SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Thank you for your support Superesse, I totally agree with how he was raised. Unlike me he’s not English and in his culture being sort of primitive and predatory males is normal and although he came to England age 18 and has lived here well over half his life how he was raised has left some really deep scars. His cousin whom he has not spoken to for years is the most despicable human being Ive ever met he has the morality of bacteria.

When he volunteered to do a polygraph I asked historical questions too and those 3 sex workers are the only sex workers he has ever been with so he’s telling the truth.

The problem I have is believing his story about the EA, it spanned over 3 years on and off and they only kissed 8 times and had sexual contact 3 times? It’s really unbelievable, but as is the fact he didn’t have sex or oral sex with her, I’m often asking myself why he didn’t have sex with her?, why not?, why risk losing everything for a few kisses and flirting with someone half your age, none of it makes sense.

I’ve asked him today if there’s anything else he wants to tell me about the EA. Because it doesn’t make sense to me I feel like he’s hiding something, he said there’s nothing more to tell I know everything that happened and all of the events that took place.

I guess we are all built different, the sex workers don’t bother me that much at all, he was intoxicated and they meant nothing but the fact he drove a girl home, flirting touching and then kissing her before he came home to me absolutely destroys my heart every day.

I get so angry that after 25 years of marriage and throughout he’s been unfaithful but the actual opportunities I HAD to cheat over the years is unreal! But I didn’t, I’ve always made sure I was 100% faithful true and honest to him and although I should feel proud of myself I feel like such a loser.

This might be a little bit off the subject, but I think it does explain some things about your husband’s behaviors. I just read that when someone knows more than one language, their personality alters somewhat, in whatever language they are speaking. Since I only know English, I don’t have any way to prove or disprove that, but it must be true because it’s a different way of thinking. If your husband is an immigrant living in an immigrant family, and that family has brought in its ideas about relationships then there you have it. So I assume your husband speaks two languages the one of his childhood and the one of English. The one of his childhood has had an impact on him whether he knows it or not. He has absorbed somewhat the English idea of a good partner, but there on the sidelines are the coaches telling him it’s OK to act the way he does. His logical brain knows he’s misbehaving. Those little imps that sit on his shoulders tells him to go ahead. He has had an affair. He can make excuses all day long but he misbehaved and knows it.
You need to look after yourself. That means good food, good sleep and low anxiety. A dr might help with that.

Cooley2 that’s exactly right, he speaks his mother language which is Albanian and Also English. Throughout our M we have had so many discussions and disagreements on our beliefs and how we want to do things within our family and so many times our cultures have clashed, believe it or not his mother begged him to leave me and marry an Albanian girl right up until the day she died in 2016 obviously he never did but she used to cry and try to guilt trip him saying he was breaking family tradition which must have been so incredibly hard for him.
Sometimes I look at him and I feel so sorry for him because of how he was raised, love was something to be earned, they never let him go to school because he had to work the land, he has never been hugged by his parents or comforted and they never told him they loved him.
I think they saw him as more of an object or belonging than a human being.
H tells me that over the years sometimes he’s been terrified by my love, he didn’t know how to act or receive it so he said he would try to detach himself from me because he was taught love is weakness, something women do and he had to be strong so he could provide for his family but said he’s always loved me.

Bruce, his particular family may be more the problem with his thinking than the culture he was raised in, too. Because my SAWH was raised in a Southern Commonwealth (British) and only speaks his version of English, yet he has the same kind of relationship with his parents as you described, pretty cold and never hearing them express "love" to the men. He and they seem to treat people as objects versus individuals. This I believe can be the heritage of having a father who used women for sex, as is legal in my WH's country. The boys cannot help but be aware of this dichotomy between what their fathers claim to be (good married men and PROVIDERS) and self-indulgent, entitled, domineering males who need not control their baser appetites. Or the family may all conclude that since the man's money buys them every good thing, and since the man controls the flow of money into the family, he can decide to spend some of his money for his own pleasure. Still dehumanizing on several levels - and that infuriates me.

My first WH was born in the UK of an American GI during WWII, and he too used prostitutes while in the US Navy. He and his Navy buddies would entertain us with lurid stories about the whole ship's crew lining up at a whore house in an Asian port city during "liberty." I hate to say it, but I've seen this thinking more than I would ever have expected with men I've known or read about here that were from several Commonwealth countries. Before I found SI, I spent years trying to find other women whose husbands had done what mine had, with no luck. 99% of the time, the women on other Infidelity forums were dealing with "affairs" so I felt lost in the wilderness of confusion as I could have better understood that kind of betrayal. It took a long time and therapy to dig out some of what I'm trying to share about this kind of infidelity and what its legacy is in a man and the Betrayed Wife.

