Daisy...

lets get the facts down...

how old are the children
what do they know about the seperation

where is he staying

how often do the two of you communicate

and

what are your conversations about...

relationships
money
what he did wrong
what you did wrong

what is the tone between you two...gloomy angry etc...

even the back lash of yours and his anger can become a comfortable communication pattern that keeps you two locked in some type of contact albeit non productive and damaging...

does he even say he wants to be married..

what is your plan to reinvest him in to the family unit..who is going to help him without ...

his guilt
his pain is so overwhelming that the human nature reaction is knee jerking blame and turning it around...can you see this ...can you understand...

the more you defuse this instead of reacting...the closer you two move towards real recovery....

why do you expect remorse at this stage...be more afraid of appeasing instant remorse that quiets you down and lets him resume the affair..

what are his "reaosns" for the affair...and what changes have you made to address these issues...etc...(which is NOt to imply that you are responsible for his choices...) but can you hear his reasons...and defuse his reasons to the point there is nothing else to look at but himself...

why are you concerning yourself with forgiveness at this stage...
why would you expect instant forgiveness when you and he have not processed yet....

you are better served imagining the type of marriage you desrie and making changes and actions that create you as that spouse you desire to be....

ARK

Melodylane,

Not to TJ, but this statement has me scratching my head:
“Daisy, there are several here who have survived long term affairs, but the weekends are slow. They are not much different than shorter term affairs, but it does seem to take longer to recover.”

I think they are very different!

My W’s LTA lasted 10 years. Several experts, say in LTA’s the OP actually begins to replace the BS. It is a form of bigamy. And the resulting devastation so taints everything in the M that recovery is much less likely than from an A lasting 2 years or less.

There are virtually no untainted memories the BS can draw on, for one thing.

The WS develop such strong attachment (see SYMC for a definition) to the OP they are rarely able to fully reattach to the BS, for another.

I dunno. The resulting M seems just a convenience if it survives an LTA.

JMHO.

Added: And, a WS that can maintain an A for so long is kind of special, don't you think? It is no longer an abberation in their personality - it is who they really are. They become a person of the lie. Not that they can't change, of course. But, this behaviour long since ceased to be just a big mistake. They are capable of such long term deception and living a sordid double life without going crazy because it is who they really are.

I agree.

Pep <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/cool.gif" alt="" />

Theo, thanks for weighing in, you are the expert in long term affairs so I am glad you are here to give her your expertise!

Reply to "Ark" I like you straight forward manner. Fact I didn't meet all of his emotional needs. He needs more admiration and praise, an unrealistic amount in my opinion. 3 kids 17,14,11 H says I'm too critical. This is true. He spends very little time with his kids and now I now why. We take great trips together, money is not a problem, overall we both agree we had a good marriage. H wants his cake and eat it too. Exposure has made him stop the affair. He is angry and we are currently separated. He is living at our vacation home 45 minutes away. The separation was necessary because of the children in the home. H says he still loves me and wants marriage. I don't know what I want. Am having great difficulty understanding how a person could carry on an A for 5 years. Saw OW almost daily. What kind of person could do this to their spouse? Please let me know your thoughts.

(((( Daisey ))))

I am no expert at all. But, my WH has/was been in an affair for I do not know how long. Sometimes I think it has been for quite a while, years, maybe one or two, maybe more.
The whole thing, as you know, is very heartbreaking.
I just wanted to let you know that you are not alone.

God bless us all.

Carnation

The human brain is capable of doing lots of things...
it's called rationalizing and compartalmentalizing...

affairs don't start usually start out as huge breeches of vows....unless the atypical one night stand...they start out as small infringements and line crossing that look very very innocent at first...

and each small tiny line that is crossed can at first be written off as just nice coworkers ..then just friends...then very good friends....then victims of circumstance....

dr. harley is a huge huge proponent of the addictive qualities of an affair...which can anwers a lot of the question as in how could it have gone for so long..

because it became familiar.
it became seperate from you and the marriage.
it was never meant to be part of YOUR world
or
meant to hurt YOU
it had nothing to do with YOU...
it became a habit...as much an action

all sorts of rationalizations can occur to feed an affair...

all of them hurt...
but I do believe that the Ws does NOT always see them as hurting you they see them as a totally different aspect of their lives...

Also for five years your husband used every negative thing you did be it real or tiny or imagined and magnified YOUR actions to justify HIS actions...
typical WS behavior..
but it grows tiring for him
and deep down they realize how shallow it is....


He needs more admiration and praise, an unrealistic amount in my opinion.

your part of it being unrealistic is a disrepectful judgement....

