Does love come back/what do I do

[helplesshopeless]

Nc for this.

Advice needed please, I've created a huge mess and can't see a way out/what is for the best. This may be long.

I am married with a 3yo. DH has always had a nasty temper, I've suggested anger management counselling numerous times but to no avail. The last few years since having my child have been really difficult. He's generally spoken to me with contempt and disdain a lot of the time, with occasional temper flashes, arguments are always toxic, things could get very nasty (never physical). On a day to day basis we would be civil enough to eachother, but nasty looks and snappiness from him were definitely daily as well, with bigger flare ups fairly regularly. We have had happy family times too and we both dote on our child.

All of this treatment from my DH culminated in my withdrawing from him and ultimately having an affair the last few months, with someone who made me feel loved and cared for. It was mainly an emotional affair but there was a small amount of physical contact (we did not have sex). This is someone that I work with, so although we're wfh at the moment, he is in team zoom meetings etc.

My DH found everything out last week. He is angry but also devastated. I have never seen him so upset and it has shocked me that he cares that much about me. He has completely woken up to how he's been treating me and is committed to having anger management therapy and working on things with me. I obviously am ashamed of what I have done and there is no excuse for my behaviour, but he does recognise that his treatment of me took me to a place where I was open to someone else. I still can't believe I had an affair because it is so against my morals and I fully deserve to be judged for it.

We are working on things and will get relationship counselling. There's a lot of self esteem issues that my husband struggles with, especially since we had our child as he's felt like he's been stuck on the outside looking in, and he thinks this is why he's been treating me how he has. I do understand this and it makes sense, but it doesn't change how he's treated me in the past and how damaging I have found it.

My husband wants me to leave my work so there's no interaction with the other man. I totally understand his point but am reluctant to do this as I'd then feel trapped.

I want to get back to a happy place with my husband. I don't want to feel trapped with him. I don't know if I can find my way back to loving him, whether all of this is coming too late after years of awful treatment. I accept I have behaved in a disgusting way and deserve all of this fall out, and am so worried about the impact on our child and how I'd manage if we separate. I am also concerned about the impact on my husband if things don't work as he has been explaining how it will crush him and he'd never be able to trust anyone again if we don't manage to work through this.

I just don't know if my heart is in this anymore, I want to be able to be happy with him and love him and our family deserves for me to work on this and fully commit to getting back on track, but I have no idea if I'll ever get back to where I need to be.

I am ashamed to admit I still have feelings for the other guy. I could obviously never be with him anyway so that is irrelevant, but it's clouding my judgement. I need to hear from people who have learnt to love their husbands again. Is that a thing? Will we ever get there?

I still can't believe any of this is happening.

Helpless.
Ask yourself, if you won the lottery tomorrow, what would you do ?

If the answer, is go & rent a house with DD to get space to be calm, recover, even give your jerk of an H another chance.

Then honestly, all this "mountain to climb" over exiting , is just Admin.

I don't think it is all about financial security though is it. Because you can't 'buy' an intact family with both parents on the same page in love with each other and loving towards their kids. I think most would rather have that than a lottery win.

It isn' all about financial security, no, but of course it would be different if you had no worries about that whatsoever, for most people. Divorces and getting a new home are expensive.

you can't 'buy' an intact family with both parents on the same page in love with each other and loving towards their kids. I think most would rather have that than a lottery win
Even if OP won a million pounds, she still wouldn't be choosing from these two options.

@ravenmum

I'm just nodding along with all of this like someone who has just found Jesus attending a gospel service.

But can you have that revelation without that experience of meeting someone who is considerate? Otherwise it is all theory.

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 No, I don't think you can. Which is why I wish more people would risk looking for it, instead of settling for the crap that we are all told is all we can hope for. I certainly never would have dreamed it possible, and of course I'm incredibly lucky. But then, is it luck? I didn't just fall into this, I had years of trial and error, some of the errors rather spectacular. All valuable learning experiences, none of which I'd have had if I'd stayed with DH#1...

