SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Pogre....EXCELLENT comment. 💯👆. I am glad you and wife are in a good spot. Glad she saw the light and humbled herself. 🙏

You’ve gotten a lot of good advice here and so I won’t take your time to try and repeat some of the things I’ve seen. But there are two important things I want to make sure you hear and since I’ve read some of but not all of the posts in this thread I would like to state them here if nothing else but for reinforcement.

That said here are my thoughts:

1) if reconciliation is truly your goal, then of course this will take a lot of work and effort from both of you. But as the cheater, SHE MUST LEAD THE EFFORT. You can’t be the main driver. She needs to do the research on what it takes to fix what is broken inside her and to build a new relationship. She should be the one to create the rebuilding plan. She should be the one to track it. She should be the one to lead the conversations.

If she cannot or will not or chooses not to do this, then In my opinion she should not waste your time or her time in thinking this marriage will be feasible going forward.

I hope you will take some time to sit and think about what that truly means and the best way to communicate that to her. Don’t let her think you’re willing to be the leader of the process. If you are the one that is deciding what needs to be done and pushing for it to happen, then I believe you will end up NOT RECONCILING WITH HER, but instead, RECONCILING WITH YOURSELF.

And to me, that’s a recipe for failure.

2) It seems like your wife likes to act tough and "talk shit" about you with her friends.

That absolutely needs to change. In therapy she needs to work on being humble and finding humility with her communication with others. She likes to appear that she’s in control of her cheating and she’s the boss of it. Then she brags about how she has you under her thumb and can handle you.

You need to communicate that this mode of operation on her part NEEDS TO END STARTING TODAY and NEVER RETURN. Even if it risks her losing friends (no big loss because some of the toxic ones probably need to be gone anyway) she needs to honestly communicate to those in her life and stop the charade she is portraying.

She instead should be saying things like "truth is, I’m a cheater and I have a problem. And that problem has caused me to truly hurt the most important person in my life. And I truly regret that. My drinking also contributed to that and I absolutely need to fix that. I regret the awful choices I have made and I am going to work to make this up to the only true person in my life, and remove anything and anyone who is toxic to that goal".

If she can’t start saying those things to the others in your lives, and wants to maintain this mask of bravado, then I would clearly communicate to her that you don’t want to be in a life with someone who is like that.

She should start saying these things to others and show you she has done that. True for any partners is "if you wouldn’t say it in front of your spouse you shouldn’t say it at all." She needs to start living by that in order to rebuild trust.

————-

Those are the two things that I think are important for you to consider and hope you will think about them for a while and communicate them to her as requirements if you are going to spend your time working to rebuild this relationship.

I wish you well.

[This message edited by Stevesn at 8:02 PM, Sunday, January 18th]

I'll be honest, I wouldn't trust her in any way. She's shown over and over again how good of a manipulator she is. This doesn't even feel like desperation, to be honest, it feels like she's putting on her best performance yet.

The fact that you read in her own words that not only did she consistently screw someone else while stringing you along, she was PROUD of it. And every time you called her on it, she put on the waterworks, waited until you were satisfied, and then went right back to what she was doing.

I don't think this relationship will ever recover. I think you're allowing yourself to keep moving the goalposts. Giving her any feelings of hope just means she's learning there's no real consequences for her actions, and you'll just keep finding yourself here, gaslighting yourself into thinking maybe it's going to get better.

Please do the hard thing. Send her on her way. There are much safer partners out there that haven't hurt you. This one has destroyed the foundation, and all you're doing now is clinging to the ashes and hoping you can paste them back together into some kind of foundation. It can't be.

Btw - I wouldn’t trust her either. And in my opinion it would take years if not a decade or more to build something new that can be strong (with no guarantee of success).

But if OP is inclined to try as I think he is, at the very least I and others here are able to provide insight as to what is required at the very least and at multiple levels from a WS to have a chance at success.

Sorry for the wall of text, but there are a few elements of your story that are eerily similar to mine.

…and one *fundamental* difference: OP is not married. He has every right to do whatever he wants with his life, but to stay with a GF who betrays you like this is…. something else.

If you must marry her at some point, I hope you get the mother of all pre-nups.

Oh wow. I take a few days break and return to this! Why can’t you all play nice while I am away?

Friend – and GF if you are reading this – I don’t really see any harm or damage in GF reading this thread.
The way I see it is that IF this ends in your separation then whatever is shared here has the shelf-life of lettuce and won’t be worth anything to anyone relevant in a month or two. You haven’t shared anything that can be traced or connected to anyone, unless they happen to know a couple that have been together for 18 years, one a recovery addict the other an active alcoholic and are separating AND are reading this site. Not really likely to happen.