He spends very little time with his kids and now I now why.

why is this?
I am unclear as to why?
and do you have a plan to change this?

my thoughts are that it is exhausting to live this lie for five years...and that your husbands internal battle exists..for five years he brought huge disrepect in to both you and the OP lives...

she not really good enough to be made a real person in his world
and you
withheld from having informed information so that you could make informed decisions...
there really is no safe place for him...for he has created chaos in all he has touched....

his behavior now is typical

1. withdrawal....to play the victim role...to play the I need a break from everyone else...to play the I need to work on myself and figure things out psycho babble role...
but mostly he's run because our human instinct is to go the path of least pain ....and he has now SEEN the real pain HIS actions have caused...and he most likely CAN NOT process it all at once....for most likely he truly would just withdrawal...and run forever..if he had to face it all at once......

he can't change what is done...

the role of the BS is NOT a fair role...

if you choose plan A...one part is showing him the possiblity of hope...
hope of what can be rebuilt between you two
hope that you believe he CAN change
(I always do believe people CAN change if they choose to do so....)

I think that if you are up for a really good plan A your marriage stands a great chance...

but you gotta swallow a lot of your emotional instincts and see a bigger picture.....

ARK

Daisy,

Your situation sounds a little like mine except that my actual PA didn't last that long. I knew the OW for 10 years and I believe I was having a light EA with her that whole time.

You see, early in our marriage, my W chose to be a SAHM. I focused on building a career that could make that possible. We both invested huge amounts of time in those ventures.

Somewhere around seven years ago, I realized that my "family" really didn't include me at all and that my W was no longer my "lover". I desperately wanted back in, but my W and kids would get upset at me for "rocking the boat". My W was very critical of my attempts to parent my own childen. She claimed to love me but treated me like another one of her kids. She was very controlling. Showed very little admiration and respect.

After many attempts to communicate and correct this, I became depressed and sought treatment. I came to believe that this is how my wife liked living, so, to keep her happy, I would have to find some way to be happy otherwise. I found a "lover" in my long term friend.

Things improved tremendously at home. I no longer had any expectation of having my emotional needs met inside my family, so it made it a lot easier to discharge my responsibilities to them. My wife seemed thrilled that I seemed to have found a way to be "happy" with the status quo.

My wife discovered my affair. She was devastated. She thought our marriage and family were "perfect".


I did love her, but made it very clear to her that we both needed to make some changes. I would not return to a life with her that had been like the last seven years. If she wasn't willing to acknowledge that she had work to do as well, I wasn't coming back.

As tragic as it may seem, I don't believe my wife would have ever recognized how bad our marriage had become had something like this not occurred. She would blow off my concerns as "ridiculous". No respect for my feelings, dreams, and desires (A motorcycle? How childish...)

I see comments in your post that indicate that you have little respect for your H. I doubt you have much respect for him to begin with. Yes, you might have respected the "role" of husband/father but did you really respect him as a man?

It is not your place to decide if your H's emotional needs are "unrealistic". They are what they are. Do your best to fulfill them. If you believe he's expecting more from you than you can give, talk with him respectfully about it.

In truth, I was VERY angry with my wife for expecting me to give up my lover. I was able to get over that pretty quick when I saw that W was serious about meeting the needs that were being met by the OW. She did a complete turnaround.

Is everything perfect these days? No...but we have a whole new outlook. She treats me like an adult, as I do her. We are lovers again. We don't take anything for granted anymore.

Can he tell you specifically WHY he thinks it was good? Can a marriage in which a spouse feels like an "outsider" truly be good or does it only have the appearance of goodness?



I don't understand this statement at all. What do the children living in the home have to do with this?



I would've continued mine indefinitely had I not bee caught. I didn't see myself as doing anything TO my spouse. If fact, I was helping my wife by relieving her of the responsibiliy of being my lover...something she didn't seem capable of, or even interested in. Things were better at home than they had been for years. I had no reason to "rock the boat" any more.

ark is spot on in most everything she's written. One difference for me is that my affair had the affect of allowing me to see my wife's positive qualities more clearly. She was a good mother. She was very organized. A good household manager. Good with money. Smart. I felt fortunate to have her as my "partner". I rationalized that she just wasn't cut out to be a good lover...so it really wasn't her fault.

I never re-wrote history or ran may wife down behind her back. I never intended to leave her for the OW.

Daisy:

I was just beginning to post to you regarding my H's LTA after our LT marriage of 29 years in July... We are happily recovered for almost two years after PLAN A, PLAN B, False Recoveries, continued hard work each day during RECOVERY....

