and wonder what lies within that cocoon of intimacy. You see the two of them in proximity and wonder what shared knowledge passes between them when they make eye contact. They share a secret and she has kept you out of it. You still feel like the brunt of the awful japes you heard them making about you in the recorded conversation.

Infidelity is often described as a "shit sandwich" for the BH. This is part of the shit sandwich your WW has shoved into your mouth -- the pleasure of encountering this man daily and wondering about the knowledge of your wife he has that is secret from you.

I think this is a big part of why it eats at you. She decided, when entering into this, that this would be your hell. If any affair screams out for full disclosure, yours does.

[This message edited by Butforthegrace at 10:17 AM, August 18th (Sunday)]

I am just popping in here to say that although I am only 9 months out, my story is very similar to yours, Thumos. Many of the threads and choices of my WW are similar, and you seem to have responded similarly to how I have.

Thanks to all; I am benefiting from the wisdom and sharing in this thread.

All I can add is support. I know how difficult it is and I respect you for how you are handling this. The anger is real. It's there. It can become toxic, but it seems that you are not allowing the toxicity to destroy hope, and that takes an enormous amount of integrity, endurance, and perseverance. You have been mistreated in a way that many people would have allowed themselves to become one with the toxicity. I often read wayward and have heard my WW say that affairs are like drugs. Well so is the anger after betrayal. It's like heroin, and it's always there, available. If you succumb to it though, it will destroy. You seem to be going about your situation with integrity, compassion, thoughtfulness, and honesty. Well done to you. Take all the time you need to figure out what is best for you and yours; you deserve it.

[This message edited by fatheroftwo at 10:46 AM, August 18th (Sunday)]

Have not been able to reply this weekend much but I will in more depth tonight or tomorrow - as well as answer additional questions that have been asked.

Thanks for the very insightful advice from everyone.

I also want to be fair and will also address a good point that has been made here about taking what I have to say with at least a grain of salt. You’re only hearing one side of the story, so I do want to also point out any additional context that helps round out the picture.

[This message edited by Thumos at 4:42 PM, August 18th (Sunday)]

She only responded to one question with “that’s private” - I seem to have blocked out which one it was, but I am relatively sure it had to do with the texts. This was in the first year after D-Day and I was still in a great deal of shock. I remember being so dumbfounded I was actually speechless and I really felt frozen by it.

Regardless if it was once or several times, I think every betrayed spouse here understands how closely we are watching, how we are listening to and absorbing every word, and how anything said can be incredibly damaging over time.

[This message edited by Thumos at 5:05 PM, August 18th (Sunday)]

Every time you see the AP, which is often, you are reminded that even now he continues to share an intimacy with her that is withheld from you. You look at him and wonder what lies within that cocoon of intimacy. You see the two of them in proximity and wonder what shared knowledge passes between them when they make eye contact. They share a secret and she has kept you out of it. You still feel like the brunt of the awful japes you heard them making about you in the recorded conversation.

Infidelity is often described as a "shit sandwich" for the BH. This is part of the shit sandwich your WW has shoved into your mouth -- the pleasure of encountering this man daily and wondering about the knowledge of your wife he has that is secret from you.

Yes to all of this, and I trigger extremely hard every time I see him. I have to see him more often during the school year but I think you can all imagine what runs through my head, how my BP is through the roof, how I am restraining myself with extreme self control, and how long it takes me to restore some sense of equilibrium afterward.

And as you so astutely observed, on top of just the initial “re-shock” I go through every time, there’s the added level of trauma that comes with understanding the symbolic import of it. I tend to think in terms of metaphors, allusions, etc that one reads in fictional literature. There’s nearly always a spiritual or deeper level behind, underneath, within the 3D reality we’re walking around in every day. So for me the deeper levels at work here are equally if not more powerfully traumatic and crippling. It feels like my soul gets chipped away a little more every time I see him.

And then on top of all of this, there’s the added layer of just understanding the brute fact of her betrayal. That she chose to put me in this position — day after day, week after week — in this precise circumstance. That she chose it for her children. Part of me is enraged by it; another part of me is filled with pity and sadness that someone could have such a disordered part of their personality capable of doing that to another person; another part is filled with dread that I’m married to that and have to figure out how to either live with that person or be away from them.

When I’ve talked about how painful this repeated exposure to the OM is, her response is “sympathetic” - “I’m sorry” along with a sympathetic shake of the head - but I get the blank stare when I ask what I’m supposed to do with this pain. She simply didn’t think that far ahead and now has no answer for me. The subtext is almost like, “Yeah, that really sucks. I don’t know what I can do about it.”

More to the point, after D-Day when I insisted that there would be no more play dates or athletics with the other child, she wanted to try to force my hand on that at one point and even tried to convince me they could still be on the same sports team. It was during that time that she also grew angry and resentful and started saying “If you had just let me talk to him we could have worked something out” - I really can’t tell you how damaging this was and has been to my trust.

[This message edited by Thumos at 4:44 PM, August 18th (Sunday)]

Every once in awhile, don’t you just sit back and look at the circumstance you’re in and go, “My God, what a sh*tshow! Who in their right mind would put up with this?!”

And you follow that up with, “Oh yeah, I would.”

Another piece of context here I haven’t mentioned is that POSOM is 9 years younger than me and 8 years younger than her. It’s clear she felt flattered and wooed by a younger man. That bit of info is not really relevant to the bigger picture here but I realized I hadn’t mentioned it previously.

“If you had just let me talk to him we could have worked something out”

Seriously. She invites another man into your marriage without your knowledge or permission. She sneaks around with him until you catch her. Then, she tries to strong-arm into letting her negotiate some sort of three-way relationship with him?

That's not just a zero on the empathy scale. That's a negative.

Then, she tries to strong-arm into letting her negotiate some sort of three-way relationship with him?

No - to be clear she wasn’t trying to do that, although what she was suggesting was still hurtful and harmful.. this was in year 1 after D-Day.

She was saying if I’d only let her talk to him to end the affair then we all could have come to some understanding regarding our kids. I had insisted that she cut him off immediately with a text and block him and she had done that, and as far as I know she’s stuck to NC since then.

When she said this to me I shut her down and told her her attitude was ridiculous. I told her she didn’t get to manage some kind of soft landing after blowing up our marriage.

She was saying if I’d only let her talk to him to end the affair then we all could have come to some understanding regarding our kids.

Ah, understood.

Still, what possible "understanding" could she reach concerning the kids? Start a two-family Google calendar and agree that you and AP will alternate games that you attend (your WW can attend and watch your son while AP is there -- you attend the games where BOW is present)?

Thumos,

You've gotten great advice here and there are similarities between our situations. I can hear and feel your pain and anguish, it reminds me of my D Day.

As I stated the advice has all been spot on, but I do recommend as a starting point you envision yourself 10 years from now. What do you see? Do you see yourself living with her or living without her?

This exercise will be the foundation of your healing IMO.