@helplesshopeless
I just don't feel anything for my husband and I know there's someone out there who is better for me. But also I know that the ideal situation is for me to be happy with my husband rather than trying to extract myself.
Why is flogging a dead horse an ideal situation? Please don't do it for your daughter's sake! Or your husband's. It's great that he (apparently sincerely, at least for now) wants to do better/differently, but it's possible he's just left it too late. We can go round the houses on this trying to work it all out rationally, and I love comparing notes with everyone on this thread, but at the end of the day you must listen to your gut, and I think you already know what it's telling you. Delay tactics are understandable. I hope the Daphne Rose Kingma book will help -- try doing the exercises at the end, they are brilliant for clarifying everything.

@PorridgeGoneWrong
Gottman says, “Happily married couples aren’t smarter, richer, or more psychologically astute than others. But in their day-to-day lives, they have hit upon a dynamic that keeps their negative thoughts and feelings about each other from overwhelming their positive ones.” This is what makes most marriages last and what separates happily married couples from the multitude of couples who stay married just for their kid’s sake.
Sorry, but if you have to make a conscious effort to stop your negative feelings for each other from overwhelming the positive ones, you're with the wrong person, and you're staying "happily" married just for the sake of an evangelical faith that that's what happy marriages look like.

I will now climb down from my soapbox!
for now, anyway!!!!!! 🤣

Oh op. There is no rush for this to fall into place. Trust yourself that you will know the right decision when the time is right. If you don't knownow, the time isn't right.

I know, but the implication is that it's only worth working on the marriage when you're financially dependent on each other.

That dependence is surely often there, but regardless of whether it's there or not, things can be improved. I suppose you can use it to motivate yourself, but is that so bad? Is it so bad to want to stay and improve things to be able to stay for the kids? There is a bit of a culture of 'LTB' on MN.

I think in the wider world there's a culture of poor relationship skills and low awareness of poor skills. Improving those skills could (IMHO) which could prevent a fair few 'LTB' scenarios (not all). Gottman seems to think the same...

Sorry, but if you have to make a conscious effort to stop your negative feelings for each other from overwhelming the positive ones, you're with the wrong person, and you're staying "happily" married just for the sake of an evangelical faith that that's what happy marriages look like.

Well, just listen to some of the advice of Gottmann. He doesn't advise at all 'making a conscious effort to stop negative thoughts'. He's very action orientated. He says : respond to your partner's bids for connection. Find out about their world and feelings (build Love Maps). Show fondness and admiration. He's researched couples for over 30 years.

When you and your partner start changing what you 'do', the positive thoughts and feelings follow automatically.

The reason I am a Gottmann evangelist is because he really has proven techniques. He tests his own ideas. He's been at it for a very long time. And when we finally started doing the stuff he suggested, it really helped.

@PorridgeGoneWrong thank you for your links. I agree that Gottman does have some great ideas, and I've been following him for a few years (attempting to relationship therapy myself!). The thing that has struck me over and over is that my husband regularly displays (or did) the 'four horsemen of the apocalypse.' That has really ground me down after all this time.

I hope the Daphne Rose Kingma book will help -- try doing the exercises at the end, they are brilliant for clarifying everything

I am going to visit a friend on Saturday and have this book to read on the train!

Oh op. There is no rush for this to fall into place. Trust yourself that you will know the right decision when the time is right. If you don't knownow, the time isn't right.

That is exactly what my therapist said to me this afternoon

I think the alternative is meeting a partner who already does the stuff Gottman advises and keeps doing despite life's stresses and strains. That would be just great!

But what if you meet someone in your early twenties and they have never seen this stuff? Their parents don't do it? They don't know the importance of it?

They get together on the basis of feeling nice together without understanding exactly what they do that makes the other feel nice, so when they STOP doing those things (too tired to make the effort, kids, stressful jobs...) it all falls apart but they don't see that they have just stopped basically doing 'the good stuff'.

OP, if your husband keeps doing the Four Horseman, and you've pointed out how harmful it is, then of course it is difficult. The things is we don't always ask are we not doing them ourselves. It's painful to see that we aren't perfect either. Isn't having an affair a display of contempt for the relationship for example?

I think we like to say it's 90% 'their fault'. And they say it's 90% 'our' fault. Well, if we worked on our '10%' then they would see it as us working on our '90%'. If you get what I mean.

@PorridgeGoneWrong -- that sounds interesting, in that it fixes issues that boil down to communication errors rather than basic lack of respect. So in that sense it must sort out the wheat from the chaff, so to speak.