Then I read LOW ORBIT's post.

LOW ORBIT, are you my FWH? I know you are not because he is not on MB. However, you sound like what he has said almost word for word... There's a lot of valuable information in LOW ORBIT's post. IMHO, a lot of this has to do with MLC....

Daisy, I do want to share that I had once thought that my FWH has NPD. However, I found that the narcissistic tendencies are part of the fantasy world that the OW creates. That's what makes the A so addictive... I agree with Ark's POV and do believe, based on my experience, that Ms can recover from LTAs. My H became an expert at compartmentalizing and rationalizing what he was doing. He was estranged from our teenage children and now is working on rebuilding those relationships. I know my sitch seems miraculous to you right now but it is not.

To me, all of the hard work that this has taken was worth it....

Awesome post, LowOrbit!

ditto Mel

Pep <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/cool.gif" alt="" />

LO,

I also think your post is illuminating. Thank you.

If I were to boil it down a bit, you did everything for the sex (when written by a male, is the word lover in the same sentence as the word affair a euphemism for sex partner)?

I my case, FWW says she does not know what EN’s were missing in our M. She says none, in fact. She just had the opportunity, on an international business trip, and took it. And she never looked back.

She does say she knows she has some serious neediness issues that are easily masked as EN’s but are really different. They are needs and lack of boundaries that no one but she can address. I and no one could ever succeed at satisfying these needs of hers.

Their A did not start slowly, as Ark writes. They were in bed together within 48 hrs of meeting for the first time. The emotional component took longer to develop. She needed some time to convince herself she was in love, in fact.

Then, as with you, she was content to let it go on forever. They actually made contingency plans to assure it would go on forever. But neither wanted to leave their spouses. Now that’s cake eating.

I still say, some WS’s realize the A is a big mistake at some point and start to correct things even if it takes a while and is a great effort. Others let/want the A to go on forever because they fundamentally do not care about anything but themselves. All the missing EN rationalizations in the universe do not change the gross selfishness and amazing callousness of even a LTA. It is what it is and they are who they are.

BTW, FWW also says she felt better about life (not just about our M) during the A. But I can point to that business trip as when I became very lonely and confused about our M. I started bumping into invisible boundaries. I bet you W felt the same way, LO, and she lived with it as best she could, just as I did, never believing such a betrayal was possible.

Tell me, anyone, how come I did not have an A when I was in even less of a satisfying M for 10 years than LO was? How come LO’s W didn’t?

I feel different somehow and I don’t like it. Makes me feel dangerously exposed to being used over and over by all sorts of people who have A’s.

I also think though it's difficult for the BS to imagine that fear of ending an affair often occurs with infidelity...
lets face it both parties have enough ammo to destroy one another.....and lots of other people...

work affairs often hold in the same breath...harrassment....but only when the work partners go sour...never ever in the throes of it...but the threat lingers in the shadows with all the other threats...

so they often stay together because it's easier than facing the fears of a person scorned....though either can be loathe to admit such reasons...much more noble to site things like soul mates...and victims of circumstance..

ark

Ark:

You are right on the mark with this, too:



I've heard this from my FWH... He talked about apprehension about ending the A. The PBL and the end of PLAN B needed to "show him a way home". Although he felt awful in the A towards the end (a 24/7 PLAN B WAKE-UP CALL WITH THE OW), he wondered if he would get "beat up" by us when he returned. That's why part of my Recovery commitment was forgiveness....He wanted to hear and believe that forgiveness would happen and I wouldn't continually "beat him up", "throw the A in his face". He wanted help on understanding how WE could have a meaningful and better life together again despite all the tragedy and hurt.

Hello, Aphelion,

Glad you found it helpful. I might point out that you are preaching to the choir at this point. I always fear that posting my experiences and perceptions at a given point in my experience will be misinterpreted as my feeling that same way now.

I have to respond to a couple of things though...


This is a common misconception. If it were only sex, I am successful enough to purchase all that I could have needed. No, it was for ADMIRATION, RESPECT, and AFFIRMATION. Nothing fills these needs more than a partner who ardently desires your body and mind.



Ah, but Aph...it certainly didn't feel like gross selfishness and callousness at the time. Emotionally, it felt like coming up for air after having been under a long time. Sure, the Former WS can come to see it as "what it is"...but that doesn't help the BS who has to deal with it RIGHT NOW.

I disagree with the latter part of your couplet...when involved in an affair, few people "are who they are." Living with compromised integrity means that one CANNOT live authentically.

People change all the time. You are not the same as your were when you stated reading this response. So, no, they are certainly not who they are.



