Zen,

You talk of church and your name is "Zen?" Hmmm...

You said you didn't think your church handled things well. How would you have had them handle the situation?

You make sweeping statements about how your husband met very few of your ENs. Did you tell him of your ENs so that he had a chance to meet them? Not did you complain about being unhappy or general complaints about needing more from him, but did you specifically tell him what was lacking rather than just mention a general lack in the marriage?

I see you saying that OM met ALL of your ENs. That would make him unique and special in so many ways that it baffles the mind. It would make him the perfect MAN., and I doubt seriously that he was any such thing. I would suggest instead that as LaLa has said that what you really experienced was in fact a fantasy.

OM had no negative history with you at all. He never left his dirty socks on the floor beside the hamper, got up in the middle of the night to get a glass of water and woke you getting up AND coming back to bed. He never left the dirty dishes for you to clean up after you had spent all afternoon preparing his favorite dinner because I doubt seriously you even discovered his favorite dinner as prepared by you. You had no bills to pay, no lawns to mow, no hobbies that took him away from you when you wished for him to be there by your side or any of the other stuff that comes with a real relationship that lasts beyond the stained sheets of an affair.

OM had one purpose in life when he was with you and that was to make you feel good. And his reason for wanting to make you feel good was because you made him feel good. Nothing ever had to be really invested for the future or in the future and nothing of value ever had to be considered as it related to the future because all there was during the affair was the here and now, the present and how you made each other feel.

Your marriage is a 50/50 proposition. That is, half the responsibility for its state at any time belongs to your husband. The other half belongs to you and since half of the whole belongs to each of you, improving either half improves the whole as well, at least by some percentage.

Something you need to face up to at some point is that you must own the choices you made. It wasn't your husband that drove you into the arms of OM, it was your own choices that did that. And it wasn't the way that the church handled the situation that was the cause of the problem, it was the affair that they had to deal with that caused the problem and the affair was your decision since they had nothing to do with it.

Likewise, your husband did not choose your affair partner for you, you did that on your own. He didn't get a vote on the matter and probably would not have voted in favor of the affair if he had been given one.

The only way you will ever save your marriage and have any hope of turning it into one that can make you happy is for you to own your own choices and realize that the mess you are in is because of the choice you made to violate your husband's trust and break the vows you made to him when you got married. There is nothing that mitigates that in your favor.

And this applies to any future marriage you might have as well if your current one ends in divorce and you move on. The very things that drove the affair and caused it to be what it was in your mind are the same things that will conspire against it becoming a valuable and viable marriage. The self soothing addiction to the feelings can only be preserved by doing all that you can to stroke each other's egos and allow nothing of reality to intrude on the relationship. Right and wrong aside, the affair was all about you and your feelings and no marriage built on that amount of selfishness can survive for long.

And consider that if OM was the one posting here, I would be telling him the same things. So it isn't all about you like the affair was.

Marriage Builders can give you the same feelings you received from OM by making your husband the man of your dreams. By applying the things you can learn here and from the Harleys you can build your marriage into one that can make you both so happy you will wonder why it took an affair to make it happen.

Before you just dismiss this as an angry betrayed spouse lashing out at a wayward wife, consider this; my wife and I are recovering nicely, thankyou, and though it shouldn't have taken an affair to bring it to pass, our marriage is today stronger and more valuable to both of us than it was for over 30 years.

So this isn't a vent from me to you, an easy target. I seldom get involved in the day to day posts of anyone whether betrayer or betrayed, but your story struck a chord with me for some reason and so I felt inclined to jump in.

If you are willing to work at recovery and building a new marriage with your husband, this is a very good place to be. Many can point you to some very good resources that are available here and other places as well but the best resource of all is a call to the coaching center. Steve or Jennifer can either one do more in an hour than most therapists can in a year because their specialty is recovery from infidelity.

If you still are having any kind of contact with OM, end that contact by certified letter at once. If contact has only recently ended, give it some time before you give up on your marriage. Get your husband home as soon as possible and if you can get him here to seek support in recovery efforts.

I offer you my prayers...

Mark

You think your church isn't treating you right?

How about mine threw me out for MY wife having an affair and divorcing ME.

Stop your whining and cut all contact with OM.

You did this all by your self, nobody put a gun to your head and now you got to get the mop and bucket out and clean up YOUR mess.

This stuns me! What denomination?

