If you found out your dh had had an affair for 16 months would you ...

[Eggid]

Throw him out? Even if he’s all you’ve ever known and you’ve been together for nearly 40 years? Even if he’s spent the 10 months since you found out doing all in his power to put things right?

Some days I want to kill myself. Some days I want to kill him. Most days I just don’t know what to do.

Please tell me what you would do given that we’ve been together since we were teenagers. Dc are all grown up and gone, and they don’t know anything.

Thank you.

@Norabloom ask him the same questions as many times as you like. He owes you explanations and it's not unreasonable for you to want to hear those explanations as many times as you need to.

Him getting upset is not your problem.

Men can compartmentalise - they really can put the memory in a box and close the door.

You need to sort out the reason it happened- loneliness, neglect stress, depression - basically develop a good healthy way of being together.

Norabloom I cannot imagine how you must feel knowing the ow spent time in your home. I think that would finish me off. How dare your dh tell you you you should be over it. They are both disgraceful.

Robin2323 I too believe men compartmentalise. When they end a relationship/affair where love is not involved, they truly move on without looking back. They can have sex without having any feelings for the woman - it is a complete physical act. My naive 20 odd year old self believed if a man slept with me this meant he really liked me. I then realised I had feelings and to them it was just sex. When casual flings ended I was upset and depressed while they quickly moved onto another woman who was able to give them the same sex I could. A hard and painful lesson to learn.

Robin2323 I remember accusing dh of fantasising and thinking about ow when in fact he had completely moved on. He was able to leave the past exactly where it was while it became my future and all consuming. Dh was able to put his wrong doing in a box and get on with family life because men can easily do this.

The worst of it is we have a family holiday starting tomorrow and I don’t know how I can bear it. It was booked long before I was told about the affair.
If I don’t go I will feel awful (disappointing other people - not DH) but I am dreading it. My friend tells me to try and see it as a reboot, but I don’t know if I can.
Sorry to hijack your thread OP I just really want to say that I totally know what you are going through and it’s really awful. All normal life is turned on it’s head.

I'm sorry you are in this situation Eggid. I found out about my exH two year affair with a work colleague after thirty years together in exactly the way you did.

We stumbled on for 18 months after that but really the marriage was over. However I was in shock and it took time to get my head round it all. The nail in the coffin was him eventually confirming that he had done it before and that the first time was shortly after my DS1 was born. So my whole marriage and adult family life had been built on his lies.

All I can tell you (I'm now in my late fifties) is that I have chosen not to have another relationship because I will never trust anyone again, but that my life is immeasurably happier than when I was married. I have built a life I want, have rock solid friendships and am shortly moving to live where I have always wanted to live. All my choices and I love them. I would not go back to my old life for anything.

Do have the counselling - it was transformative for me.

@Norabloom do not worry about letting others down right now.
Concentrate on you and what you can cope with.
People will understand.

Nora a holiday will shine a v stark light on the situation and your feelings. It will be obvious to others that there is “something up”. This will put a lot of pressure on you and you are already emotionally at the end of your tether.

You need to take responsibility for emotionally protecting yourself. This is one of the v worst things to happen to anyone in life - don’t underestimate it.

No one else is looking out for you now.

If you can’t deal with it don’t go. Or have a plan to make the logistics bearable or a get out plan/escape plan.

Do what is best for YOU right now.

Norabloom I had to name change, previously was "Ferfecksake ".
I remember you starting your thread 4 months ago. I am now 9 months in.
It really doesn't get any better, does it? I too, dread any family occasions. I bitterly hate that he Iis still here,, joining family life. Cannot separate yet, due to various financial and family commitments. Just biding my time and dreading the fall out with my DCs when I tell them.
And I too , get the impatience that I ask questions or make a remark. But fuck him. This is his burden too.
He now has a new job, paying less, so any chance of being able to part financially is gone.
And if I was younger , I would be able to manage .But I am 58 this month and carng for elderly relative.
And at the time, I too, got a car. I refer to it as the Heartbreak Hyundai.

To the OP, do things at your own pace. Or do nothing while you still feel so vulnerable . What we are being asked to do is to bear the unbearable . Bastards all.

