Hi Grace - Here is what GO wrote on strugglingaz's thread:
One thing that may help: Quit making it all about you. What about your husband's feelings? How must he feel? Whenever you think how sweet & nice OM makes you feel, you might try imagining what a kick in the stomach that is to the man you chose to marry.
I had an affair, strugglingaz. Yeah, I thought I was "in love." But I came to see eventually it wasn't that at all. Rather, it was actually me & OW being very, very selfish, and choosing to indulge that selfishness with very little consideration for our spouses' feelings.
But after I came clean & started trying to place my wife's feelings at least on par with my own, we were able to learn & start meeting each other's emotional needs better than we'd ever been able to do before in over 16 years of marriage.
OW tried to break up my family. She wanted me to run off with her. Had I done that, I would've ruined my life. She was a walking ball of issues. I suspect that your OM -- and any man who would act as though he has any kind of right to intrude on another's marriage -- has plenty of issues of his own. You think you can build a good relationship on top of that kind of character defect? Or is it your fantasy that after you & he run off to fantasy land and you ditch your husband & kids, that your OM will magically repair that character & be faithful to you, even while you repair your own character?
I don't know if that is what you are looking for...I think GO wrote another post that is a better description of what you are talking about.
Maybe I am far enough removed from my A to not feel those moments of fog anymore - I don't know. I do know that any thoughts I have of the OM are not charitable in the least. I see him as equally responsible for the pain that my H feels.
I've got a criminal justice sort of minset, so bear with me for this analogy: think about a home invasion, where someone forces his way into your home, robs you, and physically torments the homeowners. Ties them to a chair, brutalizes them, takes treasured possessions from the home. Perhaps those possessions get broken, or at the very least they are never returned.
Now, imagine that all of that happens, but the criminal did not force his way into your home.
You opened the door and let him in.
You stood by while he tied hour BH to a chair and sucker punched him in the gut.
You stood by while he rifled through your BH's most precious possessions, items he has held and treasured for years. You even bring some of those treasured things and hand them over to the criminal. Some he drops, and they shatter into a million pieces, never to be repaired again. Some he slips into his pocket and takes them away. Pawns them for pennies.
After the criminal has taken everything that he wanted, he leaves. You stand there, looking at your house, which is in shambles. Your BH sits, stunned, bleeding from a thousand cuts, bruised.
How can you possibly say "I'm sorry" to him, and it make up for the devastation?
You untie your BH. You care for his injuries first and foremost. You ensure he gets the care that he needs. If you are fortunate, he lets you do this.
Then you try to clean up the mess in your home. You begin to try to set things right. Your BH is weak, so you must do the heavy lifting in the beginning: sweeping up the broken glass, repairing the door, putting back the furniture that the criminal knocked over. You set up an alarm system of extraordinary precautions against something like this ever happening again.
Your BH begins to gather strength, and hopefully chooses to help you continue to set your house back right. Together you rehang the pictures on the wall - look, the criminal knocked your wedding portrait down - you hang it back up together. You try to replace your BH's most treasured possessions. You'll never be able to get the exact same thing - in my case, some of those possessions my BH had owned for going on 20 years - but your search for new treasures for him and if you are fortunate, he accepts them and gives them a special place in his heart.
Perhaps you find the pawn shop the criminal went to, and you are able to recover some of the things your BH lost. They are a bit chipped and tarnished, but you return them to him anyway.
Perhaps he accepts these things from you. He's hurt they are no longer quite the same as he remembered, but he still treasures them and returns them to an honored place in his home.
Or, he may not want them, and you're stuck with the broken bits and have to try and repair them on your own as best you can, polishing them and saving them until maybe there comes a day he decides he wants them back.
