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I feel stuck. BH and I have been talking a lot about the A, which I thought was supposed to help us move towards healing. Lately it just seems to upset him. I’ve been as transparent as I could be and communicative about my plans/whereabouts throughout the day. I’m trying to apologize frequently and where appropriate, listen to his feelings, answer his questions, give him a view of what was going on inside my head at the time, offer reassurance that it won’t happen again, that I want to be here with him and that our marriage can still be good, and show him that I’m working towards making fundamental changes to my character…

I don’t think he believes a lot of what I’m telling him, and I understand, partly, why: I’m no longer trustworthy and my actions contrast with what I say I feel towards him. But it also feels like something in his head is twisting things around, and I can’t reach him to encourage him to challenge those twisted thoughts.

For example, he really valued our ability to communicate well for all the years we’ve been married, but a big part of how this A came to pass was miscommunication about unmet needs (I was asking for things and not getting them because BH didn’t understand what I was asking for, and I started getting them from the AP while still trying to ask for them from BH, but BH sensed that there was an A going on and withdrew, and this made it more difficult for me to end the affair of my own accord because I believed BH was unable or unwilling to meet those needs and I was scared of going back to going without, all the while failing to understand why he was further withdrawing… It was a huge mess that resulted from a simple miscommunication.)

In his mind, this somehow means that all the years where we did communicate effectively are all null, and that his perception of them is inaccurate… But that’s just not true, is it? It’s extremely upsetting to me, and I’m trying to respond with compassion instead of frustration, but it’s difficult. I suggested he talk it over with his IC, but I worry the way he’ll present it to his IC will make it seem like that’s the truth and this will result in the IC not encouraging him to question the untrue thoughts, and then I’ll look like I’m being manipulative when I’m just trying to be comforting and helpful and to keep us moving in the right direction…

I know it’s going to take a lot of time for him to process this and for us to recover from it, and that we’re only 2 months out from D-Day…It just seems like nothing is helping him actually feel better, and that our progress is stalling. I feel like initially we came closer together, but now we are starting to drift apart again— or at least, he is drifting away from me. I know I’m supposed to let go of the outcome, but my anxiety that he’ll leave me is through the roof, and I’m feeling the urge to distance myself emotionally to lessen the pain if that happens… I know that’s not the right thing to do, but it’s really hard not to.

Everything just hurts.

Another example is that he’s convinced himself that I don’t want to be in this marriage with him because I only ended the A after I got caught, instead of ending it myself and confessing to him. The reality is that I wanted the things I was getting from the AP from BH all along, that the AP was just a pretty shitty substitute, and there was never a thought of leaving BH. I was genuinely surprised (confused, even) when BH asked me what I "wanted to do" on D-Day when he confronted me about the A. To me, it wasn’t even a question.

A lot of things I’ve read mention the WS having a period of indecision where they can’t decide whether to stay with their spouse and cut off the AP, or leave their spouse and be with the AP. I never experienced that. I sent the AP the NC text as soon as I realized I needed to do that, a few hours after BH confronted me. (I was in shock and was panicking as I realized the damage I had done, of course; that’s why it took me hours instead of being immediate.)

But in BH’s mind, I only ended the A because I was at suddenly risk of losing the dream home and comfortable life we have together, and that I really want to be with AP. It doesn’t seem like anything I say, no matter how much I insist that he is my home, that I don’t want the AP back, or that yeah, it would suck to have to figure out a way to make money and make child custody arrangements and move out and all that, but I could do it just fine— the real devastation for me would come from losing him— it doesn’t seem like he’s ever going to believe me. I’m wondering if he even wants to believe me, or if he’s concocting these untruths in his head as a means of allowing himself to gain emotional distance and leave the marriage.

Keep doing what you’re doing.

Smile at him, a lot.

Patience. It’s going to take a lot longer than you want it to. A lot longer. Not months. Years.

Best wishes.

What you’re seeing from your BS is all the classic traumas that are brought forth by what you did.

My advice? Instead of working hard to convince him his feelings and thoughts are wrong, concentrate on putting yourself in his shoes and really understanding why he believes what he does.

I guarantee you I felt the same way as he did and it lasted a long while.

We spoke about it. He said that he does want to believe me, but I was untruthful before, and his brain is trying to protect him from the next untruth and from the pain if I were to decide to leave (as if!)

I think I’m having a really hard time with not being believed, even if I logically know I don’t deserve any trust right now. I’m pretty sure that’s coming from my childhood trauma where my parents frequently didn’t understand or believe me (or, at least, one of them pretended not to.) I’m thinking it’s quite possible that I became a dishonest person because I wasn’t believed and the truth often still came with punishments, so I was conditioned into lying if it changed the outcome favorably. I got REALLY good at sneaking around and concocting coverup stories to do whatever it was I wanted to do…

Things to work on in IC, for sure.

