One about a sad pregnant lady married to a sad angry man.

[izchaz]

Before I start, please don't read this and say "divorce him, he's a shit head", much as that might be outstanding advice it's not an option I want to engage with. What I'm after is help in turning the negatives in my relationship into positives. How do I let go of the grief and hurt, and how do I persuade my husband to stop beating himself up over the protracted affair he had with my best friend (no longer)? I try every day to push the positives in our relationship: we're a good team, we can laugh and have fun together, we have an incredible group of friends that we share, we are going to be parents to a much wanted baby, and when we are both behaving we have glimpses of what used to be - it's easy to be together and we can both see how much the other loves us. However whenever times get tough - work stress, the whisper of tightening belts, having to multitask or balance multiple issues at once then the whole house of cards crumbles and one of us reverts to recriminations and aiming to wound the other. He is under a huge amount of pressure with work, an impending family bereavement, the worry of my earnings disappearing when I go off on maternity etc etc, and I try so hard to keep him afloat. On the days when I fail, as yesterday he rails and I cannot help but bite back. Last night we fought from 9 at night until 3am, and only stopped because our lodger came home. Once he has started he will follow me from room to room, verbally attacking and prickling me until I re-engage the fight. I am desperate to stop the cycle as I am conscious that our marriage is tiny and frail (married 11 months, his affair was on/off for the first 7, and when confronted twice he lied about it) and I do not feel it can stand up to such punishment without becoming a very twisted paradigm of what we wanted when we got engaged.
Please, help me to figure out how to break the cycle of bad behaviour we have both sunk into, I am miserable with him now, and would be miserable without him, but we had something so good and so precious not so long ago, and I want to find a way back to that.

Well it sounds like you have forgiven him and feel sorry for him having been taken advantage of. It sounds unlikely but ok if you say so. You are both looking forward to the baby coming, you have no concerns that he will ever cheat again, he is heartwarming lay kind and consistently loving an isn't angry with you, so the only prob is that he is angry with himself because he risked losing you. But as he hasn't lost you...eh well what's he still angry about? Life does keep coming at you ie parents die, careers/work present challenges etc and it gets progressively more complicated as your family grows. Is this man adequate? Or does he always have some excuse to e moody sulky and blame everyone else and it's just not fair? As I have said to you before, be very wary about stepping in to understanding & loving mummy mode with anyone other than your own child. Can you see how nobody else but you feels sorry fr a man who was tricked by a mentally ill woman, a friend of his wife's, into fucking her (no emotional attachment to her), while she was pregnant? Is he mentally ill himself? Does he generally have extremely poor judgement? Does he have problems empathising with women without wanting to fuck them better? Is he scared of you? How did you discover thy they had been having sex?

There's nothing you can say that any of us is going to understand in terms of your mentally ill best friend throwing herself at your husband and him being somehow unable to resit and you being to blame for putting them together -

And how does it matter how many times they had sex - she initiated it every time - it takes two love, one person can't do it on their own.

I think if I was you and wanted to stay married I'd be insisting he gets counselling as he clearly is unable to control himself, if this is the behaviour he is displaying at the beginning of your marriage - I hope he is worth it and it does work out for you both.

Of course he has lovely bits. You we wouldn't try so hard to get past the shit if they didn't have lovely bits! Only time will tell if that's enough.

one person can't do it on their own

Oh I don't know, I manage it quite well...

But yes, if you are sure about continuing, he needs to get help. Dipping one's wick in the first months of marriage is not what you'd call positive or normal behaviour.

I've no advice to impart, but I wish you strength to get through this - with or without him.

You're being a bit bossy OP. You make it clear what you want to hear and everyone else can fuck off. What gives you the right to order everyone around?

I wonder if you're quite bossy all round in that you seem determined to carve out the relationship you want, regardless what you're using as raw material. Whatever, it's your creation and you won't accept otherwise, despite the overwhelming evidence. Which you snap at people to shut up about becuase you don't. want. to. hear.

I've been on the receiving end of a psychopath and I can attest that they do indeed suck the life and goodness out of everything, like a dementor. They're kind of black. So, even though your story sounds far-fetched, I can see that having one of these life-stealers in your orbit can cause serious damage.

But I just don't buy what your husband has done. I just don't buy it, sorry. He has cheated on you and that's that.