IF this ends the way you are hoping – well... your GF will then know what we – a broad base of experienced peers looking at your situation from a birds eye view – know: That if she wants this relationship she needs to stop drinking, and stop her interactions with OM. The later is a given IF she does the former. She won’t be hanging out with OM having a diet-coke while he downs his vodka.

THAT is the key to ANY CHANCE you and GF have. Her sobriety.
Monitor that. Dry out the house, her car, the office. Confirm she’s at AA. Get the name of her sponsor and check in with him if she’s attending. Get a breathalyzer test and make random checks a requirement.
You are allowed to put the relationship on hover or hold for 30 days, and if she is in AA, sober, accountable and not around OM... you two have a shot at making it.

Hey guys thanks for the advice. I've definitely been riding that roller coaster, swinging back and forth like you say. One second I want to give her a second chance, the next I'm like hell no.

But something unrelated but very important just happened. She just found out that her mom has stage 4 cancer and is probably not going to make it.

This is so crazy. It's the time I would normally most want to be there for her, but then it's like I'm disgusted by her right now. It's a fucking insane conflict. Also, what's been going through my mind is "do I really want to be the guy that leaves his gf right after she found her mom is dying?". I know it's probably not rational but that's what's been going through my head.

Now I really feel like I don't know what to do.

Thanks for all the love and support guys.

do I really want to be the guy that leaves his gf right after she found her mom is dying?".

I am so sorry this has been added to your timeline at a time when it will be difficult to support her.

You can support her mom directly - if you have that relationship. Doesn’t mean you have to support the cheater.

If other people’s opinions matter then you may want to tell people that your relationship was broken by cheating and while it’s unfortunate that the timing of all of this is bad, you are not in a position to continue being in the relationship.

They do not need to know more. You do not need to explain yourself further.

I hope this helps you.

[This message edited by The1stWife at 11:48 PM, Sunday, January 18th]

So she can’t start sobriety while tending to her mom?

This is really an awful combination. I'm sorry for both of you.

"I know it's probably not rational but that's what's been going through my head"

It's not rational, but natural to be protective of the person you love. But of course abusing those closest to you can cause bad consequences. You sound all over the place. You can put decisions on hold and wait a bit until emotions calm down. But try to not get too invested in the mean time. As far as we know she could end up drinking at OMs tomorrow night.

Sorry to hear about her mother. It will be hard to support her right now for sure but I think it's possible. Maybe reframe your idea of support. Imagine it was a male friend of yours whose mother was dying. How would you support him? The same set of behaviors can be given to your gf. Providing support doesn't mean you have to R.

She now has a new trauma and I believe that it could influence her in different ways regarding the A. The more common is to further open her eyes toward what she has done to your relationship. However, in some situations these experiences can actually push someone back toward connecting with the AP. Keep your eye out for that possibility.

At the risk of sounding callous her mother's illness has nothing to do with your relationship problems nor should you let that distract you from them. From what you have told us about your girlfriend she is the type that will use this bad news as a means to manipulate your sympathy for her and distract/deflect the issues in your relationship.

As someone else suggested, support her as you would a male friend. You can listen to her cry or talk or reminisce about her mother but keep it at that

Even if you were to permanently end the relationship because of her infidelity no reasonable person would fault you

Decisions and choices sometimes have bad consequences. She now gets to live with the consequences of her bad decisions

[This message edited by WB1340 at 3:31 PM, Monday, January 19th]

I’m sorry about her mom. It is a shock, and it’s always easier to deal with these sort of issues with a strong backland. It reflects well on you that you want to support her.
However... I want to remind you of what I have repeatedly stated: An alcoholic will prioritize alcohol over ANYTHING.

Friend – I know that after all these years it’s hard to let go and if she really cares and if you want it then you two do have a chance. But that chance is 100% based on sobriety.
Your ability to be around to support her with her mother and to work on the relationship is still based on HER sobriety.

If I’m correct – that an alcoholic will prioritize alcohol – then expect her to use her moms condition as a "logical" reason for why she needs to focus on her mom and put sobriety on the back-burner.

^ yep. Expect "You can’t ask to to stop drinking right now while I’m dealing with my mother!"

I'll third that one. Not only was I an alcoholic, but before my wife I was in a LTR with another, even more extreme alcoholic (and that's saying A LOT. She drank too much for ME!). Any tragedy, problem, argument, or hardship will be used as an excuse to not stop. Don't accept it. I would argue that hardships are the best time to straighten up. There are always going to be problems. It's always better to face them clear headed than in a drunken or hungover stupor. This should be a first major test for her.