Thank you for your suggestions.
But, Even my mom thinks my WH has been out of love with me since his first A 6 years ago. She believes that after an A is really hard to fall back in love with the spouse (my dad was a serial cheater so I guess she must talk from experience) and we all know that that is true unless you apply MB principles to your M.
But even to that my mom thinks that you are forcing the matter and that after a person cheated twice I should tell people that..he cheated twice and that he has it in him...and no one should put up with that. I guess she does not want me to end up like her, married to a man who never really loved her.
blessing

Atena, I know that it is hard when everyone around you are saying these things to you. They are looking out for you. Only you can make the decision on what you want to do. You KNOW that it IS possible to recover a marriage after infidelity. You KNOW that you two didn't do it right the first time around. All you can do now is focus on YOUR healing.

I know that this is hard. It is hard for me. I had a happy day for the first time yesterday and it was also the first time that I had cried over WH in a week and a half. I let myself cry and afterwards I felt better. It takes a long time for personal recovery. Even if your WH were to come back to you, you would want to be personally recovered so you would set the bar HIGH so you would have a slim chance at a FR. That's what I believe anyways. You need to get yourself strong. And the beauty about it is, of your WH doesn't come home, you will be strong enough for it to not matter.

Take care and focus on healing you. When you know that you are having a down day, seek out things that will make you happy and avoid the things that will make you sad, even if that means not talking to people you will hear these things from. Maybe you need to set some boundaries with people in regards to what you want to hear right now. You have it in you, you just need to uncover it.

Channel some of MelodyLane, Pepperband, Hope, Not, Neak, or Lil and you will be just fine.

Yes, I know what you mean. I am looking forward to a happy day. It will come, I am sure.
It is important I grow strong because as time goes by I need to be able to walk on my two feet and realize my H is gone. I think for some reason, I still imagine him by my side. That is crazy, but true. I have not fully detached and realized he is gone and he is no husband to me any longer.
I can't imagine him falling off love of OW any time soon. I remember when we were first in love, those feelings lasted and then something else came into play, our son, trust, etc.. and we were together 20 years.
I am a firm believer that these A that last more than one year are those that are harder to die because they develop into something more.
blessing

I don't analyze why one affair lasts longer than another and why some seem to die at exposure, I just know that it is what it is. It really doesn't do any good for you to analyze his A. There are a few facts about affairs that hold true no matter how long they last. My grandmother married her OM when I was an infant. I always knew that he wasn't my grandfather. They were both raging alcoholics. My grandmother, during a HUGE fight, after she became sober, hit her OM in the head with a cast iron frying pan and he fell down the stairs. She thought he was dead. He wasn't, he woke up with a terrible headache. No one accept him in our family. He was always an outcast. They had a HORRIBLE marriage. 6 months after my grandmother died, her OM died.

What we know about affairs is that they are based on lies and deceit. Even the ones that survive are horrible. Waywards are not relationship material. The "relationships" they have aren't healthy ones. I choose something better.

I don't know if this will help you in your recovery but I think of it as if my WH died when I started Plan B. I just pretend that he is gone, what would my life look like? I would still have to get up and go to work. I would still have to take care of my kids. Life would limp along for a while as I grieved. I would some day feel better. I hope this helps you.

Atena, you can email Dr Harley your questions and he will answer them on this radio show, which you can listen to online every day. You also get a free book. Go check out the radio link.

hugs!

If he brodcasts from MN then I am 7 hours ahead. At what time is the radio show? and is his email on the MB site?
blessing

atena, that happy day is not going to ever come unless you take some steps to effect it. It can't come against your will. And right now you are preventing that day from coming by clinging to a dead body. You do this by watching him from afar every day. You are triggered every day you see him at school and I suspect you try to get glimpes at the apartment, don't you?

That is doing nothing but hurting you, my friend. It does nothing to get your husband back but does everything to keep you enmeshed in his life from the outside looking in. As long as you are doing that, you can't focus on making your life great.

Remember what we talked about once? Can you envision yourself with a man who loves and respects you? Who would never dream of having female friends? Who made you the most important thing in his life? You can have that, atena. You don't have to sit around and pine for a miserable life with your wayward husband.

You can say to atena: "I have decided I want better for me. I have made a decision to never be a crumb snatcher of life again. I will raise my standards and never settle for less."

You are pining for a dead corpse. A life of misery where you were not valued. You diminish your value as a person by pining for crumbs, atena.

Go to the MB radio show link at the top of the page. You will send the email to jharley@marriagebuilders.com. I think you would get the radio show at 8:00 pm your time, since it is at 1:00 MN time. Also, if you miss it, they rebroadcast it for 23 hours until the next show, so you don't have to miss it!

Are you saying that I pine for crumbs because my WH will never love me again and never has?
What is wrong with me then that he is able to love other women and not me?
blessing

I say this as someone who KNOWS you and knows that you are a very valuable person. You are pretty, smart, witty, funny, warm and loving. You deserve much better than what you have been treating yourself to.

