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.

Hear! Hear! Pictish. OP, why on earth do you think we, as readers, need you to fill any gaps? No matter how heinous a picture you paint of this woman we will still drag your attention back to the fact that your husband wanted her, was aroused enough to fuck her and desired her for a further seven months. He is an unconscionable dick to now blame her and you for his betrayal. This wasn't a one night stand, OP, where he threw his hands up, beat his breast and wailed at the sky in remorse. He gave himself to her for seven months. I don't know how you can bear to look at the bastard. Admit you have made a terrible choice of partner and boot him out.

Have you ever heard the expression, 'if twenty-five people are calling you a horse you'd better buy a saddle'?

Do you think your husband loves you? I don't think he can do. He really shouldn't be stressing you out when you are pregnant. It's not good for your baby at all. Are you the type of person who succeeds at things you put your mind to? This is an admirable quality but you are very much in the wrong in this instance and letting your marriage fail will mean you have a far better chance of making a success of motherhood. Have you read the Shirley Glass book for recovery after an affair? Might help. You can download to a kindle or phone or whatever. Good luck. It's horrible for you. Try to be brave tho and face the reality that your husband is an AWFUL man. His behaviour is that of a completely nasty inadequate and you sound traumatised and determined to brainwash yourself. It's natural to try to avoid the rottenness of your situation but keep going with it and you will end up neurotic, bitter and lonely. Get away from him. You can do it. He is a shit.

OK. So let me take your latter posts entirely at face value.

Let's then apportion blame for their affair.

What would feel about right to you? 60:40 her to him? 70:30? 50:50?

Whatever the number, my first point is that none of the blame is yours. Not one jot. For your H to suggest for one instant that you should take any blame whatsoever is sickening.

Which brings me to my second point. Just how much responsibility is he taking for his share of the blame? Is he examining what it is within him that allowed him to betray you? To trust her version of your marriage above his or yours? To lie? Not just once but repeatedly? On some level he allowed this to happen. And until such time as he faces up to that then I'm sorry to say that you're doomed.

He is trying to push responsibility for his affair onto you.

He follows you from room to room to keep an argument going.

He's given up counselling.

In all honesty it sounds to me as though he is trying to push you to end things rather than do it himself and be the 'bad guy'.

I think you can only move forward if he starts taking responsibility for himself and being honest with you, and you can't make him do that if he's unwilling/unable to.

I'm not suggesting you should throw the towel in - that's your choice, but I think you need to prepare yourself for the likliehood that this won't end in happily ever after.

Two massive problems here anyway.

1. You have 6 hour fights. That's just not healthy in and of itself.

2. He is trying to apportion some of the blame for his affair onto you - which is unbelievably shocking and, quite frankly, arselike.

You are having a child together. Do you really, truly, deep down feel that this is a healthy relationship to bring your child into?

I honestly don't think that most men would have just slept with a woman for 7 months no matter what sort of emotional and psychological blackmail she put on him. He has to take a huge part of the blame here, even if we take your posts about her mental health at face value.

And no man who truly loved his wife would just sit back and sulk "well, it's not my fault, she made me, and anyway you should have noticed that something was wrong" once it's all out in the open.

It's enormously hard to see what is salvageable here.

my husband had broken off their affair and she had been caught by her husband)...
what sort of a woman threatens the life of her months-old son

So was he screwing her while SHE was pregnant?

I have to say I find the story about the best friend highly unlikely.

It seems a narrative created to absolve the husband and demonise the absent (ex) friend.

OP this will never be resolved unless you and he are completely honest.

Dishonesty just creates blocks beyond which you cannot pass.

So if you really do want this to work (I don't believe it will but it's up to you) - you have to insist on full honesty with him, and you also have to be honest with yourself.

Actually, gilmour, I hadn't picked that up about the dates...

OP, this can only be fixed if he is honest and takes responsibility.

He is too angry with you to take responsibility.

I'm sorry you have to read so much that will not at first appear 'constructive' but the work has to come from your husband, not you, and he's not showing that he's willing to do much.

And as the supposed 'best friend' had moved into the house, this must mean he was fucking her while the OP was out at work.....

You say that when the marriage is good it is all you want? You have been married 11 months- for 7 of that he was having an affair, then you separated and got back together when the one off shag got you pregnant. And since then you have been angsting about the affair. So that's 7 months based on a lie, and four months of emotional shite

"if I spend all day thinking only about the negatives, and only about the wrongs he did then we are doomed before we have begun, so I choose not to think in terms of apportioning blame unequally, I choose to try and get past this. Does that make an ounce of sense?"

This presupposes that your relationship with your dh is the only thing that matters. That may have felt so once. But it cannot be the case now. You are going to be a parent! There will be a small person who will have a far greater claim on you than your husband can ever have, because you are his/her mother. And whatever that child sees in his or her home, those will be the values that stick with him, that he or she will have to depend on in life. If it is a girl, she will learn from you how she should be treated by any future partner. If it is a boy he will learn how to behave from your expectations of his father. If you are forever making excuses and accepting the blame because saving the relationship is all that matters, that is what your child will take away and apply to their own marriages.

You can't afford to make mistakes over this one. You haven't got the right.

If you are to have any future with your husband whilst still fulfilling your responsibilities towards your child then you will have to totally give up on this idea that you should accept blame for things you haven't done. It isn't enough of a target that he has to stop arguing. You have to stop conciliating as well.

So, the OW has done this 13 times in the last 16 years? Really? And it is only now that her husband has been able to work this out, having seen his wife in action a previous 12 times?

Surely charges have been brought if she has claimed malicious and untrue claims of rape and sexual assault?

But all this distracts from the fact that your DH had a sexual relationship with her.

