SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Hi Zeta,
It is going to take a long time and it is going to take a lot of conversations. It will often be two steps forward and then one step back.

A couple of things from your words in your post…..
Firstly, it is a good thing that he is seeing you sad and acknowledging your frame of mind and wanting to help you. He could easily ignore and put his head in the sand but making this effort is a big step. It is owning up and trying to fix. In my mind and from my experience I feel this is a positive.

Secondly, the way I look at this whole concept of my special little serial cheater package is like this. My WH was pretty happy in his marriage and his life and to be honest in don’t think he was out and about looking for affairs. All it took for him was a special little nod and a wink from my best friend in a social situation and his thinking changed right there and then. He thought…wow…this super cute female is attracted to me….and there you go. That is all it took.
What an idiot.
He just felt so much better about himself to have a female attracted to him. ( other than his wife) so then he goes through life and many years before he starts his next affair. It was the ten yr affair and it started on the bus. A stupid lonely single woman looking for love and she sits next to my husband on the bus and she flirts with him. He loves that someone finds him attractive….and there you go. Then…..The 8yr affair was the lonely widow sits at his table in a coffee shop flirts with him. He finds it feeds his ego. He had a certain mindset going at the time. Life at home, teenage kids, mtge, busy working wife and he just felt he needed something fun for himself and sitting on a bus every day with a woman who found him funny and interesting just made him feel better. He says it was like escapism. Illicit sex then became exciting and dangerous and gave him thrills. He wrote poems and love letters to these women. To me they were disgusting and bordered on pornographic fantasy but to him and those women it was huge exciting fun.

We have spent YEARS talking about the feelings and events that led to his affairs and it took him a very long time to unpack everything. It was a slow process.

Now as to therapists.
We had a few.
First Lady we saw hated my husband so much that she just kept telling me to run and that he was a full blown narcissist and he will never change.
Next he saw a psychiatrist who normalised his behaviour and was almost congratulatory. I sat in on a session. I was mortified.
Next a psychologist duo of two women who hated him but actually made him do some serious thinking about the why.
Lastly a man who just helped him unpack his life and made him think about his ego, his selfish attitude in life and made him think about his immature outlook.

He read books…so many books. He even went to a sex addicts anonymous group for a few months. He wrote a lot ( he’s not one to write) he basically tried to do as much as he could and research narcissism, sex addiction, personality disorders…etc
He knew he had done things that went so against his own morals but his thirst for those feelings just overwhelmed anything else in his life.
He was in a constant state of anxiety. He was always so scared of me finding out. He knew it would affect me and it would shatter the image that we had of him. The person who would show immense integrity in every other aspect of his life. …that person was just a big fat cheating adulterous liar.

The day I saw the text on his phone from 10yr affair person was just so weird. I was walking by his charging phone as a message came in. It was a creepy love message full of darling love etc and saw the name of the person who I did not recognise. I went all cold and weird. The proof that he was having an intimate conversation with someone else was like a bullet to my brain. I just walked into the room where he was sitting at the computer and asked him who was this person?
He slowly turned around. Fear in eyes. He got up and walked slowly towards me. I have never seen him so scared. And that was the day my world really turned upside down. It took three more months for all the affairs to surface. He was such a coward.

Ok…
So here we are…years of work, talking, sorting out issues and I will say that I have a much better relationship with him now. There is a better understanding between us. Dare I say the relationship we have now is much better than the first thirty years? It is like it is a whole different ball game.
Sure, there are still times where he does dumb things. Times where I do wonder if he is still tempted to do flirty things. He is a friendly easy going person and for some reason women more than men seem to like him. He isn’t drop dead handsome or anything, he is just likeable I guess.

We were at one point living in a remote outback town for his work. We were at a dinner party and he was in a good mood and he started to tell a few jokes and people were laughing then this woman who was sitting next to him started to chat to him. He turned his back slightly to me and spoke exclusively to this woman for quite a long time. Well, I got a horrible feeling because this was very similar to some of his behaviour pre d day. I left the table, I drove eleven hours to my home in another state and did not speak to him for two months.
He said he had no intentions towards this woman, he was just chatting. But I had to get it across to him that his behaviour felt awful to ME. I didn’t know what was going through his mind. All I saw was his disrespectful behaviour towards me. I will not be treated like that.

It then dawned on me that for the relationship to really work I need to feel like I am his number one person in life. If HE is his number one then it will always be him first and it will not work.
He has always been my number one. In all our years together and with every decision I make I always think about him first and how my decision will affect him. I could never have had an affair as I know it would have hurt him so much.

Can it be that simple? I think so.

So, if your H is seeing you sad it shows he is thinking about you and wants to help you. Your H will feel guilt and hate himself for how he has made you feel but caring for you and your feelings overrides his. So, it’s a good thing. IMO.

Other women….

They are just people that I cannot even begin to understand.

When my WH two LTA’s found out they were not the EXCLUSIVE other women they demanded answers from WH!

It made me laugh so much. Are they serious? Yes…they were.

8 year affair even contacted me to ask that I and WH meet with her to explain his behaviour.

The whole time he was in 10 and 8 yr affairs he was also meeting other women for coffee and lunches and the odd ONS.

I asked him how the hell did he find the time to do all of this deceiving? Or the energy? It was like it was an addictive drug to be wanted…or something. I don’t really know. It’s all so wrong.

The list of women on his phone was just stupid. He travelled OS a lot and many women were friends on planes…airports…hotels….locations….it was just astounding and also disgusting but it just shows you how sick and disgusting he was.

One woman was younger than our oldest daughter. That made me feel ill. When I found out I just could not believe what I was hearing? I just looked at him and hated what he did …hated. I think he hated himself a lot as well…so that helps.

8yr affair still tries to contact him from time to time.

It is a good thing that all the contact attempts are out in the open. If not then there is a reason for concern.

A OW still wanting to meet for coffee? Lol…seriously?

Stay safe and take care x

Hi Zeta,

I'm just reading your story and could relate to a lot of it, except my husband was caught 6 months into his affair. The night before DDay he had happy hour drinks with a woman (not the OW) which he didn't mention, and I found other evidence of poor boundaries outside of the affair as well. It's highly probable that he would have moved on to ONS and the like.

I think there are several questions to ask yourself:

Given the "best case scenario" from this point forward (he makes many sustained changes for the better), would you want to stay together? I'm assuming you're not a resounding "no" or you wouldn't be here. Quite likely you're a yes, no, maybe, it changes every day! But let's say the answer is yes, then ask yourself, how likely is he to make and sustain the necessary changes? He's been the absolute worst version of himself for 9 years. Those habits and impulses have become second nature. Do you think he can find his way out of this? Does he have outside influences (friends and family with good moral character) to make the changes seem appealing?

I think that becoming a mature, selfless, transparent partner is at least as hard as going from a couch potato to a marathon runner. It is possible. People do it all the time. But will everyone follow it through to the end? No. But you can certainly tell if they're keeping up the effort or slacking off, and that's a big clue as to motivation and follow through.

As you've so rightly said, you don't have to make any decisions right now. Or you can make a decision and change your mind about it 8,000 times. But these are the questions I would be asking to see if I am a path that has a good chance of producing a healthy relationship. And remember, on top of taking a harmful dynamic and turning it into a healthy one, you also have the trauma to deal with and heal from.

I don't think of healing as something we ever close the chapter on, and you will have these traumas whether you stay or go. All you can do is determine whether the marriage you can have with him today is a place that will allow you to heal.

Please remember to cut yourself a ton of slack. He's known about his double life for 9 years. You've only known for a few months. It takes time to assimilate all this new information.