My husband and I are working on repairing the damage done to our marriage caused by my infidelity. We are working on better communication which is of course difficult at times because of the hurt that was inflicted.

I've done a lot of reading and talking with my therapist about why affairs happen and how couples can recover. I frequently hear that couples who do put in the work have a better marriage because it exposed the problems that led them to that point. My husband's concern is that the best case scenario is only that he might get to a point where he doesn't think about it all the time and he just deals with it when he does. He feels that we'll never get back what we had and doesn't want less. I remain convinced we can fix this and make it better

So, my question. For those of you who made the choice to stay and work on your marriage and were able to make it work, how did it permanantly affect your relationship?

We are 15 years into recovery.
The last 10 years have been really REALLY REALLY great.
The first 5 years still had some hurt feelings on both sides.

No contact helps a lot.
Care and protection of each other and the marriage is essential.
Developing strong empathy muscles is vital.

Today we are so grateful for our marriage.
We love and protect each other daily.

I know it is difficult to appreciate, when you're "in the soup", but in 5-10 years, the recovery really is great.

If you arent on a plan of recovery with a very narrow path, your BH is correct. If in fact you have a plan to recover and affair proof your M then it can be wonderful.
So with that said...Whats the plan so far?

From being from the wife that was cheated on, be sure you give him every truth there is. No matter how hard and scary it may be. He has withheld information from me for almost two years, and I'm two steps away from walking out. Not due to the sex, but because he lied to me about it for so long.

Honesty, Honesty, Honesty.

yup, it's the lies that are the hardest thing to deal with.....just make sure that the answers are to the questions, let the BS decide just how much detail they can deal with. Once you know something you can't unknow it.

sometimes the pictures/movies are worse than the imaginings!

For me, I have enough detail, more than enough thanks, and there are lots of things I prefer not to know. Maybe it's a male female thing I don't know.

I think the reality is that actions speak far louder than words, show how much you want this to work rather than rabbit on about it!!

He should want much more than he had before. It was your old marriage that led to an affair, after all. Going back to the back is NOT what Marriage Builders is all about.


The affair was the most devastating thing that ever happened to my marriage. We recovered IN SPITE of the affair. In SPITE OF the affair, we used this program to restore the romantic love and transform our marriage.


A better tactic would be to focus on restoring the romantic love in your marriage. THAT is the real problem. People who are in love don't have communication problems. This program does have the effect of resolving communication issues, but that is secondary to restoring the romantic love.

You can recover. You can have better.


You can make the relationship anything you want it to be.


It is the choice you have!


SB

I believe this is where my husband is. He's so up and down with what he's feeling....understandably so.....that he's convinced that we could never get back to a place even half as good as what we had before. I'm completely on the other side. I know without a doubt that it will take a lot of hard work, but I'm convinced we could have a much better relationship.

I completely agree with this. We both have to be completely transparent with everything we're doing. No hiding anything.

As far as a particular plan, we're working on that. I've been living with my sister for a little while so once I move back home next week we should be able to figure that out. For now, we've just been talking and seeing each other frequently.

I have been completely open and honest about everything. He has asked for details and I have told him even though I knew this information would probably hurt him. If he feels that it's important enough to know, then I need to tell him.

I know what personal issues led me to my affair and I've been taking the necessary steps to correct those problems. I absolutely want to make my marriage work and have been very clear about that in both my words and actions. I hope he sees that as well.

I know what I didn't like about myself or my spouse in our marriage before and I absolutely believe that we can have a better relationship.

This is what I was hoping to hear. I'm sure it took time and a lot of work, but having a better marriage is worth it. You don't have to be stuck with just barely making it work. You can recover.

I know what personal issues led me to my affair and I've been taking the necessary steps to correct those problems.
Ok a 2x4 for you. Sorry in advance.
The only personal issue I can see that allows an A is boundaries. Yours suck!
Personal issues like low self worth and childhood problems dont cut it.
The environment of you M is not to blame no matter how bad it seemed.
Plain and simple your boundaries let someone other than your spouse fill your EN's. What you need to work on is YOUR BOUNDARIES.And you need to be implementing EXTRAORDINARY PRECAUTIONS.