@stillsunny hello! I have to agree it doesn’t get any better it just changes. Some days unbearable some days really unbearable. I feel like DH is setting me up with a larger house and car so he can assuage his guilt. I didn’t want either of those things!
He now says if I can’t start work on our relationship what am I doing with him! There all kinds of wrong about this. I don’t want to have to work at mending a marriage he has shattered.
I also feel that there’s no definitive recovery period for this. We are all right in still feeling dreadful months later.

Do men see infidelity completely differently to women? Because the more I hear/discover/experience about men, it really seems like an affair means nothing to them. It's like having a little hobby.

But for us, it's a complete destruction of trust and a reason to end things completely.

I'm not saying we arewrong for feeling like that. But I do wonder why SO many men cheat, if they "know" it's genuinely wrong and bad and unforgivable.

@HasThisSoddingNameGoneToo when I asked DH reason for affair he said all of the following: I wasn’t happy, I thought you didn’t care about me, I think YOU are having an affair, OW was my best friend and protected me, I never meant to hurt you because of course I always loved you.
Gist being ‘I couldn’t help it despite it being wrong/you caused it’
I think men know it’s wrong but it suits them to believe women will just accept it fairly quickly and move on and if they don’t they are mad harpies.

OP, theres a book called "Women Who Stay With Men Who Stray" all about following the different paths of women after they discover a partner's affair. It's completely neutral about whether women should stay or go.

After reading the book, I remember thinking that the women who left seemed long-term happier than the ones who stayed. Staying seemed to damage women's self-confidence, pride and optimism more than chucking them out.

Also, Esther Perel has a lot of work on this subject - find her on youtube, or read her book "Mating in Captivity". She says that once an affair happens, the relationship/marriage you had is now gone. It's over, finished. The question now is to decide whether you want to stay together and build a brand-new relationship together.

Don't stay because you think you'd be miserable without him. You have absolutely no way of knowing that, you've been together since you were 14. You have just as much chance of absolutely LOVING life without him! You might be thinking, in a year's time, "I never realised how many things irritated me! How many compromises I'd had to make! Thank God he gave me this chance to discover how amazing the world is for me, just me!"

Gist being ‘I couldn’t help it despite it being wrong/you caused it’

Ugh, that sounds like an argument my teenage son would use.

I think men know it’s wrong but it suits them to believe women will just accept it fairly quickly and move on and if they don’t they are mad harpies.

UGH! If they fel like this, why do they bother marrying us? Why not admit that fidelity is going to be an issue, and stay unmarried? Cowards.

My (Not D)H says that he never meant to hurt me so much. I asked him what he thought would happen. He said he thought I would never find out and it would be his burden to live with.
Oh, that makes it all right then !!!

Well , it is now MY burden. Ruined all that went before - FB keeps bringing up "memories" and he looks so normal. And has ruined my future peace of mind. Ironically our 30 ! year anniversary is next month. Hoping nobody remembers.

I’m on my phone so please forgive me not namechecking. Someone asked if I truly hadn’t noticed any difference at all - the honest answer is no. I don’t know what that says about me.

I don't think this is that unusual. My friend's husband was arrested at their house and it turned out had huge secrets.
She had been pottering along in a happy marriage for 13 years.
She sort of knew that he was bothered about something, and encouraged him to talk to someone, but never, ever imagined he was keeping a huge side of him secret.

I think about my own marriage, and so much of it is 'normal life' that just continues, I can imagine that it is easy to just jog along and not realise.

You had no reason to suspect either. We tend to think - oh dh is a bit tired, hard day. Not dh is a bit quiet, because he's been with someone else all afternoon.

Stillfunny your DH and mine using exact same song sheet. Word for word the whole I never meant you to be so hurt or find out all of it.
I can’t bear that their horrible behaviour turns out to be our burden. My life and my marriage feel utterly destroyed.

I always believed it was better to try and forgive and move on, for all sorts of reasons...then it happened to me and I discovered that turning the other cheek doesn't work, no matter how hard you try. His affair wasn't the only reason our marriage broke down, but it had a lot to do with it. He followed The Script (are men hardwired with this, I wonder?) and I got a new car as well (unfortunately, it proved as unreliable as him) but the trust had gone and we eventually divorced. I haven't had a proper relationship in the fifteen years since, and probably won't now, as I find it hard to trust anyone to the extent I didn't before.

