MrsZonie:

I have read many similar statements like this before from many posters. I simply MUST ask you (and other other WWs/former-WWs out there who have insight) this question:

How is it that suddenly one day you "just don't love your H anymore" and "are convinced that I could never love him again" (probably with little to any real discussion about it with your H beforehand)...and then later (probably after the A ends/is ending) you suddenly realize that you can/do "love him again"? WTF??

I know about the "fog" and may be I am just another 'stupid man', but CAN SOMEONE EXPLAIN TO ME HOW THE HECK THIS IS POSSIBLE??? I really want to know...

For me it didn't happen suddenly. I lost love for my DH over a long period of time (I'm talking years) and built a lot of resentment in its place. Prior to my A I was setting myself up financially to leave my DH. Once I ended the A the love didn't miraculously return. DH was not even aware I had an A, we started working on our marriage and meeting each other's needs. Once we started doing that my love started to grow for him. It was at that point I knew I needed to confess in order to recover from the damage he had no idea even happened.

LC

Thank you for your reply.

Love grows when both parties meet (and are willing to have met) their respective ENs. Feelings follow actions...something most WSs fail to recognize or accept to their own detriment. I'm sure for a long time you "pulled away" and were "closed off" to having your ENs met by your H--certainly during the A and probably for quite a while before. So...

What prompted you to decide and want "to work on your marriage" and "meet each other's ENs"?

I'd like to hear how other WW WH's answer this as well. Perhaps for a little self understanding.

For me the feeling of not loving my wife didn't happen over night. It took years of disappointment in our relationship, as last choice said. The disappointment ballooned into anger, resentment, frustration, a breakdown of self-respect - a host of negative emotions that masked any positive feelings I might have had. And made it nearly impossible for her to meet my EN's - simultaneously pushing me further from meeting HER EN's.

So the "I don't love her anymore" took a lot of time to evolve for me (began long before my A), but she never knew how I felt until after I began "ending" our marriage (months after the start of the A) - to her my "lack of love" was sudden, just kinda dropped out of the sky. I described the feeling to her as "I still love you, but I'm not IN love with you anymore."

Unfortunately this made the imaginary divorce easy in my mind - I'm not in love with her anymore, the marriage is (will be) over anyway... recipe for the start of an A?

Regaining the feeling of love... that is a tough topic. I recognize now that I've always loved my wife, but the love has evolved into what most people say is something deeper, stronger, more meaningful.

skald:

Thanks again...I'm assuming that you admitted the A, it is over, and you are working together to re-connect (with some success it seems).

What prompted you to "re-engage" with her after having "lost your love" for you your W over a number of years? Was it the A ending? What???

The A is recently ended, by my choice. We are still in the early stages of overcoming the A (I've only had NC with the OW for a little over 1 week) - so we have a long way to go to get over the mountain, but at least we are standing in the foothills.

Simply put, I woke up.

I realized (with my W's help as she was receiving guidance from this site and these forum members) that the events of the past few years didn't follow a logical order - something was out of place, which I'd known all along but didn't stop to consider.

So I woke up, stepped out of the fog (well, started stumbling away from the fog) and started re-examining our life together. What I found was a solid foundation to build from. A flawed foundation, but something that if we laid bare we could build from. I was... skeptical of our potential for success. So I slowed down(?) the A. I took steps (unguided) that I thought would help ME understand as I backed away from the A. Ultimately I read the Basic Concepts on this site, which put a lot of things (some of my behavior included) into perspective. And I realized that my attempts to slow down the A, and steps to help me were doomed to failure.

I ended the A, initiated NC with the OW so that I could work on my relationship with my W, and to organize my thoughts - blow away some of the fog and see with my own eyes if you will. It wasn't until this point that I realized the love that we shared is genuine, if not full of the "feel goods" that I missed from our early relationship.

Of course, the difficulty now is repairing the underlying issues that caused me to drift away in the first place, WHILE working on the immediate issue that I caused by the A.

Well, hello again, Skald. Just happened to peek in on this thread tonight and found your post.

A week or so ago, I warned you that we would call you on any remaining "fog" you might evidence, but it seems you're a quick study and we don't need to. Kudos to you and d. You sound like a special couple, and I wish you renewed love and a long life of happiness.

Just have to wonder, as well as you are doing in the short period of NC, whether OW is still intruding? If not, how have you prevented it? If so, how have you handled it? Your answers could be very helpful to others.

Wish you both a :happythanksgiving:

Right Here Waiting

RHW,

:happythanksgiving: to you too!

drgnfly

Not to hijack the thread but... nice to see you again RHW.

