Cricket here's a post from a BH with the user name of BrokenButNotCrushed and it is truly amazing. I hope it helps both you and your H.
</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial"><strong>"Two months ago, my wife put her arms around me as I lay in bed
and suddenly said, “There’s something I need to tell you. I’ve
been unfaithful to you.” With those words, I began my descent
into emotional hell. This is the story of how I survived the
torment of my wife’s betrayal, and how our relationship went
from ‘broken’ to ‘better than ever’ in just two months. If you have
had your world suddenly shattered by the infidelity of the one
you trusted most, and are wondering how you can ever make it
through, then this story is for you...
How it started.
My wife and I had been married twelve years when the thoughts
first started. Like any relationship, we had gone through good
times and bad. Surprisingly, this was one of the better periods.
My wife was in her mid 30's, and was finally attaining her
professional goals. We had a beautiful home, lots of friends and
were active in church leadership. We even offered counseling to
couples whose marriages were in trouble, using Dr. Harley’s
book, His Needs, Her Needs. I had no clue what was about to
happen in my own marriage...
For six months, my wife had thoughts about kissing a man whom
she saw often at work. He was unhappy in his marriage, and
gave off sexual vibes. He greatly admired my wife, and was
always building her up in one way or another. As a committed
Christian, she was horrified by these thoughts and tried to put
them out of her mind, but since she saw him at work frequently,
the thoughts kept returning. After awhile, she stopped fighting
them, since ‘nothing could ever happen.’ Her first mistake was in
not realizing that she had a problem, and that she needed to
either tell me or confide in a friend to defuse the secret allure of
the thoughts.
Partially out of ignorance, she eventually did the worst thing
possible. She told him that she was having romantic thoughts
about him, but that nothing could ever come of it. He was
surprised, but very interested. For the next half-year they had an
emotional affair. Again, she could have broken much of the allure
by telling someone or seeing a counselor, but by this time, the
sin had worked its way in deep. What happened next was almost
inevitable.
The affair.
After a year of holding back, the sexual tension was enormous.
Their first time together, all they did was kiss, but the physical
sensations were like nothing she had ever experienced in her life.
They both quickly concluded that what they had must be that
one-in-a-million type of chemistry. Neither one understood that
illicit sex brings with it an unbelievable high. Put another way,
the devil reserves his best rewards to lure people into the worst
sins.
But, after the incredible high came the remorse. After just two
times together, my wife broke it off. She couldn’t live with the
guilt of what she was doing, and she genuinely feared God
because she knew how much she was grieving the Holy Spirit.
She was about to learn what it means to be a ‘slave to sin.’
Affairs become a type of addiction. My wife struggled with all her
strength, but having given into the sin, she discovered it was not
about to release its grip. After a month of emotional agony, she
resumed the affair. They fell deeply in love and he offered to
leave his wife for her. Predictably, our marriage began to really
suffer during this time, as she magnified each of my faults to
justify what she was doing. After three months of this misery, we
talked about separating.
Because of our Christianity, we were both strongly opposed to
divorce. She still felt a love for me and wanted to stay married;
she wanted to have the advantages of both our marriage and the
affair. We agreed to go to marriage counseling, and to work on
making our marriage better.
After half-a-year of hard work, my wife was again ‘in love’ with
me. Though she tried again and again to break off the affair, she
could not do so successfully. The physical affair would last two
and a half years, and, incredibly, I never even suspected.
How it ended.
After three years of living a lie, my wife was at the end of her
rope. She suffered from chronic headaches, stomach upset and
other maladies brought on by the unrelenting stress of
maintaining the deception. She coped by taking literally
thousands of pills during this period of time. She had tried to
stop the affair more than a dozen times, and had even told our
marriage counselor, but sooner or later her resolve would
weaken. She felt trapped in her sin and saw no way out.
When our vacation plans with another couple changed at the last
minute, my wife went away to the ocean for four days before I
joined her. Alone with God, she begged Him to free her of the
addiction. He responded by lifting the scales from her eyes, and
for the first time in years, she saw ‘me’ clearly. She also saw how
incredibly selfish a person she had allowed herself to become.
When I joined her, she practically leapt into my arms and told me
how God had given her a fresh and beautiful love for me. She
knew the affair was over, and this time, it really was.
