Hello Everyone,

This time I’m seeking your help to get my husband to really dig, understand and tell me why he decided to cross the line into an affair as opposed to addressing his needs with me. I think this is a key thing to understand if another affair is to be prevented but he doesn’t seem to loose any sleep over it. Instead, his response is full of cliché answers such as: I just let myself get into it without even realizing it, I was stressed because of the new job, there was lack of passion in our marriage, etc, etc.
I personally don’t think such an incomplete/superficial analysis will help us in any way, as it is not providing any cues to watch for in the future to prevent him from getting into another affair. It bothers me that he’s not worried about this and is happy with those cliché answers. He’s even going to individual therapy but seems to be useless in that sense. As I said to him, he should be the one interested in understanding what happened to him since, if he doesn’t, he’ll repeat the story with me or with anybody else. (I’m still debating whether to divorce him or not).

Has any of you been able to get your spouse get to the root of why he/she was unable to stop him/herself on time and crossed the line? If so, how did you do it?

Thank you in advance for your insights.

Jul,

If you have done much reading here, you know that your F(?)WH is offering up excuses and is not accepting responsibility for his DESISION to have an affair. IMHO, until he accepts that he CHOSE to have an affair, he will remain vulnerable to further infidelity.

I don't know much about your situation, but have you and your FWH done any MC. He really needs to gain a better understanding of why he chose to have an affair, how hurtful his choices were to you, and how harmful they were to your marriage.

Recovery is tough enough when the FWS understands why they made the choice they did and are putting huge efforts into recovery, without him even accepting the responsibility, recovery will be difficult to achieve.

Who

Jul,

I want to also add that you can't really make him see anything he doesn't want to see. FWIW, most WS and FWS would just as soon move on and pretend that the affair never happened. Unfortunately, failure to resolve the issues within the marriage, understand the affair dynamics, and put firm boundaries in place often lead to another affair.

My FWH and I thought we understood why he chose to have an affair, neither one of us felt that he was vulnerable to have another one. Well, we didn't get to the real issue and nearly 3 1/2 years into recovery, as soon as we hit a rough spot and he started the same type of behavior that led to his first affair.

Look on the MB site and see if you can locate the video clip of Dr. Harley discussing infidelity and see if your FWH will watch it with you. It is powerful.

Who

There are no answers that he can give you that will make you feel complete again! You have forever been betrayed! (Don't get me wrong---Honesty & Openness are a MUST)

However, there are actions he can take to restore trust and actions he MUST take to protect you and your M from the chance of a future A and/or to restore healing. All this information can be obtained from this websight, or the books that are available here.
And I always recommend Marriage coaching with the Harley's.


Is your husband willing to start a thread here, tell his story, and ask for some help about what He needs to do?

" My FWH and I thought we understood why he chose to have an affair, neither one of us felt that he was vulnerable to have another one. Well, we didn't get to the real issue and nearly 3 1/2 years into recovery, as soon as we hit a rough spot and he started the same type of behavior that led to his first affair."


WhoMe,
You have nailed the issue I'm so concerned about! I don't intend being snoopy but would you mind sharing a bit more about your case? If you don't mind, I would like to show my husband an example of what I mean when I constantly ask him to dig dipper into himself and find the real causes that led him into the affair.

Thank you for your understanding,
Juliana

Jul,

No I don’t mind. I will try hard to be as brief as possible and still give out enough information to make things clear. In our relationship, both before and during our marriage, we never shared the responsibility for most things. In a word, I did everything, including being the primary income earner.

Yes FWH helped here and there, but frankly, it was sporadic. Over time I came to look at him as just another responsibility, like my two DD’s. Seeing him as a third child absolutely killed any desire for him on my part, so our sex life diminished to nearly non-existent.

This, of course was a constant source of friction between us since FWH was very unhappy about being constantly rejected. So he was very vulnerable to any OW who was willing to show admiration or interest in him.

I never realized how desperate he was for attention. I believe he jumped at the first chance he had to cheat which was with a former college classmate who lived 3,000 miles away. She was quite overweight and just plain unattractive, but willing which made her the ideal candidate.

He realized that the affair was a mistake as soon as it began and it didn’t help that OW ended up to be a demanding emotional basket case who used threats of suicide and exposure to me to keep him in the affair once he expressed a desire to end it.

