SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Sorry for the cross-posting. I meant to respond to you in the R forum where you asked specifically about R vs D so I moved my comment there!

I hope tonight is a little respite of joy for you.

Thanks Inkhulk, unfortunately it was not much of anything. Not a bad night, but nothing to write about either. I suppose that is the best we can do at the moment.

I am just now seeing this thread- Inkhulk I agree he sounds a lot like you did! And his wife sounding resentful of an online forum built to help betrayed spouses sounds like how your wife was.

Here is my chime in- ALL healthy relationships have boundaries. All of them.

Boundaries are not restrictions on what others do, it’s knowing where you end and another person begins.

It’s not your job to make other people happy. It’s your job to make yourself happy. If both people do that, then you will negotiate and compromise and create win wins in your relationship. It is an attractive to another person when you know who you are and what you want and that you take care of yourself.

It’s easy to take advantage of someone if all they really want is you.

Boundaries are saying what you will and won’t accept in a relationship. Allowing the other person to do the same.

When it comes to infidelity, it’s a betrayal that rocks the foundation of your relationship. It is not your job to fix it, it is her job to earn it back.

Boundaries do not dictate punishments, they dictate what you will do to protect yourself and be happy and healthy. And that means that she will have to earn trust back over time. She isn’t ready yet, that’s why you can’t trust her

Boundaries are about YOU not her.

Also, this post makes me think you do not have the truth. She said she would do a polygraph because she knows it’s the right answer. She is passive aggressively refusing the polygraphs by showing you that it really isn’t okay with her demeanor. She knows you will back off. That is in my opinion gaslighting.

She told you she wouldn’t take the period product out of the house and then did it anyway. That is not how someone builds trust.

Someone interested in building trust will not feel exasperated by your fears, they will do what they can to appease them and make you comfortable.

She is just not in a place to work on reconciliation yet. That is normal. I believe every couple who finds themselves in this place must first recover. Recovery is working on yourself. Wen that has been done to an extent that both of you are healthier then the relationship is easier to work on because the two parts that make it are better.

And I think you need to note a pattern here. She had plans for that funeral, and decided you were too suspicious and brought you instead and then confused you with "the best sex you have had in years"

Then she knew the conference was going to be a problem and she confused you with the promise of sex.

This is a tactic. I wouldn’t say it’s a malicious one, it’s a transactional one. I would love bomb and sex bomb my husband too. It made things easier for me for short periods of time because he was in a good mood and felt secure. It’s a band aid. People pleasing can be a form of manipulation.

It’s healthy to want to make your spouses day better or to be there for your spouse. Sometimes that does require doing things we don’t want to do. People pleasing is transactional and can be focused on what the people pleaser gets out of it. Whether it is control, admiration, sympathy, etc. she doesn’t do this for you she does it for her.

Resentments build when those transactional things go unanswered. The more I needed the more I people pleased. My husband was normal, he just thought I was doing what fulfilled me the same as he centered himself on things that fulfill him.

[This message edited by hikingout at 4:43 PM, Wednesday, January 15th]

@hikingout

Thank you, I do hear what you're saying about boundaries. I think it would be good for my wife and I to really sit down and talk through what all of our boundaries are. She has some for me, but they're not really spelled out all that well. I really don't have any for her other than, don't cheat on me again.

She told you she wouldn’t take the period product out of the house and then did it anyway. That is not how someone builds trust.

This got me thinking about the negligee. I didn't even ask her about it until a few days ago. I was brushing her hair while she was thumbing through Instagram ads for negligee's. She made a comment about buying one and then just having it sit in her closet. And I was like, "Speaking of that, why did you take it to the conference?" She said she had no idea what I was talking about. Then I explained that when she went to the conference on the first day, it was gone. When she came back home it mysteriously showed back up in the spot I expected it to be in.

She didn't give a good answer. At first, she acted like she didn't move it at all. Then quickly she said she didn't take it to the conference. She tried it on in the morning and decided it was too uncomfortable so she just threw it back into the closet and "you must not have looked for it very well, it was there."

I know how this looks. It's not very reassuring.

I've been kind of emersed in all thing's "affair" lately. Trying to make sense of it all, trying to learn how it happens, how it's fixed, etc. That's one of the reasons I'm here on this site so much. I read a lot of posts.

