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.

It seems obvious from your responses that you aren't going to engage with anything that we say if it doesn't support your goals. Good luck then. As others have said, you are going to need it. By the truckload.

Sorry OP but however you phrase it, it still comes down to you making excuses for him. He was manipulated by OW and his mum, you have even started taking some responsibility by saying you asked him to spend some time with her. Even the fight, you are downplaying it by saying it 'only' happened once. You have only been married for 11 months and you had a fight like that. I have been with my DH for 16 years and we have never had an argument like that.
Really unless your husband starts taking responsibilities for his own actions, you have not much of a relationship. You can't do it all on your own, you are not his rescuer.

Good luck, it can't be easy for you.

i absolutely agree with TotallyBursar about needing to play the long game, and, ultimately be able to 'let the relationship go'.

letting the relationship go allows you to grieve for what it was and should have been. only once you have done this will you know if building a new relationship with him is viable.

your DH will need to go through this process too, or he will not learn from it. being angry is all well and good, but is a defensive response which serves as a block to the shame and pain underneath. he will need to undergo a transformation to allow himself to understand why he did not say no, when he wanted to so much. this is very important and a huge part of building trust again.

I'm not angry that you don't all agree with me, I came on here to garner a wider objective viewpoint than my own, because I know mine is limited by my hopes and fears and my experience. The posts that make me angry are the ones that aren't sensible "leave him, he's a horrible cunt" isn't helpful, "take some time and think about what you want and if he can support you and a newborn" is helpful. There is a difference. Please don't think that because I'm angry I'm not listening, because I am; but please consider that this is my life, it might well be over as I knew it, but I'd rather it weren't, so forgive me if I struggle a little with some of the more blyth responses on here.
In all honesty some days I don't know if I can do this, with or without him, but then I expect every new mum feels like that. I don't know if the stress of working through all this would be greater than th stress of striking out on my own. I know what I want, I've no idea if it's possible, all I can do is try. My objective in coming on here was not to be made to feel stupid and blind for trying, just as I know that it isn't your intention to make me feel that way. But I do. I feel stupid and blind for letting such poison into my life, for not seeing what she and he weren't saying, and for feeling so out of kilter that I came to a forum for advice. I don't need my hand held, I don't need yes men, I need objective suggestions, and some of you have given them (in some cases repeatedly, thank you). Some of you have been less than gentle however, and that in the state that I am is hard to hear. I think I've probably cried more reading this thread than I did during the fight we had.

It is hard to give you suggestions. It really is a very short menu. If it were me, or my daughter, in this situation, I'd move continents to get the fucker out. "Fucker" yes. He is. He fucked. He fucked your sick friend for a long time just after you were married. So he is a fucker in a literal and figurative sense. As I've said before, you can't make a man do this. Men have sex with someone because they want to. Newly married men who have sex with their wife's sick friend and who then carry on doing it, do it because they want to and because they have no moral compass.

So suggestions...most of them involve a rusty spoon.

I'm afraid the only other suggestion I have is the one you simply do not want to hear, but that is the healthiest one: leave him.

My objective suggestion and it is offered with love, kindness is for him to move out until after the baby is born and for you to have some therapy and counselling and for him to examine on his own and off his own back why he felt the need and gave himself permission to do what he did. Anything else is madness and will see you back here in 6 months wondering why he's cheated again. Good luck you have hard times ahead.

lois says it better tho...

I know what I want, I've no idea if it's possible, all I can do is try.

How many times have I said that?! [rueful]

You might well be underestimating the degree to which your respondents - even the seemingly unreasonable ones - understand and sympathise with you. Threads on here can often be reminiscent of someone trying to make friends with a snarling dog, while the person it bit last week yells "Run! Don't touch him! Get away!!"