Did you express your loneliness and confusion to your wife? My W was completely oblivious to me as long as I maintained the status quo. She admits that she was deliriously happy and believed I was as well.


First, comparing our satisfaction is pointless. My W did not have an affair because she was quite happy with our family. There were no seriously unmet needs in her life.

I will tell you, step by step, how I got where I did.

I suffered a life event that caused me to abandon long held beliefs about what was right and wrong. My family (wife, kids) was unsupportive and treated me like a fifth wheel. My problems were an inconvenience to them. I became severly depressed and started anti-d's. I was miserable, but I saw myself as having to fulfill "responsibilities" to my family. Leaving was out of the question. OW and I began spending more time together. It felt good to have an actual intimate relationship with another adult female who admired me and wasn't shy about showing it...how could something good be all wrong?

There's the formula. It's also the explanation of why I would have let it go on forever. It is very much like a drug. Yes, it was an act of free will, but the "reward" for choosing the affair was immediate and powerful. Knowing this makes it a little easier to forgive myself. It also makes me much more wary of allowing these situations to occur.

So, no, Aph. Some of us are a bit more complicated than the testosterone driven predators you see characterized so often in these forums. There is no doubt that there are those who are pathologically flawed, but the majority of us were in a really bad place at the right time.

I'm sorry you've been hurt. I hope you can eventually heal and grow from this. What have you learned? Can you forgive those who have wronged you? Do you see that their behavior is about who they are...not who you are? You can take solace in knowing you made good choices when others were available toy to you. Obviously, not all of us have been so fortunate. I envy you.

Low

"I don't see how I can begin to forgive and get past this if he continues to blame be for "pushing" him into this affair. I know I must sound horrid. Usually I am a very loving person but this has made me really question who I am married too."

When my H used to say that to me, I'd respond "Great! That means I can blame YOU when I go out and have my (revenge) affair! I won't even have to question why I'm doing it, I can simply blame it on YOU."

It's the lies, lies, lies that really destroy the marriage. Suddenly you realize everything you believed in probably wasn't true.

Thanks for your reply Ark. You and ML are making sense. I have promised myself to be nice to him and we are meeting for dinner this weekend at a favorite restaurnant. The topic of discussion is going to be the things about our marriage that made us happy in the past. The things we like about each other and the future together we had always planned. We have both agreed to no affair talk and no alcohol to cloud any judgements. What do you think? I'm actually looking forward to having a pleasant conversation for a change.

As far as the kids. His job already has demanding hours and he spent at least two evenings per week with the OW when we all thought he was working. The 17 and 14 year old feel cheated of his time and do not feel they have much of a relationship with their Dad. By the way I did not tell the kids all of these details. The older kids suspected and asked H lots of hard questions which to his credit he answered truthfully. The morning adventures didn't effect the kids but many of the trips did. My son asked to go along on the last trip with the OW and was rejected and actually figured out the A before me.

I'm willing to give this a try. Being separated has essentially "frozen" our status and ML thinks I may drive him to the OW. At this point the OW is really angry with him so I don't think the A is continuing. To the H credit he says that "door is closed". The OW husband has also told me the affair is over and that the OW is devastated.

Sorry to be so long winded. Thanks for your help.
Daisy

Daisy:

I am in a LTM, now happily recovered for 2 years. My H was involved in a LTA for over 2 years.

I neglected my FWH by focusing on my role as a mother. I notice that you speak alot about his relationship with the children. This now is about his relationship with only you. That has to be mended first, IMHO.

I also wondered why you aren't talking about him coming home. That will be necessary to work on your M if the A has truly ended.

If you read over Low Orbit's post, my FWH tells a story almost verbatim like his in both of his most recent posts. It may be a pattern that we from LTMs with H in MLC need to really attend to.....

Reply to LoOrbit - I'm almost afraid you are my H on the same website! You understand my H position perfectly. I realize I also will have to change. Over the years we developed a pattern of behavior that spiraled downhill. He feels out of the loop as far as the family and of course he considers me too critical. Our therapist says he is extremely sensitive to any type of criticism and I will have to become super tackful with any "complaint" I might have. I really appreciate you sharing your point of view. It has helped a great deal. I admire your W for being able to change her attitude and make you feel appreciated and loved. Please give me some suggestions. I never intended to attack my H personally I just wanted more time and attention. Over the years he withdrew from his W and family. Did you separate for a period of time? I didn't want the children exposed to our fighting. Until he actually left the house he never even admitted to the affair despite overwhelming evidence. ( I know this is common) Daisy