How can I have been so stupid

[Fuzzywig1]

I am in a terrible terrible mess and it is all my own fault.

This is long sorry.

Before I post please can I say that anything nasty or mean you say to me I have said to myself and it is not why I am here

I have been married for 21 years to a kind and gentle but emotionally distant man. I know he loves me but he does not find it easy to be vulnerable and show it in some ways. I am very warm and physically affectionate and he is not or not consistently meaning I often would feel lonely. Sex was also always on his terms and less than I wanted.

30 years ago I had an 18 month relationship with who I thought was ‘the one’ . Yes I was very young 22 and he was even younger (19). Anyway after a very very passionate relationship he went off to drama school and decided to leave me. I was heartbroken and never forgot him and never trusted that sort of passion again.

2 years ago and out of the blue an email arrived saying he had seen me at my sons football training. We started emailing agreed to meet ( I told my husband about this first meeting) blah blah yes we started an affair.

From the beginning he told me he always loved me but buried the feelings deep he wants us to be together we are twin souls. He left his wife and now lives on his own.

I did not ask him to do this by the way

I feel somehow enchanted by him and that I lose my reason ....

I have told my husband I want to get divorced but he cannot believe it and says we have always had a lovely and sweet relationship

Eventually he found out and now I am in an awful impasse.

The om said he does not want to put pressure on me but his moving out made its own guilt and pressure. His constant emailing showering of love and gifts etc have made me stupid.

My husband seems to just want to carry on as if nothing has happened and that I’m the end I will ‘cone Back to him’.

Over and over every day I change my mind about what to do. What will cause the least harm.

I have two lovely children aged 13 and 9 and I cannot bear the thought of hurting them. I have already hurt them by being distant from their father and sleeping separately from him.

I think I have now got to the point of knowing that I cannot do this. It is wrong, I have been deluded Abd stupid.

But I am now scared to tell the om who has changed his life for me and will be devastated

This email sounds so stupid.

I don’t think people would believe this of me.

Thank you

I do think he craves drama and excitement and does think he is ‘special’. And he is very melodramatic eg saying without me all hope is gone, he feels disembowelled etc

One day he said to me ‘two special people aren’t going to have such ordinary lives after all’

I thought this was a bit odd but ignored it

Oh dear I sound like such an idiot

Now I can see through it....

But it is easy to be lured back in hence why the blocking is so necessary

So glad you're feeling better Fizzy. It'll come in waves but look how far you've come since Friday.

Have a lovely lunch with your friend and an equally lovely evening with your family.

It's like Mills and Boon! Omg I've just thought, I wonder if he googled these one liners?!

You've done the right thing. This is a classic "the grass is always greener on the other side scenario".

It's easy to be romantic, send romantic emails, flowers etc when you don't live together and have limited contact. It would be a tragedy to leave a good, flawed but dedicated man for one who in all honesty could've been planning to leave his wife anyway. If she wasn't devastated by his leaving the marriage was all but over anyway so you'd be a suitable replacement lined up.

Well done OP, the fact that your DH was holding on to hope shows he's a good man and I'm sure with through gentle reminders and the fear you'll look elsewhere he will show you affection. It would've been tragic to leave and realise the OM was nothing more than a romantic shadow and a grasp at affection.

It is classic and I fell for it

I have come a long way you are right but it comes back every now and again. It has been a huge part of my life and although I now don’t have that ‘perhaps he is the one’ your brain misses it even if you don’t want to

Going to walk dog and then go out

I have missed my family

This is nice as for 2 years I couldn’t because I was with OM (physically) or felt guilty all the time

I don't know about Mills and Boon, but it really does sound like he's acting out an amateur dramatics version of a star-crossed relationship, with you as his leading lady. I do wonder if it wasn't you, if you hadn't responded to his initial approach, it would be someone else.

Very interesting article here from the Harvard Business Review

hbr.org/2017/05/does-a-womans-high-status-career-hurt-her-marriage-not-if-her-husband-does-the-laundry

This is the abstract that cites the higher likelihood of divorce

We argue that this pattern is best explained by gender identity norms, which induce an aversion to a situation where the wife earns more than her husband. We present evidence that this aversion also impacts marriage formation, the wife’s labor force participation, the wife’s income conditional on working, marriage satisfaction, likelihood of divorce, and the division of home production. Within marriage markets, when a randomly chosen woman becomes more likely to earn more than a randomly chosen man, marriage rates decline. In couples where the wife’s potential income is likely to exceed the husband’s, the wife is less likely to be in the labor force and earns less than her potential if she does work. In couples where the wife earns more than the husband, the wife spends more time on household chores; moreover, those couples are less satisfied with their marriage and are more likely to divorce.

academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/130/2/571/2330321?redirectedFrom=fulltext

Reading your comments I agree that the OM is a narcissist.

Narcissists believe they are right and then know better everyone around them. They know how to save the world and everybody around them.

