But this is now my journey…
One thing I’ve learned by my own experience, and watching hundreds of posters show up here, is that the WS can do everything perfectly on the backside and the BS can deeply want to reconcile, and yet it can still fail. The BS just can’t get past it.
I showed up here in a similar situation, many years later, literally not having thought about it deeply for years. But then I did. It came on during the "what does it all mean?" years, when we start to take stock of things (meaning, checking out how the life story is coming along). It’s been a journey since.
An affair is an attack on the Self, on who you are and how you see yourself. You had a narrative, you had a story, it was wrong.
Underneath the pain is the question, who am I? What happened was crushing, why was it crushing? What exactly got crushed, anyway?
I have come to understand two points, at least for me. The first is from a Mary Oliver poem:
Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.
The other is related: The path forward is to grow your way out of this. To grow as a person.
I was given a dark gift, that pulls back the curtain and reveals some uncomfortable truths about my wife, of course, but more importantly uncomfortable truths about myself, if I am willing to see them. My Self, whatever that is. I didn’t ask for it, but it’s mine.
The affair blowtorches off the facade and exposes things we normally aren’t aware of, our fragility, our dependence on the views of others, our battle to create a story of our selves, some sort of narrative. Actually examining all of it is A Good Thing, if you prize the truth. You’ll find unexamined assumptions that aren’t true, and when you realize they are false, you can drop them and the pain that comes with them. I have.
Sorry you find yourself here, you didn’t ask for it, but here you are. You won’t find a better support group.
Sending strength!