Southern Baptist

I can't quote scriptures, but it seems to me that Christ said if your brother is in sin, go to him and point out his sin, if he refuses to listen, then go to him with fellow members of the church, if he still refuses to listen, then shake the dust off your sandals and move on.

Seems your church was never well grounded in scripture.

That's not your fault.

It's, rather, your enlightenment!

All Blessings,
Jerry

ps: be thankful you are no longer in that church!

The scripture you refer to is Mathew 18:15-17

Zen,

Ditto to everything Mark said. And one more thing that I am sure you have not thought.

Your husband is going to lose some of HIS friends because of YOUR affair.
He will lose people who are embarrassed for him and don't know how to handle it.
He will lose people who loved you both and are afraid that if they stay friends with either one of you that they are choosing sides and it will be too painful.
He will lose people who love him and now can't stand you.
He will lose people who feel he has a contagious disease called infidelity.
And so on..... Just doesn't seem fair does it?

Is it any wonder that God allows divorce because of infidelity?

You can start to fix this if you have the courage.

Love your husband. Be the wife God meant you to be.

Good Luck.

WH2LE

timeline...I just had this all typed out and lost it so I will try it again.

I am very involved with or church Zen is the name of my mp3 player and seeing as I am not very creative that is where I came up with the name.

H and I have been married 11 years. We are a blended family His son 24, my son 18, our son 9 and a daughter we just adoped in April 6. H says that the first 6 years were horrible and the second 5 we learned to tollerate each other. I immersed myself into the kids and homeschooling, etc. We argued a lot (in fact our 9 yo says he likes it better now that we aren't in the same house because there is no fighting) H would leave for a night or two every year. He would threaten divorce a lot.

I had/have a temper problem. I am in counseling now and also going for prayer counseling. I never remembered much about my childhood and heard through my sisters, etc that my mother was abusive, physical and verbally to me. I married my first husband to get out of the house and he started physically abusing me two weeks after our honeymoon. I have found out through all this that I have a lot of fear issues and make all my decisions out of fear. My counselor thinks I have been depressed most of my life. She also says that H is a emotionally unavailable person. I have a hard time making any decisions, jobs, purchasing cars, etc. I have always lived in sort of a fog.

My 18 yo son has been having kidney issues and had a 5 hour surgry last summer. While sitting at the hospital alone I started thinking how he was going to be leaving for college in a year. (We are very close and have been through a lot together in life). I started thinking what have I done with my life, I am halfway through life where am I going, when my kids are grown what do H and I have. We don't share any interests, we don't do anything together, etc.

I have known OM for 4 years or so. We talked a lot at church, we were in several church musicals together, he helped my son practice his bass. He is a musician. H and I got into a argument at church and I was crying a lot during practice and we started talking. We talked for several weeks and he started giving me a hug goodbye each night. I didn't really think it was abnormal because I hug many men and women at our church. I was convinced that after the musical was over we wouldn't talk as much anymore. Instead we got closer and talked on the phone and computer during the week. After a couple months we started seeing each other.

In march his wife found cell phone records and had someone hack the computer and found emails. She kicked him out and I told my H and he moved out a week later. We continued to talk and see each other once a week. H started drinking, smoking pot and going on some dates. Recently we started talking civil to each other and now we are talking about working things out. H still isn't sure it is going to work. Our counselors say we need to start from scratch since we don't have a foundation to go back to.

I just want to be loved and cared for and feel like I am important to H. He is a very helpful person so anytime someone needs something he will leave and do it. No matter if we had plans or not. I have been trying to explain to him that I love time together and we need to come up with a balance.

The other thing that confuses me is that my Dad, Mom, and sisters don't think I should work things out with H.

Hope this helps.

Love your husband. Be the wife God meant you to be.

For years I was told to serve my husband and family...by the church and by some christian web boards I was on. I think I burned out serving. The more I tried to serve and be a good Christian wife, the more used I felt. They taught to only meet the others needs and that would in turn make the relationship work. Until now I never really thought about my needs. Now I see that if my needs aren't met I get feel fustrated and end up getting angry. I hope I can explain this to H. I was talking to a lady who does counseling at our church and she says that is the biggest problem in the church today. Women are not finding out who they are.

More...I thought of this in the shower.

We have had a lot of deaths in the family this past year. My grandmother, who I was very close with, died, my grandfather, a good friend had a sudden accident and died, H's Uncle, H's Dad and my Uncle.

