@ IceCreamSummer20 so are all acts of abuse equal then?
I was married for thirteen years before I had a six week affair. During that time my dh:
Humiliated me in public because I didn’t cut up a piece of meat in the way he felt was appropriate (I ended up leaving my dinner because I felt so ashamed,)
When I was asked to contribute to my DC’s nursery by helping out with some musical activities he told me in front of the DC that it wouldn’t be happening. DC excitedly told him that “mummy will be coming in to do x” and his instant response was “no you won’t.”
I applied to do a college course, and unfortunately he got sight of the letter before I saw it read it, and told me I had been declined and shredded it before I could see it, the reasons given were so unexpected that I have always wondered whether I was actually accepted and he just wouldn’t let me go, but it never occurred to me to question it at the time.
Told me that we needed to have sex to prove that we could for the post birth check-up. We would be going up when the baby went down for a nap, and that’s exactly what happened. I only realised very recently what that actually meant.
In between the marriage was actually a decent one. You don’t notice the emotional stuff when it happens on a gradual scale.
I never justified having an affair, I simply explained the circumstances in which it happened.
In emotionally abusive relationships you don’t consider the possibility of being in danger. It’s not the same as a physical relationship where you face physical harm as a result of being found out. But at the time I didn’t think about that, I thought that actually, there were people out there who seemed to think I was a pretty decent human being when previously I had been told I wasn’t but it was ok, at least he loved me, even if I wasn’t as good a shag as his ex.
Ironically he would have taken me back after the affair. But at that point I knew that things would become much worse, and besides, I had told him at that point I was leaving. We’d been talking about splitting prior to that anyway but there were always reasons why we couldn’t. It’s actually not as easy as some people seem to think it is to walk out on someone without having a reason to do so.
Being abused didn’t justify my affair. But my affair did justify splitting up and his being able to retain his dignity and remain the innocent party who had done no wrong.
OK, so having had a six week long affair, most of which was emotional and only ended up in sex once, I am an abuser. But tell me this. If a couple are in a relationship where there is violence from one side and one day the victim retaliates and hits him back, is she then also an abuser? Are those things equal?
Even a woman who murders her husband in self defence is often justified because of everything she has been through. yet someone can go through years of emotional abuse and when they have an affair at the end of that, somehow what they have done is considered worse...
I can hand on heart say that I would never have another affair.
My ex on the other hand is now with someone else and his behaviour towards her is following the same pattern. He’s already managed to move her away from friends, gaslights her, made her believe I was totally against her in the beginning to ensure that she and I would never actually get to talk. The difference is that she uses their children as weapons and threatens him that if they ever split he will never see them again. She’s already turned her own DC against their father, and even though they do see him occasionally it is very much not encouraged.
But people need to distinguish between justifiable/ok and understandable. I never justified my affair. I have written about it on here before and I have never said that what I did was ok. But such a situation can make it understandable.
Life just isn’t that black and white.