A friend of a friend, married nearly 40 years, only discovered her husband had been having an affair a couple of weeks after he'd died suddenly, when the OW left a message on his phone as she hadn't heard from him. She has no idea who the OW is, or how long it was going on, but suspects that it was long-term (over ten years). And with him gone, so many questions are left unanswered. She says she hadn't a clue...how do you move on from something like that??

it's such an interesting thread for me as I've recently discovered something I wish I hadn't

I discovered that my dp (and I don't want to put too many details on as I've name changed for this) was living with another woman when we first started going out. I totally, randomly discovered this years later. At the time, I knew he had lived at X address. Around 6 months ago, I had to look up our title deeds for something and realised on the land registry website, you could see who owned the property from the address.

I honestly, to this day, don't know why I typed that address in but I did and a woman's name popped up. I then recognised that name as when we had first met, her name used to pop up on his phone the whole time and he had told me it was an ex of his he was helping with a commercial transaction.

I confronted him and he made up some half arsed story about us only overlapping for a few months and he had already broken up with her. But I could see he was lying and I pushed and eventually found out that he had actually been seeing her around a year into our relationship (and their relationship lasted around 2-3 years, he started seeing me in the last year of it) - in fact it looked like it only stopped just after he moved in with me.

I am still in shock today. For me it's the deception. The fact that for that whole year he completely and utterly lied to both me and her (she had no idea I existed). And I suppose it's the deep down horror that if he was capable of this once before, who is to say he won't do it again.

I'm not sure if I want to continue but I don't have the benefit of a 40 year marriage just a relationship under 5 years. The problem is if you'd asked me before this, I would have told you how happy we were. We are about to buy a house together, he's spoken about getting married. I feel like someone's ripped the carpet from under my feet.

I wish you luck in your decision. There's an interesting article in the Mail of all places talking about how infidelity in some cases does save marriages (though not sure how). I've been divorced before and it's such a horrendous process, it does make me feel more likely to want to sort things out but I think ultimately, if you can never trust them again, then there's no point continuing and I guess you have to decide if you can do that....

Men cheat because of" the rush" , the feeling of being wanted , they "deserve" it , wife will not do certain sexual things , they are flattered amongst many other reasons .

Yes - it is crap and just heartbreakingly awful but I would not let one shite man stop me from living my life . Do you really want to live the rest of your life being a victim of your ex H ? Move on, be aware and open yourself to someone new . I did and am loved by the most loving and respectful of men . He makes me realise how crappy my first marriage was.

I agree Stuffedpenguin that you should not let one man define your life etc but the problem is that the immediate fall out from the revelation of all the deception, and all the pain makes it impossible to make a clear decision. And it seems to last a long long time.
I am hoping that one day I will wake up with the strength to say ‘just fuck off and leave me alone for ever more’, but all this has so upset me I can’t make any decisions.
I am 60 years old and I feel like there’s nothing to look forward to now whether I stay with him or split. Everything is tainted.

Men cheat for more reasons than what stuffedpenguin said.

Every case is different while some have similaries of course.

I do think there are too many posters not thinking about how they are going to make a cheated person feel when they bang on about he won't change, one affair is all you know, have some self respect, I couldn't stay etc.

Someone once said to me that the easiest option is to walk away and it can take more strength to stay. I think there is an element of truth in that and there are many reasons why some people stay when their spouse cheats and none of them are because the spouse I stupid, an idiot, weak etc.

People make mistakes. Forgiveness is so very difficult but it is what we are all supposed to do.

We are not here for a very long time. Perhaps you should try and help the people you know during your life.

OP, this is so hard - I am so sorry for you - and I have no direct personal experience. All I can tell you is that my best friend (now my partner) found out after 30 years of marriage that his wife had had at least two affairs, one lasting over a year. He tried to stay with her because he loved her, and it nearly destroyed him. He, too, was in his 50s and scared of the future - they had been together since they were virtually kids. But in the end he couldn’t do it. And a few years down the line, he IS ok now. And happier than he has ever been (of course - he’s with me !) His biggest regret now I would say would be not leaving as soon as he found out......

Oh, and he has forgiven her. We are all really good friends now, spend Christmas together and stuff. Forgiveness doesn’t have to mean staying together.