Back in Jan, before the A got more serious, H left for two days, he came back saying that I had 6 months to come up with a financial plan for us to seperate and divorce. The next day is when my Uncle died and the kids and I had to go 5 hours away for a couple days for the funeral. I have traveled a lot alone with the kids, H always considered that a vacation from me and the responsibilities of the family. I always resented that. He did not check on us once while we were gone. This was normal behavior when I traveled with the kids, if I didn't call him he didn't call me. Also, this was before the A got serious and he found out. But the OM called every few hours while I was driving just to make sure we were ok.

How can I get H to understand that that kind of stuff is important to me. I like to be cared for and cared about.

This is going to be harsh. But it is also the truth.

First, if you really sat down and genuinely thought about it, I would be willing to bet that your OM did not actually meet ALL of your emotional needs. I would be willing to go out on a ledge and say that he was meeting the needs that your husband was challenged with. I would also like to remind you that there was a time that your husband met all of your emotional needs, otherwise you wouldn't have entered into the sacred bond of marriage with him. So, stop imagining the sex, the recreational companionship, the affection, and the conversation with your OM and think about what you are really saying. Because, and I will tell you this with a very large amount of conviction - if you were giving your husband the time you give your OM, your husband would be in a much better position to provide these needs. The fact is, your affair, with the amount of physical time and mental energy you give to it, strips most of your husband's ability to provide it. The very fact that you had an affair, or are having one now, leaves your husband at a huge disadvantage.

Second, as with most people who have commited adultery that I have listened to and heard from, your "plea for help" is still all bout you. You, and the action of most adulterers, is plainly narcissitic and your desire is simply self-fulfillment. I find it uncanny that your post says nothing about your husbands feelings, except for the fact that he "wants to work on our marriage". The rest is about you. Get a grip. Your marriage will not survive, and, if you were to leave your husband for this OM, your relationship with your OM will also die a miserable death if you don't stop the one single thing that is primarily at issue here - YOUR SELF-CENTERED WORLD. It's fine if your single, but the very meaning of marriage is a promise of dedication to a lifelong partnership. You have failed at your promise, and without serious changes in yourself, you will fail any others that your embark upon.

Third, be very, VERY grateful that your husband is willing to put any amount of effort into your marriage right now. And be thankful that he chooses to still stand by your side. As a BS, I can tell you first hand how hard it is to be able to do just that.

So, back to your question. How do you get over your OM? Develop a conscience. Realize that marriage is about a partnership. Understand that all is not going to be fun or smooth sailing in marriage, and there will be times that it gets REALLY hard. Remember that you made a commitment to yourself, your husband, and your marriage when you said "I do". And most importantly, get out of the mindset that the only happiness that matters is your own and correct the weaknesses that would allow you to betray your spouse and your marriage. Forget the OM, forget the bs about your emotional needs, and get on with it. Otherwise, do yourself and your husband a favor and end the marriage. Nobody, husband or wife, deserves to be manipulated, disenfranchised, or deceived in life by the one person who promised them the opposite. Nobody deserves your unbelievable selfishness.

Zen,

You said earlier that your focus was on the kids and home schooling. You also stated that you had/have a temper problem. You really never mention any focus on your H other than to state people have told you, that you need to be a devoted W.

Then you end a post with
And I would bet really good money, your H would same thing about you. I would be good money he wants to be cared for and cared about. Arguing, fits of temper, focus on the kids don't accomplish one bit. You two could have had a great sex life, although I don't know how, and still this marriage would be a mess.

It has been my observation that when someone doesn't want to be around someone they used to love, there is a reason. And that reason is often based on sound facts, even if it is covered up with all sorts of other stuff. You stated that your H wanted a vacation from you. That tells me YOU have some big issues to address in addition to the A.

I am not saying he is perfect. I am saying you BOTH need to make changes. Since you are here and asking advice, my advice is that YOU change and see if you can give him some of the very thing you crave. Read about needs even take the EN quiz as if you were him, and see what you learn.

God Bless,

JL

Hi Zen!

Welcome to the world of the wayward where the marital re-write is all about how about how BAD the BS has been, how inconsiderate and unfulfilling the M was, and how the knight-in-shining-armor OP (who just happens to be someone of such low moral character that he would engage in an affair with a married woman) came in during your hour of need and swept you off your feet!

BARF!

