Moving from being the OW to being his girlfriend...

[beingmyself]

I've got my flameproof suit on and will start by saying I know being in an affair is a selfish and cruel thing to do. I did it. He did it. We decided we wanted to be together so after having an affair for several months we both left our spouses. He has moved out and so has my h.
We are not living together though and are not intending to for a while. We are also still secret and will remain so for some time.

Is anyone who has been there brave enough to come and talk to me about the highs and lows of finally getting to be together? I knew it would continue to be a rollercoaster and would really appreciate anyone who's willing to talk about it with me to do so here or to PM me!

Thanks

I really would advise you to come clean to your respective Xs as soon as possible. It's extremely likely that even if you manage to keep up the pretense until you are ready to inform them (as opposed to being found out or someone else telling your Xs), once it comes out in the open, your Xs will put 2 and 2 together. Then you can expect a lot of anger borne of pain, which will set you back several stages. Far better to get it all out now.

Personally, if I was the partner who was left, the insult to my intelligence made by pretending there was no one else would make me far angrier than being left.

I think it's nice to kid yourselves that you're keeping things secret out of respect for other people's feelings, but are you possibly deluding yourself because it allows you to paint yourselves as innocent parties, considering other people's feelings? It's tempting and I can understand it, but if you want to herald the start of your relationship with honesty and integrity, you need to mark the end of the previous ones with the same.

FWIW I wouldn't hold your affair against you IRL. While I think it's wrong, you're human and humans make mistakes. What you do next will define you.

Men and women who leave their marriages for OW / OM often find the experience quite traumatic. Of course it is. There is massive upheaval and upset for everyone.

It's reductive to suggest that "once a cheater, always a cheater". That may the be the case for a man (or woman) who casually cheats. But to actually leave a marriage for someone else takes a tremendous amount of courage and I would auger that most people who have have been through it would NEVER do it again. It is horrendous for everyone.

And yes, I use the word courage with great thought.

Why does she have to tell her ex every bloody detail? so he can move on and be free to find love elsewhere? what, will he end up a complete wreck and unable to move on - ever - unless he knows everything?

What rot. She's ended the bloody marriage. Maybe he will spend the rest of his life chewing his fist, wondering what went wrong. Probably not though.

I've been cheated on. I felt like I was dying, I was absolutely vociferous in how much I hated affairs and as for OW? my god they were pure scum with no exceptions. Then life threw a big curveball my way and I had to have a major re-think because life isn't as clear cut as I thought it was. However strongly you feel right now, there is a real possibility that a life event might force you to re-evaluate.

Good people can do bad things and it can happen to anybody.

nkf if this is the poster I think it is (and she evaded the question when I asked it outright) this marriage was not 'close to separation' before she met the OM, according to her earlier thread. Whether the OM's was, only he and his ex-wife together in a room could verify that. The OP certainly doesn't know that as she wasn't there and can only rely on what he's telling her, just as he only knows her side of the story and not her exh's.

Yes bottleofbeer I think it does help people to move on quicker if they know there was someone else involved. The bereavement period when a relationship breaks up includes healthy anger and learning that a partner has unilaterally chosen to make a relationship non-monogamous without discussion makes people very angry indeed. For some, it's like a switch and getting over that person is made easier. For some people, it's the ultimate dealbreaker, even outstripping abuse and violence. While I don't understand that myself, I accept that others feel that way. I don't accept that people are unwitting victims of curve balls though. There are always choices involved. However I agree that no-one- and no relationship- is impenetrable. Unfortunately too many people assume they are and so they get addicted to relationships that will hurt others and sometimes themselves.

I don't think she has to tell him every detail. Just that she had an affair and planning to live him eventually. But then again, she doesn't have to do anything that strangers tell her to.

Secrets will out at some point, why not now? If she waits and then ex finds out at some point, then she will have to deal with the repercussions when she has moved on, but where for ex it will be still raw.

I am coming from the angle that it will come out anyway, why not be the one to control how it comes out?

My ex-h cheated on me with OW and as far as I am aware they are still together and have children. But you know what? Shit happens. Life moves on.

I'd point out too that there are always loads of threads on this board from people who've been left by a partner and given no reason for it, other than the tired old script of 'I love you but I'm not in love with you'.