[This message edited by DayByDay96 at 7:22 PM, Tuesday, September 16th]

Respectfully, it sound like you blame him. at least partially, for the A. Specially his part of this purported miscommunication. The way I read it was, it’s partially his fault for the starting and the continuation of the A.

I’m not trying to throw shade. But the A and everything surrounding its inception and continuation is on us. He could have been the best communicator in the world and it wouldn’t have mattered. We WS could make up all kinds of reasons why the A wasn’t our fault.

There were dozens of different ways we could have handled our situations rather than cheating. But we chose to look outside our marriages.

I don’t blame BH at all. I actively discourage him from blaming himself. The A is 100% a result of my unilateral actions, therefore it is 100% my fault…

That being said, there were still conditions in the marriage that weakened my resolve to walk away when I should have. That is simply the truth, as hard as it may be to understand that this doesn’t shift any of the blame. The conditions of the marriage don’t justify the A or make it okay in any way. They just weren’t properly communicated between us, and therefore they weren’t getting resolved.

("We’ll you should have communicated them, or left the marriage!"

I did try to communicate them…I should have tried more persistently to communicate them, and I should have tried harder to understand why my H was withdrawing when I was begging for connection, instead of committing {and perpetuating} the infidelity. But what’s done is done, and now we’re picking up the pieces.)

As someone else here put it:
"You[the BS] did not cause the affair – the affair is your wandering spouse’s shit. You may be responsible for 50% of the problems in your marriage, but you are responsible for 0% of the affair! Your wandering spouse owns 50% of the marriage problems and 100% of the fault for the affair. Your spouse had many other choices about how to deal with marital problems; up to and including the "I want a divorce" speech. THIS IS NOT YOUR FAULT!

For the first couple of years after d-day, our past together was irrelevant. The only thing that mattered was that infidelity is a deal-breaker. My wife had broken the deal.

It's difficult to explain. Imagine gaging relationships on a 1-10 scale. Level 1 is a stranger you meet, exchange pleasantries, names, and maybe a laugh or two. As time goes by, the relationship progresses, "leveling up," until you get to 10 and wedding bells ring!

My exww's infidelity reset that level to like... -10.

So, yeah. Your BH is likely questioning your entire relationship... from the moment he first met you. That's a natural part of processing the shock and trauma, which takes a long time.

Be patient.

I’m just struggling to understand how one instance of miscommunication and infidelity renders 9 years worth of really good communication null. I understand if he is questioning how much I’ve cared about him or wanted to be with him, or how much of what I said was true, and that’s causing him to rewrite the past, but… objectively, we’ve communicated very well up until this point. I think we’re doing remarkably well communicating in spite of the infidelity presently, too. Like it just seems to me that he’s unnecessarily mourning the loss of a treasured aspect of our relationship that we haven’t even lost, when he already has so much to mourn over…But I guess our feelings don’t always make sense.

I wish I didn’t want to shut down over this

If you truly want to reconcile you need to be patient with him. It’s only been 2 months and right now he doesn’t believe anything you say and rightfully so, you’ve proven that you can’t be trusted. You need to rebuild that trust. It won’t be easy and most of the work to do that will be on you. You say your husband wasn’t understanding what you wanted from him and so you started getting that from AP. That is all on you, your husband not understanding was not justification to start an affair. You say you never planned to leave him, that doesn’t make it any better. It actually makes it worse because at least if you planned to leave him then he can understand you didn’t love him anymore but by planning to stay while having an affair he’s not only betrayed but feels used for the comforts of the home he provides while you are out having an affair. I was in his shoes and it’s been at least 10 years since my wife’s last affair and yet I still have times when I think back to happy moments when my son was younger and can’t view them as happy anymore because I know while spending that family time with us she was also cheating. You have to be patient, healing from this type of betrayal can take years and even then there will always be triggers so it will never go back to the relationship you had before. You need to build a new relationship and much of the effort to build that and earn his trust back is on you and being inpatient with him will not help. I hope it works out for you.

That is all on you, your husband not understanding was not justification to start an affair.

Again, I’m not justifying it.

You say you never planned to leave him, that doesn’t make it any better. It actually makes it worse because at least if you planned to leave him then he can understand you didn’t love him anymore but by planning to stay while having an affair he’s not only betrayed but feels used for the comforts of the home he provides while you are out having an affair.

