Rumours at DH's work

[Ormiriathomimus]

He is one of the few men working in this school. Last year rumour started that he was having an affair with one of his assistants. Nasty particularly because her H is an abusive twat and if he got to hear these rumours the consequences could be pretty bad. Rumour was quashed by HT would sent strongly worded memo about spreading malicious rumours.

Anyway it has started again. Assistant in question is in the process of trying to end her marriage and is in a very difficult position.

But right now, I am more concerned about me. Selfish I know but I am recovering from depression and still a bit unstable. I know he isn't unfaithful. I know they are just stupid rumours. But it hurts to think that so many people (some of whom I know socially) might beleive these rumours and in fact be spreading them. It makes me feel undesirable and ugly, middle-aged and stupid, a sap who is being take for a ride.

I can't tell you how upset it has made me feel. It had made me angry with DH for being the sort of man he is - the sort of person who gets close to other and shows that he cares about them, and lays himself open to rumours.

Can anyone understand me?

Oh brilliant news, hope she is fully better soon :)

Well 2 failed long term as he has now finished it although I agree, if I hadn't found the texts it might well have meandered on for longer. DH reckons the final result would have been the same but later down the line and our marriage might have been fucked beyond rescue.

4? Well he hasn't risen to the bait so far.

There may well be be more to find out - have to wait and see. I don't know how else to find it out.

Thanks stealth!

he can't feel any anger towards her Why do you want him to feel anger towards the ow when to do so would be to imply that he had no choice but to succombe to her advances - if, in fact, she advanced on him?

Do you believe that she took advantage of him in some way? If so, please disabuse yourself of that notion because no siren's song could have lured him from your side unless he was up for it and clearly, as demonstrated by his recent revelation that he loves her, he went willingly.

Any anger he may feel should be directed towards himself for being an old fool who should have known better having made such a colossal error of judgement in risking his marriage and trashing his reputation as a respected member of staff for a meaningless dalliance with a much younger colleague.

It is to be hoped that he is feeling a sense of deep shame that he has caused you such immense hurt and, as sadwidow observed, caused his colleagues to be castigated for repeating what was no more than the truth but, while he continues to believe that she's the answer to his prayers he loves her, I very much doubt that he'll be able to see the wood from the trees with the same degree of clarity that you're beginning to possess.

Orm,

Well done for holding together. The points you raise above - 1-4, are very insightful. She sounds like a manipulative cow.

Her response of 'You fucking idiot' when she found out you had discovered the texts says volumes. Your H may think he 'loves' her, but she most certainly doesn't reciprocate.

I too suspect that you haven't yet been told the whole truth.

Keep your chin up.

izzy - is this what they call 'tough love' ? I appreciate you feel very strongly about this issue but it sometimes feels as if I am the one you are angry with. Every time I start to feel a bit better and that there is hope you lay into me again with the 'he'd have left you without a backward glance' and comments such as ' because no siren's song could have lured him from your side unless he was up for it and clearly, as demonstrated by his recent revelation that he loves her, he went willingly'. Basically I am undesirable and worth nothing compared to her.

I am quite prepared to beleive he was 100% to blame for deceiving and betraying me. But as his 'love' was kindled by his perception of her need of protection I want to make damned sure he sees she is a fairly dubious character and the scales fall from his eyes. I want to make 100 certain that he is no longer in love with her and he sees how badly she has behaved. When he is no longer infatuated with her and he is realises that he was risked everything for someone so unworthy, I can then make a proper decision about our future. Level playing field.

I don't think he was 'up for it' FWIW - according to a book I am reading it was an 'accidental affair' rather than something looked for or planned. So yes, he was an old fool, but not a malicious old fool.

I agree with your assessment Orm and I think your husband has been 'played' to a great extent. I think this woman has grossly exaggerated tales about her husband's 'abuse' to the extent that it's in fact non-existent, whereas her own affair is of course emotional abuse in itself, isn't it?

I think she is the architect of all the rumours, wanted your husband to leave and make a grand sacrifice - at which point she would have withdrawn, having 'won'.

I agree it's very important that he makes these realisations, but the most important one is that she did not love him. Nothing she has done conveys love.

Once that realisation hits home, the usual progression of these things is that he will hate her, at which point you'll start to hear a few more stories from the affair, but told through his by-now different lens.

