Can my wife ever forgive my affair?

[Funkywotsits]

Hello,
I'd like some honest advice please.
Back in 2014 I had a silly,brief,stupid and first time ever affair.
I told my wife it was going on and stupidly told her our marriage (7 yrs) was over.
I left her ( and my sons) for three days before opening my eyes and seeing what a stupid mistake I had made.
I ended the affair straight away and asked to come home and she said 'No'.
We have lived apart for 6 months now but have talked about going for counselling ( Relate) soon.
I truly regret this ever happening and over the past six months have kept some distance as asked,sought 1-1 counselling,kept regular contact with my Son's,paid monthly amount to run family home and caused no trouble or hassled her.
Can she ever forgive me? Does that happen?

I've spend a lot of time thinking about affairs and the hows and whys, having been through a very nasty break up involving an OW, and trying very hard to find some peace of mind if not forgiveness, for my own sake (I dumped him immediately).

OP - for some perspective on what you are facing...it's been 3 years, I now have a new DP I'm happy with, I don't regret the ending of the relationship with ex, but I still wake up some nights at 3am going over and over it in my mind and feeling fucking furious.

It's not the whys that are important. Or even hard to work out. Whys are usually very simple and straightforward - lust, ego, selfishness, cowardice about ending relationship, finding it difficult to communicate with partner blah blah.

It's the hows that utterly destroyed me at the time, and get to me now. It's the hows that have been insurmountable for me to forgive.

You see the whys are always there, for all of us. We all look at people and find them attractive, we all feel lust, we all like our ego stroked, we can all be selfish, we can all be cowardly, we all find it difficult to communicate sometimes with our partners. The whys won't ever go away.

It's the hows that matter, and I'm sure matter a lot to your wife.
The hows are the difference between feeling the influence of the whys and still not cheating, and acting on them.

How could you do what you did? How did you bring yourself to look your wife in the eye and lie to her when you were off with OW? How did you manage to kiss and fuck OW and then go home and kiss and be affectionate to wife? I like to think most people aren't capable of that behaviour - but you were. How? If you are capable of doing those things, why are you suddenly not capable of doing them again?

Brilliant post love.

How could you do what you did?

This still gets me too. Because nice people don't do these things ergo, someone who does these things is not nice (putting it in the mildest of terms!).
Then we feel conned, manipulated, deceived, used, abused that there was this person inside the DH we thought we had who was lurking under the surface like a horrible monster just waiting for an opportunity.
Then we think that the whole of the marriage was a sham, a mirage, a fake. Not only do we mourn the death of the man we thought we married, we also mourn the marriage we thought we had.

exactly.

OP - made you think a bit more about the extent of the impact on your wife? That there's a lot more involved than 'I did X because of Z factor, and I've dealt with Z factor, so I won't do X again'. Not enough. That's just the easy bit at the surface of it all.

TheyLearnedFromBrian Fantastic post - so well put.

OP I do hope you get what you want from this.

For me, I couldn't forgive.
I thought I could. I took him back, it lasted a day or 2 before I realised that there was no going back.

He had changed everything with his actions.
He was once my rock. The person I could trust more than anybody. The man I loved, who loved me and would never ever hurt me. He was my protector, my support, my friend. The most important person in my life. The soul-mate I could laugh with and cry with. Share everything with.
That all completely changed once I found out about the affair.
He became someone who was cold, uncaring. Someone who could hurt me more than I ever thought possible. When your heart breaks it is literally a physical pain. A pain so severe you can't ever know what it's like until it happens to you. He was someone I couldn't trust anymore. Someone who was willing to betray everything we ever had or worked for. Someone who was prepared to throw away our life our DD and me for a shag.

I always think working on a marriage after an affair is the much much harder option. Especially for the person who was cheated on. It takes a lot of strength and courage to work at a marriage and try to forgive.
IMO, I took the easy way out. Didn't feel like it at the time but we are all different. We all have different boundaries, different deal-breakers.

Keep reminding her how much you love her and how much you are willing to do to help her through this.

I'm not judging you. Many many thousands of people a day are having affairs. All for varying reasons. Just be there for her whenever she may be ready.