Oh, well. The most any of us hope for, at this stage, is that you can take our viewpoints in and re-inform your thinking as life goes forward. You've said this is so; thank you. Remember you can come back here any time :)

Business game theory out of Transactional Analysis. I think you will enjoy the book!

evolved out of

Your OP asked how you would stop the spiral that you and DH get into. I do think you need to take more time for yourself whether this is a few days away or a regular weekend away every couple of weeks to break that cycle. It is hard to regain equilibrium when you are in a situation which is constantly throwing you off balance.
I think that you are carrying a lot of frustration and that is coming out in the bickering and getting distance would be a good idea.
Another thing is the talk of the OW's mental health problems. Could you enlighten us as to how you got to speak to her medical/psych team? Has being in touch with her DH helped you come to terms with what you're facing?

This makes such sad reading:
'I feel stupid and blind for letting such poison into my life, for not seeing what she and he weren't saying, and for feeling so out of kilter that I came to a forum for advice'

None of this is your fault. Even if you knew, read the signs, foresaw the future etc you couldn't have stopped it. Your H did what he did out of his own free will. Nobody forced him. The only person who could have stopped it was him and he decided not to.

I'm with GoodtoBetter. Is this something you'd consider and if not, why not?

I have to add this because I think it relates to your situation.

When I was in my mid teens I had an affair with a teacher of mine. I've talked about it on here before.

He was married and they had a very tempestuous relationship which was on and off. His relationship with me was very abusive and also on and off. After our relationship ended he ended up reconciling with his wife.

She and I had a memorable argument where she made it clear that he was her man, this was not going to destroy her marriage and that she would "prove me and everyone else wrong". They were both not local to where we were all living and she told me she would stay here, in my home town, so I'd always be able to see them and remember that I "couldn't destroy" what they had.

Almost ten years on and they're still married, and as promised, do still live here so I do get to see them from time to time. Usually they're having a huge row. Once I saw them at the station late at night where I was returning from a night out with my husband. She was crying in the taxi queue and he was calling her a bitch. She 100% blames me for the relationship I had with him- which began when I was 15 and he was 31 and has openly and publicly called me a "whore" and a "slag" amongst other things. Through the grapevine I've heard lots of things about him over the years, including that she found out he was a member of a "no strings" sex/dating website. He has clearly never accepted his role in having the affair with me, but has slotted into the role of "wronged" victim.... Which has just allowed him to continue behaving badly. It boggles my mind that she stayed with him. She always wanted a baby but he didn't and- surprise, surprise- now in her late forties she still doesn't have one. Rather than take the painful step of acknowledging what an abusive prick she was married to, she helped create a fiction of blame-shifting that absolved him of all responsibility. I fear you are in danger of doing the same.

Your husband is clearly a sexual predator who had preyed on a vulnerable woman. Don't be his second victim, because that is what you will be if you continue to have him in your life.

For what it's worth my life now is good and happy because I broke free of a weak willed wanker. You can do the same.

Honestly OP I understand where you are coming from. I won't go into details but will just say that I can, to some extent, understand your mindset right now.

My advice would be as others have suggested, that he should move out and you should take time to adjust to becoming a new mother without him around. Take time to focus on yourself and your new baby.

It might not seem like it but it would probably be better for you and your baby. Take some time to imagine how life will be when you are sleep deprived and dealing with the unrelenting needs of a new baby, only to then have to spend 9pm till 3am fighting over the window being left open and not enough noodles in the cupboard.

A new baby will put further strain on an already immensely strained relationship. A baby is a blessing, but realistically they can put a lot of pressure on a relationship when you are in what seems to be a pressure cooker environment where little things can dredge up all the nastiness from the past.

I know because I have been there. my DH and I weren't dealing with what you are dealing with, but we also had a lot of built up resentments due to family issues. We were also stuck in the cycle you have described of little things bringing everything back to the surface and two years later we are still working it out. I really understand your want to fix your marriage, but I also understand how much worse it can get after the baby arrives and you start arguing over the responsibilities that come with adjusting to the needs and wants of your much loved LO.

I'd second (third, whatever) Goodtobetter too. What you have to work through is difficult, hard, upsetting and uncomfortable. There is a hard task of picking out what is reality from amongst all the reasons or excuses for his behaviour. You'll also need to distinguish between positive thinking/ determination and avoidance/denial. You'll need to work out whether what you want is possible, knowing that wanting it isn't enough on it's own. And you need to work out whether you need to grieve for something lost and irreparable or work on fixing something that might be worth having again one day. Whatever the future, it will be a long game. And that's unfair because it's been inflicted on you. It wasn't your making.

