just recovering from shock of discovering dh's affair

[mollynp]

i discovered on friday my husband's affair (after suspecting for a while) after reading his text messages.
it's been going on for six months, there have been a lot of calls, texts and emails and he has kissed her 4 times, though never had sex.
he said he fell in love with her but didn't want to sleep with her as that would be taking it too far.
she is a colleague of his (which i'm not happy about) but he doesn't see her a lot at work as they work in different buildings.
he did go to her flat twice but insists that they only kissed and never slept together.
but even though they never slept together i feel totally devastated. we've been together for 18 years (married for nearly nine) and have 3 young children.
am i being over the top? is this as bad as a normal affair?
he says that it's an awful mistake, that he loves me and doesn't want to leave me and never did and i feel i couldn't live without him (i never expected this!), so don't want him to.
i am totally confused and don't understand how he could have done this to me.

Hi OP.

You've already had some excellent advice on this from WWIFN so I won't repeat it, except to say the book by Shirley Glass is a good source of helping you both understand.

I would say that I was in exactly the same place as you are 4 years ago (indeed, I would have written almost word-for-word what you have, it's uncanny).

I can't tell you what the right thing to do is but I can tell you what we did that ultimately led to his second affair and now we are divorcing.

He consistently denied it was sexual and failed to understand how much his actions had hurt me. I was so ashamed I never talked about it with anyone and so I was vulnerable to just trying to focus on our marriage and putting it right again.

We spent many months as if fused together, rekindling our early days and all the passion we'd had then - rather than me taking time out to really ask myself if this was the behaviour of a man who had my best interests at heart and whether I could trust again - I couldn't in the end and he never faced up to his vulnerability to the adoration of others - hence the second affair and some really depraved and cruel treatment of me and our DC's.

We tried couple therapy but since he wasn't able to look at himself fully and take responsbility, he just lied all through it, and now I know the first affair was a sexual one.

So if I could go back I would have asked him to go and spend time on his own (I'm not suggesting you do this btw) while I decided if still wanted our marriage to work. Then I would have insisted he go into therapy followed by couples therapy. And then I would have reappraised the situation again to see if it could work for us.

You are still in shock OP and it takes a long time to get over that I'm afraid. But it's natural and you should be allowed to do this at your own pace, with no pressure to 'get over it' for the sake of peace because you can't. I can't say how long it takes for normality to return - I'll let you know when it comes back for me! But the thing is that normality as you knew it is gone now and something different will unfold which will become a new normality. The uncertainty of what the future holds can feel unbearable, but take each day as it comes and post here as often as you need, talk with your H, talk with RL friends and take support wherever you can get it.

Hope this helps.

Hi molly

Was in similar situation as you after Christmas. I received tons of good advice from WWIFN and AF plus others and shied away from most of it (at my peril). 'H' and I are now separated, solicitors involved etc. (was called amicable then). He's moved on from the initial OW to a one night stand with another OW and now admits that he is just too attracted to a single life of screwing about to commit to me fully. But offered me the chance to hang around to see if I could make him fall in love with me again. I have declined his offer .

But anyway, just wanted to share a few observations that I hope may be helpful from someone who knows absolutely how you feel right now.

All your feelings of shock / illness / stress / self harm / anger etc etc are very normal and will continue for some time I'd imagine. Just try and ride the wave of them rather than fight them (this helped me anyway).

Realise that it is waaaay too early to be making any decisions. It takes a long time to absorb this horror and it takes a longer time than you've had for you and H to start seeing the shape of what your new reality is. You may find that your H makes the right noises now, but that a month down the line when the drama has died down a little, that he starts drifting off again.

That you may need a period of separation from your H so that you can see things clearly, but you are almost certainly not ready for this yet.

That your H is almost certainly still keeping stuff from you, and you will keep making new discoveries which will feel worse than the original discovery (even if the details are quite minor).

That it is probably too soon for relationship counselling at this point. But not necessarily to early for personal counselling to help you through the trauma of this stage.

Most importantly (and this is the bit I ignored when I was advised it) is that it is entirely up to your H to fight for you like mad. Any ambivalence in him at all is a very bad sign. You've done nothing wrong, he should be breaking his back to 'win you back' and that's not really the vibe I am getting from your posts.

Clearly a lot of this relates to my situation and what eventually panned out, but I just wanted to respond as I felt for you so much reading your posts. It is shit right now but it will get better, even if your marriage ultimately doesn't work out you will find new reserves of strength that you didn't know you had.

Remember that you are a prize to be won, don't question whether you can win HIM back. Question whether he is worthy of winning YOU back. (hugs)

Would it be ok, please, if I copied and shared this? Absolutely spot on but do not wish to infringe anyone's copyright.

