@lindyloo6 please don’t think I am worse off than you. The hurt and betrayal are the same. The timing of discovery is the only difference. You must be kinder to yourself! Please don’t compare or minimise what has happened to you. My experience is no worse or better than yours, my pain worth no more or less than yours.
I was sharing to try to show you through my own experience, that you are still in the early stages of discovery, and that there are traps of thinking that you can fall into, as you are desperate for information at this stage and hanging on to every word as if it was the truth (I did) whereas he is desperately trying to minimise and will lie to do so. I truly understand that it this so hard to comprehend in the beginning.
My husband is a very intelligent man, but intelligence has little to do with it. He was never going to leave me for her, she was a much younger fantasy in a parallel world. He was convinced I would never, ever know, it all happened at the other end of a long commute with ‘meetings’ and ‘beers after a heavy day’ sounding more than plausible. He had never given me reason to snoop or question in all our years together. This was as out of character as Mary Whitehouse lap dancing. It was only when he saw her for the first time at a weekend rather than a working day that I got suspicious. He was very cagey and his alibi was fishy to say the least. Most of his working day lies were texted “I’ll be a bit late tonight because...”
In his total panic of being discovered, he tried to solve everything as soon as possible, but was a coward and lied to me about finishing the affair as abruptly as I demanded, because when he tried to break it off with her she unsurprisingly was not at all happy! 🙄 He fobbed her off and backed away from that too. He hates conflict of any kind and it took three horrible weeks for her to get the hint. He fobbed her off with being ‘busy’ hoping she would dump him. Coward. She had kept asking him what was wrong (🙄🤷🏼♀️) and when he finally met up with her, in desperation she said “You’re never going to leave your wife, are you?” he said no, and that was that. No contact since. God knows what he had told her for it to go on so long.
I had no idea they were in contact during those three weeks. He was a sobbing wreck desperately trying to show me what a mistake he’d made and that he loved me, whilst feeling shit about having used her and not plucking up the courage to tell her that. He apparently saw her a couple of times after he’d told me it was over, but it was awful and he finally found the balls to tell her the truth and ended it. I only found this out later, when I demanded to see all our financial information.
That it effectively continued, as far as I’m concerned, for three weeks after he’d promised me he’d called her and ended it the next day, really screwed up the progress I’d made after DDay and the picture I had of him. He was a colossal arse who hurt me in the worst way possible but I loved him and was willing to accept it as a huge midlife crisis mistake and try to rebuild our marriage. He undid that in one afternoon. It’s very hard now going forward.
This is why the trust issue is so important. At present I doubt you can trust him at all and that’s absolutely expected and totally valid. You no longer feel safe. Time, and his proving on a daily basis that he is no longer lying, that he doesn’t mind being totally transparent, that he has lost his right to privacy for a while (negotiated as you go) in order to prove to you that he is honest in all he says and does, might bring back trust. But it is a very long, hard process and not for the faint hearted.
But I’m no worse off than you. I really feel for what you’re going through.