I've been following this thread with interest, and felt compelled to comment on a couple things, although as a FWW I don't know that I'm qualified to speak on BS resentment per se...at this point in our marriage, overcoming indifference is a far greater issue than overcoming resentment.
Aph, you said:
� The fact that the adultery is abuse is irrelevant to the issue because it is in the past. We need to deal with the present. �
This is a reasonable analogy? A man�s arm and leg have been chopped off. The wound is healed. He�s not lying bleeding on the floor. So, it�s all in the past. Time to forget the past and move on. He is still missing an arm and a leg, though. Is MB saying the equivalent that he should act as if he isn�t?
As you've given me a similar analogy, this resonated with me.
A man who has has his arm and leg brutally chopped off - i.e., a betrayed spouse - I think that's an apt analogy to what we do as adulterers to our spouses. Let's add to that by saying that many times, there was no warning. The man was simply walking down the street, thinking all was fine in his world, when he was jumped by the criminal who popped out of an alley or from around a blind corner.
It is what that criminal - the offender - does at that point that I see as critical. Do we leave the man to lie bleeding from his wounds on the sidewalk? Some do. Some adulterers walk away from their crimes, without a backward glance. Do we recoil in shock at what we've done and run for the hills, leaving our victim to fend for himself? Yep. Some do that too. Do we stop and try to help our victim, but do it all wrong, oftentimes inflicting further damage through our incompetence? Yep. Some do that too.
Me, I was in that last category. I stopped my initial offense - I put down my machete, in other words...but while I tried to bandage the wounds I gave broken, I didn't clean the wounds out first. I left lies in there to fester and cause infection. I was frustrated because he wasn't healing as fast as I wanted him to, and I took that out on him. I was ready for him to get up and start running again with one arm and one leg, and when he couldn't run, I kicked him with trickle truth while he was down.
I gave my victim a lot to resent.
What about the offender who feels remorse? What does the offender do with that remorse? More often than not, that remorse doesn't happen instantaneously. Oh, we might feel bad initially, when confronted with the extent of the damage we've done, but the key with remorse is making amends.
Sometimes our victim doesn't want our help (amends). Sometimes they would rather heal as best they can on their own. They may make it to a hospital (here to MB) and learn how to best clean and bind their wounds, to regain mobility, replacing their limbs with artificial ones.
Sometimes the victim accepts the help of the remorseful offender, if they believe the remorse is genuine.
In any of the above cases, they will always have scars, whether they choose to recover with a remorseful offender or whether they choose to recover on their own, or whether they are left on their own by the offender who abandoned them to their fate. The artificial limbs don't work the same as the old.
In some cases they are stiff and unnatural. They cause the limping of resentment. They settle for the limitations, and refuse any attempts at physical therapy. In some cases, victims recieve limbs that are amazing technological marvels, similar to those that athletes in the paralympics may utilize. They learn to operate them skillfully and in recovered marriages, they learn to rely on their spouse when they need assistance with an obstacle - to trust that their spouse will be there to help them. The limbs don't work the same...they'll never be the original arm and leg, but the victim adapts, survives, and goes on to live a fulfilling life.
Some victims don't want replacement limbs at all. They may "need" two arms and two legs, but decide they can function well enough without them. They will simply stop doing some things they believe they are no longer capable of doing. Some will resent the offender for taking those things away from them, and some simply decide that they don't care...that perhaps they never really needed those things to begin with. Or at least they convince themselves that they no longer need those things.
The past has the capability to scar all of us. I have scars that have nothing to do with my infidelity, nothing to do with my marriage. As Pep brilliantly pointed out, it is all about choice. We have the ability to choose what we do in response to those scars.
Here's another thing I want to comment on:
As a FWW, I have a hard time swallowing this statement:
"After all, an affair is hatched with full knowledge of how much pain it will inflict on an unsuspecting spouse after it's discovered. It reflects a wanton disregard for the feelings of someone that was supposed to have been cherished and protected for life."
If I had full knowledge of how much pain it would inflict on my dear husband I would have had the sense of reality needed to stop myself. I certainly agree with the second sentence. How do I accept the first sentence about myself so my husband can heal and have less resentment?
I don't have a hard time swallowing that statement at all. As GO pointed out recently, affairs rarely begin because you bump into someone attractive in line at the grocery store and say, "Excuse me! Oh, hello there, my, you're good-looking. Whaddya say we hop on over to this motel next door and have sex?" Infidelity - at least in my sitch - was akin to walking down a set of stairs. Respoding to POSOM's "friend request"
on FB - one step down. Sending text messages, emails back and forth - another step down. Allowing myself to enjoy the attention and flattery - another step down. Get it? At each step along the way, I made a conscious choice to proceed. At any point, I could have made the choice to stop and run back upstairs to the safety and sanctity of my marriage. No one can rationally believe they didn't know how much it would hurt their spouse. If they did, they'd be shouting the news of their burgeoning adulterous relationship from rooftops instead of skulking around secretly. If we truly didn't think infidelity would harm our spouse, we wouldn't do it in secrecy.
Perhaps that is correlated with the comparative rarity of remorseful FWW's to FWH's...I don't know. I do know that in no universe can I truthfully say that my adultery was broken's fault. Sure, we had issues in our M. Sure, both of us had unment EN's and LB'ed each other. Both of us were at fault for the problems in our M. But *I* was the one who deliberately chose to take each distinct step down that staircase. broken did not push me down the stairs. broken did not say, "Hey, why don't you go down those stairs and see what's at the bottom?" I've never understood why that gender disparity in remorse for adultery exists, because I simply can't understand NOT feeling remorseful for what I did.
On a personal note...as I said, I gave broken a lot to resent. I didn't give him a "false recovery" in the technical sense, as my affair ended upon his discovering and confronting me with it, but I gave him a fraudulent recovery based on lies. I try to put myself in his shoes, and even though there is no way I can possibly comprehend the totality of the damage I did to him, I cannot blame him for resenting me, being indifferent to me, even hating me. I can still see the tears of joy in his eyes at our wedding. I can hear him speak his vows (he practically shouted them out, because as he told me later, he wanted everyone in the church to hear how much he loved me).
I do feel like broken has chosen to live with one arm and one leg. And I inflicted the damage. I can't abandon him to live with the consequences of that.
For anyone who managed to read this far, I apologize, I didn't mean for this to turn into a novel, and I hope I made some sense with my rambling!