I'm not a psychologist but this was intersting: I spoke to my mum at length, as she dealt with my father's infidelities for many years when I was a child, her view is "put up and shut up", mine is most definitely not . Erm. Er. Well.... well, you are putting up and shutting up. Or you're shutting everyone else up, let's say. You are accepting what he has done and the very strange reasons he uses for doing it. But no, you will have what you want!

If I may just say, without checking the list of acceptable points and unacceptable points one is allowed to make, that, while you are tipping the light fantastic with this high drama, your baby is being treated to the heightened adrenalin and emotion. You say you'll get this sorted by the time the baby comes out (and people have suggested you may want to rethink that - but you knew that already, silly!) as if the baby isn't pretty viable as it is. not going to get into one of those arguments but you need to be calm ffs - the poor thing had to hear that 6-hour marathon.

Please stop getting narked that people 'don't understaaaaaaand'. I think a lot of people do, actually. Please, just move out, move apart, be calm in your pregnancy, take this whole shit down a notch, or ten.

Hi OP, I've posted a couple of times upthread.

You do seem intent on trying to find solutions to his anger/behaviour and haven't wavered from this viewpoint since your initial post. But you can't be his wife and is counsellor.

Life throws all sorts of shit at us be it job loss, breavement etc. He needs to find ways to deal with these ideally through counselling. From the timelines you have indicated, it looks like he will be processing the birth of his child and loss of his mother at around the same time. That is lot to deal with.

Good luck for the future.

Izchaz - I have read most of this thread, all of your posts and most of the comments.

I am not going to comment on your choice re. your marriage but I am going to say one thing about your feelings and you may or may not agree with it.
I have doublechecked and see you got pregnant AFTER you discovered the affair, so obviously you had very strong feelings about it when it happened - but I'm slightly concerned that your feelings are now somewhat less than they would be if you were not pregnant.

I'll explain - I was 19 weeks pregnant when my Mum died of cancer. We had 8 days notice that she was terminal, although she was in hospital for 4w before she died - we think she wouldn't let them tell us earlier because I got married 10 days before she died (we had to visit her in hospital on the day). Anyway, my point is - MY MUM DIED. While I was pregnant. And I wasn't as sad as I felt I should be; I was sad of course but it just didn't rip me up as much as I expected it would, as much as it had when my Nanna died some years previously. It felt almost as though my pregnancy was protecting me in some ways from the shock and stress of the bereavement.

And that's my point - I worry for you that you may not be experiencing the full extent of your emotions, because you are pregnant. And that when you have your baby, those emotions might come back in full force...

Of course, my experience of damped-down emotions might be unique to me - but I just wanted to drop a little warning in your ear in case it isn't.

OP, you say your mother suffered serial infidelities. Also you say something about your DH being stressed and manipulated (or words to that effect) by his DM, also she is ill I think which makes things worse. This makes me think that you are both carrying a lot of baggage from your childhoods which might be influencing how you are behaving in the present. And are possibly acting out your feelings about that disguised as 'dealing' with the issues you both have now.
You childhood can also influence who you decide on for a partner.
Perhaps both going individually to counselling might help look into this.
I see you were told that you had come to terms with these things previously but being pregnant etc can reawaken feelings.

I remember reading somewhere (might have been the "60 Second Father" or the "60 Second Parent" - I read the former to help understand and support dh) that it takes less than 60 seconds to "save" a marriage from an affair.

...in that, you have the choice at the beginning, at the point that the affair starts: "is giving in to the temptation worth the of my marriage/relationship?"

Your dh had a choice. Unless he is prepared to look honestly at himself and why he "gave in" , your relationship doesn't appear to look like it has a future and you are wasting your effort. To use a cliche, you are thrwoing good money after bad.

You can't do that for him - he has to want to do it, not just for you but also for himself, so that he can understand why he chose to jeopordise his marriage, as presumably, when you decided to get married, you did both think you loved each other

OP: "DH, you must spend time with Friend, she's having a hard time"

DH: "No way, she tried to come on to me once. Never again."

End of story.

This is bullshit: "with hindsight I can see that on numerous occasions he did try and tell me"

He tried? What happened? Tongue get caught in something? Was he suddenly rendered mute?

Honestly, OP, you can't keep excusing all of this nonsense, it will get you nowhere but in the shit.