Our biggest mistake was thinking that his A was mainly about SF. It wasn’t. Fast forward 3 ½ years to last April. Things had been going OK for us, although I had a constant sense that we hadn’t really found the recovery that I wanted. Something still didn’t feel quite right to me.

We had a terrible argument on our way to FWH’s class reunion. While at the reunion, he paid way too much attention to one woman in particular and completely ignored me. I was hurt and angry that he would deliberately act that way given our history. We ended up leaving the reunion fairly early and when he got an email a few days later from a friend asking why we left early, he replied with a really insulting message that I had been jealous of the woman he had been talking to and thrown a fit, which was completely untrue.

He then made things even worse by expressing an interest in the woman and asking the guy for her email address. I found the message and for me, well I was ready to divorce him, right then.

I had no fight left in me, I just wanted out. He, in desperation to compensate, actually posted what he had done here on MB and got severely beaten up. I guess hearing what I was trying to tell him from strangers helped open his eyes, because he made an appointment for counseling with Jennifer.
What we learned was that his affair was really about his own serious problems with self esteem and his inappropriate reaction to things that made him angry. Over the course of our relationship, he would dabble in infidelity following arguments with me. For some reason, that made him feel like he was in control and was a way of punishing me for saying hurtful things to him when we argued.

Of course, he knew what he was doing was wrong and harmful, and it didn’t really give him any real satisfaction and actually made him feel worse about himself.

We have had a couple of incidents during the past 12 months were he did things that I found questionable regarding interaction with women. We have discussed these things and he has had to start looking at things very carefully. As I explained it to him, I can’t read his mind so I don’t know what his intentions are and if he puts me in a position to have to question his intentions, then we aren’t going to be able to stay married.

This ended up longer than I intended, but I hope that it was at least in some way helpful.

Who

Who,

What I see in your story, and what I see so often in recovery stories is the lack of "protection"(Love Busters)
And the lack of "extra-ordinary precautions" that need to be in place.


Jul,

One of the roots of all affairs is "Independent Behavior" (an LB). The most extreme independent behavior, as described by Dr. Harley, is having an affair.

tst,

You are completely right on. Jennifer pointed out the importance of this to my FWH. I do believe that he now gets it, but we had to reach the point of me reaching the end of my willingness to remain married to him for him to finally be willing to see that it is his job to protect himself and me from the consequences of his poor choices.

I simply told him that if he ever again makes me feel like I have to be the fidelity police, then we are done.

Initially, I believe that he honestly thought that if he had no intent to have an inappropriate relationship with a woman that my discomfort with him having female friendships was more my problem that his.

Knowing what I know now about everyone's vulnerability to affairs, I now believe that friendships with members of the opposite sex are just plain no, no's for married folks.

A person is either married or they are single, no gray area. If my FWH ever decides that he wants to act like he is single, that's fine with me, he can move on out and I will be just fine.

Who

WhoMe,
Thanks a lot for sharing your experience with me, it was very generous of you and you cannot imagine how helpful it will be for us. I have already sent the chain of postings to my husband hoping that he will better understand what I mean when I ask him to go deeper into himself.

I cannot believe how similar our cases are. I've also had the feeling that my husband was a kind of child that I had to look after all the time and that I couldn't lean on him as a woman could lean on a grown up man. Also, I've felt that he becomes vulnerable to infidelity when I'm critic of him for not being the adult I often wish he were. My therapist suggested that he resented that and wanted to feel an adult and in control of his life by going out looking for other women. I'm sure there is something at the root of this problem but I feel we're way far from discovering it, especially when he's satisfied with those silly excuses. We should be starting joint therapy soon and I guess that'll our chance of getting to the truth.

WhoMe, I'm still getting used to the acronyms. Would you mind telling me what SF means? You said that's what you mistakenly believed was the root of the affar.

Thanks again to you and TST for your wonderful and helpful postings, I'll let you know what my husband's reaction was to them.

J

Thank you, TST. I think you made a very valid point regarding independant behaviour at the root of infidelity. I hadn't thought about it, but I can see it clearly now that you mention it.

Juliana

He/she got into it because he/she wanted to, and because he/she had no plan to avoid it. It is a simple as that. The priority of what he/she wanted to do exceeded the priority that he/she gave to the marriage.

Jul,

Has your husband put together a list of "extra-ordinary precautions"?

