Thanks...fortunately I am married to a man who values marriage. He did slip off track for a while though! And, I hope all hopes that he looks at me again the way he used to. It's not that I think he does not love me, I honestly think he's embarrassed.

I was always one who never bonded closely with anyone. Perhaps from the pain of loss from my childhood. I had a fear of intimacy.

That all changed dramatically and completely when I met and fell in love with the beautiful engaging angel who would become my bride. She was truly "The One". I embraced the feeling of togetherness that came with sharing my vulnerabilities and fears with her. She made me complete.

Once the adultery began, and still to this day I am fighting with more than I ever would have imagined possible. I did fight for her to the point of madness to try to save our marriage. At first, during her adultery, I was fighting for her. Now that we are attempting recovery, I am fighting myself... Perhaps to the point of madness.

So I have actually been both.


I keep going back in time to last October when I had decided it was time to take my Son and give wifey the heave ho. As it turns out, the timeframe was right at the same time her adultery was becoming physical. I suspected, and felt that I was done. That she needed to knock this [censored] off, or we were through. I even had the letter written that she would find on her pillow when she returned to an empty house,from a night out with POSOM. I did not follow through. I dismissed what I knew in my gut needed to be done.

I have grave remorse that I did not follow through with this. Perhaps if I had, she would have realized then, before F-ing him, what she stood to lose. I did not, rather I continued to try to negotiate with her, and she proceeded to continue her descent into irreversable H*!!.

I believe this will haunt me til the end of my days. I just can not come to grips with what she did, and will always believe that if I had acted with more strength and conviction, had followed my gut instincts, I could have affected a different, better outcome and spared her dignity and my sanity...

So F-ing sad...

TTH,

I often feel the same as you. EXACTLY!!!! I even had a dream right at the beginning of the A that my H was cheating on me. I wish to God that I had followed my instincts. This is probably my biggest barrier to recovery right now. Why didn't I do this, or why didn't I do that? I call it "trying to go back in time".

Impossible of course.

Also, I have even told my H that if anyone would tell me that if I cut my arm off then this whole thing wouldn't have happened, I would cut it off.

Again, impossible.

This horror we are experiencing is grief. Some of us are harder grievers than others. A big part of grief is that feeling of "if only......" We need to grieve. I told our MC that I would rather cry and wail and beat myself up a bit now than pretend it doesn't feel this way and someday get cancer or heart disease because I pretended I was recovered when I'm not.

Hang in there TTH. No advice, just empathy. I believe that when we are recovered, we will REALLY be recovered.

Blessings,
WH2LE

I hope it isn't "if"...

TTH,

You are still soooooooo early in this discovery/recovery.

One of the things that I could say to my H in the first few months, and that he actually UNDERSTOOD, was that if one of my children had died, he wouldn't have expected me to be feeling anything BUT god-awful terrible!!!! He wouldn't have been expecting anything from me but heart-wrenching, agonizing, sobbing grief. For a long, long time.

It's not an "if". It's a "when".

If your child had died in May, after a protracted illness with many ups and downs, including a period of remission when you thought all would be well, you would be able to understand this awful grief you feel.

Dr. Harley is so on the money with this. It's every bit as bad as a child dying. Every D*** bit of it.

We just somehow think that this just can't be THAT bad. So we don't get the grief aspect. It does truly suck.

I suspect you are indeed a hard griever. In all honesty, I think those of us who grieve hard are "lucky". Sounds so stupid when I write it, but in my heart I believe it's true. We ultimately come out on the other side of these things healed. It feels incredibly bad at the time, but WHEN it's done, it's DONE.

Again, just empathy here.

You are going to make it.

WH2LE

Thanks for the vote of confidence.

Yikes!
I am sorry that you went through that. My DH acts like a tough guy but with me he does let his guard down. Once I had a pap-smear come back questionable and my Dr asked me to come back in for more test. I really didn't think about it when I told DH. I just knew I was ok but my sister is a ovarian cancer survivor. Honestly that didn't even cross my mind. I told DH over chat while he was at work. He came home and he was a wreck. I felt SO bad for freaking him out. I tried to reasure him that it is common for these test to come back questionable. He calmed down a bit but it wasn't until I had the results of the follow up test for him to relax. Now I am careful about telling him anything health related about me. His biggest fear (other than loosing one of our kids) is loosing me.

Thank you, saumico.

I thought he was stronger than that. I really did.

I found out from his ex that she had a health related issue when they were married and it was much the same. He couldn't handle it. She always says: "I wanted to warn you! I wanted to warn you so badly!"

But would I have listened? Nah. I would have filed it away and remembered it later but it wouldn't have stopped me from having a relationship with him. He made HER out to be the bad guy in the demise of their marriage. Of course!! He was having an A!!

But it was nice of her to say she wanted to warn me. We never exchanged one word between us until I told the kids to tell her what was going on if they wanted to. Now we are in touch regularly.

I am SO tempted to say, "Come on ahead!" to her when we have our final court date. I bet his jaw would fall plumb off and disintegrate when it hit the floor!!

That is a dead-on accurate statement. I emphatically, 100% agree.

My FWW had all the power, because she really was willing to walk out on me at any time, chose to have an A instead, and didn't let me know any of this.

D-days are a great equalizer, though.

I know the power I hold in my marriage has increased tremendously since d-day. Can you guess why?

Really? D-day is when I felt I had LOST control. Of course, up until then I didn't know "control" was such an issue.

At any rate, I got control of MY life back on Brave New World day. Exposure!!

Well it looks like you found an ally in this mess. I would love to be a fly on the wall if his ex showed up with you. I can see it now. You lean into each other and whisper, look over at him and laugh. He would go nuts! Of course you are more mature than that...right?