While I'm sticking my tuppence worth in - having a baby, however much looked forward to - is far more life-changing than you can know. You simply don't know what it's like. And I'm not saying that to be superior, you don't know. Once that baby is out of your vag, life changes beyond measure.

If you are not with a partner who can go through this life-changing event in a supportive way, you will be in trouble. And so will the baby.

Sorry, not sure if you can edit things you have already posted. What I mean is, if you are with a partner who will not be able to support you practically and emotionally when you have a baby, you would be better off on your own. Then you just have you and the baby to deal with.

I'm sure it must be a bit difficult listening to so many people say "but, but, the first few months of having a baby are so hard" - I used to hate it when people said things like "oh, but you get a baby at the end of sickness/labour etc, it's all worth it!". But the thing is, it really is hard. It can rock even the most solid relationship right to its core. And that's one of the reason why people are so worried about you.

This is a man who, while currently stressed, thinks it is acceptable to harangue you for 6 hours about minor things. Now you say this has never happened before, and it quite possibly hasn't. But if this is his response to being stressed now, what will his response be when neither of you have slept properly in months, and your baby has colic? Or when he's doing all the housework and all the cooking and getting no attention from you because you have a baby that wants to feed every 2 hours and will only sleep on you? Dealing with all that is hard enough without the underlying problems caused by his affair.

Going back to your OP, you want to know about turning the negatives into positives etc. Despite you saying that, I still feel rather vague about what you want from this thread - you don't want people to see LTB and aren't happy with posters who say that - but what do you really want? Forgiveness? Carte blanche to forget that everything bad happened?

And you might, and I'm not being a doom-monger, get PND after the birth. Or just feel shit. Anaemic. You might have mastitis (that's always good fun). You might have really painful wounds - either up your fanjo or your tummy. And birth changes how you feel about your body. All sort of things are happening after you give birth. So you need a good, stable person with you, or none at all, in my view.

What I think some people are trying to say is:

You haven't got a marriage rocked by betrayal and infidelity, you never had a marriage in the first place because of that. Or rather you had a marriage with only you in it. So what you are asking is an impossibility - you can't rebuild a relationship that was existing only in your own head.

What you can do is build something else, something honest, something using solid foundations. But not alone. And not before the poison is dug out of the wound so it can heal untainted and without the ability to fester.
Sometimes a structure is so damaged it needs to be torn down, raised to the ground so it can be rebuilt rock solid.
It's like the garden spade - it's my grandfather's spade, it's had a few new handles and a new head but it's still my grandfather's spade. Do you have a spade? Can you replace the handle or head and still have the same thing? It doesn't seem so, but what do I know?

What you are trying to do, in limited time, is play the short game, the magic fix (and it isn't guilting to consider a newborn in amongst this). You have failed to take key things into account.
If you want to stay and fight (!), as is your choice, you still have to play the long game and look at the bigger picture, because there will never be a time after superficial reconciliation where this goes away. It will come back and kick you square in the teeth just as you think you are ok. Playing the short game doesn't show you quick resolution, if it will work, if there is a life to be built - it scuppers the chance of those things. It uses wallpaper paste and blind hope to hold together foundations of sand.
Only by doing the painful work now - moving away from each other, counselling and some insightful thinking over a prolonged period of time (usually much longer than the time the betrayal lasted) will you see what you have to work with.
You talk a lot about you, you may have to realise that even if he does this it won't be to your schedule - it is yet more loss of control. You may find that the separation shows the truth and he never comes back - if you can't take that leap of faith the other things you do are not faith, they are fear.

That is the closest you will ever get to a magic pill, there is no easy way through something like this - sometimes realising that is what it takes to digest the scale of the devastation.
Garlic makes excellent points, but I'm not as fancy or eloquent - I do know a leopard when I see one though.

Saffron - thank you for understanding my difficulty in hurrahing over what you are all saying, it's hard to listen to. He does try to minimise my stress, but then I don't know of anyone who's had a stress free pregnancy, so far we have had a major house move, news of MIL's extreme ill health, the trauma to our marriage, me changing job, DH potentially being faced with changing job, my feelings of betrayal and grief over my friend who turned out to be anything but, and my boiling rage over the whole thing. We have not had an easy time, but consistently he has been as supportive and positive as he can be - for the past week I've had wonky blood pressure, and he's been brilliant at looking after my physically and mentally (outwith the argument, obviously). He can be crap, but he tries very hard not to be, and he does apologise when he has been crap.