WWIFN - you're brilliant!

Oh! I did this wrong - was trying to see if I could cut and paste WWIFN's post about chronology of affair earlier in posts!

OP - hope that you're coping well! Know that it's all dreadful for you; try and look after yourself; Mn will give you lots of help; take care. x

Feel free to use it Maundy - if it helps someone else, it will have been worthwhile. I have a feeling too that while it might not resonate right now for molly, it might further down the line.

Scaredydog, i think the thrush was due to the stress at the time along with the heartburn (could have been a side effect of drugs i was on). i think i subconsciously knew something was up, but had no idea what. When i went to the clinic i think the dr probably thought wtf when i said that the last time i had sex with my husband was last night after i had told her why i was there!

Hi mollynp .

How are you?

Thanks for asking. Feeling tired and terribly sad this morning. thought i would be able to sleep last night, but still can't. Can't really take feeling like this for much longer. i'm neglecting the kids and i have to go back to work at some point soon. don't know how i'll cope with living a normal life again. i just want the pain to go away.

The emotions you're feeling now molly are debilitating and bewildering, because it is rare in any other situation to feel so many extremes within a short space of time. Hence, you can feel sadness, loss, grief, anger, hope, exhilaration, happiness, joy, lust, love and hate all in one day - and all directed at the one person.

Later on, you might notice that these emotions become more singular and last longer, so you will have whole days of feeling mostly sad, or hopeful, or angry etc. If recovery is going well, eventually the positive feelings stretch to weeks, but any new lie that is exposed, or blip in your H's behaviour, or even a memory that is triggered, can take you right back to despair again.

Eventually, if you're both finally on the same page and have done all the hard work, the positive emotions extend to whole months at a time.

But this is why you cannot make any promises about the future, because you cannot know whether you will withstand this, or indeed dependent on the work your H is willing to put in, whether you even should continue trying. There comes a point in this for some people, when it is more sensible and healthy to step away. No relationship is more important that an individual's mental health.

What happened overnight molly? What did your discussions reveal?

Just a thought molly but can you get your GP to sign you off for a couple of weeks just to help you get yourself together again?

Don't know what work you do, but you'd be absolutely in the right to need some time to start recovery. Otherwise you might end up crashing if you go back too soon. The time I had off was so helpful in my need to just get through the day and have enough energy to be there for my DS's. Think about it.

WWIFN is right, you'll feel and think things over the coming weeks to an extent that you never thought you would but this is entirely to be expected and absolutely the sign of someone who is traumatised, believe me.

Be nice to yourself in the here and now though.

WWIFN, sorry i didn't reply earlier, H stayed at home again yesterday after i had a really bad night and we did a lot of talking. I don't think there is any more for him to reveal, now he has told me everything he sleeps soundly all night and is less upset. Neither of us slept very well for months until i discovered his affair!
I think if i could sleep well i would feel a whole lot better, i don't think taking sleeping tablets help, so will try again tonight without them (i tried on wednesday night unsuccessfully). Don't want to start getting addicted to sleeping tablets as well!
He is truly sorry and he had no idea i would be so hurt by him having an affair, though i don't know why. i suppose i am surprised at how i have been feeling the last 6 days. i would have expected to have been upset and angry, but not this!
We both love each other dearly and want to stay together, so i don't see why we can't get through this, but i still feel constantly anxious that we will end up seperating. Every time i think of the idea of him leaving i cry! i need him to reassure me constantly, but i am finding it difficult to think of the future as i feel i don't know where we'll be. Though he is sure we'll be together.
He is going to start seeing his psychologist again tomorrow as she has kindly fitted him in, and we have postponed relationship counselling for now as we're not sure how helpful it will be.
I know others might think me pathetic for still wanting him, but i've never been able to imagine a life without him.
Wisedupwoman, my GP did say that all i had to do was ring him and he'd sign me off for another week, so i think i'll have to. Though today i am feeling better than i have for a few days, i can't see my brain being able to function well enough to work next week, i find emptying the dishwasher or cooking dinner challenging enough!

WHAT a bastard. Dont make excuses for him he has made his bed he can lay in it

i know he has been a bastard, though i still don't want to be without him. obviously if it happens again i would change my mind.
i'm not making excuses for him either, i just think that he didn't think about how badly i would feel if i knew what he was up to. i guess he has been incredibly selfish and he needs to start thinking of other people's feelings a bit more!

He might not have thought that you would feel as bad or as hurt as you do, but he would have been well aware that you would feel some hurt, some upset. How does he measure how much hurt of distress is ok to inflict on you?

