I've been reading alot of posts but I don't find any that express how I'm feeling. Please tell me I'm not alone.
For about 6 months now (I'm sure alot longer but I've just ignored it)I've been feeling miserable in my marriage. I've been married to my "best friend" for 16 years. We have had (or so I thought)a very loving and fun marriage. I have a friend at work (opposite sex)who I began talking to more when he started having problems with his wife. This guy has never tried anything with me but I know we have an emotional attachment.

I told my husband about this when it first started and he was very hurt. He said he couldn't believe I was doing this to him but then kept saying he deserved it. I explained the reason I was telling him was for us to pray through this.

I was having a very hard time separating from my friend so I went to see a Christian Therapist. I know this was a God send for me because I now understand so much more. I asked my husband to see him (alone) for a couple of sessions. As a result, he came home on 1/7/04 and confessed to having had 5 affairs throughout the course of our marriage!

To say I'm totally devastated would be the understatement of a lifetime! I can't think of a single memory in our marriage without wondering which woman he was with at the time. He says the last one was 6 years ago and that he's a changed man. I think the fact that he's continued to lie to me all this time speaks volumes.

My problem is that he says he wants to keep the marriage together because he's committed to me. Where was this commitment each time he was having sex with someone else? I have been the main financial provider our entire marriage and I really think he wants to stay out of convenience. He denies this but I have no reason to believe him.

I'm staying because I feel it's "the right thing to do" but I have no emotional connection to him (I haven't in a long time) and I don't know how to get passed this.

Any thoughts?

cindy - The fact that your H confessed to you is very promising. I think that if he was just concerned about convenience, he never would have admitted the A's.

Now you have found this site and can work on making a better marriage. Check out the emotional needs section. Sounds like both of you are not getting your needs met. Time to change that.

Keep posting and reading, although you are miserable now, things will get better.

Hi cindy,

That's quite a bomb your H dropped on you huh?

It sounds like you both really could use some hard work and guidance in your marriage.I understand that you are emotionally distant from WH now and he obviously has his issues to deal with as a "serial" cheater but there is hope even though it may seem like there isn't.And that stems from your WH wanting to stay in the marriage and there is you,although you are not sure you want to stay or don't know how to get past this,you are not running to the divorce lawyer either.

So I would suggest that you get the books,'His Needs,Her Needs' and 'Survivng an Affair' by Dr.Harley,good reads.Also,keep reading the posts here and also read the MB concepts front to back.Then come back and post some more for support.Also,you may find that the General Questions message board gets more "traffic" so if you don't get many responses here on Just found out,hop over there with questions.

Take care.

O

things can get better! i went thru a long period of time when i had lost all hope too. i stayed because of the kids. i am also the main bread winner and wondered the same things you wonder. is he just staying because he needs me financially. when we were having the most trouble, i even found out that he started storing up cash in his drawer, just in case. he had over $3000 in there. he was extremely concerned about money and that made it hard for me to believe he was staying for me. even if we had split, i would never have just left him high and dry and i was hurt that he would think i would do that.

for me it just kept coming back to the kids. And also part of me did not want to see him struggle either. well the good news is, hope did finally return for me and i am glad i had the kids here to help me hang on until that happened. so hang on for whatever reason you must right now, but do hang it. your marriage can get better but you two must get down to doing some serious relationship work. there is great info here and i also recommend you look into an organization called Retrouvaille. it helped us tremendously.

good luck.

Beleive it or not, a great many people (including professional counselors) advice people like your H(usband) never to tell the truth about his affair with the excuse that it would only destroy the B(etrayed) S(pouse) and the marriage. As you've seen for yourself, this approach only fosters the continuation of the pre-affair conditions that helped the W(ayward) S(pouse) to go outside the marriage, and sets the stage for more affairs in the future. Also by keeping the truth about his affairs a secret, he ended up helping to create an emotional wall between the two of you that prevented the sharing of each other's deepests thoughts and feelings (intimacy). Unlike you, your H has to realize that his lies and dishonesty are what caused his affairs to happen and that until he starts practicing what Dr Willard Harley calls 'radical honesty' he is not to going to be trusted.

Cindy, you are NOT alone. My XW was also a serial cheater but unlike your H she never hid the fact of what she was doing and was never willing to give it up. If she had been like your H, there is no doubt in my mind that our marriage would have not only survived but become better than before.

Don't beat yourself up for feeling like you do. What you are experiencing is perfectly normal and ALL of us BS here are either going through what your are experiencing or have already gone through it. As I said before, you are NOT alone.

Thank you so much for your replies. They really do help. When I first started going to the therapist, he told me I was totally disconnected "emotionally." Well, now that I'm connected, I am in a continual state of RAGE! I'm very good at hiding it most of the time - after all, I do have to continue to function at work, with family, etc. but it's eating me alive inside.
Every time a well meaning person tells me I have to work it out because "God hates divorce," I want to yell "Yeah, well I'm also pretty sure He hates infidelity, deceit, and betrayal too!!!"

To make matters worse, even after he told me about this and while we're dealing with this, he has continued the process of ordination and is currently (right this very moment) on his way to a Pastor's conference where he will receive his ordination papers and be prayed over by the head honchos of the ordaining organization. Just last week our Pastor, who knows everything that is going on, signed his paperwork approving him to be ordained. Isn't there a little thing in the Bible about HAVING YOUR HOUSE IN ORDER before you enter into any type of public ministry?