Inserting.......
You will hear Joyce and I repeat, "there are reasons but no excuses." One of the reasons for an affair is that emotional needs are not being adequately met in marriage, which makes an affair that meets those needs more tempting. But the same thing can be said of some who rob banks. They may be out of work, need money to pay the rent, ask for a loan but are refused by the bank, which makes robbing it more tempting. One reason for the robbery is that the bank refused the loan, but it wasn't the bank's fault that it was robbed. On hindsight, a bank might have helped the robber get the help he needed through social services, but the bank is under no obligation to do so, even though they advertise that it is a "caring bank."

An affair is different from robbing banks in that a couple have promised to be more caring than banks. But the principle is the same. The lack of care by one spouse does not excuse harmful behavior by the other spouse. Even when one spouse absolutely refuses to be affectionate, or to make love, or to talk intimately, or to join in recreational activities with the other spouse, it gives them no right to have those needs met by someone else of the opposite sex in an affair. They have the right to separate until the other spouse meets those needs, or even divorce when it becomes obvious that there will be absolutely no cooperation (there are many who strongly disagree with me on that point). But an affair is so cruel and so painful that nothing any one spouse does (including having an affair themselves) can justify the suffering that an affair causes.

Making a disgraceful act more tempting by someone is no excuse for that person committing the disgraceful act. Besides, in most marriages, there are times when emotional needs are not being met for reasons beyond anyone's control. That's why I recommend extraordinary precautions to help spouses avoid an affair. They are to not allow anyone of the opposite sex to meet their need for affection, or intimate conversation, or recreational companionship, or sexual fulfillment. When those needs are met, they deposit so many love units that you are likely to fall in love with that person, and make you hurt your spouse in the worst way possible. I hope that explanation helps.

Best wishes
Willard F. Harley, Jr.

Obviously my boundaries sucked in this situation. They were always very strong before. I never even smiled at the opposite sex because I didn't want the door opened at all. Unfortunately, I let that that guard down because I found myself in a situation I didn't know how to handle and came to a point that I couldn't bury the issues i'd tried to ignore for so long. As I already said, I know what caused me to let my guard down and make the biggest mistake of my life. That's not an excuse. It's still my responsibility to know myself and make changes and improvements when I recognize that I need to do that. I didn't. I know what happened and what caused it and the work that needs to be put into fixing it.

All i'm really looking for right now is personal experiences of reconciliation or attempts at it. What was it like for the injured party to make that attempt?

There are thousands of threads on this forum you can read to find that.

Typically, people come to this forum saying something like this, knowing what they are looking for, but not knowing what they need. Typically what they need is to think about some things that are uncomfortable to think about. Many people react when experienced and knowledgeable posters bring up these uncomfortable issues, often protesting that they are looking for something else. But it is the ones who put in the hard work of dealing unflinchingly with uncomfortable subjects who end up maturing and recovering their marriages.

What I'm saying is, pay the MOST attention to the posts that make you uncomfortable. Don't reply saying you already know what's being said, or saying you need something else. Just read and soak it in. Most everyone here (whether they were faithful or unfaithful in their marriage) showed up needing some maturing, and needing to listen to some uncomfortable stuff in order to do so.

regretful: I have just copied a post I recently made while venting. I want to echo MelodyLane's comment that there are thousands of posts here that talk about that. And by the way, MelodyLane is someone I literally owe my life to.
Here is my post that I think come's close to explaining what it is like...
But before you read it... Know that despite everything I have written, I have not given up. As my Dad often told me... "It is always darkest before the dawn."

The following is me just getting things up out of my chest and soul. Please allow me to let it out.