Look, noone is perfect...no marriage is perfect...bad things happen to good people all of the time (deaths in the family, illness of children, etc), but what YOU chose to do is not the answer to any of those problems. You will not convince anyone here (even a FWW like me) that the MAN YOU MARRIED is some horrible monster who really deserved this due to the fact that HE DIDN'T MEET YOUR NEEDS! Actually, a more ACCURATE portayal is that you BOTH contributed to a less-than-happy-and-fulfilling M and then YOU decided to cheat...because you thought YOU deserved to be happy above all others in your life...no matter WHAT the consequences.

First of all, no matter how cold he was to you for whatever reason, it did not give you the right to seek comfort, companionship, and romance with another man. OWN THAT FACT! You could have called up a counselor, sought out this site sooner (which you had no trouble finding after your betrayal), read some books and tried to find a way around the wall that was between you...not to mention FIX YOURSELF and the issues that you brought to the table that created the condition of your M.

Countless things you could have done...but you didn't!

SO...now you get to try to pick up the pieces of the mess you have made, quit pining over your OM (who, BTW is NOT you assholemate, no matter what you believe right NOW), and put your husband and your children FIRST in your life. If your children are "happy" that he is gone and the fighting has stopped, guess what?? YOU are as much to blame for them feeling that way as your husband. Each of you is 50% responsible for the state of the M pre-A, but YOU AND YOU ALONE are responsible for the A.

So, put your warped wayward paintbrush away, because we really are NOT interested in the "way things were" through YOUR eyes right now. YOUR eyes have a big cloud of FOG in front of them and you cannot even see the canvas. If it was all so awful and he was such a jerk, then why hasn't he filed for D? Why is he still willing to work things out?

After saying all THAT, I will say that the "way things were" probably WERE pretty dismal and so you BOTH have work to do if you want to have the M that you both seek. I would be sure to start reading ALL THAT YOU CAN on this website, realize the level of pain you have inflicted on your husband, your children and yourSELF, and start apologizing to everyone involved. That includes your church support system (and be sure to throw in a HUGE THANK YOU to them for helping your husband in HIS TIME OF NEED!). Then tell your H that you have a plan for the two of you to have a better M than you ever thought possible.

Put down the weaponry and learn to be HUMBLE!!

Look I thought that our marriage was just as good as anyone else's. It was H who never wanted to be married. Believe me he does feel this way. When we met with out Pastor for counseling it was H that said he only married me for convience, he had no place to live at the time and we were living together and the church said he either needed to get his own place or we needed to get married. I got married because I wanted security and someone to take care of me.

I know I have issues and I am working on them with a counselor and through prayer counseling. Believe me I feel horrible about myself and my decisions and I am trying to improve.

Still blaming your husband I see.

I hope a few more posts from FWW's can wipe those thoughts from your head with a MB 2x4 because as a BH your posts make me ill!

I said the same thing...it was my justification for my affair. And it is a steaming pile of BS. Doesn't really matter one way or another how the marriage came about. The fact is that you ARE married (for 11 years, mind you!) and there is no justification or excuse that makes it okay for you to have an affair.

It doesn't matter that he didn't want to get married in the first place.

It doesn't matter that he likes it when you go out of town.

I'll bet it didn't bother you for the first 11 years that you knew your husband "only got married for convenience" or that you only got married "to have somebody take care of you"...it wasn't until you were having an affair that these became convenient excuses for you....

It's called REWRITING MARITAL HISTORY...

Every wayward does it. Don't say you aren't doing it...that you are stating facts...yada, yada, yada. Been there, done that, have the T-shirt.

Stop rewriting history. You're not going to sell it to anyone here...because EVERY SINGLE AFFAIR has the same elements. A little rewritten history, a little justification with some blame thrown in for flavor. It's NEVER the wayward's fault. It always gets blamed (one way or another) on the betrayed spouse. Your situation is not special. You don't feel any more deeply than anyone else here. Everybody thinks that their affair partner is the only one that really understands them.

Read the books....you'll see that your situation is just as special as the millions of others out there....in fact, there are threads on this site that deal with the "wayward script"...because every wayward has exactly the same excuses and says exactly the same things...word for word. It's quite humorous once you get past the disgust.

(p.s. I was a wayward wife...now a FWW. I've been there. It's embarrassing to find out you're just like everybody else, but it helps clear the fog)

You know I was just talking to my H about what you guys were saying and he wants me off this site. When I told him what I said he thought I was being kind. His version of our first 11 years is worse than mine. I am not rewriting history to justify my A. We are trying to find out how to create a good marriage when there was no foundation to beging with. Have others done this? Like he said he is not hurting so much from the A as from all the bad stuff that happened in the years before.

