"I lived at my mother's house with our daughter, and he was home, basically drunk the entire time. He sent me text messages that were horrific, and he said he was leaving the marriage. After he sobered up, he asked me to come home"

I think this shows that your BH still wants you.

"husband has left town and he said he doesn't know when he'll be back"

Your BH needs time to process the new details of your affair.
He has to go to work, he can't stay away forever. BH's responsibilities will force him back to town and going by his past response he will come back to you.

Others have given you great advice on how to help your husband.

An important question is how did you meet the OM?

Have you told BH how you and OM communicated?

Have you given BH access to all passwords for email, IM, cell phone to check for texts?
BH needs you to prove that you are having NC and you have given BH all the tools that he needs to verify NC. That will be a good start to rebuilding BH’s trust in you.

Thanks for your replies. I have cut off all contact with the OM since D-Day. My husband is the CFO at home, so he looks at all of the cell phone bills and he sees all of the text messages. In fact, that is what brought all of this to light in the first place.

I met the OM at work (two weeks ago he moved another company, btw). We were friends for over a year before anything got started physically. If only I knew then about how vulnerable I was to entering into an affair, I would have told my husband that I was getting too close to someone at work. I would have told him that I was connecting emotionally with someone in a way that I should have been connecting with him. I would have sought to cut off contact with the OM before anything got started. I really believed I was impervious to having an affair, now I know that this kind of delusion is what puts us at risk. This site has set off hundreds of light bulbs that I wish were turned on two years ago! I’ve read about emotional needs, the Love Bank, all those things. We were a textbook couple. I truly believe that my husband was also at risk, but his work schedule kept him from it.

He and I have uncovered a lot of these things over the last few weeks. We have read chapters from a book about affairs together, printed articles from this site and gave them to each other, we filled out the EN questionnaire, and we know where we both fell short. But now we’re at square one again because of the lies I told on D-Day. I realize it’s like D-Day all over again. I told everyone here about the “addiction” to help create a picture of where my head was at two weeks ago. I tried to come clean that day, but I didn’t reveal everything at that time. I was scared and frankly, a mess. What I’m trying to say about these last two weeks are like coming off of drugs because I’m no longer in the throws of the affair. Dr. Harley has said that there is a withdrawal period and I didn’t want to believe it. I thought I could just put the whole thing behind me and focus on the marriage and on helping him, but in my mind, I was still confused. It’s almost like I wanted to believe the lies myself so that I could put the A into the past. I totally understand that I made a huge error in judgment.

I felt the need to understand why I lied so that I can change it, and I’m thinking that if he understands it then maybe he can recognize that I’m committed to honesty now. I don’t know how else to put it, I’m trying to learn from my mistakes so that I don’t repeat them. That’s why I feel the need to talk about the A as an addiction, because when you’re in the throws of it, you’re not rational. I know I need to put my pain in the backseat, I’m only looking at it to gain better understanding. Does any of this make sense?

Mrs. Z,

Welcome to Marriage Builders. I was just like you about 9 years ago and can tell you that as you travel this road you will find out things about yourself and your husband that will either 'make you or break you'...

The first thing I suggest is that you not to rationalize the infidelity. I understand that you felt addicted and out of your mind, been there got the t-shirt. Bottom line though, you must be honest with YOURSELF as well as your H.

Honestly... there was a moment when you could make another choice and you didn't. You know, nine years ago I made the same choice and it changed my life in ways that I won't bore you with now... but you know, even now, I remember with clarity the moment I crossed the line with OM. It wasn't a kiss or a hotel room - it was a conversation. I let him into a place that only my H should have been. Was it the same for you? OWN IT.

You are in the beginning stages of something that will change your life forever. Beginning stages... it can't be hurried.

Some questions to ask yourself:

Do you want your marriage and what are you willing to do to save it?

Are you willing to do whatever it takes to help your H heal?

Do you want to be able to look in the mirror... deeply into your own eyes... and forgive yourself?

What will you do to ENSURE that you will never, ever do this to another human being, or yourself, again?

The last question is vitally important because it's about YOUR ETHICS AND INTEGRITY. Please take some time to thoughtfully consider your answers... and you don't have to make them public, but in order to begin this process, I believe you need to answer them for yourself and your marriage.

Mrs. Z, my first H and I were married for 20 years. He cheated on me several times. I knew of the devistation because I'd lived it. I thought I was above cheating, would never lower myself to his level. Oh, how the mighty fall. Flat on my face and it was as if a bomb went off in the marriage. It was over from the moment (the moment) I strayed. We divorced and I am remarried to my second husband (a rebound, no less) who is a sweet, caring, lovely man.