It's hard to see clearly up close to anything so complex and difficult. What do you think about individual and couple therapy/counselling? (and if only one of these then individual counselling?)

This perception on your part worries me: .... 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

Trauma to our marriage - sounds like you see it as something inflicted on your marriage externally. It wasn't. Your husband had an affair. He did that, whatever the circumstances and pressures he had choices along the way. Especially since it wasn't a one off.

Betrayal and grief over my friend. Are these feelings misplaced, do you think? At the very least you might expect to be saying this about both your husband and your friend. (Not to mention that your friend was in mental distress and she didn't take the vows to you that your husband did). You may need to feel these things about your husband too, before you can process them and move forward.

I worry that you're displacing it all on to her/external to your husband/taking responsibility for it yourself in order to contemplate a future, ie.to be able to fix it. To truly fix it, you may need to be able to blame him too and then forgive him. Right now the responsibility you give him comes across as pretty superficial. If you go back through all your posts and look for anything that sounds like making excuses or justifications for him you'll see people mean..

Do lean on your friends - people you love and trust. You deserve all the support you can ask for right now.

Don't beat yourself up OP. You have been manipulated, lied to and deceived.

In all honesty, if my DH had done something like this, I wouldn't want him to be near me ever again. But again I understand you feelings about wanting to try and save your marriage. Its easy to say LTB when its not your life that will be in upheaval, but sometimes it is something that needs to be said so that even if the person doesn't end up choosing to end the relationship, they at least have an outside perspective of just how bad the behaviour of the offending partner has been.

You mentioned earlier that "I had counselling for an unrelated issue many years ago, and my odd family unit came under the spotlight, my counsellor felt that I had made a good adjustment to it all, and that although it had coloured my approach to relationships, they didn't feel it had negatively impacted that approach."

I'd be really interested to know if that counsellor would make the same judgement about your current approach to relationships

Being pregnant and having a baby often makes you start to revert to "old" learned patterns. Up until now, you haven't been a family unit. You soon will be. You are determined that you want your much wanted child be part of a loving family unit. You are prepared to fight for that - and to overlook what he did/is doing.

You said in your OP that you wanted help "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."

Is that not the same cycle your mother was in?

I may well have seemed glib, I often come across that way in writing. I didn't mean to and am well aware that this is your life.

I offered the only viable way that I can see as a way to achieve your long term goals. I didn't offer my personal judgement on your situation.

Currently you are asking the impossible - there is no healthy way to do this quickly, make it better and be happy.
And the only thing you have control over is you - no matter how you support, forgive, rail at or demand from him, fundamental change into a respectful and loving husband can only come from him. It is also nearly unheard of.
You are being blinded by your friend, you are conflating all the feelings you have about her manipulation and betrayal with those for your husband. The only way to move on is get her totally and completely out of your marriage and deal solely in your husband's transgressions.
As long as you have such a convenient repository for all of the difficult feelings to come she will be exploited by both of you. That will not heal you.

Because there are only 2 options - he has been a victim of sustained, chronic, sexual assault in which case he needs significant help to allow him to process those issues and she should face the threat of prosecution to the fullest extent of the law.
Or
He chose to have sex with another woman, at the time in a position of closeness to you, and carry out a large, explicit and months long campaign of lies, emotional and sexual betrayal.
This manipulator could have been foiled with one sentence. She could have been foiled by him removing himself from the situation - it was easier to avoid having sex with her than to continually have sex and an emotional affair with her. And I have a master class in dealing with Narcs and abusers (and I await the answer to pps ? with interest).
That is what you won't see while she fills your vision.

Nobody gets talked around and out of their strongly held morals and beliefs, (without so much as a heart to heart with you? for reassurance, help?) unless they choose to be led. Or they are a vulnerable adult - in which case he needs even more support.