So many posters here have experienced the pain of infidelity. The hurt that turns to anger, and sometimes to a self-hatred that boarders on self-harm, the fear of the present, the future. The erasure of anything that was remembered as good and happy and wonderful. We remember falling in love. The first time we �noticed� our spouse, the warmth of their smile, the sound of the first laugh and the lingering joy of that first kiss. Let me tell you about infidelity from the eyes of a victim. You see, I am a two time loser in this circumstance. In fact, outside of marriage, I lost every girlfriend I ever had to someone else. At age 56, here is what I think about today�.
Suzi was 7 and she was recovering from chicken pox when I met her. She lived in the beach cottage across the street from the beach cottage my parents rented for three weeks in the summer of 1963. She could not leave her house and I played checkers with her as she sat inside a screened porch. I was just a little boy, small and extremely thin for my age but we became friends. A week later when she could leave the house I was able to go fishing off a dock with her in a week full of clouds and cool summer air that kept sweatshirts on. Each summer for the next four years we met and played together. She liked baseball and we played endlessly on the sandy beach. By sixth grade we would write to one another during the school year. That last summer I was still a little boy but Suzi had grown up with curves and an outgoing personality and suddenly the teen age boys were asking her to go water skiing and I remember the day I heard her tell one boy �he thought I was his girlfriend.� We never said hello ever again.
In high school on a different stretch of beach I was welcomed into a group of kids who lived by the salt water year round. Me, I was a �summer kid� but they accepted me and we hung around. One day when I was a freshman in high school I asked a girl who was a year older than I to go sailing. On a hot summer day we walked three and one-half miles to go for a day of sailing on a borrowed 12 foot sunfish. We sailed for hours and bought a hamburger for lunch miles away from where we started and then walked home. My �date� was so sunburned that she had to stay inside for four days! We talked on the phone for hours each night that summer and sailed many times. The night before I left to go �home� for school in the fall we held each other standing outside her home for two hours. The letters flew back and forth that winter and the next summer when I returned to the sea shore I worked six days a week in a supermarket. We sometimes walked to a soft ice cream store together in the evening and we played board games. Then, one night I could not get through on her phone. At about ten in the evening I walked a mile to her home. There she was in her driveway with a mutual friend, an older boy with a hot car and the realization that they were kissing in his car with the radio on was hard to swallow. I walked home and spent the balance of the summer working and on days off fishing or doing things with my family.
The next year I met a pretty girl at a high school dance at another school. I asked her to my prom and we had lots of fun. A year later I had my drivers license and we began to go bowling and playing miniature golf on dates. As she prepared for college in a different state (and I did the same), she decided to play the field and we went our separate ways. Only a week later I noticed a mutual friends car parked in front of her house. Such are the pains of growing up that I am sure many here can identify with.
I had fun in college. No girl friend the first two years but a few fun dates. I met a wonderful young woman the next year and we began dating once a week, usually to fraternity parties. I was growing close to her and she me or so I thought. But when I left for a week to do research on a college project I recall driving home all night only to be told the next morning by my roommate that my friend was seen getting high with a young man in a rival fraternity the night before. Though we dated a few more times, it was obvious that she wanted to be �just a friend.� The relationship ended as I graduated college. Out in the real world I moved on with life. I was happy but I missed having a girl friend. In the course of the next year I visited the girl I once had taken to my prom and we began to date. 18 months later when she graduated from college we married. We had three children over the next 11 years. Somewhere during year 12 she became involved with my (at the time) best friend. I did not know. As the frequency of SF dropped to zero over the course of a year I became curious. Eventually, a late night snoop in her pocketbook found pictures in her wallet of my best friend. I went into a deep depression, and when months later I found the courage to ask about it she told me she wanted a divorce, that she was in love and I was asked to leave the house. That was the only way she would consider staying married to me. I listened as she told me what a good lover my best friend was. I listened as she told me she liked to wear the underwear he bought her because �it brought them close when he was not there.