Pictish - believe me I do, he's the lowest form of heel, but given the huge propensity for people on here to go "LTB" I didn't really see the point in highlighting his failings. I also think it's not a great idea to get into the habit of fault-finding with those you love.

OP, none of this is your fault, be clear on that.

Are you saying this all started 8 months prior to the wedding, with her 'chasing' him and him not being able to tell you anything or did I misunderstand that?

When I was twisting myself into knots, leaps of logic and an utter whirlwind of bullshit trying to settle my relationship with my mad and bad ex I admitted to a friend that I felt quite mad with it all. She pointed out that of course I did. "You're very clever and you can't understand why you can't fix it". That pulled me up short.

OP you're obviously very bright yourself, but in this instance you are eventually going to have admit defeat.

I had a 'frenemy' like this. I've used the same word as you - horror - to describe the period in which I acknowledged what she really is. That period was the beginning of a shortish, unbelievably painful, tearing of veils from my eyes regarding my husband, boss, colleagues and family members. It did cause me a breakdown; I was the one who ended up in a mental hospital. "Truth hurts" has resonance for me, though not in the way it's usually meant.

Of course it takes a minimum of two to make a relationship, toxic or healthy. My part in my own downfall? Blind trust and irrational optimism ... heroic efforts to see my world as I wished it were; denial of the first order. Just like yours.

Your ex-friend can't have been successful every time she tried. The thirteen instances you & her H have identified are those where she succeeded. The others? Her 'failures' didn't deny to themselves what they were doing with her, or she with them. Unlike them, your husband abused a woman's apparent vulnerability to stick his dick in her. This makes him a nasty person, a sexual predator. He went on to lie to you, abusing your trust. This makes him a dishonest person, unworthy of trust. He blames a woman for making him have sex with her. This makes him a fucking chancer, I'll give him that! And he blames you for minding that he lied, cheated and abused. This is classic abuse.

"She made me do it"
"You made me do it"
"You should be sorry" [no emoticon]

In the film, Single White Female, Hedy sneaks into Sam's bed and gives him oral sex. Sam refuses to keep it secret from Allie. Hedy kills him. I'd be curious to know whether your OW attacked your husband with a stiletto?! Did threats to his life make him get an erection, use it to have sex on a dangerous, pregnant woman, and abuse your trust? Would it not have been more rational to go to the police, or at the very least tell you and her husband of the threats?

" 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's bullying. You're married to a selfish, dishonest, unfaithful, manipulative bully. Well done.

Marriage isn't a shackle, you know. You can stop being married to him.

"The habit of fault finding"?

WTF?

We're not talking about leaving dirty pants on the bathroom floor. He was screwing your so called friend for seven months. While you were pregnant. It's not really nit picking to find fault with that.

Madbuslady - I have been seriously angry at my husband, I'd have to be mad to have been. I soulsearched for weeks about whether to leave him or whether to return and fight for what I wanted. I made the decision to go home and fight for what I wanted because it's what I want - saying I don't want her to win is a flippant justification for my actions, if I'd come home purely to spite her it'd be a pretty shitty basis for any relationship. I'm not wondering why it doesn't feel good, I know why - because I'm still grieving. What I'm looking for is ways to spot when a cycle of anger starts, and how to diffuse them before they become ingrained behaviour.

"I also think it's not a great idea to get into the habit of fault-finding with those you love"

I wholeheartedly agree, when it relates to situations which aren't possible dealbreakers in a marriage, not a 7 month long affair.

I feel worried about how this man will react when you have to devote your time and attention to a newborn baby.

Rarely have I read such well written, lucid and articulate posts married to an inability to accept that probably things have gone too far here...

I really dislike the immediate LTB mentality and won't say it, but there is little I can add (as a man) to the above.

If there was some earthly way I could have ended up having an affair (not just a one-off fling) for 7 months with my wife's best friend (mad or not) only a couple of years after getting together with her, shortly after marriage, when really life should be the best it's going to get (because with a baby it will be 100 times more stressful) then the only way I could even vaguely imagine saving the marriage would be to absolutely prostrate myself and do whatever was needed, my wife needed, to try and build up some trust again. There is absolutely no way I could harangue someone for 6 hours or even argue with her, if fundamentally the cause of all issues were mine. If she wanted counselling I would set up the sessions for us, if she wanted me out, I would go until told otherwise.

He may not even be a particularly bad person, but there is something badly flawed at the base of this relationship that somehow you need to get to the bottom of. He does not appear to want to make the effort to let that happen.

Best of luck.

Do you feel you've no right to demand honesty, respect and fidelity, izchaz?

ways to spot when a cycle of anger starts, and how to diffuse them

Answer: Leave. Leave for half an hour, three hours, a weekend or a lifetime, but leave. That is anger management 101. I'm astonished you don't know it.

Keep a packed bag, with taxi money and a phone inside it, somewhere near the front door. (Even I did that, and I was a right mess!)

Man, I have opened such a shit storm for myself here. I'm struggling with all these posts, it's kind of like being hit repeatedly in the face and being told I'm stupid for having hope with every strike. Thank you all for your input, please don't be offended if I stop posting for a while, this is emotionally taxing for me, because as kind as you are trying to be you're telling me that I've married a predator, a liar and a cheat. And that none of those things can be changed.
I quite often read the boards here and often think "all these men cannot possibly be abusers and bastards, because if that were true there would be no men left". I think perhaps it is easy to say that a man is bad or weak or pathetic, it is much harder to live with that man and see all the flavours that make him a man and still say he is truly bad. We are all flawed, that doesn't make us lost causes.
Thank you to the various people who posted about books to read, I will chase those up.