She may be many things but she was those things because she was a currently disturbed, pregnant and mentally ill woman. That makes her vulnerable in anybody's book.
She also said she was fleeing a destructive and unhealthy marriage, while pg - that would be classed as making you a vulnerable woman.

So whichever way you cut it his 'weakness' led to him starting and maintaining a months long affair with a woman so vulnerable to exploitation and scapegoating she has needed to be sectioned for her own safety.
Any decent man would have seen 'vulnerable woman fleeing DA' and backed right off, many more as close to the situation as he was would have seen 'liar and manipulator - get her out, protect my wife and myself'.
No decent man would have fucked her, let alone minutes after they married and in the marital bed.

She is your white whale. But you need to be looking closer to home.

In all honesty some days I don't know if I can do this, with or without him, but then I expect every new mum feels like that.

OP, please consider going for more counselling. Being pregnant with your first child for most people doesn't invove feeling like you describe above.

Why the need to placate him OP? Shouldn't it be the other way around?

You may think that posting on an internet forum is desperate and shameful but if you take a look at the shift in you since the beginning of the thread, which has been a relatively short time, then perhaps you can see that posting on an internet forum isn't particularly shameful. A lot do it - to get an unbiased perspective. Posters get to see the situation in the raw and, interestingly, it is the unadorned that often shows the real flavour of a situation. I berated you for insisting on filling in the gaps, but the gaps you have filled in make no difference to the central theme. Which is that he cheated on you and had an affair with your friend when you were newly married.

It is 'convenient' that she is, apparently, mentally ill, personality-disordered, whatever. So easy to hang this whole thing on her peg. I do waiver about this, though, having been the victim of a psycopath and ending up doing things that were shameful and completely out of character... I'm muddying the waters here - you/he may be right that he was taken in by an alarming person. It is shocking to be taken in by characters like this - nothing prepares you for it. You think you ought to have seen it coming but I really don't see how one could see it coming without specialist knowledge.

Whatever has gone on here, the facts do speak for themself and he does need to take responsibility for what he did. You were and are a victim of the wiles of these two (I'm sorry to lump them together but the end result was the same), you do not need to take responsibility for what they did. I am concerned about your history (your parents marriage) and how it appears to be playing out all over again in your life: we think we have escaped their toxic legacy and are shocked to realise we haven't at all. It is very difficult to accept.

I feel incensed that he is bickering with you - for 6 hours! when you are pregnant! - when he doesn't have a leg to stand on, regardless of the circumstances. He did it, he needs to grovel, but it doesn't look like he's doing that. And you are desperately trying to sweep over this in record time, the iminent arrival of your child as a benchmark for getting it sorted. It's not going to be sorted in such a short timespan, particularly as you are pg; and particularly as he is hotly denying he had much to do with the end result. Regardless what he may say, his actions speak louder.

sorry to go on, though. I do feel for you.

Ok, I've only made it about two thirds down but I have to say this:

1. In order to understand all of that logic you probably have to share my viewpoint that the affair ...was and is an abberation, and is absolutely out of character for him
   I disagree. Your relationship is only 2.5 years old. For 11 months of that he has either been unfaithful and/or has been behaving extremely badly towards you. That means, taking that time frame as a representative example, his 'character' is to be extremely unpleasant nearly 40% of the time. I'd put money on him being a through and through bad egg.

2. People can change. But it doesn't happen very often, and it needs to happen quickly after the initial error. The fact that he lied twice when confronted, harangues you for 6 hours and 4 months after, tries to blame you AT ALL for his affair all tell me he's never going to change. He's also a liar, a cheat, a bully and very very immature. It's unlikely enough for one of these aspects of his character to suddenly disappear, let alone all of them.

3. Similarly, people are only as nice as their worst traits. This idea you have of a lovely kind honourable man going through a rough patch is dangerous nonsense (and I have been there, in a much more abusive relationship, for longer than you have been, telling myself the same crp.). We're not talking one, even large, but brief mistake, followed by remorse and attempts to remedy it. We're talking sustained affair, denial, lies, bullying, inability to shoulder the blame. It doesn't matter how much he appears 'prostrated' by guilt. It doesn't matter what he SAYS. He's HASN'T and IS NOT NOW BEHAVING* like a nice person who loved you. At all. It's going to be the hardest bit for you to accept, but the person you thought you knew before you got married probably doesn't exist at all.