So far we've done the obvious. Changed my cell #, blocked her from sending me emails and made my co-workers aware of likely caller-id #'s she'd call from. They are behind us 100% and are ... excited... at the opportunity to have words with the OW if she attempts to call me at work.

Small steps, but so far they are working. She did attempt to call my office a few times last week I was told, but drgnfly and I both took the day off, so we were at home together at the time

Skald911

Skald & drgnfly,

Happy that both of you are feeling so optimistic after so much pain. Stay the course, and be prepared for some bumps. It's rarely a straight-up trajectory.

Hope to bump into you again along the way.

t/j over!

RHW

This is 100% true, I did pull away and close off from him. It got to the point I couldn't stand to be in the same room with him and I was very, very mean to him.


The short answer is, reality. I was over my head in fog, but must have had some rational thinking fighting for me. All of a sudden I started to really see the lies my FOM's was telling me. At the same time I was starting to realize my DH wasn't as bad of a guy as I thought he was. I started to imagine what my life would be like without him in it, started to realize there was much more to him and to our relationship than I had given credit for. It wasn't long after this realization that I told my FOM I couldn't do what we were doing.

The plan at that point was I was going to take it to the grave and never tell my DH about the A. Well, that didn't work so well for me and I had darn near close to a nervous breakdown over the whole thing.

Below I will post a link to my story which you may find helpful. The short of it is this. I decided I was going to give our marriage one last shot, only I didn't tell my DH I was doing anything different. I started reading book after book about marriage, communication, and infidelity and started applying what I learned. Things started improving a little for us.

6 months after I ended the A my DH had a business trip he was taking to Hawaii and he asked me to go with him, alone. We had not been on a trip without our children in 13 years. Before we left I had decided if we went on this trip and had nothing to talk about except our girls then I was done and I was leaving.

Much to my surprise we bonded in an unbelievable fashion. To this day I refer to this as our marriage saving trip.

Once home we kept moving in the right direction with our relationship only he still did not know about the A. It took me another 8 month to confess. The total time between the time I ended the A and confessed was 15 months.

The whole story, including my DH's side, is here if you are interested in reading it: LC's and Docp's story You will have to scroll down a little. Ace was kind enough to combine part 1 and part 2 of my side of the story and my DH's version follows mine. His username is Docp.

As you will see if you read our story I had a major mental breakdown over all the events and every bit of it I hid from my DH trying to protect my secret.

LC

I'm a BS, but I actually understand this somewhat. Pre d-day, I didn't think I was "in love" with WstbxH. Our M wasn't perfect but it wasn't horrible. My major ENs had gone unmet for over a decade. Initially I tried to communicate my feelings but he either didn't take me seriously or didn't care (in retrospect it was probably the latter). I found my own ways to adapt and between my career and my hobby, found a fairly rewarding life. The only thing really missing was a loving, affectionate marriage which I had simply come to accept was not in the cards for me. I probably even grieved this for a time but in the last 2 or 3 years before d-day, I had accepted things for the way they were. There were no "romantic" feelings left for him, though I certainly cared for him and our household was generally happy and peaceful. Funny, it never once occured to me to cheat.

Given all that, one would think I'd be relieved come d-day - as if I'd been handed a get out of jail free card. But honestly, I was happy and fulfilled with life in general and I didn't see it that way at all. Though I didn't feel romantic love for him, I knew I still loved him and I still considered us to be a family. It still hurt like heck and still does sometimes.

So I understand the sentiment. What I don't understand is the action of having an affair. Just like I can understand why someone might be tempted to shoplift something in a store - it's attractive, you want it or possibly you even need it but can't afford it - but how many people actually do it??? Or am I just that naive??

Skald:

What caused you to "wake up"? You mentioned that the A ended (apparently by your choice) and that your W helped by applying and leading you to MB's principles.

What happenned first? Did the A have to end (or nearly end) before you were emotionally open to to truly LISTEN to your W? Or were you able to do that beforehand and make the concious, active decision to end the A because of it?

Tabby,

Every WS will (as part of the fog rationalizations) say:
"I have been unhappy for years"
"I have no feelings left for BS"
"I have given all I can and tried everything"
"Our M is dead and has been for a long time"
"You (BS) made me feel this way -- I'm dead inside"
"I love you but I'm not 'in love' with you"
"I can't and will never get 'my feelings back' for BS"
"I'm happy with OP and I deserve to be happy" ....etc, etc.