But at what price?

I am stronger now, I am worthy of love, I am a person of integrity. It was hard won. There were easier ways to do it. I wish I'd found one of them because it wasn't worth it. It's kind of like a hurricane and a new house is rebuilt - never the old one... it simply cannot be. The new one may be stronger, prettier, whatever, but the home is changed forever.

You are changed forever because of your choice. And what you do from this point forward will determine who you will ultimately become. I wish you healing, both personally and in your marriage.

Finally, in response to something MEDC said:


I get where MEDC's going with this ... but disagree on one point.

I would say, "In life, when we choose the action... we GET the consequence(s) that comes along with it." Choice or no choice, the consequences come.

Yes, we ABSOLUTELY choose the action, but I can tell you that for me, while I may have *deserved* the consequences, I had NO IDEA what they would be. None.

That does not take *anything* away from the consequences I got, nor do I minimize them. I am an advocate for self-responsibility, certainly. And perhaps this is a discussion for another thread, but wanted to say it.

MrsZ.


You said something that I really think you need to address.
Trust and forgiveness are NOT things you should worry about right now. He would be a fool to trust you right now, you have not earned it. And he would be a fool to forgive now, as you have not shown him and cannot show him, that you are forgivable.

What you need to do is be honest, "radically" honest, not brutally honest, "radically honest" with your H from now on. Further, you need to figure out what you told yourself to make what you did "OK" in your mind. In short how did you convince yourself that crossing the boundary of fidelity for 17 months was a good thing to do. No matter what you say, you did think it was a "good" thing to do, because you did it and you did it repeatedly.

He needs to know the answer to this last question if he is to have any hope that you can, will, have learned from your choices and mistakes.

Right now he is very messed up. It has only been a few weeks and alot of what he was told just two weeks ago was a lie. He just learned everything today. So in many ways discovery day, d-day, started today.

You are going to need time and patience to rebuild this marriage IF he decides he wants to try. Meanwhile, you need to figure out why you want to be married to a man you did not respect, you did not value, and clearly you did not love. I know this sounds harsh, but it really isn't. It is how he will see this and he will need to know the answers to these and other very very difficult questions.

Our goal here is to help you rebuild this marriage if he decides to give it a try. Your goal is to be very very honest about yourself, your decisions, your desires, and your goals. Frankly, you have to really decide if you want to be married to him, and then you have to address (if you do want to be married) what you did to contribute to the state of the marriage both good and bad, before you decided to have an affair.

The answers to these questions, all of them, will be the basis for your plan to rebuild this marriage IF he and you mutually decide to give it ago. Personally I hope you really do decide to give rebuilding a chance, but you really need to think about it and why you want to do it. Recovery of a marriage is not for the faint of heart.

I hope something I have said helps.

God Bless,

JL

Thank you all so much for your posts. You’ve given me so much to think about and a lot of questions to answer. While my husband has been away for two days, I’ve come to discover a scary truth about myself: I am terrified of intimacy. It’s so easy to have faux intimacy in an affair. There isn’t much risk of rejection, because if he calls it quits, I can always blame it on the fact that I’m married. If I open up to my husband, he may discover that I’m boring, or too complicated, or just plain crazy, and if he leaves, it’s a clear rejection of me and who I really am. In an affair, I can pretend to be erotic, but in truth, I ranked SF as number five on the EN questionnaire. I hid behind a façade of eroticism to get at what I really craved but was clearly afraid of: intimacy.

Knowing this, I know I need to push through my fears and be radically honest from now on. As JL said, rebuilding a marriage is not for the faint of heart.

Thanks for all of the incredible insights. I hope my husband will come home.

I don't believe this for a minute...and if you are serious about marital recovery you will refute that comment.

You lied to protect yourself.

committed

Also...I believe that knowledge is power.

If he has knowledge of EVERYTHING regarding the affair, he has the power that he needs to make decisions regarding the marriage.

WSs don't want their BS to have knowledge because it then gives someone else the power in the marriage.

Tell ALL...only then will recovery truly happen if it is meant to be.

committed

Ms. Z,

My husband lied to protect me.

I had to pry everything out of him.

How humiliating for me.


I had to ask questions of my own husband that I never thought I would have to ask. And I would wonder, "Have I asked the exactly correct question in order to elict the information, or if I worded the question slightly differently, would more information have been revealed?" So back to the table we would go, over and over, so I could ask the same question, over and over, in slightly different variations in order to be sure that I was able to elicit the truth from him.