Tst,
I know that OW changed job and they're not talking to each other anymore. He also sent a final letter to her.

Don't think he's put together anything else than that, as we're still trying to pick up the pieces of our marriage. But I think it's never too early to take those precautions. Do you have any suggestions?

J

Amen to this. These are my sentiments exactly.

BTW(By The Way)- SF is Sexual Fulfilment and is one of the EN's (Emotional Needs).

These all still make me crazy

I have my list of extra-ordinary precautions that I put into place immediately. I copied them over for you to reference. Hope they help.

I still recommend you have your H start a thread........as there are many other one time things I have done to protect my wife and our M.


Extraordinary Precautions:

a) I am responsible to protect my wife at all times.
b) I will give full access of all my business records to my wife.
c) I will agree to give all passwords, account codes business and personal to my wife.
d) I will not put myself in an advice giver role with another woman, unless my wife is present and has given her prior approval.
e) I will defer to my wife as the advice giver when it involves another woman, unless she specifically calls on me.
f) I will not spend any time with another woman that my wife is not present.
g) I will allow only my wife to hear my problems or concerns.
h) I will not share my infirmities with another woman.
i) I will allow my wife to be my exclusive care giver, unless she specifically calls on someone else to help her.
j) I will defer to my wife in all matters of charity and outreach, with her being the sole point of contact when caring for women.
k) I will not teach martial arts to another woman without my wife being present and having enthusiastic agreement about such training in advance.
l) I will openly share my daily business schedule with my wife.
m) At any time she requests, I will trade cell phones with my wife for the time she deems necessary.
n) I will allow only men to provide essential care, such as Doctors appointments, hair cuts, massages, individual counseling, etc.
o) I will always defer to my wife regarding any outside activity and will agree to eliminate any activity she feels is interfering in our relationship or the relationships of our children.

This is great, thanks a lot, TST! I'll send it to my H right away.
J

Will he post here???

It would be much more helpful than you sending him stuff. He may see that as you trying to "educate" him, which is a love buster.

You sending him this stuff could actually be pulling love units out of his love bank. Does that make sense?

Also, he really needs to show some initiative on this. You can tell him about the website and the books, but it's his responsibility to start learning and working toward putting the marriage back together.

Hello to all of you,
As you know, I flipped your postings to my husband on Friday and they got him thinking. I think he finally understood what I mean by getting to the root of the problem and he said he'll starting reflecting about it. Let's see what comes out of it. He had a valid question for WhoMe, though. He was wondering how you guys were able to finally uncover what was really at the origin of your husband's vulnerability to affairs. Was it through couple's therapy? If not, how? If yes, I imagine you had couple's therapy at the beginning but it really didn't get to the truth and misled you into thinking that SF was the cause while it was actually not. What was different three years later?

WhoMe, I'm very sorry for asking so many questions again, but I really want to make everything possible to avoid us more suffering in the future. I'm having my full share of pain since DD. He's also recognized that he should be doing more to understand himself better as opposed to waiting for me to send him stuff.

After TST suggestion, my husband has prepared his own list of extraordinary precautions to avoid falling again. I've added a few I thought were important based on his experience.

Also, he's interested in posting in the forum in order to better understand his behaviour, so I'm hoping he'll get at least as much learning as I've gotten from the wonderful postings of people like you.

Jul,,


Actually, it kind of came as a gradual recognition on my part rather than an aha moment.

It seemed like anytime we began discussing any element of the A or how anything my FWH had done that hurt me or made me feel insecure, he would immediately turn the tables and start talking about things I had done years and years prior to his affair that hurt him and made him feel bad.

He consistently ended up making the conversation about what I had done to hurt him. Mind you, I never had an affair of any kind, but I was the queen of AO (Angry outbursts).

It finally occurred to me that there had been a pattern of unfaithfulness that seemed to follow arguments between us.

It also became very clear that while I had forgiven him for the worst possible betrayal, he had never forgiven me for things I had said to him as much as 15 years before.

I asked him if that seemed fair given the fact that I had worked very hard to stop AO's since d-day and he even admitted that I had done well.

Since I had been doing much better in meeting his need for SF and we had, for the most part been doing well in recovery, it became real clear when he started contemplating beginning a friendship with a former classmate immediately following an argument, that his affair had been about dealing with anger.

Make sense?

Who