joker:
A few things for you.
♣ Go 2 the home page and read all the articles about infidelity. Your sitch is not unique. It is also recoverable.
♥ Spacecase posted this on his
www.iloveulove.com resources page. It's the best definition of secrecy, privacy, truth, and honesty that I've ever seen:
"The Difference Between Secret And Private
Private matters are those traits, truths, beliefs, and ideas about ourselves that we keep to ourselves. They might include our fantasies and daydreams, feelings about the way the world works, and spiritual beliefs. Private matters, when revealed either accidentally or purposefully, give another person some insight into the revealer.
Secrets, on the other hand, consist of information that has potentially negative impact on someone else-emotionally, physically, or financially. Secrets, when revealed either accidentally or purposefully, cause great chaos or harm to the secret-keeper and those around him or her.
Private: I believe in reincarnation.
Secret: I have a wife and a mistress and neither knows about the other.
Private: I got terrible grades in high school.
Secret: I forged my medical degree.
The Difference Between Truth and Honesty
Truth is empirical, demonstrable fact. Your bank balance, today’s date, whether or not you’re married.
Honesty is about feelings. If you’re honest, you are open and clear about how you feel. You can be truthful without being honest and you can be honest without being truthful (the latter a little more difficult). The best relationships, stating the painfully obvious, are both truthful and honest. Trust is built on both truth and honesty, tempered by the proof of predictability and reliability."
And there are some great things about forgiveness as well:
"I worry about fast forgivers. They tend to forgive quickly in order to avoid their pain. Or they forgive fast in order to get an advantage over the people they forgive. And their instant forgiving only makes things worse...People who have been wronged badly and wounded deeply should give themselves time and space before they forgive...There is a right moment to forgive. We cannot predict it in advance; we can only get ourselves ready for it when it arrives...Don't do it quickly, but don't wait too long...If we wait too long to forgive, our rage settles in and claims squatter's rights to our souls."
-Lewis B. Smedes - "The Art of Forgiving: When You Need To Forgive And Don't Know How"
Finally, about spying. I think many of us have done it at one time or another. Certainly, you need facts. Particularly at the beginning, when you're so uncertain of who you've been living with all these years. After a time, though, you will find you don't need 2 snoop 2 know how you're "doing." Your W's behavior 2ward you will show you whether she's being truthful and honest with you.
Whether spying is right or wrong isn't really the issue - trust is.
"From “How To Recognize Emotional Unavailability And Make Healthier Relationship Choices” by Bryn Collins, M.A., L.P.
"James Bond: Spies & Lies
He won’t tell you where he lives. She will give you only a work number. He’s evasive about his history, friends, job and background. A year after you marry her, you find out she’s been married before. A mistress shows up. You find bills for credit cards you didn’t know you had.
Secrets and the lies that support them make it very hard to make an emotional connection. In part that’s because the secrets create a wall. In part it’s also because the secrets take a lot of energy to maintain and that energy is stolen from having a relationship with a person.
James Bonds are secret-keepers who withold information from people with whom they are in a relationship. Sometimes this is because they believe the secrets give them power or an illusion of mystery and excitement; other times it is because the revelation of the secrets will end the relationship and they won’t get what they want-the reason for keeping secrets in the first place.
When you get into a relationship with a James Bond, you may enjoy the mystery at first. It’s kind of exciting not to know when he or she will suddenly appear to sweep you into whatever passed for his or her Aston Martin or private jet and then just as suddenly disappear again.
As the relationship moves along, however, predictability becomes more important and desirable to you, but the James Bond has no interest in being trapped by your rational expectation of continuity in the relationship.
You begin to snoop. Bond leaves you alone in the car or the apartment for a few minutes, and your fingers stray to the glove compartment or desktop. You hate yourself for what you’re doing, but you can’t stop. Bills, letters, scraps with phone numbers-a flood of information without explanation. What you’re looking for are the missing pieces of James Bond’s life that you don’t get to know. The problem is that you have no threads to weave into a fabric of truth. All you have is scraps that have no clear meaning.
Or, worse perhaps, you DO find something; a breathless love letter you didn’t write, a sexy card you didn’t send, a photo that isn’t you. Now what do you do? Now you have information and a whole new conundrum. In order to confront James Bond with the information, you have to admit you’ve been snooping. Then Bond has the perfect out: he or she can get mad at you for snooping, and never have to own up to the rest of it.
The other thing that happens is that you lose trust completely. Being in a relationship with someone you don’t trust isn’t being in a relationship at all. It begins to undermine your trust in yourself as well and that undermines your self-image, which makes you more vulnerable, which undermines your self-confidence-you can see the descending spiral here.
Meanwhile, James Bond isn’t making any changes. The secrets and lies continue, surrounded by denials and protestations of honesty or indignation that you would even suspect him or her of not being completely truthful.
James Bond has difficulty with both truth and honesty, which makes trust impossible.
The sad thing is that even if he or she changes completely, it’s still really hard to build trust because of the history. So you get more and more suspicious and less and less trusting while James continues along the self-focused path of getting his or her needs met above all else.
When the situation (we can’t really call this a relationship) finally blows up-and these relationships almost invariably blow up rather than fade away-your ability to trust anyone blows right with it. The next person who comes into your life will be under the microscope, and that is a very uncomfortable spot for anyone. The new potential partner often departs to avoid being distrusted at every turn."
This isn't a very satisfying way 2 end the discussion, though. For2nately, the Harleys have METHODS for recovering trust and love in even the most dire of dire relationships. It can be done, should be done, because it HAS 2 be done by the individual if they're 2 avoid what Colllins describes in the last paragraph. If there is 2 be a "new potential partner" or a recovered existing relationship, a solution 2 these behaviors must be found.
No matter where you go, you take you with you.
best,
-ol' 2long