I recently started watching a series called "The Affair", and it's pretty good. I think it does a good job representing how I imagine a lot of affairs get started. I'm only about 5-6 episodes into it, and it's odd because I don't think I'd ever have watched this in a million years if I couldn't personally relate. So I'm not sure if this is just affair porn for me now, or if it's a healthy part of the healing process. I'm not getting even a second of sexual arousal from it. But I do get almost a therapeutic feeling seeing the affair play out and knowing how all the people involved must feel (being able to see the "truth" as a third party I think is very helpful for some reason).

Anyway, I was watching last night as I was doing a workout and my wife came down the stairs and sat near me, just to be near me. It was nice. I hadn't told her about the show because I didn't want her to get defensive, but now that she was there, I explained what it was. Her first reaction was, "Maybe I can learn a few tricks". And I thought, WTF, why would she say that? And what's really weird about it is she's not interested in flirting with me like that, which I might actually enjoy. It comes off as almost a way to make me wonder, is she serious?

I turned the show off because I figured it would only trigger one of us, and we ended up having a nice time talking. But navigating the simplest things is just so hard now. I really don't know if years of this is good for anyone. I'd like to be able to joke around about it (I honestly would) but I never know where the lines are, because they shift around so much.

[This message edited by 4characters at 4:01 PM, Wednesday, January 15th]

The affair is far less realistic than "scenes from a marriage"starring Jessica Chastain. I watched that when it came out and I was many years out. It was brutally honest but very hard to watch. The affair makes it seem like it’s about someone in being irresistible to you rather than depicting it’s actually often the outcome of not coping with crisis.

Plus the guy in it does pick me almost all the way through it. It’s very sad and realistic.

The more you say the more the first post I wrote you seems more and more true. I am sorry but I believe your wife is addicted to the affair feelings, knows it’s going to go nowhere and does want to reinvest in the marriage. However, I do not think you have the truth about how far hinge went or that she is trying to deal with the withdrawal from the chemicals it produced.

I am no a psychic, but in my marriage my husband cheated 18 months after me. He displayed none of this confusion and did not have those addictions or justifications. He wasn’t emotionally invested. Your wife sounds far more like me, and the emotional investment is hard to let go of because it’s been a depressed persons sole happiness for as long as it was happening. I am going to guess your wife had a very down period leading up to this? And you never said but was she somewhat unrecognizable in some of the texts?

There are articles online by Dr. Frank Pittman called romantic infidelity. When this happens, people have very similiar and predictable reactions to their affair. I think you will find you recognize your wife in some of this.

Also: you do not have boundaries for your wife. You have boundaries for yourself. This is about what you will and won’t accept and she can choose to comply or not. Boundaries are not rules with punishment, that’s parenting. Boundaries are knowing what you will and won’t accept and conveying that to her. They are non-negotiable.

I know you do not want to police her but she is doing a lot of things that make me think there is some contact occurring. If you aren’t seeing withdrawal because I think the affair may still be active. She didn’t need to try and wear a negligee to the conference or get her period supplies. I know you don’t want to police her but honey I would do some snooping. It’s in your best interest.

At the very least ask to add her to life 360 so you can see her whereabouts. If this doesn’t cause a shitstorm I would feel better about this hinky behavior. But expect a shitstorm I am afaraid.

[This message edited by hikingout at 4:45 PM, Wednesday, January 15th]

I am going to guess your wife had a very down period leading up to this? And you never said but was she somewhat unrecognizable in some of the texts?

The answer is yes to both.

I was seeing a different person entirely before I found out about the affair. I would say the changes in her personality were going on at least a year before DDay, and they progressively got worse and worse. About a week before DDay, that's really the first time I started to wonder what the actual fuck was going on.

shitstorm

Yeah, I hear you. I actually thought about hiring a PI, but that's so expensive, and even though I know it's not extreme in this situation, it sure feels like it.

Since calling her out using phone records, she basically no longer uses her phone except for close friends and family. All the thousands of texts she used to get pre-DDAY have vanished. Which makes sense since she blocked his number. But I always worry that maybe she's using another app now. She has Instagram, Facebook, and Teams (for work) on her phone. And she's offered to let me look at them, but I know she's going to be hovering over me as I look through, so I just don't even bother. I really hate social media; she's been kind of addicted to it for our entire marriage.

One thing I should mention in her favor. Prior to DDay, when she was taking her phone to the restroom every morning when she woke up, I had also noticed how much more attention she was paying to her looks. One thing she would do is shave her legs on Sunday nights, before starting her work week. She would also wear perfume. Together with the texts late at night, I was really feeling like "something was going on" even though I didn't have proof.

