To think anything I did was also his fault?

[Naomi189]

I'm about a year into recovering from my DH having an affair. We stayed together, and there's been generally good progress but we keep having the same argument and I get insanely angry when we have it and I just want to know AIBU.

After he cheated, for the first couple of months I was fairly calm. I was devastated, but I wasn't chucking his clothes out of windows or screaming and shouting.

The first 12 weeks was hell, but in a lot of ways we were closer than ever before and I felt like it would be a lot road but we'd recover from it. We'd been to counselling and attended an online infidelity course and things had been really positive.

One thing drilled into him was the need for total honesty going forwards. During that period, he met the OW for drinks to give her "closure" he felt she "deserved", after he'd expressly promised not to speak to her ever again.

To me, that was actually worse than the affair itself and I went absolutely postal, chucked him out, went on Tinder, got insanely drunk and gave a random date a blow job in the garden and texted DH to tell him.

I'm not proud of that, but he'd had an affair that went on for months and while I was in the process of giving him an opportunity to make amends (and while he'd seen me clearly devastated), he betrayed me again.

So we got through it all eventually, but now as we're trying to do the work on the affair, he keeps banhing on about how I "hurt him too" and how much what I did, damaged HIM.

To which I roll my eyes, go absolutely postal again and tell him HE is responsible for his affair and breaking our marriage and HE is responsible for betraying me again when I was devastated and therefore HE is responsible for any fallout or consequences.

He says I need to take responsibility and just because he screwed someone else 50 times while I was home cooking his dinner, that I still had "choices" and didn't need to behave in ways to deliberately hurt him.

I think I have absolutely zero responsibility for damaging our relationship and that he's lucky I didn't do worse.

Am I wrong here?

Largely we are doing well, but he just will NOT stop bringing this up during arguments which they turn very ugly because it feels like he's trying to act like I'm to blame for reacting to his shit behaviour.

...Even the way you describe the messages from your husband to the OW maintains his dignity ! It's like you're saying " though my dh cheated on me , he maintained his love and respect for me through it all!"

Your words -" The months of messages he sent her telling her he didn't love her, didn't want a relationship with her and it was a friendship that "got out of hand", were a ruse."

It's like you're minimising his betrayal . Even stating that he wasn't emotionally stable for the marriage beforehand due to his past . Please stop making excuses for your dh's behaviour! This is why he has you feeling the way you do - it is not a healthy long term approach!

People can be unhappy without their being a villain. Children can be caught in a very unhappy marriage without anyone “abusing” them. Lots of people suffer terribly from the depression of a parent, or a parent’s trauma, without the parent being “guilty” of doing something deliberately to harm the child. Hell children suffer from losing parents to death when that is 100 percent not the parents fault.

The stately homes comment, which I am guilty of, grew out of the fact that you described overwhelming grief and rage towards your dh and also seemed to think that performing happy families would render it invisible to your children. I just don’t think that any number of packed lunches or school pickups —however welcome they are—really paper over the kind of rage and grief you are describing.

But here is the thing: its a mugs game trying to figure out who to blame, or arguing that random commenters are misdiagnosing the issue. Sometimes no one is to blame, sometimes everyone is.

There is a parable I learned once: The Man in the Boat.

Once there was s man canooing on a quiet lake. Through the morning mist he saw what looked like another man in a canoe coming towards him. At that rate the other canoe would crash into him. He began to shout and wave his paddle trying to get the other guy to see him and stop moving towards him. He screamed “I have the right of way!” And “are you blind?” and “you jerk don’t you know how to share the pond?”

No response and suddenly the two canoes collided. But it wasn’t another canoe at all—it was just a log. Our poor hero had wasted time and energy trying to “be heard” and “be recognized” snd “have the right of way” when there was no one there. If he had just quietly waited and used his paddle to fend off the other boat/log he would have been safe.

