Separate rooms, separate lives?

[blondie74]

DH has been sleeping in guest bedroom for some months, due he said to the problems I've been having with symptoms of going through the change. This has seen our sex life dwindle to practically nothing, something I have tried to improve but with little success. He has now decided that he wants this arrangement to be permanent.

I really miss the intimacies of sharing a bed (not just the sex) and he is well aware of that. It feels like we have become housemates and are no longer really a married couple. One of my biggest pleasures was having DC join us in bed at the weekends which felt to me what being a family was all about and I had always thought he shared that view but apparently that's not the case. Our DC is still young and of an age where they love being in the big bed and pretending it's a pirate ship or whatever but just doing that with mum isn't quite the same and it saddens me that DC has lost that.

DH has been on ADs for a couple of years and it has changed him. DH is happy just to bumble along like this and doesn't want to split up. Neither of us wants to subject DC to a divorce. Has anyone else been in a similar situation and how do you make it work?

Charbon DHs depression has been around much longer than the OW and is something that he has always struggled with. Currently he is giving me space and not trying to force the issue. Initially he was wallowing in his own misery about the mess he had created and angry with the everyone and everything but that has gone. Anything I ask him to do he does and without having to be nagged about it. He's trying to be caring and it is me who is distancing myself from his gestures but he is still trying.

I don't think it is realistic to believe that I had no part to play in all of this. I'm human not some model wife on a pedestal and whilst it was wrong for him to take the route he chose to do, and I'm not excusing him for it by any means, to move on from here (whichever way it goes) we need to work out what the failings were on both sides. He has repeatedly told me that it was not my fault and that I did nothing to cause him to stray but we need to get to why he did what he did.

I do feel I am in protector mode but that is purely for my benefit and that of my DC. I don't want to be "poor little blondie" the one who everyone pities and gossips about until something else more newsworthy occurs. I've seen it happen too many times that the wronged partner understandably broadcasts the situation and gets lots of support before trying to resume the relationship. Inevitably the disclosure colours existing relationships/friendships and rarely for the better.

I think he is all too aware of having put everything at risk by shagging the OW. If he needed the reactions of people finding out to motivate him into realising what he has jeopardised that lack of awareness would suggest it was unlikely that he would ever take any responsibility.

My DH knows how independent I am and that if I decide that it is over that there will definitely be no going back. I've never been the kind of woman that has needed a man to feel complete.

He has repeatedly told me that it was not my fault and that I did nothing to cause him to stray but we need to get to why he did what he did.

He did what he did because he is selfish and entitled - he needs to find out what made him allow himself to have an affair.

I agree that as part of the later stage of recovery its useful to look at the weaknesses in your relationship in order to affair proof it (Shirley Glass's Not Just Friends is useful for doing this section).

Yes Blondie I was aware that his illness pre-dated the affair.

Is your husband saying that he had dissatisfactions with your relationship and with you and that these were causatory in his affair, or is that what you believe? This is what I mean by challenging your thinking.