Now for a while, that hatred will get in the way of him taking full responsibility for the affair and he will start to blame her for more things and you might even find yourself doing the same.

But it's a process, this business of recovery - and that phase will soon pass. The next phase will be some acknowledgement that although she played him like a fiddle, there were things he did too that were dishonest towards her normally in relation to the impression he was giving of your marriage and his happiness in it.

Orm I think your husband needs to read about how much 'mirroring' goes on in affairs, which is a fancy name for lying to eachother. He also needs to see that these rumours could have come from no-one but the OW and to question why a woman who was allegedly in an abusive marriage would take such risks with her own safety and the emotional wellbeing of her children. You're dead right, the scales need to fall from his eyes and he needs to see through the lies and the motives.

On a human level, he will feel a bit crushed that he wasn't adored after all and then he will feel utterly stupid that he was so naive not to realise this at the time. There will be some maudlin self-pity about being an old fool, but he must not wallow in that.

One of the things he will realise is that he needs to work on his assessment and judgement of people's character. I have a feeling that he's always relied on you for that and trusted your judgement more than his own. Because once again I think this affair was all about the feelings it gave him about himself and all it took was a belief that he was worshipped, to make him vulnerable. What was missing of course was an assessment of the motives of the 'worshipper' and then later, the value he placed on the person who really loved and respected him - you.

stern - it's funny you should say that. When the friend I mentioned earlier came round for dinner yesterday she told DH that one major bit of 'unfinished business' was the acceptance that OW hadn't really loved him as much as she had said and he had thought. It struck me as odd but thinking about it she never showed any real affection in her actions. Dh was the one doing all the caring and protecting. It will hit him hard when/if he realises that.

Just wanted to offer up some parallels from my own situation as they might inform yours. The OW in my marriage also had a lowly paid support role in a school, also in an abusive marriage, with "issues", passive aggression her speciality. I find it also telling that the OW 'befriended' you; she saw a window into your life and wanted what you two have: a strong and happy marriage and a nice life. Mine heard about us through H and then saw photos of our home. I think your H's OW was casting around for an 'out' of an unhappy relationship or one that isn't feeding her neediness - maybe her OH is bored of her threatening to cut herself? Your H functions in a senior role so is well paid, comparatively to her, has power, presumably a 'good sort' whose instinct, given his profession, is to help/fix/make good. I wonder how many other dysfunctional relationships the OW has had along the way? or whether even your H was the first affair? My exH's OW was the 2nd marriage she ended. Anyway she sounds the sort incapable of having a healthy relationship with a man.

Hmmm...well I don't think she's as unhappy in her relationship as she's made out and I don't think she ever had any intention of leaving it. I agree though that it's likely that she's got unresolved issues, that almost certainly pre-dated her relationship with her husband.

Orm, of course she didn't love your H. If you love someone, you want what's best for him. I'm going to take a stab in the dark here - when you found out about this affair, did you find yourself wondering briefly whether you should let him go to be with someone he loved and who loved him? Real love is that selfless.

Earlier in your thread I commented that because they've known one another for 4 years, she would have known that the bedrock of your husband's happiness and equilibrium was you and the children. That he would have been destroyed if he lost that. It's therefore not an act of love to collude in that destruction, or to make life intolerable for him at work by spreading rumours and confiding in colleagues when the apparently secret relationship is over.

What the OW loved was not your husband, but the drama, the ego-boost, the competition, the image of herself as a femme fatale who could tempt a happily married man who no-one would have said was the 'type' to stray.

But to balance this, your husband didn't love her either and I wouldn't necessarily agree that the 'protectiveness and caring' was all on your H's side. Remember what I said about mirroring? For every tale about her dreadful overbearing husband, your husband would have had his own about your depression, the difficulties of having a wife who worked full-time, your softness with the children and how he felt shut out and isolated at times in his own home. I don't think your husband's the sort to have directly criticised you; I think he would have felt that was more disloyal even than the affair, but what sometimes happens is that the OW will have tried to find fault with you and offered him sympathy - and he wouldn't have done much to contradict the impression she had.