This doesn’t make sense to me. How is it using him to stay with him if I love him and want to be with him? I don’t see how it’s any different from when the affair was going on vs now; I feel the exact same way about him. You live with the people you love, and you raise your kids and do life together. How is that "using" him? An abuse of his love and trust, sure. A failure to conduct myself according to his expectations of a wife, definitely. But not "using" him for what he provides. It would make more sense to feel used if someone was cheating on you, didn’t love you or want to be with you, but stayed anyway for the home benefit.

I felt like I was using the AP, though. But maybe he felt he was using me too, so who knows

Edited to add: I didn’t plan on having an affair at all, and I didn’t plan to let it get as far or go on as long as it did. There wasn’t malicious intent to pull one over on BH while he provides for me. There was a slippery slope from "just friends" into deception, and guilt while it was going on, but I still wanted to be his wife, in every sense of the word

[This message edited by DayByDay96 at 10:40 PM, Tuesday, September 16th]

"’m just struggling to understand how one instance of miscommunication and infidelity renders 9 years worth of really good communication null. I understand if he is questioning how much I’ve cared about him or wanted to be with him, or how much of what I said was true, and that’s causing him to rewrite the past, but… objectively, we’ve communicated very well up until this point. I think we’re doing remarkably well communicating in spite of the infidelity presently, too. Like it just seems to me that he’s unnecessarily mourning the loss of a treasured aspect of our relationship that we haven’t even lost, when he already has so much to mourn over…But I guess our feelings don’t always make sense."

He doesn't trust you. I don't think you get it or have empathy for him. If you do, the words you are saying here are way out of alignment. "Unnecessarily mourning treasured aspects of your relationship". You're justification for cheating from what I read is - poor communication around my needs lead to a fragile state in our marriage, which lead to my cheating. On the other hand I want my husband to believe that we always had pretty great communication because at the present moment that suits my "current biggest needs" safety and security with my partner. He is mourning the most treasured aspects of your relationship - "trust". The part where your words, actions, integrity are all in alignment. He doesn't trust you - nor should he.

You aren’t getting it. You may not think you were using him but in his mind you were because right now he sees that whole period during the affair as a lie. You were coming home to him and the comforts of home but you were cheating at the same time so while you say your feelings for him haven’t changed, how is he supposed to believe that? You say you loved him then and still do but that doesn’t line up with your actions? Saying you loved him while cheating on him doesn’t line up. You can’t expect him to just believe you that you never stopped loving him because in his mind if you had loved him as much as you say you do you wouldn’t have had an affair. You say you didn’t plan to have an affair? Affairs don’t just happen, that’s wayward reasoning. You likely had countless opportunities to keep it from getting beyond friendship but you opened yourself up for it to happen. Then you had countless opportunities to stop it and come clean and you didn’t til you were caught. Look I hope you can reconcile but while you think you are being accountable I see a lot of justifying. I’m back to same point as earlier, you need to be patient and do the work to regain his trust. Your marriage ended when you opened yourself up to an affair. There’s nothing you can do to get that marriage back now so you need to be patient and work with your husband to build a new hopefully better marriage.

I’m just struggling to understand how one instance of miscommunication and infidelity renders 9 years worth of really good communication null.

Infidelity renders your entire relationship null. All of it. Every aspect of it. All that matters is that you had an affair, that you are not the woman he believed you to be.

Now, that's how I felt and thought. That's how many betrayed spouses have shared their thoughts and feelings. The weight of the betrayal exceeds all else. It's all consuming.

It seems to me that you're stll in "damage control" mode. It's common enough for anyone busted with their hands in the cookie jar. You're still rationalizing, minimizing, trying to protect yourself. It's understandable. I can relate, in ways.

You don't have to understand his thought processes right now. Chances are, he doesn't much understand it himself. Infidelity is crazy-making shit.

I’m just struggling to understand how one instance of miscommunication and infidelity renders 9 years worth of really good communication null

So your neighbor one day goes into your yard and shoots your dog in the head. He then can’t understand why after living next door for 9 years why this one act negates the last ten years where he watered your lawn and was a great neighbor.

It’s because the act of infidelity is so destructive. Your logic might hold if it was an argument about money or something that might be important where the communication might be a blip. An affair isn’t a blip.

Edited to add: I didn’t plan on having an affair at all, and I didn’t plan to let it get as far or go on as long as it did. There wasn’t malicious intent to pull one over on BH while he provides for me. There was a slippery slope from "just friends" into deception, and guilt while it was going on, but I still wanted to be his wife, in every sense of the word

I heard all this and more. Meant absolutely nothing. My EX didn’t plan either, yet that didn’t negate what happened. This is justifying after the fact. You are trying to minimize by saying your intent wasn’t malicious, but do you acknowledge the act itself was?