So before the conference last week, I told her that I still didn't like that she shaved her legs on Sunday nights, because it felt like she was doing that for other people, and not her husband. I told her I wasn't going to demand she shave on another night, but it would be nice if she would do it on like Thursday or Friday nights, when she had the whole weekend to spend with me. So last week she did that, she didn't shave at all for over a week before the conference and then shaved on Saturday night. She also seems to have stopped wearing the perfume to work.

I know I'm rambling. Just helps to tell someone, I don't really have anyone else to share this stuff with.

[This message edited by 4characters at 4:49 PM, Wednesday, January 15th]

Well she may not be seeing him physically right now because it’s too risky. (Or maybe less frequent) I don’t know if you can tell if she adds and deletes apps but it’s common for some to download ICQ or WhatsApp and delete it when around the spouse.

I am not trying to make you paranoid, in fact I would love to be wrong.

I do believe she does want to be married but I also think when you have an affair cognitive dissonance is high, so you can have two opposing feelings at once and that is why a cheating spouse is so confusing to navigate.

Trust your gut. You are not crazy. But look out for you because that’s the one thing you can rely on right now.

Oh and when my husband checked my phone in the early days, it was rare and something he didn’t so for long, me hovering would have been a dealbreaker for him. He was allowed to have it and look at it as long as he wanted on his own. This is because I had nothing at all to hide, and also he would not have accepted any other agreement.

I think we all have "boundaries" as threats in our minds. The hard and fast rule of life is we cannot change another human being. We can make it so uncomfortable that they pretend to change but that is surface behavior. So boundaries are for us, the bs. It is what WE will tolerate, and what we will not. I love this quote, Do not promise something you will not do, and don’t threaten something you cannot do. If you cannot move past this and live in limbo that is being stuck. Neither in or out. If you choose to reconcile go all in…and trust but verify. If you choose divorce get it done. Getting out of infidelity is an emotional change rather than a physical one. You can separate and divorce but continue to yearn for your spouse. That is not surviving infidelity. You will have taken the equivalent of a box of rocks that you haul every where. Surviving is thriving. It is getting joy out of life again. How you do that is up to the two of you but don’t drag it out for years. Your health is at stake.

I think it would be good for my wife and I to really sit down and talk through what all of our boundaries are. She has some for me, but they're not really spelled out all that well. I really don't have any for her other than, don't cheat on me again.

Have you asked your IC to help you understand what boundaries are, and then help define what they are for you? You’re still not getting it. "Don’t cheat on me again" is NOT a boundary. "I will not remain in a relationship with anyone who cheats on me" is a boundary. See the difference?

[This message edited by gr8ful at 6:50 PM, Thursday, January 16th]

My IC kinda sucks. I've talked to him three times and I'm not getting a lot out of this guy yet. So no, I haven't talked to him about boundaries.

I think I get what people are saying. Boundaries are what you're willing to do/live with. They're for you, they're not rules for other people, they're what you can/can't put up with.

I still think "don't cheat on me" is a boundary, in that context. But I'll talk to him and see what he says.

Counselors can vary greatly and it can be important to find the right fit. If you don’t feel a connection with him, don’t feel badly to try another. I stopped seeing my first IC because I went initially to work up to confessing and trying to deal with all my conflicting/big emotions but she kept advising me not to tell him. So they aren’t all cut with the same cloth.

You can decide in your boundaries how important fidelity is to you and what you will or won’t accept. My feelings after a betrayal is that it’s all a hard line because it’s such a slippery slope to walk with a new bs/ws dynamic. But everyone has different takes and feelings. To me "don’t cheat" is bare minimum. But you may be too early in your own self discovery process and learning curve of infidelity that you may need a lot more time to think about this. Boundaries are a hard concept to master.

I will say this, creating a hard line over and over but then accepting the behavior is a bad way to start so if you are not sure how you feel about this or that, take the time to work that out.

You may find it easier in the beginning to have a list of things you would like to see her to in order for you to consider reconciling. This is a little different. Some common ones:

I want you to figure out why you cheated, the deeper reasons beyond marital dissatisfaction. People are dissatisfied during different periods of a long term marriage and that deeper discover helps them map how they are wired and how they can cope better during their next crisis.

It might be helpful for you to ask her how she plans to build trust, she may come up with things you didn’t think of and she needs to see it as a process so it might get her but in without you feeling like you have to make rules or boundaries right now.

And ask questions. For example If she said "I won’t take my period device out of the house" - I would ask "why do you see that as important?" And "what should we do if you break that? Because if you do not follow through on the things you say this puts my trust in a deeper deficit"

I’m really struggling this morning. My wife and I have had consecutive "good" days for the first time that I can remember since DDay. No big fights, had sex both days, spent quality time together, felt a connection.