He didn't love her of course because having an affair with a woman in an abusive marriage would have put her in danger, especially as he couldn't promise to rescue her and give her a soft landing. And all this 'care and protectiveness' on his part was a smokescreen. You can be damned sure that he wouldn't have made such copious efforts for a woman he wasn't attracted to. All his 'care and protection' was self-serving, so that he could keep getting the idolatry that he'd become addicted to, as well as the new image of himself that was being reflected back - a man capable of inspiring sexual and emotional adoration in a 25-year old woman. That's what he loved - not her.

One day she'll realise too that your husband didn't love her, but I think that's likely to take longer to sink in than it will for him because she hasn't got an Orm at home who knows about her affair and is pointing out the inconsistencies. I also suspect it would be too much for her ego to bear.

Hes in love with the idea of being a knight in shining armour. I also think she played him for a fool.

Good news about your friend

A lot of good points in sternface's post there. As the saying goes, there's no fool like an old fool - and I agree that a lot of his feelings probably stemmed from flattery that she chose him to lean on/confide in. He might feel less flattered if he realised that she was playing him exactly because of his age.

And yes, very pleased to hear that your friend's test results were better than expected :)

You're mistaken, Orm. I don't feel strongly about this issue at all.

Is it so unpalatable for you to consider that your dh may have acted of his own free will and was, effectively, ready and willing when the ow hove into view or got her claws into him, as the case may be?

You appear to be determined to paint your dh as some noble creature when his behaviour has been patently ignoble. My fear for you is that you are in a state of denial not dissimilar to that when you first posted here and maintained that your dh was the innocent victim of an unfounded rumour mill.

I think this seems pertinent on so many points.

I agree with much of what that article says, but I don't like the use of the word 'accidental'. Interestingly, the police don't call what happens on our roads 'accidents'; they call them 'collisions'. This was a deliberate change of language because in their view, an accident implies that all parties involved had no choice or decision-making powers whereas in their experience, at least one of the drivers involved made poor decisions.

Which leads to me the second thing I take issue with in the article. I think in its attempt to be even-handed it neglects to mention that in all affairs, one of the protagonists knows exactly where it's heading even at the early stages and cannot with all honesty claim that they didn't.

I agree though that once the addiction has taken hold - and this occurs far earlier than people think or even acknowledge at the time - it is very hard to walk away. The people who are safest in these situations know how easy it is to get addicted and so they put up boundaries to stop that happening. They don't trust themselves and they don't think that infidelity is only practised by bad people in unhappy marriages. In summary, the person who is self-aware and the least able to kid and tell lies to himself is probably the least likely person to have an unintended affair.

Orm when did you last re-read the entire thread incidentally? It's getting long now and I get the feeling that some of what's being posted is getting lost and therefore repeated. It might be a good time to re-read it, take stock of all the advice and post/write down somewhere where you're at now in terms of your beliefs about the affair.

Thanks stern. Yes the use of 'accident' does underplay it a bit. I think that from DH's part it wasn't something looked for but something he didn't fight hard enough against.

As you say thread is too long and rambling now. I think it would be a good idea to try to right a timeline for myself - when I found out, how I felt, where I am now.

Good idea Orm.

I'd write a simultaneous timeline though regarding their friendship and what was happening in your marriage. Because although I agree from what you say that your husband didn't go looking for an affair, becoming a friend, protectant and confidante to this woman in January when there had already been rumours last summer that they were having an affair, lends less weight to the 'accident' theory doesn't it?

I hope he can admit at some point that he knew before January that he found her attractive and that he knew that a closening friendship was dangerous, both to his marriage and his career. If he is able to admit that he'd become addicted to the whole enterprise long before that, it would explain why he went ahead anyway. Otherwise, it looks like he made an active decision in January to take this relationship to a new level.

This is of course assuming he's telling the truth in the first place about there being a new catalyst in January. Given the fact that there were rumours months before that (which I'm sure she started, are you?) and he was behaving very strangely towards you last summer, I must admit I have my doubts, as I also have doubts that nothing beyond kissing happened in the 6 months after January.

I think Stern has it right. This focus on the OW as some kind of manipulative cow who corrupted the poor innocent DH is actually an impediment to moving forward. Whatever her intentions, he wanted to have an affair with her. The DH (and OP must accept this). While she may have exaggerated the poor state of her marriage to draw him in, you can be damn sure that he exaggerated how terrible his marriage was too. This is classic affair behaviour, where the two participants make out that they are two star crossed lovers trapped in unhappy marriages. It's a device used to suppress the feelings of guilt and give oneself the green light to embark on a physical relationship with someone else.