� I listened while she told me �his wife never gives him anything � that this OM�s wife was on anti-depressants because her mother had died, and that he was going crazy in frustration when he found my wife who was SO GOOD IN BED. I listened while she told me he liked SF in his car. I listened to her cry that he was everything she ever wanted or needed and that if I were her friend I would understand. Eventually I started to crack. Sometimes she would ask me to �pretend� I was him and she would ask for SF from me while calling his name. I have no idea how I kept my job. I cried often at work. I paid 100% of the bills for the home, her car, her car phone and even took the kids while she went on a secret vacation with her lover. Still, she filed for divorce � my old best friend at this point ran back to his own wife and I had nothing. Feeling guilty for not being good enough I gave her everything including the house which was paid off. The divorce was final and I was broke having giving her (for the sake of the kids) everything.
Two years later I began tentatively to date. A few months later I found a lover. It felt good, it took my mind off things and I was not so lonely. This woman increasingly became agitated. In the middle of the night she would awaken me with her fists striking me. She used razor blades to cut herself. Having been told that she was divorced I learned to my horror that she was still married. At that time I followed her one afternoon only to watch her drive up to a man and throw her arms around him in a deep soul kiss. Shortly there-after I broke off the relationship only to have her climb into my garden apartment in the middle of the night with a hand gun � waking to find her sitting on my bed naked with the gun pointed to her head. I was so frightened that I urinated in my bed. I felt forced to stay in the relationship and two months later I moved 270 miles away in a new job. I was free.
Three years went by. I went through a period of loneliness, and then I tried dating. The first woman I dated seemed nice and fun. An unexpected date cancelation one evening led me to drive by her home. Sure enough there was a man there and I �headed for the hills� and never dated her again. These things happen. Dating has no guarantees and certainly many of us have been through it. I was hardened or so I thought.
At this point I had been divorced for seven years. I was a good Dad and my kids and I vacationed together, I was there for the basketball games, I coached soccer and baseball and I did many a school project with them. I was proud of who I was.
I was lonely�.
Then I met the woman who became my wife. She was recently divorced, outgoing and sweet and very, very naive. We worked together and about 18 months later, she asked me to her mother�s home for a July 4th picnic. I declined even though I thought she was wonderful.
A week later I asked her for a date and we married a year later.
It is no excuse, but long work hours in a different job and a 150 mile a day commute took a toll on us. The stress of my job and my life experience led me to begin to yell a lot at home. I felt I was being taken for granted and I was lonely. My wife repeatedly refused to go out on the weekend with me (we had a young child of her own and she had two boys from her first marriage). We became roommates.
I became resentful of being second, third, fourth or fifth fiddle. Almost on schedule I had an angry outburst about being ignored for the next five years. I worked hard long hours and I focused on the memories of the good times. When my parents died 20 days apart my wife (because of travel distance and �needing to take care of the kids�) did not even come to my mother�s funeral. I was adrift and simply trying to survive. Amazingly, even with my own hurts, I was still in love in my head. I was used to being not good enough with women. It started when I was eleven years old and never stopped.
I took my hurt out with my angry yelling. I think I swore once but mostly I just used volume and occasionally hurtful comments.
I began reading Dr. Harley and began to realize how much my angry outbursts were hurting my marriage. My wife was thoughtless and selfish at times. But she was also gentle and naive and easily hurt. Just yelling upset her for MONTHS. At first, I would think about the movie �My Cousin Vinny.� After all, that is how I grew up in a family like that and Mum and Dad always made up after they yelled at one another. But that is not how my wife reacted.
So when did I realize my wife was involved with other men? I don�t know but I thought about it after I buried my mother alone. I was probably right. But I was in survival mode and work was six days a week (still is) and I did what I could.
Then one day 25 months ago I came home to hear my wife say �I love you� on the phone and she said it with a tone and intonation that is not used for the kids, family or girl friends. My life as I knew it crashed.
I will spare some of the details. Eventually a tape recorder in her car revealed the truth. Months later I was told about one OM. He had died 40 days earlier. He was not the man on my tape recording. Even today that identity though known through other snooping has never been revealed to me by my wife.