But to the part about your WH perhaps thinking kissing and playing around with a co-worker would be somehow less bad "for the marriage" than actual intercourse outside the marriage (if that is the case and he did not go any further with it)? I know a whole generation of men, like my brothers and many men I worked with, who thought like that! There were vulgar but common sayings I heard about cheating (which would be forbidden) versus (rhymes with...) which may be "excusable." Of course it's all lies they tell themselves.

Again, my SAWH just thought sex was sex. Like a thing! He is a mechanic. I guess he thought of his appendage as a tool. A sad and detached way to look at the greatest gift for intimacy we can have, isn't it. 😢

Importantly, my SAWH was also a sexually abused little boy and this too among males is endemic in certain cultures. As you can probably tell, I did a lot of digging in the early days. I read some good books on the topic, however no book actually helped ME heal the trauma it dealt to me. That needs to be your focus dear Bruce.

Wow Superesse, so much of what you said has resonated especially about H family and how they view the male role in the family unit-exactly the same.
H kissing and messing around with this co worker is as far as it went, he voluntarily took a polygraph which proved he did not have sex or oral sex with her and the last question asked was ‘apart from the 3 sex workers have you had sexual intercourse with anyone else apart from your wife since the day of your marriage’.
No deception indicated - he told the truth.
He said that he told himself that as long as he did not have sex with her it was just a bit of banter, EAP was fine with what was happening and said it was no big deal. Another thing that bothers me that he says is that he didn’t think it would hurt me like this, he said he told himself I’d not be that mad about it which makes me think he could actually be on the spectrum like Cooley2 mentioned.
I love him terribly but sometimes I can’t see a way through this, I don’t want to lose my beautiful family but it hurts so bad.

I don’t know why the incidents with the sex workers don’t bother me nearly half as much as the emotional affair because they didn’t sleep together.

I guess we are all built different, the sex workers don’t bother me that much at all, he was intoxicated and they meant nothing but the fact he drove a girl home, flirting touching and then kissing her before he came home to me absolutely destroys my heart every day.

You're feelings aren't abnormal. The typical rule of thumb is that men tend to care more, or a lot more, about PA's than EA's while women are the opposite. There's even a (in)famous video that shows how far this can go: it shows japanese women saying how they generally don't consider their partners to be cheating if they hire prostitutes and that some would even prefer it if doing so prevented their partners from engaging in "actual" cheating(EA's).

You sound very suspicious about the notion that your WH did not have any sex or oral sex, even though it was offered.

He said he the reason for the affair is because he failed to put boundaries in place and it crossed the line in to flirting then taking dirty to each other, he said he got a kick out of it because she’s half his age and he was extremely flattered and his ego at work was being stroked every day, he said she would not entertain his talk about his problems and so she made him forget his problems at home (we were renovating our home at the time), she was fun to be around and he said she followed him around like a puppy and then he said after he went in her house and ran off he started to be repulsed by her.

Take the genders of your WH and AP and flip them. Now we have a man using ego kibbles to lure a woman into a PA(or EA/PA) and a woman that is really enticed by the ego kibbles but is uncertain about how far she wants to go for those kibbles. IMO from this lens the behaviors stop looking so inexplicable and start looking pretty stereotypical. It could just be that your WH is the kind of man that really prefers the ego kibbles to the physical stuff, or did so in this particular case with this AP.

Couple more ideas:
His guilt from the sex workers suppressed his physical desires in general
His guilt from the sex workers placed, in his mind, a giant blaring stop sign in front of the real sex acts, but not the lead-up
He was too embarrassed about his PE to want to engage in oral or PIV

Thank you for your input Mardandra, some valuable and interesting points.
I guess I’m very suspicious because it doesn’t make sense to me really, it went on for so long on and off for a couple of years or so, so it’s very confusing why a young woman would waste her time messing around with a married man who told her he didn’t want anything with her, or why my H would risk his whole marriage for a few kisses.
My brain is still flying round at 100 miles per hour wondering if I still have the right story.

it’s very confusing why a young woman would waste her time messing around with a married man who told her he didn’t want anything with her

This part isn't too surprising. These women don't think the way you do. You can look around for some materials regarding 'the other woman' to get some insight into their mindset. The following are a few examples:
She has daddy issues
If your WH happens to have high status(social, financial, etc) then she wants that for herself
She's wants to get help for her career
She sees married men as a challenge and wants to 'win' over you to stroke her ego(yes there are women like this)

My brain is still flying round at 100 miles per hour wondering if I still have the right story.