But all I can think about is that I must be missing something. I’m probably being manipulated. It’s not real.

There’s a part of me that just wants to run and hide from all of this, get a divorce immediately, and never look back.

But then I see that my wife is looking for a new job every day, and she’s being consistent with the few asks I’ve suggested, and I see that she’s very slowly starting to figure some things out. And it makes me worry that if I leave now I will never know if we could’ve made it back to a place of safety and love.

I hate her goddamn phone. It’s just too easy to cheat with today’s technology. Someone really needs to create a software solution that completely locks down a phone and removes the ability to download new apps or change configuration settings. Like a wayward spouse mode that informs the betrayed spouse the moment anything is off. Sigh.

@hikingout

Your stories are always helpful. Thank you for providing insight.

Someone really needs to create a software solution that completely locks down a phone and removes the ability to download new apps or change configuration settings.

It’s called Mobile Device Management. Look it up. It’s existed for some time and does exactly all this. Might cost you as little as $5/device/month.

I’m sorry you are struggling today. The rollercoaster is real

My own experience is I had a major discovery of lies of enormous consequence about a year post d-day. My gut tells me there is more to your story, but clearly that is not definitive.

Do you have a well documented timeline from her? If not, that needs to happen. Yesterday.

If so, I’d recommend a polygraph. I have so many mixed feelings about them, but what does seem indisputable is that they create a fear in the WS and have a strong tendency to shake out more of the story. Or maybe you actually go thru with it and she passes with flying colors and that helps with (but won’t cure) your anxiety.

And if you feel the same fear of upsetting your wife that I did when considering a poly, that is something for you to tackle internally. You CANNOT allow fear of her reactions to drive your choices in this stage. If you feel that come up, get curious about it, find your whys, and then push thru. This is the fight of your life.

@hikingout
Your stories are always helpful. Thank you for providing insight.

And hikingout is a fucking national treasure. I’m glad to see her investing in you and I’m glad to see you recognizing it for what it is. She changed my life, even did a fair amount to save it.

@inkhulk

You CANNOT allow fear of her reactions to drive your choices in this stage.

Yeah, I’m coming around slowly to see this reality. It’s very hard for me to do anything to her that would cause her pain.

She doesn’t believe this is true though, and that makes it even harder.

The thing that bothers me the most is that she makes it seem like he’s not interacting with her at work since she blocked his number. That just seems anti-intuitive.

Yeah, I’m coming around slowly to see this reality.

I understand. It took me more than a year and a half to really address this.

It’s very hard for me to do anything to her that would cause her pain.

Because you are a good man at heart.

She doesn’t believe this is true though, and that makes it even harder.

And yes to this a million times. My wife had the absolute worst perception of me of anyone in the world. There is SO much to say about this, but I think it is best saved for another day. For now, believe what you know to be true about yourself and don’t let her dark distorted mental model of you have any hold over you.

It’s very hard for me to do anything to her that would cause her pain.

That's something one wants to do for one's partner, but I think it's also a symptom of co-d for you.

The co-d element depends on your answer to the Q, 'How much pain are you willing to endure to keep from causing your W pain?' 'Cause it's absolutely certain that if she cheats and you leave, you'll 'cause' her to feel pain.

Have you seen The Blue Angel? If not, watch it. How much of (the nazi) Emil Jannings's character lives in you? Is that the amount that you want?

*****

ICs are not magicians. Telling your IC what you want to change in yourself will help. All an IC can do is help you make the changes you want to make. That's much closer to a fact than an opinion.

*****

The pre-A complaints - yours and your W's - are no longer very relevant, IMO. If you D, the more you give them up, the better, because you can't work to resolve the issues unless you're together.

If, OTOH, you R, you'll have to change yourselves, so you'll hit new issues that need to be resolved, and you'll need to resolve them as they occur. Old issues may resurface, and you'll need to deal with them when they do - but lots of the old issues will disappear, because the M is new.

So ask your W to put aside her old excises for cheating. Tell her you can deal with them when they come up, if they come up. If she accedes to your request, you may have a chance to R. If she doesn't (and she doesn't have to come around immediately), you can't R, because she refuses to give up the past (as she sees it).

*****

My bias is to test, test, and test again if you're in R. Passing tests is positive for R; failing is negative. You want to give your WS and yourself lots of opportunities to fail, IMO, because I believe its' better to find deal killers sooner rather than later.

But that's a lot closer to opinion than to fact....