Often the WS indeed DOES have legitimate complaints about the BS and the M. But they then mix 1 part truth (their understandable hurts & frustrations), 1 part unreal exaggeration ("nothing can ever make it better"), 1 part romanticsm ("my feeling must lead me"), and 1 part self-entitled addictive fantasy ("OP is my soulmate and only he/she can make me as happy as I deserve") and WHOILA!!! .... the A is indulged in and justified.

I would bet that most WSs don't "have it in them to occur to cheat". 90% of them will tell you that they were not "not looking for a relationship--it just happenned". They simply do not realize or accept their own role in ALLOWING and FURTHERING it to happen and the false sense of 'spontaneity' and 'serendipity' of the A only serve to reinforce in their own foggy mind that the A is "accidental", "special", and "meant to be". So, NO, you are NOT "naive", the WS IS--he/she actually convinces themselves that the A and the OP are "sent by God" to rescue them from their unhappiness, discontent, and lonliness. They almost always discover in time that these fantasies are untrue, never were true, and were easily forseeable long ago.

[Back to your original question]
Since virtually every WS feels (as you did as well) that they have irreversibly "fallen out of love" with their S and the M is irretrievably "hopeless", one must wonder...

Why did you not just leave your S and get a D to be on your own?
Why did you stay in a M that was so miserable?
Why did you not find happiness as a single person if you couldn't have it in your M?
Why did you not express these sentiments LOUD & CLEAR to your S BEFORE?

ANSWER: Because none of the justifications are anything more than PARTLY TRUE and the A is a fantasy escape excuse for leaving the M rather than dealing with problems in a healthy and productive way.

SD - Good insight


This one really astounds me. I am shaking my head as I realize how right you are. FOG does not begin to describe how anyone could ever venture along this thought pattern, when nothing could be further from reality. To me this borders on delusional and I am flummoxed that a person can be so deceived. How is this possible?

Frank Grunzburg suggests that no matter the justification given or the reason why expressed there will never be an acceptable answer as to why an affair happened.

This is because there is no acceptable answer. There is NOTHING that can make something so wrong and hurtful an acceptable choice, especially to the BS.

The reasons given for having an affair are after the fact justifications and nothing more. If they were in fact the real REASONS, the marriage would have been abandoned or repaired long before an affair.

I think some of what the WS experiences that makes them think these clearly fog-laden thoughts leading up to and during the affair has to do with a mistaken idea of what both marriage and love are supposed to be. Love is thought to be a feeling. It is believed by many to be a magical or mystical thing that merely happens to us. It is kismet, not chemistry.

To anyone with this view of love, when the feeling they describe as "love" is no longer present, it means that the rest is invalid as well. To a person of this type of purely romantic belief system, loss of the feeling means that this person cannot be "THE ONE" because "THE ONE" would continue to foster those feelings without any effort from them at all since "love" is something they experience rather than something they do.

To these folks it is easier to have been wrong about WHO was right than to be wrong about WHAT is (right or) WRONG. Finding the right person is more important than being the right person and choosing the right mate is more important than being a committed and honest mate.

Mark

Hmm. I'll have to think about this one a bit and provide a better answer later. Short on time for now. Perhaps when/if I get to writing down the story/events leading up to and through the A.

Short answer is I was deep into the A when I woke up. I was much closer to ending my M than the A - in fact, had left my W and home the day before I even confessed the A. And listening to my W's attempts to recover/repair our M was... frustrating. For now lets say that I had no interest in repairing the M, and anything my W said was "wrong".

The Long answer will require a bit of background about the kind of person I am, which lead me to question the decisions I'd made and events that lead me into the A. So, coming soon...?

Edit: My wife commented on reading this that it sounds like I was leaving my M to pursue the OW... something I'd adamantly denied. So for clarification when I said "I was much closer to ending my M than the A - in fact, had left my W and home the day before I even confessed the A" I did not mean I was leaving for the A - I was leaving for the faults in our M and was clouded more than ever by the fog. From the start of the A I had no intention of it becoming a serious relationship, and never believed it would become a long-term relationship. - Skald911

These very same questions, and especially the answer, went through my mind as part of my waking up process. Spot on SDCW.

