Nearly 2 years down the line from dday I have been over my memories of my relationship with H with a fine toothcomb. Trying to work out where a really close, loving, intimate relationship where we shared everything and the rest of the world could disappear and we wouldn't care less, to one where we were both more or less indifferent to each others' presence and eventually H had an affair. You could remove the phrase 'H had an affair' with 'we got a divorce' if you wish, it's irrelevant to this post.
And the most truly tragic thing is that I cannot really find one occasion where I could point a finger at either one of us say 'that was a really shitty thing to do' or 'how could you be so unkind?. There were minor acts of selfishness and thoughtlessness at times but nothing that would have been a deal breaker on their own. And for a long long time we were still in love and inspite of life's difficulties (and there were more than our fair share at times) we preferred each other's company to anyone else's.
What did the damage? Resentment (mine mostly), complacency (again, mostly mine), selfishness (mostly his but mine as well) and laziness (ALL his!!). They act like waves on a cliff - slowly over time eroding what was once strong. Fear helped - we were both afraid to look at the damage and admit we had a problem. Failure to communicate about the negative.
We are getting back to what we had. Slowly. And it's OK, more than OK at times. But it shouldn't have got there in the first place.
I don't even know what I'd say to a couple getting together now. What advice I'd give to them. All we ever did was try to get by as best we could.
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Relationships
Post-affair retrospective, or what who did, where and why.
ormirian · 19/03/2014 12:07
Each couple will be different, I suppose, Orm. Why does it happen? Goodness knows... =/- 1,000 different reasons coupled with opportunities for repair or affair. 
It's so easy for people on the outside to say "It's a deal-breaker for me, I'd never give him another chance" but it's impossible to know unless you've been in that situation. With my previous partner, if he'd had an affair, I would have walked away (and did) - because my motivation to stay was not enough. With my current husband - I'd probably want to try and get back what we had but with that comes the realisation that what we had wasn't 'all that'. I don't know. Hopefully I'll never find out.
Talking of not finding out... I'm not convinced that disclosure/discovery is always the right way. Affairs happen so very often that I think sometimes they'd be better off being 'shrugged off' and relegated to 'unimportant in the grand scheme of things'. With that, you get to truly move on, when they feature very heavily and 'taint' a marriage, I would say that's so, so difficult.
Keep on keeping on, Orm. If what you're doing is right for you and your husband then nobody else's opinion really matters.
Thanks for your replies.
I am just musing really.
donkey - to be fair to him he never blamed me. He didn't need to. I was doing a pretty good job without him 
At first he did have a sort of martyred air about him that pissed me off - 'look how good I am being, not contacting OW, and letting Orm get mad at me, and not blaming her'. I felt like he was behaving towards me like a crying child, 'there, there!' while his head was elsewhere. Which drove me mad! But that passed too. The shock wore off for him and he began to see the magnitude of what he had done. And then we began to make progress.
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