Take the man out of the boat. Stop shouting at people on the internet. Just do what you feel you need to do to live a good life. If you can do that with your dh: do it! If you can’t: do something else. All the wailing and shouting and grieving snd bragging in the world will not change the fact that you are alone on a misty pond by yourself.

Thanks Cherry

I answered most questions. A lot of times I answered questions people would not accept my answers and insisted that I was wrong about myself. If people engage like that there isn't much point in speaking to them on a serious level.

By the time we got to the question you're referring to I was 16 pages into a thread of people who'd been fairly extremely abusive and amongst other things claimed my children are abuse victims. So, it isn't a safe place for discussion, but thanks.

Comments re your children are out of place and quite judgmental . You have given very little if not no information about your kids stance/reaction to this and so I have no idea why posters are assuming this

amongst other things claimed my children are abuse victims

No-one claimed this.

Read @pikkumyy77 for the accurate account of what was said.

It's quite irritating that posters took time to carefully set out their position and share their stories are having valid points twisted by you.

Your DC are not being emotionally protected in this awful marriage. That's problematic. But it's not saying they are 'abuse victims' 😡

@pikkumyy77 that's (another) excellent & thought-provoking post.

My first post on this, but I’ve read it all. You have on the whole been given some valuable and insightful advice on this thread. But you do appear to be stuck with your own thoughts and own way of thinking which does pose the question of what do you want from this other than people to agree with your thinking?

You fully disclose that you have explored your feelings in depth with a qualified counsellor and have excellent esteem and confidence going forward. But your posts don’t really correlate with that. If you truly felt the healing process was on track with counselling why would you be posting here?

At the end of the day it boils down to the fact that you seem full of rage and want your husband to completely capitulate to your thinking but he seems to have his own pathway of thinking that’s different to yours.

Life is messy sometimes and sometimes we don’t have it bundled up as we would like, but only you can decide whether your marriage can go forward leaving behind the hurt and betrayal. And that is the million dollar question here as you don’t seem that open minded to others who are actually trying to make balanced and valid points that could be of interest and benefit to you.

Give over.

@cherry2727

You've gone off on a tangent as this doesn't have anything to do with my thread, but I'll answer.

>> I only mentioned the messages with the OW because people were defending him meeting her for closure by saying he must have bullshitted her. I know this to be factually incorrect and explained why I know this.

>>I do not "minimise" my husband's affair. To minimise means to represent or estimate something as less than the true value or importance of itself. This thread is about doing the complete opposite of minimising in that I am insisting he take responsibility and work through healing fairly arduously.

>> When you choose to stay or go after an affair, you have to decide for yourself what factors make it impossible to live with. Had I seen any messages or emails which were flirty, romantic or loving, for me the marriage would have been over. I am simply stating I saw none of that. As well as not seeing any of that, I saw letters from the OW describing the relationship in a way that exactly matched the characteristics seen in the texts and also got it from the horses mouth.

If you wish to believe otherwise, please go ahead.

@pikkumyy77

the stately homes thread is for survivors of abusive households. You have no evidence my house is abusive in any, way, shape or form.

I do not drink
We do not fight
I do not rage
We are nice to one another

As you say children unfortunately do not live in perfect homes. Parents die, get divorced, have affairs, lose their jobs, have money problems, have long term illnesses. I am quite sure their children are affected, but they are not abused just because their parents have a problem.

Unless you have some sort of evidence people's children are survivors of an abusive household, then it's an incredibly shit thing to say that they are.

>> When you choose to stay or go after an affair, you have to decide for yourself what factors make it impossible to live with. Had I seen any messages or emails which were flirty, romantic or loving, for me the marriage would have been over. I am simply stating I saw none of that. As well as not seeing any of that, I saw letters from the OW describing the relationship in a way that exactly matched the characteristics seen in the texts and also got it from the horses mouth.

Please clarify this - was your husband's affair just sexual ? Am I correct so say that there was no romance or flirting on your husband's part ?

You ignored everything @pikkumyy77 said.