You might be saying all the right things but until you come to terms with what you did wasn’t just a blip, or little mistake, or you feel bad now, this will permeate the discussion and render all of your efforts to soothe him will be moot. He can tell you feel bad about it, but he can also feel that what you did in your mind wasn’t so bad to put you into this situation after 9 years.

I lived this. My EX knew what she did was heinous, but like you she felt that after 25 years she should if not get a pass, but at least understanding. But some things transcend getting glossed over.

Dig deep, and as others have mentioned put yourself in his shoes.

Edited to add: I didn’t plan on having an affair at all, and I didn’t plan to let it get as far or go on as long as it did.

You had to make so many different decisions and choices along the way for this situation to blow up into a full blown affair. You had ample opportunities and chances to back out or call it off. You most certainly made plenty of "plans" to obfuscate, deceive, and hide this from your husband, and he's well aware of that.

From what I've read in this thread so far, I'm not sure you really "get it." I've read many accounts on this and other sites, and I've seen folks who've lost loved ones. Parents, siblings, friends, and they've said that finding out about an affair is the single most painful thing they've ever experienced. You're 2 months out from d day. That's barely even in the rearview mirror. It's going to take years to heal and rebuild from this, if ever. It's never going to be the same. It's going to take a lot of patience and empathy on your part if this is going to succeed. Your husband's entire world has just been shattered in an instant. Everything he thought he knew and believed was pulled out from under him. He's questioning everything about your relationship now. Up to and including the way you communicated over the years.

I’m just struggling to understand how one instance of miscommunication and infidelity renders 9 years worth of really good communication null

Human beings are black boxes, we can’t really know what is going on inside someone else. Best we can do is watch their actions and listen to their words and then see how we feel around them. People can hide cruel intentions behind deceptive words, even for decades. Given the high stakes and the poor transparency, we slowly build up trust and eventually get to a point where we think we understand the other, but that trust is being given on faith, because we really can’t know. So when you betray, it calls into question all that trust that was given, from the beginning. It highlights the possibility that you were never sincere, you never should have been trusted. I think this is why a really strong understanding of "why" is important. It can contain the damage, like cleaning up an oil spill on a beach, awful but at least possible. But if it’s a situation where the land has been salted and the damage is everywhere, then even the past gets reinterpreted.

Being indignant at not being believed will serve you very poorly. I hope you can control that.

[This message edited by InkHulk at 2:32 PM, Wednesday, September 17th]

This doesn’t make sense to me. How is it using him to stay with him if I love him and want to be with him?

This question comes from a place of confusion and hurt, and it reveals a disconnect between the way you feel and the way your actions are likely perceived by your BH.
The truth is, he can't see into your heart. He can only judge your feelings by your behavior, and your actions have told him a very different story. You've proven that you are capable of lying about something as significant as an affair. Your love for him now, and your desire to stay with him, have to be proven through consistent action, not just words.
Love and trust are active verbs. They are built through continuous, intentional choices made every day. Your husband needs to see that your words are backed up by your actions. In 'Not Just Friends', Shirley Glass emphasizes the importance of transparency and consistent behavior in the healing process. She explains that a BP needs to feel safe again, and that safety is created by seeing that their partner's actions align with their words.
May I ask what the age of your AP was? There's a 25 year difference in your and your BH's ages. I'm the age of your BH, and if I had been married to someone so much younger than me, there's a part of me that would wonder when that major gap would rear its head. And that would have been long before an A was tainting your marriage.
In his mind, you're now a proven threat. You've devastated him in the most profound way, and he is now re-evaluating everything he thought he knew about you and your relationship. This is a natural, primal response. Think of it like a security system that has been breached. He is now on high alert.
This is what's known as the "food poisoning analogy" and it's a helpful way to understand what your husband is going through. Even if you get food poisoning from a food that is normally nutritious and healthy, you will forever be on guard against it.
A part of his brain will always be wary. The trust you once had is gone, and while it's possible to build a new, stronger foundation, it will never be the same. The process of rebuilding trust after infidelity can be slow and arduous. Your BH may experience PTSD, where he is constantly on guard against being hurt again.
What you're feeling is valid, but your feelings can't be his reality. Shift your focus from your own emotional state to his. You can't control how he feels or what he thinks, but you can control your actions. Your commitment to rebuilding the marriage needs to be shown, not just told.
The fact that you are here, asking questions and looking for ways to move forward, is a great first step. It shows that you are willing to do the hard work. Keep posting and keep trying. Recovery is a long road, but it is possible.