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I know I've read about this topic on here a few times but can't remember where/when. I'm finally to the point that I would like to hear from others.

I'm in R (about a year now) and it's going OK. As you are all aware, it has good days and bad days. I finally have gotten him to talk to me more and answer questions I have about the A and the AP. He's been very good at doing this and not getting defensive. Right now, I feel I need to hear something "negative" about AP. I don't know, maybe like she was a smoker, or a liar or mean to animals. Just something to let me feel like he sees her as the whore she was and not some woman to be idolized and put on a pedestal (He has told me that's not how he feels, but it would feel good to me to hear this.) Anyone else feel/felt this way? How did you explain it to your WS - the need to know and why?

I didn't necessarily NEED to hear anything about the AP. He was the contractor in my house daily for 3 months, then 3-4 days a week until the job totally finished. We talked. A lot.

I knew that he had cheated on his XW twice. I knew he claimed to be a Christian now, having "changed" his life. After discovering the A and outting him to a mutual friend, I learned that he had in no way "changed", that he still hooked up with 1-2 women a week while he was supposedly dating someone else.

What I appreciate now knowing is that his name makes my wife sick. Not that I do this often, but I have three very good friends with the same name. I talk to all three of them multiple times a week. And often, I tell my wife "I was talking to [name] today about XYZ..." I don't do it to purposely make her feel sick, but if that is the consequence of her choice, so be it.

[This message edited by CaptainRogers at 5:44 PM, July 10th (Saturday)]

I said something like, "She is a piece of shit and we both know it, but you never say anything bad about her." Actually, he rarely said anything at all about her other than answering my questions.

I think he said something like, "Well, she's a liar. And manipulative."

And then I egged him on some, by repeating things he had mentioned.

Me: "And she is not imaginative, and even her make-believe blow jobs are boring!"

Him: "yeah! Really boring! and she is kind of stupid, too!"

And it went on in that vein for a while, until I said, "You are such an idiot. You almost threw away me for that piece of trash."

And he said, "Yeah, I am an idiot."

I knew the AP: she was my wife’s ex-girlfriend. It’s hard NOT to know exes in lesbian circles. Not only had the AP interfered in our relationship during the first 9-12 months, but she even successfully got her to spend the night about a month into our relationship. She also stole their house (forged signatures), gave away my wife’s dog, abandoned their dove in a closed-up house in the middle of summer: she was in every way a bitch. And my wife agreed. And she admitted she knew if I found out I would be devastated.

Big understatement.

My wife got nothing out of the six month affair. Her ex got over $1,000 cash, Starbucks card refills, her car gas tank topped off, and more than a dozens dates on the waterfront for cocktails and food. My wife only got to pretend she had no responsibilities while she was gone from our home. She now realizes that her ex took her for a ride. Oh, and that she destroyed me in the mix.

It doesn’t help to know the AP was awful —- that only reinforces the fact that they weren’t thinking about us.

[This message edited by OneInTheSame at 2:27 AM, July 11th (Sunday)]

Wanting to know is basic to your healing and the healing of the marriage. Ask him anything and everything. And tell him it's for the sake of trying to R. Ask him about her, if you need to know. Be specific as needs be. If he hems & haws or gives the 'I don't know' garbage, then he's lying and you need to decide what you will do with that.

I need to hear the truth. That's what I want.

I had / have felt the same way as OP. For me, I think I needed

1) To smash his little fantasy world

2) To destroy any intimacy (i.e. you let her into my world, now you let me in to hers)

3) proof that he did not feel protective of her or the affair

And I mean, talking shit about the AP just feels good.

But really in the end, we all just want the truth. And no matter the details, the truth is they cheated, most likely down and that was ok with them. In fact, affairing down is probably preferred (part of the thrill) on some subcon level.

My FWH totally threw her under the bus early. He kept a burner phone for a week to say his own goodbye.....but was super quick to make up silly nicknames about a fat a&S and a horse face. At the time I thought it helped. Now it's hard to understand how it went there. He didn't idolize her, she was just there.

What I needed to hear then was this never happened and it was all a bad dream.

However - since it did happen and it isn't a bad dream what I needed to hear was the truth.

Any discussions of the A now if the answer is particularly bad WH will now preface with "I'm sorry this is going to hurt but..."

And I remind him that yes, truth hurts but lies devastate and the unknown is torture.

What Chaos said!

Early on, I took some weird solace in knowing that FWH would gently share "hurtful" truths. At least I could know that they were true.

After 45 years of a reasonably strong marriage, my WW rekindled a relationship with a high school boyfriend at their 50th HS reunion. It began with about 6 months of emails before the reunion and continued for about 6 months of emails after. I will never know what they did at the reunion, but apart from that there was no face-to-face contact before or after. He lives 600 miles from us.