To tell or not to tell?
As a result of that revelation, my wife made the decision to focus
on becoming a better person, and especially, a better wife. Over
the next three years, I saw her make changes that produced
increasingly positive results in our marriage. For the first time in
a long while, I was happy with our relationship.
My wife spoke with two Christian counselors about whether to tell
me. Both knew me well, and strongly advised her never to tell,
fearing that I would divorce her if I knew. She reconciled herself
to carrying her terrible secret ‘to the grave.’ But the closer we
got, the more stress it caused her to keep up the deception. Also,
she never stopped loving the other man; she just made, with
God’s help, a solemn vow to never act on those feelings again. At
first she wanted to keep up a friendship with him, but over time
she realized the danger and finally cut off contact entirely.
While my wife had accepted that she would live with, and
perhaps even die from, the symptoms caused by the stress of
maintaining the deception, there was another price tag which she
had not anticipated. She found it impossible to accept my
praises! Whenever I would tell her how wonderful she was, or
how much I loved her, she would always think: “That’s because
he doesn’t know about the affair. If he knew what I have done,
he wouldn’t feel that way.” She came to see that the affair, even
though over, would steal the joy from our marriage for as long as
she kept it hidden from me.
The Confession.
The evening she told me, my wife suddenly knew in her spirit
that the time had come. As much as she dreaded what I might
do, there was no doubt in her mind: God’s will was that she tell
me that evening. At first, she didn’t offer details. She was hoping
that I wouldn’t ask. And initially, I didn’t. I assumed it was a one
night stand type of situation, and I immediately forgave her. But
over the course of the next 24 hours, I could think of little else.
Certain things she said didn’t fit in with what I initially thought.
And so over the next several weeks, I endured the horror of
learning piece by piece the full magnitude of my wife’s betrayal.
My reaction.
Shock. Absolute, total shock. This can’t be happening to me! My
wife would never do something like this! And on, and on, and on.
Somehow, I managed to ask myself the right initial question, on
which everything else would depend: “After nearly twenty years
of marriage, knowing what I now know about my wife, do I want
to work on rebuilding my marriage, or do I want a divorce.?”
Because my wife had changed so much over the three years since
she broke off the affair, the answer was easy to arrive at, but
painful to work out. I wanted my marriage!
The day I arrived at that conclusion, I took off early from work
and stopped at a florist to buy my wife a dozen roses. I cried all
the way home. I presented her the flowers and said, “Our past
may lie in ashes, but we still have the future.” She looked at me
in disbelief and said, “How can you give me flowers after what I
did to you?” I told her to remember that moment, because it was
a true picture of grace - the betrayed giving flowers to the
betrayer. We held each other and wept for a long time.
Dealing with the pain.
Knowing that I wanted to make it work was the first step.
Learning how to live with the pain was another matter entirely. I
never knew I could hurt so much inside. With each new
revelation of some aspect of the betrayal, it was as if the scab on
my emotional wound would be torn off and I would relive the
whole experience all over again. I knew it was hard for her to see
me in agony, knowing that she had caused it, but it was vital to
my recovery that I be able to trust what she was now telling me.
So each time she gave me a truthful answer to my questions, I
would say, through my sobbing, “Thank you for telling me the
truth.”
Integrating what my wife was telling me into my memories of the
past six and a half years was the most difficult thing I have ever
had to do. Nothing in my life was as it seemed. It was so much
more like a nightmare than it was like real life. Many times I felt
that it was all a terrible dream, and that I would soon wake up
and my life would go back to the way it was before. It was as if I
were a stranger in my own life!
I soon discovered the terrible roller coaster ride of recovery. One
day, I would be able to function reasonably well, and be in decent
spirits, all things considered. The next, I would be an emotional
wreck, crying my heart out. To my surprise, the pain did not
grow less with time, it increased with each new episode. As the
level of pain approached my breaking point, it drove me to
behaviors totally outside my character. I screamed profanities at
my wife, something I have never done before. At one point, I felt
such a rage building that I had to break something, so I
destroyed a gift he had given her by pounding it into splinters
with a hammer.
