Hi. I am kinda new here. I've been lurking but never got up enough nerve to tell my story but here it is.
Me and my husband have been married for 8 years yesterday. In January we had a fight and it turned into a huge nightmare. I was asking him why he had been acting differently towards me. He's always been the one who couldn't go to sleep if we were arguing and recently he seemed like he just didn't care. Going on JUST a gut feeling I asked him if there was someone else and I said it would almost be easier if he told me there was someone else instead of just saying he didn't care about me anymore. Well was I shocked when he said he did have feelings for someone else(I get a sick feeling in my stomach just repeating those words). He said nothing has happened but there was a girl at work who he has been talking to and had feelings for. Come to find out he had been having personal conversations with her for about 2 months about our personal life and telling her how he wasn't sure he wanted to be married anymore and he would like to just be able to do whatever he wanted to do without having to go through me. He also told me he actually said to her he had feelings for her and probably more then he should. He says her response was she had feelings for him too but nothing could happen because he was married and she was engaged to be married soon. So in my eyes if this is what happened he would have physically cheated on me if she had didn't say what she did. Well needless to say it was a big blow out in our house that night. I told him I wanted a divorce, he left for a couple of hours, went and talked to our brother in law, then returned crying saying he didn't want a divorce, he loved me and would do whatever he had to do to make it work. Since then we started MC and we are doing better. My only problem is that I don't trust him. I want to believe him when he tells me things but it is so hard. My guard is always up. The thing that stinks is that I was NEVER like that. I always trusted him 100%.(I learned the lesson never to trust 100% the hard way) Can anybody help me find a way to trust again. Not a day goes by that I don't think about this. I feel like I'm torturing myself by reliving it every day but I can't turn it off in my head. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

There are 2 important rules about gaining trust.

1.. Earning Trust Takes Time... It's not going to happen overnight.. It may take months, or even a year or 2 to regain the trust you once had.

2.. Trust has to be earned. You can't just give it over. He has to show you effort in the relationship, open his life to you.

Dr. Harley reconmends a policy of Radical honesty in marriages. Basically, you both have to be 100% open and honest with eachother at all times.

Call him through the day to check where he is and what he's doing.. Let him do the same for you.. Give eachother access to your voicemail/email accounts. Give eachother a daily schedule "I'll be here from 8:00-10:00.. Then I'll be going to here.. then, at 2:00 I'll go to... ) etc.

And he needs to cut all contact with the OW. No phone calls, no visits, no e-mail. A No-Contact letter like Dr. Harley reconmends is the best way to cut things off. Ask him to follow that letter, and if OW tries to contact your H, he should tell you about it immediately.

This is all just advice I've gathered from this site and Dr. Harley's books. You may want to pick up "Surviving An Affair" as it talks about rebuilding marriages after events like this. It seems you H did have an Emotional Affair. Luckly, it never moved on to a Physical Affair.

Above all, be patient.. Trust takes time.. And it's not going to get better over night.

Keep us updated, and best of luck to you.

marmeg,

I was scrolling through last weeks' posts and saw yours. I echo JohnnyB's comments and cannot improve on them, they are excellent.

Your lack of trust is sort of like one of the laws of physics. Ripples in a pond, action and reaction, cause and effect. Trust can't be restored by flipping a switch.

The emotional infidelity is really hard to get over, but you can restore your marriage if you're both willing to work really hard and follow the MB principles.

How are things going?