Because every day, another little "memory" would slip out.

And d-day would start all over again for me.


There was no protection in this for me. None whatsoever. There was a whole bunch of protection for my then WS.

He was able to protect the secrets and lies he held with the OW. He held them close to his vest, and kept what he and she had together "only theirs" for as long as he could.

Which is what you do when you fail to disclose any information to your husband.

Each and every piece of information your H wants or needs is rightfully his to have - because it helps to break the secrets between you and the OM, and breaks the fantasy of the specialness that you felt with OM.

And your H deserves the truth about the affair, because he needs the information in order to make decisions about his life. He needs to understand what happened, so that he can rightfully decide what he wants to do now. Whether that goes your way or not, your H deserves to understand what happened to his marriage.

To decide for him that he needs to be protected from anything in his own life is to diminish his manhood.

To decide for him that he does not deserve the entire truth about his own life is to diminish his humanity.

To decide for him about anything is to dimish him, period.


With that in mind, please understand that your husband may very well return home and want to go on with you.

I did decide to go on with my husband, and we are in recovery, two years and then some.

It is possible. But my FWH had to figure out a lot about who I was, and what I needed, and vice-versa. This marriage of yours didn't arrive where it was by accident on the day before you started your affair. It took both of you, and you both need to figure out what went wrong there.

But YOU own the affair, 100%. You could have chosen any number of ways to solve the problem, the day before you started the affair, and I believe from your posts you see that now.

I guess the next time your husband talks to you, my advice would be to tell him that you apologize for not telling him everything from the get-go, and actually for not talking to him the day BEFORE you started the affair.

I wish I could go back to the day before my H's affair, and ask him to talk.

SB

I've come to terms with that one. I don't think it's entirely accurate though, I did try to protect him from more pain, but I also lied because I was afraid he would leave me. So yes, I lied to protect myself too. I also know that I didn't protect him from more pain, and that in fact, I created more. And on top of it all, he left me.

Mrs. Z, I feel for your BH. In the beginning days of my upheaval, I asked my H to just take the time to write down every thing they talked about, everything he was thinking. He wouldn't do that. It would have been better if he had, he elected to verbally tell me, which resulted in LB's from me. Maybe you could write a synopsis of what happened including the reasons you had at the time, then dispell them as you go. It could be a release for you as well. I told my H I wouldn't tolerate one more lie about Ow and he was painfully honest with me after that. This is a season your BH never wanted to go through. Good Luck to ya GF.

Thank you all again for your replies and calling me on my bullsh!t. Now is not the time to look for empathy. I’ve learned so much these last few days. I’ve been in a fog for so long. Much of the affair has been in my head. Where the OM didn’t meet my emotional needs, my fantasies filled in the blanks. Although I stopped contacting him weeks ago, I wasn’t willing to let go of the obsession, therefore I was still in denial. I was still deceiving and lying to everyone including myself, because I convinced myself I was being honest since I at least told my husband about the affair. I finally figured out that by holding back the truth, it gave me the license to still obsess. Now I don’t let myself dwell on the OM and I’m not helplessly drawn to it.

I have to visit these boards every hour to get a reality check, but it’s working. Mr. Z, please come home. You can ask me anything. And if you ask me if I love you, I will honestly say yes, and I will give you my whole heart.

-MrsZ

MrsZ

I applaud you.

I hope you get the chance at R. Make the needed changes, learn new ways, be better prepared when and if he comes home. If he doesn't you will still be OK.

Mrs. Z.

You are not out of the fog yet, but it is lifting. I would like to make a suggestion. Go back and reread this whole thread, and I mean critically read it. Read it as if you were your H and then tell us what you saw and see. How you would feel if you were your H reading what you have read? Don't sugar coat it with what you WANT him to see, feel, but what your stark, cold, words actually would have meant to him/you.

Part of coming out of the fog is not the ability to say: "sorry my bad", "its all my fault", or the ever popular "the devil made me do it." Part of coming out of the fog is being able to look at your words as your spouse would. Being able to see the parts that hurt him, and the parts that help him. You cannot avoid hurting him now, but do it with truth and love, not defensiveness.

But, Mrs. Z there is good news as well. He would not be hurt if he did not love you and need you in his life. If he did not his solution would be easy and simple...divorce and leave. He would not be miles away, he would be right there.

He is deeply hurt and wounded now, he will heal no matter what you do or don't do. The real issue is will heal in such a manner that your marriage is of value to him. I know he can, and so do you, but to do that you will have to help. That doesn't take hiding, or sugar coating things. It takes honesty, compassion, love. You need to provide that to yourself and then to him.