Wise heads suggest an OW/OM and are often shouted down by other posters who suggest depression or illness in the person leaving and wanting to clutch at straws, a lot of those OPs hang on to false hope believing that as soon as their partner 'gets better' or 'sorts his head out' he or she might return. This can go on for months and months.

That's so outrageously cruel.

Are all of you apologists forgetting that cheaters will always create a bad marriage in order to validate their choice to cheat?! How many MNers post to say that their OH is distant from them, picking fights etc and then finds out that he is cheating?

Seems to me that whether cheating is OK or totally unacceptable depends entirely on your gender on MN. Well not for me. A cheating scumbag is still a cheating scumbag whether they have tits or testicles.

I agree, Leavenheath, that there is no excuse really for unnecessary cruelty.

Just when I thought it couldn't get any crazier - I discover a view that validates my ex's affair (and all that went with it)

He is courageous, a hero and a brave soul. Cheers for that cutitup, are you my ex or his OW I wonder?

I'm glad you said you'd got your flame proof suit on... wow. Some of these messages! I just want to say that life is short and you should follow your heart. Generalizations do not help at all and comments loaded with other people's "baggage" don't help you either. I wish you all the best. I have been through fire to follow my heart....and I was right to do so. You do what feels right for you x

I was thinking, akaWisey, that the posts which give the OP the support she craves are a bit ... from the odd side.

With support like that who need reality?

Maybe 'some' cheaters don't 'create' a bad marriage to excuse themselves for cheating. They sure as fuck create a bad marriage in the act of cheating though (that's my view).

Yes, Bogey, you are right that there have been many threads on this Relationships board that follow the pattern you describe, sadly. Fortunately there is also lots of good advice given, as well, by people with empathy and emotional intelligence.

Yes they do, Wisey, no argument from me on that.

I suppose we all project our own experiences to the various threads here. Sometimes we miss the mark, sometimes it's too close for comfort, but I don't see the point in calling people 'apologists', particularly when those same people have been on the receiving end of cheaters and have their own experiences of that.

LineRunner... In what way are the posts on the 'odd side'? Is there some kind of moderation processs that I'm unaware of? Is there some kind of 'manual of instructions' that we should be following?

I agree, akaWisey, that it is hard to see cheating as anything other than a negative act, really.

When ever I'm on these threads, I always try to remember that some of the posters responding will be terribly hurt and angry- and their pain still fresh and raw. To be fair to the OP, I think she understands that rather better than some of the posters supporting her. I don't agree with name-calling but neither do I support angry and attacking posts from people who are supposedly neutral and which seem to have no empathy for people's very visible pain.

A little understanding about the place people might be in would go a long way IMO. It's possible to say 'that wasn't my experience but I accept it was yours', isn't it?

Yes there are choices but by the time you realise a choice has to be made it becomes a very, very painful choice to make and this is where the problem lies imo. Someone said you slip into these things, slowly, slowly and it's true. Nobody wakes up one day and just decides to begin something inappropriate with somebody. And yes sometimes they do happen because of distant/critical/whatever Husbands or wives.

You're down, you're not happy and then in the most random chance circumstances you meet someone who blows your socks off. It's wrong, you can't eat, you don't sleep and everything you knew just seems different. It can be an overpoweringly strong pull towards this other person who is treating you the way you should be getting treated at home but you're not and you've concluded you just don't have the right words to make your spouse listen up because this shit is a really slippery slope now but nothing physical has happened and I can tell myself it's just friendship...

Then you've slipped that bit further and you pine for them (genuine chemical, primal reactions that you really can't control and more to the point, don't want to because you're in love and you feel amazing and that is the kind of high it's very difficult to come down from). I'll just see him one last time and walk away. You're not actually being a selfish boot, you find the thought of people hurting because of you and your actions physically painful to contemplate - so you don't.

You bury your head in the sand of knowing it will come out and it will hurt everyone involved but just a little bit more of the drug I've become so addicted to and then I'll deal with it.

In the end I walked away from the affair and concentrated on my family (yes, I did tell my husband and in all honestly I'm not entirely sure it was the right thing to do) because I do love my husband, I'd put my life on the line for him. I've done a bad, bad thing that I feel has totally tainted me as a person. But I'm really not a bad person.