BCBoy:

Oh, yes sir, you are so correct in being flummoxed by this. The "thinking" (and I use that term very sarcastically) is NOT LOGICAL but ENTIRELY EMOTIONAL...i.e. driven by romantic "feelings" of fantasy. I give you a quote from "Private Lies" by Dr. Frank Pittman:


"They (WSs) tell me they have gone through all of this for a quick thrill or a furtive moment of romance. Sometimes they tell me they don't remember making the decision that tore apart their life: "It just happened." ... From the outside looking in, it is insane. How could anyone risk everything in life on the turn of a screw? ... Surely the craziest and most destructive form of infidelity is the temporary insanity of falling in love. You do this, not when you meet somebody wonderful (wonderful people don't screw around with married people) but when you are going through a crisis in your own life, can't continue living your life, and aren't quite ready for suicide yet. An affair with someone grossly inappropriate—someone decades younger or older, someone dependent or dominating, someone with problems even bigger than your own—is so crazily stimulating that it's like a drug that can lift you out of your depression and enable you to feel things again. Of course, between moments of ecstasy, you are more depressed, increasingly alone and alienated in your life, and increasingly hooked on the affair partner. Ideal romance partners are damsels or "dumsels" in distress, people without a life but with a lot of problems, people with bad reality testing and little concern with understanding reality better.

Romantic affairs lead to a great many divorces, suicides, homicides, heart attacks, and strokes, but not to very many successful remarriages. No matter how many sacrifices you make to keep the love alive, no matter how many sacrifices your family and children make for this crazy relationship, it will gradually burn itself out when there is nothing more to sacrifice to it. Then you must face not only the wreckage of several lives, but the original depression from which the affair was an insane flight into escape.

People are most likely to get into these romantic affairs at the turning points of life: when their parents die or their children grow up; when they suffer health crises or are under pressure to give up an addiction; when they achieve an unexpected level of job success or job failure; or when their first child is born—any situation in which they must face a lot of reality and grow up. The better the marriage, the saner and more sensible the spouse, the more alienated the romantic is likely to feel. Romantic affairs happen in good marriages even more often than in bad ones."


The strangest (and most utterly illogical) irony of romantic affairs is that the WS's OP is ALMOST NEVER "better" than the BS in any way! In fact, the OP is almost never even close to being "as good" as the BS. It is not like these WSs go skipping off into adultery-land because they have magically met some superior and amazing 'fair princess' or some 'shining knight on a white horse'...that would, even if immoral/unethical, at least be logical.

No, the people they affair with are usually FAR BENEATH the BS, the WS's, and their (former) standards in every way. In terms of someone being "a catch" to the objective, emotionally-healthy, detached observer, these OPs usually fall FAR SHORT in a number of ways:

AGE/MATURITY: women often A with much older user men and men often A with much younger immature women
LOOKS/TASTE: it is amazing to watch these WSs with OP who cannot in any stretch of the imagination be called "physically attractive" or "classily put-together"
MORALS/ETHICS: obviously someone who cheats and homewrecks WITH someone doesn't have much in the way of moral value...not infrequently, they both are married and are co-cheating & abandoning their marriages
EDUCATION: the WS often cheats with someone who barely made it out of high school or is at least a big "step down"
INTELLIGENCE: (as above)
SOCIO-ECONOMIC: the WS usually A with a "basket case in need of rescue" rather than someone truly who has their "**** together"...a history of job-hopping, un/under-employment, and career under-achievement is the norm
FAMILY VALUES: the OP is often someone who record as a parent leaves a lot to be desired...prior and present emotional/social/financial neglect of children is common...the OP often "has kids" in the biological and superficial sense only
HISTORY/"CITIZENSHIP": the OP often has a shady and checkered past (i.e. "baggage") such as multiple prior marriages, children from multiple partners, a criminal record, civil judgements, dishonorable military discharge, broken family/friendship relationships, etc., etc.
COMPATIBILITIES: the WS & OP usually have little "in common" in terms of values, goals, principles, demographics, upbringing, history, spirituality, social style, and recreational interests...often they only "share" working at the same place or hanging out at the same bar/restaraunt/gym/park/etc. where they met

In general, WSs cheat with seemingly the WORST POSSIBLE CANDIDATES. It has NOTHING to do with "finding someone/something better" than the M/BS, but rather than with addictively latching on to someone crazily "different" who just happens to be available and willing to reciprocate with the WS when they sub-conciously seek attention and validation outside of their marriage and value-system.

I find this very interesting information and NOT true in my situation at all.

I certainly won't get into a comparing game between the 4 of us, but will state things that are fact and not just a matter of opinion. My DH and FOM are both highly educated with similar educational backgrounds (they are both doctors). I am college educated, FOM's W is not. I had no baggage whatsoever, led a very upstanding life and never once were my children neglected in any way shape or form. I find most of what he stated insulting and untrue.

Just based on what I read here I would not read this authors book because it is very far from the truth for my situation and actually makes me a bit angry he would lump people together in such broad categories. I realize he said almost never, or something like that, but....

LC