I have watched myself end my angry outbursts, I nearly ended my own life in anger at myself for angry outbursts in the past (I blamed the cheating on myself). Of course it helped that my wife told me she had endured terrible verbal abuse. And I now know she rewrote the marital history to justify her behavior. I have struggled with the knowledge that never in my life have I been good enough for a girl or woman. Even today though the intense self hatred is gone I still sort of accept that I am just not good enough to have a woman be faithful to me. I don�t see it as �women� are the problem. I just see it that I am not enough. I have to accept that. I am fighting for my marriage. Fighting to raise one of my children �our eleven year old� free of divorce. And everyday I am reminded of the fact that I am not good enough. Its hard fellow MB�ers.
It is harder than my experiences as a young man in combat.
Here is what infidelity does�.
Rarely does this man care if he lives her dies. I have days when I simply want to take my wife�s hand and put it in the hands of some handsome, wonderful man that she will actually love. I day dream thinking that my eleven year old son might bond to another man (a step Dad) were I to die of a heart attack. I wonder dozens a time each day if my wife is still in an EA or PA with someone from the past, present or if she is wondering who will be next. Each day I pray for my wife and my family. My work days are filled with moments when I shake, worry and fear. I watch two of my three adult children from my first marriage embrace alcohol to cope with life and I know in my heart that the fact that I was not good enough for their mother is the cause.
I am growing stronger and most days can function at 100% there are many days when I function in a dull, lifeless fog. I wonder frequently if I will ever now happiness again.
I feel like a caged animal in a zoo.
At night I snuggle up to my wife, rub her back and her feet and do whatever I can to try and make myself at least good enough that she will stay in the marriage for the sake of our eleven year old. I no longer really know who I am. I am too busy trying to think of what I can do next to try and please / appease my wife. I feel depressed if I am not successful at pleasing her.
Every once in a while I hear an �I love you.�
But as each day goes on I am convinced that my life will never know happiness again.
Perhaps I will �win� my wife enough to keep her married. But I know in my heart that I will never be loved. My back hurts severely shortly after climb into bed every night (stress and fear). I have settled for table scraps because it is better for my son and to try and find something better at age 56 given my life experience is not very good odds.
The simple truth is, I am enslaved.
I have the fire in my belly not to give up.
What has infidelity done to me? It destroyed two of three children of my first marriage, it destroyed my career (yes I am still successful at work but I gave up my ideals to work in an environment that is counter to everything I really believe in), it has led my current wife to a quiet depression of her own and all I can do is go on.
But I am not alive. Infidelity may be recoverable but some of us probably aren�t. The faint hope of some miracle drives me on.
In reality, I am a broken man. I just refuse to quit.
This once happy man� he was murdered. He will never be back.
Today, I am burying him. Who I will be in the future, I cannot fully predict. But the carefree happy man who�s college friends called �Smiley� will never be again.
Infidelity does not just hurt someone. It kills their soul.
I hope as I come back a new person that I will not be uncaring. I hope as I come back that I will retain my good qualities. I think to myself why didn�t she just shoot me. That would have been kinder.
What does infidelity do? It destroys people from the inside out. It is the worst form of violence on the planet. And it is legal and common and�.
Leaves pain that cannot be imagined by the perpetrator lost in their thoughtlessness.

Regretful, all of this is what it is like. It is just not your action that comes back to hurt the victim. It is every hurtful thing similar in their entire life.

If you are really fortunate... and your spouse really does love you... eventually if you follow the plan here... they will love you for your weaknessa and your strength to overcome that weakness.
Recovery I believe is possible. But for me... two plus years out... it is still a long, long way into the future for me and my marriage.

Blessings, Regretful, I do respect you for trying.

Hurting Turkey,
Me BS 56
She WW 50
Hers 18, 22
Mine 22, 28, 30
Ours DS 11
D-Day 1 - April 26 2009
D-Dapy 2 - October 15 2009
Exposed February 22, 2010
Me: Reforming Verbal Abuser
She: still won't divulg OM # 2 despite overwhelming evidence

Hello regretful MD I just finished reading your story I just want to say I hope things are going well and that you drop by sometime and give us all an update

Regretful MD, I agree with others that posted: complete honesty in all in-depth details that your husband needs to know about your feelings and why you had the affiar are essentially inmportant to your recovery as a couple.
My best wishes to you in restoring faith and trust again.