Reading through your posts, the thing that jumps out to me is that you want to feel better as quickly as possible - hardly surprising. I just wonder if you are making choices and telling him to want your relationship to survive this, as a means to getting to that 'feeling better' goal quickly. The problem is that he is having fewer consequences as a result of this - it seems that little has actually changed for him. You are still cooking for you both, having sex with him, telling him you want to stay together, he's now sleeping well etc etc. He has nothing to fear really, does he? The only thing for him is seeing you so upset, but even that is only just a few points higher on a scale of 1 to 10 than he would have inflicted on you knowingly through his deceit.

I don't think you are pathetic at all, far from it. I just think it would serve you better in the long term to make him sweat a bit more than he has done.

So he appears to think (and you to agree) that the problem here is less his actions than your reaction.

From what you're saying the message I'm hearing is that this all would have been OK if you hadn't got so upset about it. So if you didn't know, that would be fine.

He's a long way from recognising that his behaviour towards you was shitty in and of itself. Even if you hadn't found out, it still wouldn't have been OK for him to have a new girlfriend and write songs for her and publish them for all to hear.

Are you sure this is the first time he's done this? He seems very comfortable with the whole thing, other than your reaction.

Right now, given your obvious desperation to keep him, and his clear wish that you hadn't found out (but crucially not that he had not strayed), I think you're in a "cover tracks better next time" situation.

The fact that he's sleeping like a baby when you are so traumatised because if his actions that you are barely functioning tells you all you need to know about his future selfishness.

He feels safe.

Well put ScaredOf - that was where I was trying to go, but didn't quite get there.

Exactly how much upset would he have been OK with inflicting on you, OP?

Whenwill - sorry for previous mix up - nothing a couple if quotation marks wouldn't have made clearer.

You are not pathetic at all! Until 7 days ago, you believed that your H was the man he'd always been; faithful and incapable of hurting you. You're still trying to process your shock and the realisation that 18 years of assumptions have been shattered. The shock is also profoundly worse when a marriage has been happy and loving - you simply didn't see this coming. This wasn't a marriage that had deteriorated over the years and an affair therefore wouldn't have come as a surprise. It would be very strange in these circumstances then, if you felt any differently, because your safety has been taken away. I understand totally why your instinct is to cling to him right now - and why you can't imagine life without him.

I think what might be a helpful thing for you to do is to suspend judgement on whether you have got all the truth. As you become stronger and some of your symptoms have gone, you will find some of the determination you had last Friday, coming back. You will feel able to see things more logically and rationally - and you might find more searching questions coming to the fore.

I do think you might regret not insisting that you got to hear or see the message he was communicating to the OW. You might have felt too shocked and powerless to make too many demands about that last week, but I have a feeling that what she has been led to believe about the affair, why it happened and why it ended, will become more and more important to you, so give some thought to that, while you have still got the chance to set the record straight. It goes without saying that he must have the balls to be honest with her about not being in love with her and having been caught up in a fantasy - and actually that is fairer to her too, because so many OW cling on to a delusion that a man would have left his wife, if it wasn't for the kids/the money. It's evident that she didn't think this was just a bit of fun, given the romanticism in the relationship that you've described. Most of all though, it will give you more peace than you can imagine, to know that she has been put straight that his loyalty to you is because he loves you deeply; that he is staying for no other reason.

I'm glad he is taking time off work to talk and think that is a good sign.

Finally, remember that no-one can accurately predict how they will feel until this event happens to them. In addition to the shock of what has happened to you, there is the shock at your own reaction. But remember that you have had a very strong attachment to this man for your entire adult life and it would be bizarre if you felt able to detach so suddenly. At the moment, I want you to think of yourself as a little girl who fears she might be parted from her Mum and imagine how you might have behaved towards your Mum before that happened. You would cling and desperately try to keep her by your side, wouldn't you?

Your husband is your main adult attachment figure, so this is no different. Cut yourself some slack here in these early days and don't waste time worrying what anyone else thinks. Soon, some clarity and spirit will return.

No worries spidookly. Cross-posted before seeing anyone other than the OP's post - I understand where posters are coming from, but IME it's pretty typical for a discovered adulterer to regret getting caught, more than regretting his actions, in the early days. Let's be honest, this affair would still have continued if he hadn't been rumbled, so in some ways, it would be pretty disingenuous to claim horror and regret at what he'd done just yet - because if he didn't feel those things last Friday, why would he feel them now?

