mirror,

Let's say you decide to divorce your wife. What can you expect to go through?

You will experience a rollercoaster of emotions. For the first few days and weeks after d-day (the day you discovered the affair), you will have moment-to-moment emotional swings the likes of which you have never before encountered in your life.

Your mood will go from crying, to melancholy, to zoned-out, to desperation, to panic, to hopeful, to elation, to anger, to resentment, to depression, to mania, to despair, and back again - and all in the course of an hour sometimes.

One day can seem like an eternity, and the next can fly by so fast you didn't realize it happened. You might feel like you are losing your mind, because your wayward spouse can say something that sounds almost logical, yet you know it is a lie - but you want to believe it. Inside your heart, you know that your WS is "in there" somewhere, and you might get glimpses of that person you once knew, and when you do you so desire to trust that glimpse, and then the rug is pulled out from under you again. You see what you believe is truth, you don't trust it, you forget things, you look back over your past and wonder "was that REAL, or was that fake?".

As the weeks go by, you find out enough information about the affair that you begin to piece your world back together, at least some of it. You wonder if what you know is true. You wonder if you should reconcile, or if you should walk away. You want to reconcile some of the time, and at other times you think you should throw in the towel and just be done with the whole darn mess. Maybe everyone would be better off if the marriage was over. Five minutes later, or the next day, you wonder what you were thinking, and you believe that the marriage should be recovered, and start thinking about ways to work on that.

After three months or so, you wonder about how the marriage ended up where it was. That initial shock is over, and you have figured out that the blame for the affair itself really isn't on the betrayed spouse - it belongs to the WS. Some of the pieces of the marital problems belong to the BS, others to the WS. You begin to pick up the pieces that belong to you.

As the months pass, you hit the six month mark, and around then you begin to be angry again. You get good and mad, because as a BS, you wonder why YOU have to deal with the fallout of the affair, you have to deal with the pain, and why the WAYWARD seems to go along, LA-LA-LA-LA-LA and seems to just skate away unscathed?????? How does this happen, after the nuclear bomb that WS dropped in the marriage?????

And the rollercoaster of emotions seems to have hills and valleys still, but they are not moment-to-moment, but more like you have up days and down days, or perhaps weekly. Maybe certain things trigger you, perhaps that restaurant you know the affair couple went to, or that shirt you know the WS wore on the movie date that one night when they said they were going to work late.

You hate movies, or you are more careful about choosing them, because you now realize just how many of them have affair themes, affairs included in the plots, or have jokes about affair sex or casual affair scenes in them.

You lose many friends, because you just do not want to deal with people who are cheating on their spouses, or in affair marriages (affairages). You can't hang out with them anymore, because it makes you hurt to the very core of your soul. From your own lips, you hear yourself cursing movie stars and others who openly and cavalierly betray their marriages.

There is a pain you carry, deep inside your body. The pain does not leave you. When you awaken in the morning, it is there before you open your eyes, and greets you as your first thought: "Your spouse betrayed you. You still feel this hurt, and it is embedded in your soul. Some of the pain has been shaved away overnight, but not so much that you might feel the difference." When you close your eyes at night, you know that thought will be your last: "Try to sleep, your love has killed your heart, it hurts........."

And in your dreams, you know that the pain will also echo there.


Know that this will be the scenario, for about two years. The pain and the mood swings and the triggers - they fade over time. They do. It takes time, and work, to get yourself to the point where you can go to sleep and wake up and it NOT be your last thought and your first thought. It does change over time.


About two years, if you decide to divorce your wife.
That means, she will not be there to help you get through this. You are on your own.



Now, if you decide to recover your marriage?????


Same scenario as above. Because the emotional deal is the SAME, either way. You will still hurt. There is no getting around that. You will still have to go through the recovery cycle.

The difference is that if you divorce, you deal with the court issues, separating "stuff", legal paperwork, attorneys, money/finances, all of that. And you do it alone.

My advice is for you NOT to decide on divorce for at least six months. Mainly because you will change your mind so many times between now and then - just because of the rollercoaster ride. And if you do decide to divorce six months from now, there would be a more thoroughly though-out decision made at that point. At least that works in your favor, and allows things to cool off.


If you remain married, you work on your issues as a couple. Your wife and you focus on what went wrong, fulfilling your emotional needs together, she works on making restitution to you, you rebuild the marriage as a new one with the rules you jointly create to protect it from affairs in a better way. MB gives you the plans.



But either way, it is a long, hard road to recover from what has happened. You have a difficult choice to make.

My husband has had five affairs (of varied types), and I had a one-night stand (over 35 years ago). We are recovered. It IS possible to repair a marriage, to fall in love again, and to make your relationship work. Start with the foundation of love, and rebuild from there. I am not saying it is EASY. Worthwhile things are seldom easy.

But they are worthwhile.


Schoolbus

Here is a link to the original thread !