4. Details aside, your posts could pretty much have been written by my mother 32 years ago. Where is she now? Still married to my dad. So bitterly unhappy she's physically and mentally unwell. My parents have the sort of 6 hour arguments you describe several times a week. THEY HAVE DONE THIS FOR 32 YEARS. Just stop and imagine that for a minute. What went wrong 32 years ago gets dredged up every few weeks. My life? Wretchedly miserable childhood, and an adulthood spent listening to and trying to deal with my mother's absurd attempts to try and change my father.

5. It doesn't matter how manipulative/unstable your ex friend is, or how much previous she has with other similar situations. No one can force a married man to be unfaithful if he's not willing to be on some level.

6. It will be harder to leave after the baby is born.

7. There are a lot of nice men out there. There are a lot of happy marriages which fundamentally work that don't involve 6 hour arguments, bullying, 'safe words', or lies. It's easy to replicate your parent's habitual behaviour. I did that. When I realised it didn't have to be like that it was miraculous.

8. In the same vein, I notice you talk about having 'fought' for your relationship, and you take about your 'downfall'. Please stop. You're not teenagers. It's not a film. It's not romantic. Love is NOT supposed to be tormented and difficult. It's not a Greek tragedy. A relationship does not become more worth fighting for the more it's put you through, if anything it shows its probably less worth saving.

Please, please listen to everyone.

OP I am very sorry that you are having a tough time at the moment.

From reading your last post, it seems you have form for seeing the good in people and investing in their own views of their lives and problems. This appears to be what happened with your friend, when you fell for her manipulative behaviour. Do you think that possibly this is what is happening again with your DH? I feel that you are very ready to believe his view of what has happened.

As far as positive advice goes, if the bickering starts to make you feel sad or uncomfortable I would advise immediately getting out of the situation. Tell DH that bickering is bad for your baby and go and lie down/out for a walk/to visit a friend/whatever it takes to remove yourself from the stress. Has he fixed your car yet? If not is it a (possibly unconscious) ploy to keep you in his control and unable to leave quickly? If the car isn't fixed, get a taxi if necessary. It is very important that you take good care of yourself and your baby and do not allow yourself to get unnecessarily upset again.

I fully support the idea that you should both have counselling to help you to sort out what's going on in your minds. As others have said you can't rebuild a marriage single handed, get in as much outside help as possible.

Good luck, I hope your view of your marriage turns out to be justified.

OP, I think you are hell bent on making everything ok again you can't see the wood from the trees - time will tell if he can change himself into the man you deserve, I wish you all the best in this quest. On here you get blunt advice, ie, not how we would put it face to face haha, it's easy if it's anonymous like this to actually say what you think from the gut, although yes it must feel quite cutting as well, you can't say you don't get a good range of opinions though!

This is not what you want to hear- you want to hear how you can singlehandedly make your marriage to an unfaithful, verbally abusive, blame-shifting man work. Collective experience tells you it can't work under these circumstances but you'd rather get angry with those pointing out the pitfalls , because you refuse to direct your anger and blame at your husband (and he refuses to accept responsibility).

The truth hurts.

You can try to avoid the pain by ignoring or papering over the truth. But it won't make it go away. I'm sorry, none of us can make your husband faithful or conjure up a guaranteed way to stop him cheating and blaming you . Only he can do that- and as long as knows he'll get away with it, as he has so far, there's nothing to stop him having sex with whomever he likes.

I'm not surprised you find it difficult with your mother. You are becomming her, no? Standing by your faithless man because it's not really his fault.

I hope you have counselling - you talk about him like you are the only one who understands him (after only 2.5 years!). What is overwhelmingly obvious from your posts is that you do not see him for what he is at all.

Sorry - I know this is more of what you don't want to hear...