Walking away is so much easier said than done. Maybe we could have been happy, maybe I threw away that one chance of passionate love but I fucked up, tough shit on me if it hurts till the day I die but ultimately I must have loved my husband more. Or maybe I did what society expected me to do. Either way I do now have a good marriage because ironically it made me husband wake up to how miserable he'd been making me for so long. But I'll bet my house on it that there are loads of families/people out there who will have been in this situation. An untold lie or omission of a few truths does not mean a marriage will always go down the pan. I guarantee people have their secrets and continue to live a perfectly normal life, their blip way behind them and a marriage that survived. There are nowhere near as many foregone conclusions that people would have you believe.

Keep your generalisations - and wrong assumptions - to yourself, please. It's annoying to those of us who KNOW differently, actually having been in the relationship.

2 points. Firstly I dont have to keep my thoughts to myself as this is a public forum and by posting, one invites answers from all comers, whether they agree or not. Secondly, I have been in that relationship. I tried again after my husband cheated on me, and he did it again. I dont much care about the sex but I do care about the lies. He lied to me over and over, even when the evidence was irrefutable. It is the lies that I have such issue with. The OP's cheating I find disgusting, however that is her choice to make, but why continue to lie after she has left the marriage? She is being selfish, she is protecting her own self image rather than be honest and allow her husband to heal fully. Unless he is an idiot of the highest order, I am sure he knows that there is more to this than "I love you but I am not in love with you". She owes him honesty if nothing else.

Your description of what happened bottleofbeer sounds very credible and to be honest believable. Some of it mirrors what a relative of mine's husband said about his affair, although he's always said it was infatuation, not love. I think all relationships go through a bit of a 'meh' phase at some time or another and sometimes it's sheer bad luck if one of the couple meets someone else at that point. After that it's a test of willpower and trying not to get addicted, I'd have thought. I really can see how easy it is to go down that slippery slope and it's not that in itself that I take issue with.

It's the lying- and when relationships that were at worst in a bit of a rut get revised after the fact as shockingly bad and destructive to children. I've read wiser posters than me describe this as re-writing history.

While I will always understand why some affairs start, I have no respect for people who don't take responsibility for what they do and who try to blame their partners and embellish the past to justify their current decisions. Or people who do all this and then lie about even having an affair in the first place. It's spineless and it's cruel. I don't suppose those character traits end with the old relationship either and must present a hefty risk in the new one.

I wonder whether some of the successful relationships that posters have talked about here didn't have those facets? That is, once the decision was made, no continuance of lies, no blaming of others for their own choices and no rewriting of history?

I don't think that only those who have pain that is "fresh and raw" are critical of adultery and it's consequences. It's shouldn't be about making assumptions about posters to stereotype and diminish them.

OK, some people don't like reading condemnation, whether muted or strident. OP asked about the "lows" of her situation. Well one of them is widespread condemnation of the adultery, plus the effect on the DC. And it'll hurt, because only a parent serious lacking in normal empathy doesn't worry about effect on children and feel guilt when they are sad.

And of course these DCS would be sad; the marriage wasn't abusive, and IIRC OP's earlier reads, home life was amicable. And OP has, furthermore, decided to continue to lie to them. That is hardly going to foster the building of a new, healthy set of relationships.

I'm not sure where the comments about me telling my h "I love you but I'm not in love with you" came from.

I tried for a long time to 'fix' us.... Both pre my affair and when I ended the affair (or took a break from it as it turns out). My h and I both agreed we could not make each other happy. Not did I chuck him out bogey... As I mentioned upthread he said he would rather move out as he didn't really like the house we are in.

I do understand the view of people saying 'tell the truth' if someone is confused and unsure but in my case I don't think it would help anyone - and of course I include myself in that.

I also would have had the most judgemental contempt for people who've had affairs but the fact is - it happens. I will never be proud of how we got together but I do hope we can build something from here that we are both happy with and in which we can be supportive adults to ours, and each others children too.

Karma

I think those are wise words, meditrina, that the more successful 'new' relationships are likely to not involve blaming the previous partner(s) for what has happened, but rather to show them some respect and concern.