In many ways this is sort of like an airplane. You know those safety instructions that no one listens to? The one where they tell you to put YOUR oxygen mask on before trying to help someone else, even your children? Well, this is sort of like that. You need to get on an even keel. YOU need to set your goals, develop your plan to achieve your goals, you need to understand your boundaries and how to protect them, and THEN you will be ready to help rebuild this marriage if you and your H choose to do so.

Must go, hang in there.

God Bless,

JL

I've bolded the section that you should read over and over. Currently he probably feels like he is comprimising his integrity and if you try to mail this in it will only validate his feelings in the end. He needs to feel like you were worth his decision to stay and that will require some intesnse effort on your part.

JL, you continue to amaze me

JL,
So are you saying that I need to work out my own issues before working on the marriage?

If that's what you're saying, my counselor told me something similar today. However, she thinks that my dh and I are both alcoholics and we don't have a chance of rebuilding until we address that. In her mind (and she may be right) we can't meet each other's needs with alcoholism in the picture. She also thinks that we need individual counseling right now and not marriage counseling.

What are your thoughts on that advice? It contradicts what I know about Dr. Harley's advice of 15 hrs a week of care and meeting each other's most intimate emotional needs.

Dr Harley says MB does not work with addictions. However if you are both working on your addictions in AA, then MB will work. I think it could be a parallel approach.

Mrs. Z,

No I am saying working on your issues IS working on your marriage. You need to be able to look him in the eye and tell him what you want and why? You need to be able to look him in the eye and tell him the issues you need to deal with in order for you to be a happy individual and also be happily married to him.

You will not recover this marriage in a few days or a few months, it will take years. You will be alcoholics the rest of your life. The only issue is whether you will be recovering alcoholics.

Harley claims that if there are other addictions in place then MB won't work because the other addictions swamp and defocus the effort required to rebuild the marriage.

I would say there is no need for marriage counseling if there is no marriage.

So the first thing that has to happen is that he has to come to beleive that your marriage to him will enrich his life again. You have to decide that your marriage to him will enrich your life. Then you start to make plans on how to do this.

From the sounds of your counselor the plans should include addressing the alcohol issue, it should include IC for both of you, and as you learn more then MC as well.

But while doing this you can spend 15 hours a week with your H. You can love, and respect your H and ask him to do the same for you. There is nothing in doing what your counselor has asked that precludes you from treating your H well, from apologizing to your H for your actions both in words and deeds.

Mrs. Z, you do need to set your boundaries and then protect them, counseling can help you there. You also need to really decide why you want to be married to your H, and then act accordingly.

He is deeply hurt. If he is an alcoholic, the bet is he is drinking too much right now. It means he will be difficult to talk to, and it means that he will be hughly depressed due to your lies, and the alcohol which is a depressant. Depressed people don't do proactive things well.

Mrs. Z you can do as your counselor wishes and still meet one anothers needs, spend time together, and discuss your life's goals with on another.

This is not an either or situation.

I hope something I have said is of help.

God Bless,

JL

JL and Kahuna,
I agree with what you're saying, I was thinking along those lines as well. I have to admit, I'm an addict of many types. It all boils down to the need to escape from reality. I'm so glad I never got involved with drugs.

In the two weeks after the affair was revealed, we caught a glimpse of what our relationship could be like. We were sharing, laughing, talking, listening, and taking care of each other. It was scary and wonderful at the same time. I do think we can have a relationship that will enrich both of us.

Mrs Z,

Then I think you need to start planning, and don't be afraid to tell your H want you want and need. One of them is clearly for him to be happy, but start to lay out a plan for how your marriage should be based on what you two have learned in the last two weeks.

God Bless,

JL

He’s home now!

We had a very long and open conversation last night after our daughter went to bed. Afterwards, we hugged for a long time and I felt like I could have melted in his arms.

This morning was a little weird. I felt very clumsy, and I couldn’t stop from saying really stupid things. I promised Mr. Z that I wouldn’t post what I said and did specifically, but suffice it to say, I was acting like an awkward teenager. He looked a little puzzled, especially when he was shaking his head back and forth.

Maybe I was self-conscious because I’m not hiding anymore. It feels really weird, like being naked but not in a sexy kind of way.

I’ll be making new threads and I’ll have a lot of questions, but I wanted to that you all for your incredible posts. You’ve given us insight, encouragement, and hope.

Mrs. Z