Zen,

Read the Basic Concepts; check out the articles and some of the Q&A columns.

Look at the questionnaires. There are several that you can use to identify the Emotional Needs of each of you as well as getting a handle on Love Busters, those things you do to make each other NOT feel loved and cherished.

If you learn about the Marriage Builders methods and apply them to your marriage, it will improve.

And just so you know, folks have gone pretty easy on you so far. Nobody has called you any names, told you you were stupid or any of the stuff that usually happens on internet forums. Your beliefs and ideas have come under scrutiny but no one has attacked you. They have told you that you are/were wrong, but that is not a personal attack and believe me, it could be a lot worse.

My guess is that neither you nor you husband have read any of the basic concepts, or at least you don't understand them very well, you have not examined the Q&A columns regarding infidelity or looked the the Questionnaires. The people around here get pretty passionate about marriage as some of them have spent years trying to rescue theirs from a cheating spouse. And frankly, everything you have said attempting to mitigate your adultery has been heard by almost everyone on this site before, not just here, but from our own spouses, who were cheating at the time and attempting to make what they were doing acceptable behavior.

And that is exactly what everyone has been trying to get through to you. All you are saying seems to be attempting to make your affair something acceptable within a marriage. It removes the blame for cheating from you and attempts to place it on others, mainly your husband.

While your marriage might have been the worst on the planet and it may have been a marriage that should have been ended years ago, there is nothing in any marriage that makes adultery right. Infidelity is wrong in all cases, not just some of them. If your marriage is bad, you can fix it or end it, but cheating, lying and going outside of the marriage to have Emotional Needs met by someone else is NOT what honest, committed, loving spouses do.



And if your husband thinks we should lay off of you and doesn't want you to seek help here, we understand and you should go with our blessing, but until he has looked at the site himself and not through the filter of what you have told him, then he might be missing an opportunity to make your marriage one that would make you both happy for many years to come.

And one of the reasons everyone is focusing exclusively on you and your actions and not your husband's is that you are here and he is not. We cannot give you advice on what to do to make him be any different because the only person you have any control over is yourself. It is your actions you can control, just as it was your choice to commit adultery and your choice to blame your husband for your choice to cheat. We can't give your husband advice about what he should do until he shows up here, but since you are here and you can only change YOU and not him, any advice you receive will entail what you should change in yourself.

If you look at who has posted to you so far, it has been mostly FWWs and a few easy going people who just love to help others. They have been hard on you because every single one of them, by their own reckoning, was saying exactly the same things you have been saying and in some cases they were saying it not very long ago. LaLa and Cathy were not many months ago saying exactly the same things you have been saying and they got beat up a whole lot worse than you have been so far. The reason they even jumped into the conversation was because they were you a short few weeks in the past. They heard the same stuff you are saying coming from their own lips and they know that it was all smoke and no flame.

You see, if it looks, smells and steams like it just came from a male of the domesticated bovine species of herbivore, it is probably bovine excrement and somebody is gonna say it's bullsh!t.

If Mrs W shows up, she'll really slap you silly.

The betrayed husbands who are now divorced because of their wives cheating or whose wives are still actively pursuing other men and in some cases have gotten pregnant by other men could show up and you'd really get an your money's worth.

Mark

G-R-E-A-T post Marky, as usual!!!


ROTFLMAO!!!! Yep, yep!!

Zen...put your big girl panties on and get to work fixing your M. Tell your H to come here and READ your thread and he will agree with US, I guarantee it. I'm sure he's got plenty of work to do as well, but YOU are the wayward and YOU are the one that is HERE. Therefore, you are the one we are going to try to talk some sense into...and honestly, until you change your tune, your M doesn't have much of a chance anyways. You need to show him the way back home...not the other way around. Once you do that, you'll have a starting point.

I seem to be back here. I'm an "old timer" MBer who's been away for a while.

I'm also an FWW who had an 18 month PA from 2002-2003. I've been there done that for just about everything. I even started up the A again (for 2 weeks) after 2 years NC (while I was on MB). That was 2 years ago now but I know people here have long memories.

I'm VERY happily recovered with my H and my M now. If any WW's want to talk, I'd be very happy to listen.