The OP needs to be very careful not to buy into the line that this only happened because the OW lured him in. To do so, lifts responsibility off of her DH's shoulders. Look at it another way. If you were the OW's mother or father, and you found out that a 40 yr old (I'm guessing DH's age here) man at school in a senior position abused his position of trust and embarked on a sexual affair with your newly married daughter, what would you think? Who is the principal wrongdoer here by any objective standard? What he did here was utterly disgusting whatever the actions and motives of the OW.

For that reason I think it is a little arse about face for it to be the OP's responsibility to make her DH understand that the OW did not love him. Surely the issue here is for the DH to understand how much he loves the OP and if, in the process, he comes to realise that the OW did not love him and that he did not love her because it was nothing more than a mutual infatuation fuelled by rescuer tendencies and sex, then bully for him. Again, by putting it upon herself to save DH from the love he still has for the OW, the OP is assuming a responsibility that should be his.

The one thing that I do agree with is that I don't think he was actively looking for an affair. But I do think that when he formed a friendship with this girl, he very soon wanted it to be more and was the primary player in making that happen. Married men (and women) don't have affairs unless they want to.

I agree schmarn and the advice on the thread is different, because op is not ready to hear that.

It does make me sad for op though, because unless he is "allowed" to and does him self. Accept full responsibility for why happened, accepting he had a choice, he had bad boundaries, lied to many people. All his choice. Then at the end of the day, he'll do it again, when he's 50, or when the next damsel in distress comes along.

Painting him as some dippy old fool who made a mistake. Is kind of absolving him from responsibility and the choices he made and his character traits he made to get there. Leaving him vulnerable to another affair or leaving if ow clicks her fingers :(

"For that reason I think it is a little arse about face for it to be the OP's responsibility to make her DH understand that the OW did not love him. Surely the issue here is for the DH to understand how much he loves the OP and if, in the process, he comes to realise that the OW did not love him and that he did not love her because it was nothing more than a mutual infatuation fuelled by rescuer tendencies and sex, then bully for him. Again, by putting it upon herself to save DH from the love he still has for the OW, the OP is assuming a responsibility that should be his."

This is so true, I think the temptation is to show the OW for her 'true colours' and, poof!, the feelings H professes to have for her disappear. Orm 'fixes' her H's misaligned thinking and suddenly he loves her totally again to the exclusion of all others. But that throws the onus all onto Orm and supposes her H is an idiot, governed by some midlife crisis hormone (he has behaved idiotically but I do assume his intelligence is marginally higher than an amoeba) with no self will or initiative of his own.

However, I do think it is instinct for the betrayed spouse to want to examine the outside agent that has dared to intrude upon their marriage; to put the OW into a box, labelled, and put away to one side so she can then focus on what is her priority: saving her marriage. It's a tough road and I don't think Orm is absolving her H at all.

I don't think it's Orm's responsibility to encourage some clear-sightedness in her husband about the OW - and I'm sure she doesn't either. But I understand why she wants to do that and sees it as necessary. This is no different really to any of us telling a much loved friend (who's also behaved badly) that she's got her head up her arse about some utter wanker of a bloke. I think our advice needs to be realistic here and accepting of human frailty. Just as Orm needs the tough love and the "what about...?" questions from us who've come to admire her, the husband here also needs someone with a better grip on reality to help him to see things in their true light.

I think most of us have been in situations where we've misjudged people and have thought they loved us and had our best interests at heart - and those of us who've had someone who really loves us telling us the unvarnished truth about that person, value that advice tremendously, even in hindsight.

I think that's all Orm is doing and I understand why.

" It's a tough road and I don't think Orm is absolving her H at all" No, you're right, I am not. I don't know why anyone would think I am from the things I have said. But how can I start again with DH when his head is full of some stupid daydream about a woman that doesn't actually exist. I want him to see that she isn't perfect, or a victim. And his daydream has made a twat out of him.

I, a normal, middle-aged woman, can't compete with some dreamy little figment of his imagination. He needs to see the reality.

We had a text conversation while I was at work. I told him I am not prepared to stay in a marriage when she is still in his head. He needs to break the addiction or he's out.

Good for you. About time you realised you were too good to be left hanging, whilst he was mooning over his love at his own leisure. Hopefully he'll come good.