Possibly. There are elements in your case that do indicate honesty on his part.

Last night some new information came from EAP and he had to admit it was true and he was furious she had disclosed that information

This means he's already been burned once by TTing. And since the AP has shown a willingness to blab about the A, he faces enormous risk of being exposed again if he continues lying. The risk vs reward for him continuing to lie in this situation just doesn't seem worth it to me. This of course presumes he's acting rationally and not in a panicked fashion.

Thank you Mardandra,

AP replied back to my message she said in her own words, maybe 80% of the time we were friends then 20% probably a little more than friends. It was literally just a lift home or a kiss every now and then, I can’t remember how many times we kissed.I can’t remember him touching me down there and we never talked outside of work or went on any dates and we did not have sex that’s for sure. It didn’t happen in one thing it happened in blocks. He ghosted me and I met my now fiancée and we have not spoken for nearly three years.
I know she’s lying about him not touching her because H has told me that he has and she said she can’t remember how many times they kissed, to me that would imply more than she can remember but H said roughly 8 times so now I’m paranoid thinking he’s lying and they were kissing all the time. It’s driving me insane.

I’m going to have a good chat with him today see if anything has changed, if not then I have to accept the information I have and try to move on because I just can’t stay here in this whirlwind of confusion and trying to make sense of something that was an absolute abomination.
I think that is going to be easier to say than to do and I have no idea where to start.
He went back to work yesterday after taking the past 6 weeks off to take care of me and the boys and it was very strange, when he is with me I feel safe and loved but when he went to work I felt hopeless and disconnected from him almost repulsed by him. Such a weird feeling I’ve never felt before.

Thank you for listening

I don’t know what is wrong with me, sometimes I think it’s because I don’t have enough information about the EA to accept it and try to move forward, or maybe it’s fear that I don’t know everything and I’m frightened one day something else might come out about the EA or maybe it’s because I don’t want to accept it happened at all.
I know when it started and when it ended, how many times they touched and kissed and it was on and off.
I don’t know anything really about their relationship together only that they only spoke at work and on the way home in the car, and he didn’t give her a lift regularly either.
H doesn’t give me any clue as to how close they were to each other and that again is incredibly painful for me because my intuition tells me they were and my mind tells me not.
H said she was just something at work he used to pass time, once he clocked out and came home he didn’t think about her at all. I find this mind blowing, completely do not understand this way of thinking at all.
Today when I asked him why he didn’t stop it sooner he said ‘because I couldn’t get away from her, she was in my face all the time constantly tempting me’. To which I replied you are going to have to come up with something better than that because you transferred department and still went back for one more kiss and touch. He didn’t say anything.
I can’t work out weather he did in fact have feelings for her or he went back for one more time because he knew he could, he did say previously she would do anything for him, practically throwing herself at him.

I wish I didn’t think about these things anymore, I’m tired and I want to try and feel a little bit better but these thoughts above are nibbling away at me, I want to get them out of my head.

Sometimes I think it would have been better had H not told me about his infidelity’s and I would not be going through this but in all honesty I think I’ve always known deep down he’d cheated on me in the past or at least suspected it and it’s kept eroding at me through the years until I’ve prodded and probed a confession out of him. H also said he wished he’d never told me now he said that he feels like he hurt me by cheating but then hurt me again by telling me about it.

Right now I’m just fantasising about a day in which I can function without these things being in my head. If it weren’t for SI I don’t know how I would be, reading other people’s posts it’s heartbreaking but knowing I’m not alone in this world means everything right now.

It takes years to heal from infidelity, not days, weeks or months. Healing is more of a marathon and not a sprint.

Have you asked for a written timeline, with him providing as many details as possible - including his thoughts and feelings? For the older dates, he may not remember details. For the more recent stuff, he should be able to give some details.

He has a lot of work to do to become a safe partner and not a repeat offender. His thought process is out of whack, so the reasons he gives you won't make sense.

No I have not asked for a written timeline but I will ask him, another thing is does anyone have any ideas on questions I should be asking?