Shortly after the reunion I detected her becoming increasingly distant and detached in bed. This led to my breaking into her email and learning of the affair. The AP is younger, bigger, and better-looking than me. There is also a psychobiological adolescent bond between them. In her emails she said she had more in common with him than she did with me. And she belittled and denigrated me. On Valentine's Day -- a day dedicated to mutual declarations of love -- in the same breath she both denigrated me and told him she fantasized talking with him because "he would understand."

After D-day I needed to hear I was better than him, especially after being negatively compared with him and denigrated and belittled in her emails and learning he was younger, bigger, and better-looking than me. Indeed, just the fact of an affair implies that the WW thinks the AP is better in important respects than her BH. But for more than two years after D-day she couldn't bring herself to do this -- to tell me I was better than him. She remained very protective of him. I practically put the words in her mouth and begged her to say it, that I was better than him, but she couldn't bring herself to say it.

She will now say it, but half-heartedly. It's too little too late and I have a hard time believing her. This is a barrier to genuine R, though considerations of family and finance keep us under the same roof.

Seventy-Four:

Hearing this:

She will now say it, but half-heartedly

is heartbreaking because it sounds so much like my WW.

I don't know your story, are you still married? You wrote you stayed together for family and finance, do you regret it? Did she ever come around? Do you consider yourself R now?

I'm with Chaos and Thumos.

But I've kind of concluded that my WH will NEVER give me the truth.

HowCouldSheDoIt:

Sorry to hear that in at least one respect your situation resembles mine. It sucks. Here are answers to your questions:

Yes, we are still married. I very much regret -- no, stronger, hate the affair and the extent to which I was deceived, disrespected, and manipulated into partially enabling my own betrayal, especially after 45 years of a strong marriage. If the affair had occurred earlier in our marriage I would have divorced her in a heartbeat. But as a retiree with strong connections to children and grandchildren, I don't have the energy or finances to start over. So, all things considered, I don't regret staying together. To me there's no viable alternative.

For more than two years my WW had a hard time understanding just how emotionally devastating her betrayal has been on me. She refused to tell me what I needed to hear -- that I was a better man than her POSOM. She has since made some progress, but her failure to recognize it for so long has left me deeply scarred. And I have lingering doubts about her sincerity, partly because of what I have learned about the indelible (psychobiological) nature of adolescent bonding and how it is frequently rekindled at high school reunions. If she knew then what she knows now, she may have been more likely to say what I needed to hear. But she didn't and I am still somewhat traumatized.

What we have now is peaceful, mostly civil, coexistence. But it's not what it was -- it's not spontaneous, carefree, and lovey-dovey as it had been for the first 45 years -- and it's not what I would consider genuine, whole-hearted R. The lingering trauma is too deep.

[This message edited by SeventyFour at 7:11 PM, July 14th (Wednesday)]

I haven’t posted in a while, but circumstances are bringing me back. I needed to hear different things at different times. My fWW gets upset because I “won’t get over it. I am here to stay.”

Early on, I needed to hear she was not leaving and it wouldn’t happen again. By the time she said that, it was the least of my concerns, because I knew how to handle it if it happened again.

What I struggled with not hearing was

- I needed to hear apologies and that it wasn’t my fault. When we discussed things, it was regularly met with defensiveness and blame.

- I needed to hear the full truth. My story involved some major rug sweeping. Vague answers and diversions continuously made me question ‘what isn’t she telling me and why?’ I got some answers recently after a decade…which brings me to

- I needed to hear why I am the better partner. The lack of apology and lack of transparency really messed me up.

I don't post often but do read. I think the most important thing all BS"S need is truth. While painful, it gives us the position of being important enough to know all that happened. It is the lying and deceit that hurt the most. It is feeling like another person knows your partner better than you as they have all the truth and are part of a history we know nothing about. Losing our history I believe is one of the most painful parts of an affair. I cannot look back and know what was true and what wasn't. What you want is relevant and important.

As far as the OW, she was vapid, dishonest as she was also married, had no guilt nor felt she deserved any consequences. She thought she deserved the affair as they had been lovers before our marriage. It took time, yet I now see who she is and know she isn't worth much at all. She could be with anyone and convince herself it was ok. I am just so glad I am not her. If my H ever made a choice to even speak to her again I would kick him out. It has been 5 years this month for me and I am still not totally committed to R. I am working hard on it but years of lying and cheating change a person and I am not who I use to be. I will never be the wife he once had. I am a better person all the way around and deserve nothing but the best of all things.

Sadly, my FWW made the process of answering questions so painful that I gave up and swept it all under the rug. Which is why we're revisiting it all over a decade later.

Whatever you do, do not stop pursuing the truth until you are absolutely confident that you know all that you need to know to process everything and eventually heal. Unanswered questions will come back to bite you eventually.

As for negative things about the AP, I think we often hear such glowing things about them in the WS's immediate set of excuses for the affair that we need our WS to tear down that facade and help us trust that they are seeing them in their true form.