God’s grace to my wife during this time was nothing short of
unbelievable. Not only did she hang in there without being
defensive during the worst of my outbursts, she did it all without
any symptoms of stress! One episode, where my impotent fury
was so great that I felt I had to leave (I didn’t have anywhere to
go, I just felt a desperate need to run), she let me know that she
didn’t want me to go out, but she wouldn’t try to stop me. She
called out to me as I was about to leave: “You don’t have to go!”
Her calmness was so soothing that I found the strength to resist
the impulse to run. She also spoke the truth to me based on
God’s word during the many occasions when I hovered over the
black pit of depression. Time and time again she pulled me back
from wallowing in destructive emotions.
The Other Man.
Upon learning of the affair, I searched the net and read
everything I could on the subject. After reading one especially
relevant article on what affairs are like, I called my wife over to
the computer and asked her to read it. Her jaw dropped. The
article described what she had experienced ‘to a T.’ At last she
understood that what she had with him was not something
‘special’, but rather, the stereotypical experience of someone
cheating on their spouse. Once this last deception was exposed,
she no longer had to hide away her feelings for him, because she
understood that what she experienced wasn’t true love at all, just
a fantasy based on deceptions. In truth, it wasn’t him she loved,
it was the idea of being in love with a soul mate who truly
understood her.
I chose to confront the other man by telephone, with her on the
line. I wrote out ahead of time what I would say, since I couldn’t
trust myself to think clearly once the conversation started. I told
him that I knew everything, and that I had considered every
possible response to what he had done. I then said that while he
deserved retribution, I had chosen instead to forgive him, and
that I would never do anything to harm him personally or
professionally. He had become a Christian not long before, and I
told him I hoped that through my actions, he might better learn
what God’s grace is. He seemed deeply moved, and agreed to
never contact us again.
Sex.
Until I made the initial decision to stay with my wife, I wouldn’t
let her touch me. Even once I made the decision, there was an
overwhelming impulse to punish her actions by not having sexual
contact. I realized, though, that this was like cutting off my nose
to spite my face. So, even as I cried, I allowed her to make love
to me. It was a beautiful emotional experience. Afterward, she
shared that to her it meant I was taking her back as my wife in
the fullest sense.
Sex has become the greatest source of pleasure and of pain in
my life. The frequency of our lovemaking greatly increased
initially, since there was little else in life that brought me any
true pleasure. Unfortunately, sex is also a terrible trigger of
almost unbearable images. Sooner or later, though, I need to
deal with those images, so I decided, "Why put it off?" I can’t
change the past, but as I create more and more positive sexual
experiences with my wife, the negative associations will gradually
lessen in frequency and intensity.
Our relationship.
Incredibly, my relationship with my wife is now the closest it has
ever been. She has been my helpmate through the most horrible
ordeal of my life. She has shown true repentance and remorse,
and made major changes in those areas that caused problems in
the past. For the first time since early in our marriage, she has
been a true ‘giver’ in our relationship.
Although it seems strange to me considering what has happened,
I cannot help but want to give in return! Without her asking, I
have made changes in those areas that I know were always sore
spots for her in the marriage. Because we survived the incredible
trauma of the affair by leaning on each other, I honestly believe
that we are closer today that we would have been if the affair
had never happened.
Don’t get me wrong, I would give almost anything to turn back
the hands of time and prevent my wife from doing what she did. I
still have good days and bad, though the bad ones are a lot less
severe than they used to be. I know there will painful times to
come, but I can face them with the confidence that my wife and I
will handle whatever comes our way together, as a team, with
God’s help.
The moral of the story.
My marriage is living proof that surviving an affair can make you
better, not bitter. Please understand, I am not passing judgment
on anyone whose experiences are different than my own. I was
very fortunate in many ways, and I thank God that my recovery
time has been so short, due to His mercy. I want to share our
story so that all those involved with or even contemplating
adultery can learn from our failures and successes.
Through my suffering these past two months, God has revealed
many truths to me about how to prevent adultery and how to
deal with the pain if it happens. Many times, I felt that the pain
was ‘more than I could bear.’ Each such time, He revealed some
truth to me that enabled me to make it through. One day soon, I
will share what He showed me in another post.
He loves you.
BrokenButNotCrushed
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