(And you're incorrect about Stately Homes too - as the very name suggests - the threads deal with emotional harm that can occur in even 'stable' houses with outwardly supportive parents.).

Why do you keep making up this fiction about 'abuse'? No-one's saying that. They are saying your children aren't being well-served in this toxic situation. They're not.

@cherry2727

Yes, none of any kind. Believe what you like but I read it all and it was business like. That was confirmed by OWs letters.

@Naomi189 Once again, and as kindly as I can.

Why are you spending so much time arguing with other posters about the details of what happened?

Your relationship does not seem healthy to me, and I was in a blame-game relationship for far too long. I couldn't afford to divorce until DC were grown.

Frankly, I think the likelihood of him fulfilling your criteria is very remote. How much longer are you prepared to go on suffering?

PS One thing I realised during my own dysfunctional marriage was that I tended to confuse pain with love. Anyway the man I loved turned out to be a fiction of my own imagination

You’ve just said

we do not fight
i do not rage
we are nice to each other

But this completely contradicts the summary of your original post!

@EarringsandLipstick

ME: Amongst other things claimed my children are abuse victims

YOU: No-oneclaimed this. Read@pikkumyy77for the accurate account of what was said. It's quite irritating that posters took time to carefully set out their position and share their stories are having valid points twisted by you.

Here is an copy and past of what @pikkumyy77 said

whoever said upthread that this was all very “stately homes” (From the perspective of the children) was right. For everyone’s sake split up this house of horrors

The stately homes thread is about kids who have survived abusive homes. She issaying, explicitly, my home fits that description and calls it a "house of
horrors"

What "valid point" am I "twisting?"

Can you please explain what someone means by calling my home a "house of horrors" that belongs on a thread for children who've survived abusive homes if what they're saying is not that my children are abuse victims?

@friendlycat I obviously meant we do not do it anywhere near our children.

@EarringsandLipstick

How do you know how well my children are or are not being served? You have literally no basis for this other than that you have decided something must or must not be happening. The idea they will end up on the "stately homes" thread is a complete invention on your part. You do not have a single shred of evidence that this is the case, yet you are persisting on saying it over and over and demanding I accept it.

What in God's name is genuinely the matter with you?

@ImNotWorthy It's my thread. A better question is why are some of these posters investing so much time trying to argue with me? I mean, this is all a bit gaslightly isn't it. I'm not the aggressor here, I am responding to other who are directing pretty outlandish accusations and nonsense at me.

My apologies - no offence intended. Obviously, it's entirely your choice how you post on your own thread

I was just sharing my own experience of having unproductive discussions on threads I myself have started in the past

The stately homes thread is about kids who have survived abusive homes.

Again, it's not. I already addressed that twice. It deals with narcissism, hurt, emotional harm. I'm not saying those are necessarily applicable to you. But it's not only 'abusive homes' in some specific definition.

She issaying, explicitly, my home fits that description and calls it a "house of
horrors

She isn't.

It is a strong phrase I grant you. But I don't think she means it literally. She means the marriage. Which is a horror show.

How many times do you want it explained?

You're coming across really badly here, spitefully attacking people who've tried to help.

I didn't say they'd be on the Stately Homes thread 🙄

I corrected your misunderstanding of that thread.

On the basis of your own words this is a deeply dysfunctional marriage which will have a impact on your children. I gave you an example from my own situation.

What is wrong with you? Why are you arguing with everyone whose tried to help? It's your H that deserves your anger.

Yoj have to stop blaming OW, she was taken j by him. Whatever she did for whatever reasons she owes you NOTHING. No respect, no loyalty, absolutely ducking zero anything. Your husband owes you these things and he failed you. Put the blame 10@% on him because blaming the OW just gives him permission to do it again…

@ImNotWorthy You're right and it's unproductive, but if they keep directing it I'll keep responding and then I suppose it's up to them if their idea of fun is this!

Oh stop.

'Gaslighty' after everything that's been said.

You've got a lot of issues OP