I mentioned this to him and he says that this organization only meets once a year for ordination purposes so he would have to wait another year. I guess he thinks that I'll be "over it" soon enough so why have to wait a whole year? He also said he wouldn't go if I told him not to. I don't want him to not do it because I say so. I feel like my blindfold has come off and I see that our roles have been totally messed up in our marriage. Not only is the provider role reversed, but it's like we have a mother-son relationship. He actually wanted me to tell him what to do in order to pursue me successfully! Needless to say, at that point, I told him not to bother. I don't think anything he does will make things any better.

This is just too overwhelming. I don't know if I can get passed it. I keep reading on here about people whose lives have been devastated because their spouse has cheated on them once. While I am not minimizing that at all - all it takes is one time for the vows to be broken - I can't even get my mind around the fact that my h cheated on me FIVE TIMES!!! I really wish I could find the button to get disconnected from these feelings. I don't regret knowing the truth. I just don't think this relationship can survive it. Sorry for the ramble but it helps knowing I'm speaking to people that know how I feel.

Cindy, I think sometimes in life we have to take the long view and sometimes we have to live day to day and do the next task at hand without knowing how it will all turn out. I think right now you are in one of those situations where the best thing to do is turn to the task at hand and wait to see how it all turns out. And my take on "the task at hand" is for you to follow up on your perception that you and your H have had a mother-son type relationship and do what you can, with the help of your therapist, to change your end of it, because maybe that had something to do with him choosing to have affairs (rather than work on his end of it in an adult way). Even if you and your H eventually divorce, you don't want to carry that pattern into new relationships.

It is good that your H wanted you to tell him what to do to pursue you successfully. That is a very hopeful sign. Fill out the emotional needs questionnaire here and you will both find out what the other one needs.

Yes it is terribly hurtful to find out about 5 A's. Your H has some problems to work on. In his defense, he did tell you. Many here spend months trying to get the truth out of their WS, and that is just as bad as the betrayal. Mine lied even when I caught him, and still continues to lie.

So stick with the MB program. Don't hold all of the rage inside. It is not bad, you have been betrayed and your marriage was not honored. No wonder you are furious.

You will go through various stages of grief in the coming months, keep on posting. Many of us know how you feel. Somehow it helps to share with others who have been through the same thing.

Rage RAGE is good!

Actually though I was joking rage is good. The opposite of love is not hate its indifference. As long as you have feelings...even angry ones there is still hope.

I have to agree that even though it was a bombshell I would have much rather my WS confessed than me catching her.

Its going to take time. Lots of it because of the mulitiple affairs. But his willingness to admit to them his sense that he deserved the EA you had shows me he is remorseful and wants to put his cheating ways behind him.

Dear Cindy,

I think that there is hope for your marriage. #1 your H confessed. He didn't have to do that. You did not suspected his repeated infidelity. He obviously felt a need to live honestly with you.
#2 He said his last affair was six years ago. IF that is the truth, that implies that he learned that having affairs was wrong *and* he has been strong enough to survive tempation without some of the safeguards in place that the Harleys advise: accountability for time and Radical Honesty.

Yes, it certainly does seem an inopportune time for him to be ordained but maybe he feels his house is in order. He has not cheated in six years, he has gotten his demons under control. If the affair was a long-time ago, the WS (wayward spouse) often feels that it is way in the past. As the BS, we are experiencing the affair as if our spouse has just immediately crawled out of someone else's bed. It is important that both of you can be very clear about what you are experiencing and how and why you see it differently. It is part of, no, it is the only way of experiencing empathy for the other. He needs to know that for you, his affairs feel present now, today.

I too felt that all of our marriage had been tainted by my H's 7-year affair. After a while I began to realize that the fact that we had fun on a certain trip, or had loved each other on a certain day, or grieved with each other at the passing of a beloved grandparent, was not changed by the fact that he was at that time, still involved in his affair. They are (in some ways) different events. I have reclaimed our happy times, still knowing that at that time he was not totally mine. Happy was. It was. Nothing can change the fact that I was happy that day, that week, or those years and apparently so was he. Maybe for a few hours or a few days he got away from the horror he must have been living. I know his affair tore him to pieces although it didn't show at the time. For him, reckoning day came when he saw my anguish.

3.5 years later I am far more recovered than he is, or maybe ever will be. He broke my heart, but he also broke his own by betraying everything he ever held dear--me, our marriage, his honor and integrity, his religious faith, his family's good opinion of him and his ideas about responsible fatherhood. He fathered a child of his affair. A child that he will never be able to love and care for as we both believe all children should be. He has a child who will grow up basically fatherless, because long-distance visitation 4x a year doesn't mean much in the life of a child. He also used another woman in a way that no one deserves to be treated. He robbed her of her youth, the time when she should have been building her own life instead of eating the scraps that fell from the bountiful table of our married life. (Yeah, I know. She bears a great deal of responsibility for allowing herself to be used. I don't know what kept him from facing his pain during the entire affair, maybe an affair really is an addiction or a drug. But if he had 7 years where he could turn of his conscience, he certainly does not have that luxury any longer. He has a much harder time forgiving himself than I ever had.

I am sorry for your enormous and almost-unspeakable anguish. Hang in there. Although you don't want to hear it, time helps. Whether you stay married or not, you will heal. I told myself to hang on for one year and that there was nothing I could do in divorce court today that I couldn't do a year from now. (God's permission to divorce due to H's infidelity was valid on D-day and well beyond if it took me that long to see if the marriage could be saved. It gave me a time table and took some of the pressure off of me to make a life-altering decision in the middle of the insanity of D-day.

Shalom, God's own peace and wholeness,
MJ

I find it ironic that my first post was asking the same question. I just wanted you to know I came back. I still don't think I want to hear what these guys are saying, and I still don't understand what NC or poja or anything. But I want this to work more than anything. But I thought you should know that you are worth pursuing.