There are some excellent responses here. Sadly I too have experienced the crushing pain of discovering that my husband had an affair. On other threads I have seen incredulous posts from women saying that the wife must have been ignoring signs or in denial about their husbands’s behaviour or just thick. I wasn’t and I’m not. I had been with my husband for well over 30 years and was due to celebrate our 30th anniversary in the summer of the same year that I found out about his affair in the spring. We were happy, everything was ok, not perfect, nothing is, but very ok. I trusted him completely and utterly, as I had always done, he had never given me a day in all those years that made me doubt his love for me or faithfulness. He used that very fact to betray me completely and utterly for fourteen months.
The total soul and self-esteem destroying SHOCK when I found out that he was having an affair with a woman nearly 20 years my junior and the ensuing pain was worse than even the death of my beloved parents. If he had told me he was actually an alien in a human suit my mind could not have been more blown. SO:
Do not underestimate what has just happened to you. You are reeling with shock and desperately trying to make sense of everything.
Logic does not apply here. Here are the three most important things to let sink in. It’s hard, your head is spinning, but this is the truth:
1: the blame is his.
2: the blame is his
3: the blame is his
My dear, dear girl, you were only responsible for 50% of the state of your marriage at any given time.
This current state of your marriage is down to HIS poor decisions, HIS decision not to discuss his feelings with you before he had an affair and HIS choice to pursue this woman. You are in no way responsible for any of those appalling choices. He could have approached you and tried to sort any problems he thought he had at any time. His choices, his decisions.
So if you are anything like all of us who have been there, just as when anything traumatic and unexpected happens, you are now desperately seeking “Why?” and hanging on to everything he has said, trying to replay it and decipher it to find the truth, who to blame, was it him/ me/ her? It is a waste of your precious energy that you will need to heal yourself.
Here’s why: This is also very hard, you now have to go against the grain of the way you believed him before, but:
Everything that has and will come out of his mouth is really coming from the whacky planet he currently inhabits. This planet is a marvellous no-rules no-guilt planet called the planet Screwpiter. It has so many warped constructs and distortions of reality it makes Fraggle Rock look normal. He has constructed this planet to enable him to conduct an affair guilt free. It is NOT real and from what you have written, anything and everything he says is straight from Screwpiter.
On Earth if you have an affair, you are an Enormous Shit. On Planet Screwpiter, The one where you really can do anything you want to get what you perceive as ‘your needs’ met, your nice marriage must be changed to be dead, dying or clearly struggling in relationship A and E, thanks to your awful wife. You can increase Planet Screwpiter’s psychological comfort factor by reinventing your past and carefully moving yourself from the role of Enormous Shit to the role of Poor Victim. Isn’t that great? Now you can pursue any crumb of anything or anyone you fancy because you deserve it after all life has put you through. And Yippee! The other deluded inhabitants of Screwpiter feel the same as you! Fantastic! Now you can use the new woman you quite fancy screwing as an emotional crutch to move things along nicely on Screwpiter, and both moan about your spouses and how you are ‘saving each other’ from the allegedly shitty life back on Earth. Now we’re not Enormous Shits who have to feel guilty, we’re star-crossed victims of awful spouses! Yay!
Meanwhile, back on Earth (or reality as most of us know it) you annoyingly have a loving wife and children who really are fucking up your nicely constructed planet, so more and more fake crap has to be made up to keep away the extraordinary and scary possibility that you might indeed actually be an Enormous Shit after all and not a PoorVictim.
At present, back here on Earth, his cover is blown and he is struggling desperately not to have to face up to the fact that he, that nice family guy, the one who is so straight-up and nice that nobody thought would ever, in a million years, be capable of doing anything to his family as appalling as having an affair, is actually capable of having an affair. Of being an Enormous Shit. Of lying to, deceiving and manipulating you to enable him to continue screwing another woman behind your back. He will reinvent history, paint you as the problem, say ANYTHING to avoid facing up to himself. He’s desperately trying to protect his previous image of himself and avoid the painful truth that he isn’t that great guy, he’s really capable of doing terrible things and lying to cover it up and pursue his own desires at the expense of others who love him. Oh dear, another Enormous Shit just hit the reality fan.
Lovely, what I am trying to say is that his secret life is not compatible with reality. He needs to keep clinging to the crap he invented to try to excuse the terrible things he has done. As long as the two planets didn’t collide, they could co-exist. He swallowed every word his Planet Screwpiter Lying Bitch told him and was devastated to find out that she actually prefers Planet Earth to Screwpiter. There’s a chance she might be the kind of Superbitch who is pulling a stunt to see if he would actually leave you for her, or maybe actually she couldn’t construct a decent enough amount of bullshit to protect her from guilt, so Planet Screwpiter became a mirror for her own awfulness. She had to get out and go back to Earth.
Who knows? Point is it doesn’t matter. They are both in such La-La land that I doubt either of them actually knows whether they love each other or not. They don’t have a ‘relationship’. They have a series of shagfests based on lies and deceit. Your ‘unhappy’ husband wasn’t so unhappy as to leave you. He just made up and lied his way through an entire planet to stop having to deal with reality. Pinocchio is a mild fibber in comparison. Even the Blue Fairy couldn’t make him a real fucking boy after all this.
SO:
Give yourself time now. Don’t look for explanations. Let the DeathStar of reality nuke planet Screwpiter for you (It will) and use the time to try to get enough food and drink inside you, love and support your children, accept help from wherever you can get it and see how you really feel about all this. You need time.
Although tempting and I know, my lovely, I know how much you need something that makes sense right now, please, please, stop trying to make sense of what he says and do not under any circumstances even consider self-blame or criticism. There is truly NO sense to be had from him yet until he faces up to everything and that might take a while.
Feel free to PM me any time you like. I’ve walked in your shoes and am 16 months on now. Prioritise yourself and the children. Much empathy and love to you, you sound like a lovely woman. X