In around 8 weeks time, it’ll be one year since I discovered DH had kissed an ex colleague whilst on a night out after them messaging for the few weeks prior, and enjoying drunken work nights out together.
I’ve been through a real rollercoaster of emotions since, and to this day, I still struggle with it all. I went through the sheer anger and heartbreak, the confusion, the 'maybe I'm overreacting it was only a kiss it could've been worse', the obvious broken trust and respect, we had a period of ‘hysterical bonding’, we’ve spoken about ‘that night’ a few times largely so that I could attempt to gain some closure and move on from it - but it never really works as planned as while I have forgiven, I clearly haven’t forgotten.
DH has expressed and shown remorse and guilt, has put himself through therapy too and as a whole, we really are trying our best to leave that horrible situation in the past, and our day to day lives are now seemingly ok.
However. I knew the one year anniversary would be hard for me, and as it’s slowly creeping closer, the thoughts of what went on between the two of them are starting to consume me again.
I don’t want to leave DH, I do want to reach a point where I hardly - if ever - think about what he did, but it’s been nearly a year and I don’t seem to be any closer to truly putting his infidelity behind me for good.
I guess my question is - for those who stayed after infidelity- just how long did it take you to finally feel like ‘ok so that happened, it’s part of our past but we’re good now and that's all that matters' as opposed to feeling quite negative about it relatively often. How did you feel one year after you discovered your husband had cheated? Were you more or less back to normal, barely thinking of it? Or was the anniversary of it all still really tough to handle?
If a friend had come to me and asked if she should be over her husband cheating on her within a year, I’d likely tell her to cut herself some slack and that the whole ‘forgive and forget’ thing is one giant process that takes a lot of time, just as any form of grieving does. But there’s something inside me that thinks I should be over it by now, that a year on, I shouldn’t still feel sad and hurt by it all.
I’m dreading when the date rolls around of the night that he cheated, and then the date of which I found out about it. I don’t know whether I’m going to wind up burying my head in the sand and pretending that that night exactly a year ago, my DH wasn’t out kissing another woman, or if I’m going to wind up having a mini melt down!