This is from your original post, izchaz

I try so hard to keep him afloat. On the days when I fail, as yesterday he rails and I cannot help but bite back. Last night we fought from 9 at night until 3am, and only stopped because our lodger came home. Once he has started he will follow me from room to room, verbally attacking and prickling me until I re-engage the fight

That doesn't sound very supportive. When you have the baby, who is going to "keep him afloat"? Who is going to keep you afloat?

You are making excuses for him, endless excuses. I understand why, you are desperate to fix things, to get back to what you thought you had before you got married, but you can't.
He decided to have sex with a mentally ill woman for 7 months when he was newly married to you. And then he said it was your fault. You can go round and round with the excuses but that's what it comes down to. He did it and you can't fix it on your own. You're getting angry at people for saying the truth because it hurts and it's not what you want to hear, but you can't fix this on your own and as fast as you want to.
You need some distance from him and some time and you need to stop fixing things. He needs to be making the running. Although, personally i think you should run very fast away from him. Nothing you have said makes me think any better of him than I did in your first post. I feel for you though, I do. You deserve more.

I think you are getting pigeon-kickingly angry with us because we won't validate your view of him, your view of your marriage, and your view of your future with him.

If a man can cheat on you with your (then) best friend, who is mentally unwell, for over half of your newly-married life, can you honestly, hand on heart, say he won't do it again? This was the honeymoon period - he should have been having sex with you lots and lots and lots and loving you and praising all the gods in heaven that he was lucky enough to marry you. Instead he stuck himself in your sick friend, repeatedly, and then whined that you shouldn't have introduced them, you should have worked out what was happening. Because, of course, you made him stick his willy in her. In his head.

When life gets rocky, and it might well do once the baby is there and if neither of you have much money coming in and his mum is sick, HE WILL FUCK SOMEBODY ELSE. Because that, it appears, is what he likes to do.

There isn't much positive to say about that negative.

Sorry, posted too soon there!
Saffron - im very aware of what's to come, which is why I'm trying hard now (with his help) to set good groundwork in place, so that constant sniping isn't a habit by the time the baby comes. It's all too easy a habit to fall into, and I'm anxious to avoid it. We do sit and talk about what we need from the other, specifically what I need from him, and it is all about support. But then that's a two way street, I don't want to be some sort of leech, sucking all his positive juju away, so I give back too.

Chaos - 7 months is a very long time, but from what I have been able to glean (it's a very muddy puddle and I prefer not to rake over the details with DH) the gaps between encounters got greater and greater, and she began to spiral, becoming more and more unstable and making greater threats every time he said "no". That at least is patently obvious from her behaviour looking back, so I think he was desperately trying to extricate himself.
You make a very good point about his faith in me - he could see (and I certainly couldn't) how much she had me in her thrawl, I have always firmly believed that you don't question a woman when she tells you she has or is experiencing abuse or assault, be that physical, verbal, emotional, financial, interpersonal or whatever, and I felt desperately that I needed to support her. I would have had a hard time accepting what he was saying, because it would have meant going against so much of what I was throwing my energy at. In fact, part of the reason I'm so determined to keep working at my marriage is because I stopped listening to my gut when it came to her: it was telling me something wasn't right, but I wouldn't listen because there was my friend in real danger as far as I was concerned. As I turned out my gut was right, and my gut is now telling me "stick with him, he's better than he has behaved, he is worth the effort".
I very much like the way you break down the problems we face (you and I clearly think along similar lines) and the answer to almost all of them is "time will tell, but I can live with the wait".
Thank you for the good wishes.

His behaviour is telling you what he is like. You say he tried desperately to extricate himself from the arms of SickFriend, but why did he insert himself in her to start with? Surely that was the point at which to extricate himself.

Your "gut" tells you to stay because you love him and are having his baby and because your parents relationship taught you to accept infidelity. It doesn't mean it's a feeling you should trust. He isn't the man you want him to be. He will fuck someone else. If he can spend 7 whole months fucking your pregnant, mentally ill, vulnerable FRIEND when he'd just married you, what on earth makes you think he won't fuck someone else? It'll be your fault then too...you're too tired, he feels pushed out because of the baby.

He is telling you who he is...but you don't want to hear it.