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Joined: Oct 2002
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I promised in the tread of DECISION TO MAKE to post an old MB post I frequently reread as a source of inspiration in my marriage. I start a new tread since I would not disrupt the focus of his.
BrokenButNotChrushed wrote this old post back in 2000. (Is he still around, anyone know his further history? If you are still around BBNC, thank you very much for the inspiration and hope you have given me!)
I hope some of you can be as inspired as I have been. Here it comes:

***********************************

posted March 09, 2000 10:18 AM
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

Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 2,342
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</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">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.</font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">Beautiful post Frank.

Did BrokenButNotCrushed ever post again?

Debi

Joined: Mar 2002
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wow what a story


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