He might feel horror at seeing the pain he'd caused now he's had to see it with his own eyes. Frankly, most people grossly under-estimate the pain an affair will cause, otherwise they would never be able to do it. I expect that part of his permission-giving process might have been that what the OP didn't know, couldn't hurt her - and also, as long as he wasn't going to leave his marriage for the OW, this wasn't "as bad" as a "threatening" affair. These are the crazy delusions that many people engage in, when they are trying to find justifications for doing something they know at heart, to be wrong.

He'll learn.

And for those who are understandably concerned that this man is sleeping well and appears to have suffered no consequences, he doesn't know it yet, but this will be the best he feels for a very long time....he doesn't know yet that he's got to face months of angry tears, recriminations, searching questions and possibly losing his marriage further down the line. He is as blissfully unaware of what lies ahead as it is possible to be. This period is a completely false dawn - and he really doesn't know what's going to hit him.

WWIFN - I really hope you're right about that.

Don't know whether anyone else is the same, but I get a feeling about some OPs and if I'm right about you molly, as you say yourself - you are no doormat. I bet up till now, people would have described you as a strong, assertive woman - and this explains some of your shock about your own reaction. That woman hasn't left the building permanently - in fact, I suspect you will emerge even stronger. But at the moment, you need to lick your wounds, grieve and give yourself permission to feel the way you do. It's not a weakness, it's a sign of being human and someone who is capable of loving very deeply indeed.

Well I get a feeling about the OP's husband - that he is in love with his own image of himself as a romantic hero.

He supposedly fell in love with this woman, but didn't want so sleep with her as that would be taking things "too far". I think this is a lie, but it's another "give yourself away" lie: he thinks it's OK to fall in love with other women, to act on that "love", to indulge his heartsick feelings and write songs celebrating that "love" and it's all OK as long as his precious dick stays dry.

I doubt this is the first emotional affair he's had. I suspect he sees himself as a deep-feeling fellow whose creativity is inspired by these muses.

There's a long way to go before this gobshite has any insight into himself and his tawdry affair (that he still can't name for what it was).

you are right WWIFN, i am no doormat, and i don't think H would have married me if i was. I wouldn't describe myself as weak and will put my neck on the line for what i believe in. i think that explains why i didn't get the full story all at once, though now i know that is normal, as H truly believed that our marriage would be over if i knew the whole truth.
What i don't understand is why he thought it worth risking in the first place. He knows that he has been a bastard and that there is no excuse. hopefully he'll make amends and never do it again.
The other point Spidookly is that i don't truly believe that they wouldn't have had sex if they had had more time to spend together. Most if this affair was conducted by text, phone and e-mail. He'd obviously decided it was going further a month ago, when he made the decision to go round her flat and perform oral sex on her. No doubt if another opportunity had come up where he could have gone round there without me realising, he would have gone, and things would have gone further. But i found him out first.
And by the way, i'm only making the dinner so the kids don't eat too late when they come home from after school club. I'm not cooking anything special for H (he had fish fingers last night)! He's currently having to do all the running around and school runs whilst having to work as well, so he's not having it that easy!
i don't feel like such an emotional wreck today, just tired and hungry.

How much of a gap was there between the two visits to her flat then - and what allegedly happened on the first occasion molly?

Given what you believe about what he's said, I'm glad at least that you can see that things would have gone much further without discovery. Your jaw might drop open when you read the Ralph and Rachel story in Not Just Friends...have you ordered it yet - or rather has he, because I can imagine you've got no desire to go onto Amazon and order a book? Add that to his list of chores and if money allows, get him to order 2 of them, because actually, it's more important that he reads this, several times.

I have exacly the same impression of your H as spidookly incidentally. It's partially what I was alluding to in earlier posts. I think this affair was all about what it made him feel, about himself. When I suggested you found out what he enjoyed about his role in the affair, I agree that I think he saw himself as some star-crossed romantic hero. Although I think this is a Feelings Addiction affair, there is a bit of the Romantic Idiot affair here too. He sounds like someone who would have refused to believe that this was a tawdry, nasty affair while it was happening - or even after discovery. One of the things that will shock him to the core in the coming months is how scripted he actually became - and that there was nothing "new" or special in any of this. He behaved according to a well-worn script, as no doubt did the OW.

And it was nasty, seedy, deceitful and revolting - and not romantic at all.

I have read most of the replies and tryly sympathise with your plight although some of them do seem to be a bit long-winded and the advice convoluted. Good intentions no from some doubt but please beware the 'Internet Expert'.

I don't think you will find much help or any meaningful resolution is in a book though. Hearing about other people's experiences can be very useful and often helps put your own problems into context but there is a lot of opinion dressed up as knowledge or even fact out on the Net.

Glad to hear you are feeling a little better and I hope that your husband has finally admited the whole truth. Good luck to you. x