You wait for your husband to come back. But you forget that he is not acceptable as he is. You would not accept him back as he is, atena! He would not be a suitable husband because he is so wayward.

He does not meet your standards. Because of this, you have the right to reject him and move on.

He doesn't love other women. He uses them. He is toxic to any woman because he is wayward. And yes, you are pining for crumbs. There is nothing there. It is not your fault that he does not value women. Not your fault, not your problem.

The bottom line is that YOU cannot value him as he is. He is wayward. He is toxic.

I agree that he is toxic and that he is so far gone that I doubt he truly cares about OW. As far as I could tell when I was still investigating, he is using her to get rides, to get sex and for company. And I am sure he keeps a wondering eye.

This is what I have been doing recently to move on:
-I finally finished my master degree, yeheeeeee
-I vacationed with my son in the states for 3 weeks and we only once talked about WH and was very briefly
-Every time someone begins to tell me about WH I stop them and say: please, I am not interested in what he does, we have been separated for a year now.
-I do not inquire about him
-I rarely see him at school and when I do I turn my head towards the nearest wall. I do not register any emotion presence (and believe me, my heart used to beat fast and I would become all red)
-I no longer observe him from afar when he has lunch
-If I go to the apartment and run into OW I have the same reaction as when I ran into WH. Total indifference and no emotions
I have been practicing this only for 2 weeks, but it is already working well. I reached a point that doing the above was the only way to have a decent day and not one where every minute was taken by thoughts of my WH and OW.
I am not saying I am not hoping he comes back, however, I would NOT take him back as he is and he will have to show me a dramatic shift of personality and values and be willing to do xy and z with MB in order to R the M.
I am a family person and love my son and would like to rebuild a M according to family values and love and joy.
However, I am fully aware that my WH, as he is and as he has been for many years now, is not the right person for me and for my values.
He has no integrity and has a huge sense of entitlement. He is addicted to thrills and teen age love and has a lot of growing up to do. He hurts people, knows he is doing it and can still walk with his head high just as if he is doing something perfectly normal.
I know I deserve better, but 20 years together and lots of goods stuff are hard to cancel. But I am on a serious quest now and once I put something in my head I can be very determined. And I have finally put it in my head that what goes on in my WH life I do not care about. I do not want to know and would not want to be part of his life right now even if he asked me to.
thank you for your support!
blessing

atena,

Sounds like you have a good list of priorities. Keep it up and you will find yourself feeling better with each passing day.

You will still think about WH, you will still think about what could be if your WH would just wake up and get it. Heck, I still have thoughts about WxH waking up to humility; it would be great for my son if his dad got it, so that he could better advise his son in the travails of life.

Plan B helped me to move on, it helped me to recover from the destruction, and even now continues to help me maintain my sanity as a single mom, because I do not have interaction with WxH. We ONLY discuss DS--that's all.

I hope that you find peace in Plan B because it can do wonders for you.

Understand that this will take you a lot longer to get through with all of the contact you have. Every time I even think about my WH, it triggers a bunch of thoughts and feelings and the what ifs. That is why I try to impress on people so often to try to have NO CONTACT. Give yourself some time to get through this and KNOW that you WILL get better. Just make some changes whenever you notice you need a nudge. Small changes really do add up to a lot when you add it all together.

thank you!
I am truly determined to be as dark as possible. I was doing it all wrong but was not ready to make the resolution I made now.
blessing

Atena, just stopping in to say Hi and tell say you can do this.

We both see our waywards at work and have the dishonor of seeing the OW also. Schoolbus gave me the best advice that when I see either of them to smile (not at them) and if I am with someone to laugh, lift my head up. It confuses them by confidence.

Congrats on getting your masters. whoa whoa. I got mine 4 years ago and it is a great achievement.

What now?

atena, I found a post written by Dr Harley over on the weekend forum to a woman in a similar position:

"There's nothing more that you can do to encourage him to do the right thing.
All you're left with now is to try to protect yourself from future suffering.
And that means having absolutely nothing to do with your husband, possibly for the rest of your life."



Just repeating ...

And, for some reason I think that when the WS leaves you for OP he then becomes so focused on making the A work that he forces himself to see in OP only the few the qualities she might have, because if he were to see the reality of it he would have to admit he made a mistake. So I think WS work hard to keep their fantasy going even when the fantasy starts to crumble. Had they put the same amount of effort in the M, they would have a very happy M.


I know for a fact that the WS tries to make us look unreasonable to the eyes of family and friends by saying that out total NC with them is ridiculous and it would be so much easier on everyone, especially the kids, if we remained friends.
Well I ain't doing that!
blessing

Atena,
Look back over the last two weeks at your posts. You seem to be much more focused on yourself this week, than wallowing in what is to come of WH and OW's relationship. I know you probably still think on it often, but your priorities seem to be shifted to healing yourself. This is fantastic....the lack of contact with WH and OW is doing it's magic. Keep it up