I was under influence of a narcissist in activism. It took few months to realize how we were manipulated, few more to get ourselves from the mess we ended up in. Unfortunately only people who once experienced what you are going through can recognise the symptoms and remove themselves from similar situation.

It took me as long to recover from (what I would say was some kind of PTSD) impact of being around that person as I was under her spell.

Be kind to yourself and you will get over it.
It is hard for me to trust again people who come from nowhere into activism which I know is bad.

From the HBR article
We found that wives who believed they held higher status positions than their husbands were indeed more likely to experience feelings of resentfulness or embarrassment, feeling that their status was decreased by their husbands’ lower status position, which in turn had a negative impact on their marital satisfaction — and even increased the likelihood that they were thinking about divorce. Husbands, however, were unaffected by their wives’ status spillover feelings: They only experienced greater marital dissatisfaction and thoughts about divorce if their wives’ were outwardly unhappy with their relationship.

I wonder if the piffle that is 50 Shades of Grey would have sold many copies if he'd been the shop assistant and she'd owned the helicopter.

Do clear and get rid of anything that reminds you of OM or that he’s bought you. Take it all to the charity shop.

If you haven't already, please delete the song he sent you and all his texts, emails and messages so that in times of weakness, dissatisfaction, neediness or boredom you do not have the option to indulge yourself. Because it won't help

I have deleted the song

I have moved all his emails to junk

I know i need to delete them too but it is very hard

It is definitely the case that reminders don’t help. Just out walking the dog and it reminded me of him. He used to come and meet me and play with the dog

But at the same time I was actually meeting a nice young couple from borrowmydog and they reminded me that love is not something to be conducted in shame and secrecy

Also do not listen to sad songs ..

Wish I could tell my uber driver that

I mean about the songs!

That article is interesting . I don’t have status issues Re my h job but I do have resentment that I still carry most of the domestic load ie most of the laundry, cooking, tidying, admin etc. Though he has got better recently ( in response to this situation which actually made me cross as I had sort of told myself he didn’t notice the things needed doing)

But then everything he did made me cross at that point

I dont want to derail your thread Fuzzywig so I jave started a separate one on the challenges and opportunities of women being the main breadwinner.

I know that this probably won't be a popular opinion, but could you have more help with the domestic stuff? Your h is what he is and at least he's trying!

I understand totally how you got cross with everything

I have a cleaner and have for years because the cleaning caused such arguments. If I wanted us to clean at the weekend he’d say he didn’t want to spend his weekend cleaning but if I said in the week he’d say he was tired....

But she only comes once a week and there is all the daily mess to clean up and put away....,

I suppose I could get another one for a couple of hours

.........

I’ve just remembered something else about OM.. I told him a few times in years that I wished I was dead. Well really if he had cared about me you would not carry on in a situation that made someone feel like that.

At the same time he was telling me that if h loved me he would not try to hold onto me .

I never actually fell for that second line though

That should have said in tears not years

I know that you feel like the bad guy here Fizzy, but your husband doesn't sound too good with the 'chores'. It probably feels like a small thing in comparison to what you have been through, but I can see how you could resent him for that. It builds up then doesn't it?

I'm sure at the moment you feel you are this awful human being and he is a saint.

Btw - Om sounds a bit of a knob!

Hopefully om can now let you go if he loves you. Hope you're having a lovely lunch

If I had your income I'd have a housekeeper. What's the point of doing all that housework shit if you don't have to?? Small price to pay for martial harmony.

You talk of addiction and as I'm an addict in recovery I can relate to that: how the thing that is poison to me is seductive. Giving in to the addiction, even momentarily, is called 'picking up' and, frankly, it's a disaster: the addiction comes raging back in an instant with all the hopelessness and wretched despair that went before. Picking up can be listening to that song - it opens the door. You can't afford that, you have to be ruthless if you want to be free.

I heard today in a 12 step meeting that it's not so much giving something up as wanting and being attracted to sobriety, being dazzled by sobriety rather than being dazzled by the addiction - which actually destroyed our life.

They call it being clean - and it is a joyous feeling isn't it? Wonderful wonderful to have that awful presence gone and to have clean, fresh, uncomplicated in its place.

Don't jeopardise that op. Employ strategies that keep you far far away from temptation, even OTT strategies just to be safe.

As I always say, if you can't do it for you, do it for your kids.

Good luck fuzzy xx

FWIW I earn more than DH - nothing like as much as you sadly- and I know it has made him feel guilty at times and I have felt resentful (not about the money so much as the fact that i always has to take the minimum of mat leave). But guess who had the affair? Yep. DH..... but funnily enough in the brief period when he was earning almost the same as me. However I did have a brief EA with a coworkers 23 years ago when he was a student - I thought I was OK with being the sole breadwinner but maybe not. Interesting.

And your H needs to grow up a bit. I am sure he is fundamentally a good man but he needs to be more supportive on a practical level as well as more emotionally supportive. My DH is still pretty crap at chores but at least he has stopped shutting me out emotionally. He is definitely a stiff upper lip sort - but he has realised that is simply not acceptable all the time.