I can't help thinking it also sounds just a wee bit creepy! Like we're gerbils in a cage or something. The human mind is very trainable, and I could imagine using his techniques to establish a good and loving relationship with my captor should I ever be abducted... By which I mean, it's ideal for making the most of a situation you can't escape.

He has a Wikipedia page!
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gottman

Marriages last so much longer now than the lifespans they were originally invented for! I sometimes think that in a humane society, married couples would be forced by law to part every 20 years, just to see if they find their way back to each other or their lives take a wholly new direction.

As @QuentinBunbury said. Sorry if I am hammering you OP, I don't mean it to come across that way. Things will unfold over time and there is no need to rush anything.

We focus a lot on 'compatibility' and 'meeting the right person'.

I agree with Alain De Botton that compatibility is an 'achievement' of love.

“The Romantic vision of marriage stresses the importance of finding the “right” person, which is taken to mean someone in sympathy with the raft of our interests and values. There is no such person over the long term. We are too varied and peculiar. There cannot be lasting congruence. The partner truly best suited to us is not the one who miraculously happens to share every taste but the one who can negotiate differences in taste with intelligence and good grace.

Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate dissimilarity that is the true marker of the “right” person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it shouldn’t be its precondition.”

Why you will marry the Wrong Person
www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/opinion/sunday/why-you-will-marry-the-wrong-person.html

Sorry, article was not free. You can hear the talk here:

Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person

It does sound creepy. But I think in the end we are biological machines. We can be trained and manipulated into doing many things. You can train your partner like you train a dog, and they can train you the same way to 'like' them. It's not that 'magical'.

@PorridgeGoneWrong

I can see that you are very keen that women stay in unhappy marriages. You have 33 posts on total on MN and as far as i can see all but two of these are linking to particular articles/ videos or promoting their ideology .

It’s clear that you are very keen to promote these here on MN. Perhaps you could tell us about your affiliation/connection ?

@PorridgeGoneWrong

It does sound creepy. But I think in the end we are biological machines. We can be trained and manipulated into doing many things. You can train your partner like you train a dog, and they can train you the same way to 'like' them. It's not that 'magical'.

See, this is just horrible!

I don't have any affiliation whatsoever! I found out about Gottmann and School Of Life on Mumsnet! I thought they were both really helpful. This OP reminded me quite a lot of my personal situation.

The other website (Al Turtle's Relationship Wisdom) is pure gold. I found it by random Googling. He really explained the neurology behind relationships to me in a way that I found very easy to follow and very helpful.

I just post the links in the way you post positive reviews, as a way of returning the favour to the wise people who helped me.

I do have a scientific background and I think the logical rational approach is very appealing.

Re: 'the horribleness' of it all. Personally I had to 'get over' my own romantic ideals about relationships to be able to make progress.

I think the Hollywood/TV representation of relationships doesn't do people any favours. Nobody sees how real love happens, past the infatuation stage.

Of course you have 'teach' your partner what you want. AKA 'train' them ;-)

I supposed you're supposed to be 'born good' at relationship skills or 'learn it at your parent's knee'.

And as for 'keen that women stay in unhappy marriages' what makes you think that? All the sites I have posted are about how to make marriages happier before you throw the towel in.

If you look up these guys, they don't tell you 'not' to ever leave, they tell you 'try this before you leave'.

@I0NA I would like to add that it was the OP who specifically 'asked' for advice from people who managed to 'get the love back'. So I feel your comment is really unfair :-(

How to End a Relationship

www.gottman.com/blog/signs-time-leave-your-relationship/
Love Quiz: Is It Time to Leave Your Relationship?

@PorridgeGoneWrong

Re: 'the horribleness' of it all. Personally I had to 'get over' my own romantic ideals about relationships to be able to make progress.

I think the Hollywood/TV representation of relationships doesn't do people any favours. Nobody sees how real love happens, past the infatuation stage.

Of course you have 'teach' your partner what you want. AKA 'train' them ;-)

I supposed you're supposed to be 'born good' at relationship skills or 'learn it at your parent's knee'.

B-b-but... it sort of sounds like a romantic ideal that you're aiming for. Like a sort of gradual but persistent brainwashing, in the interests of achieving something "higher" than you might expect from ordinary communication.

I've certainly never been much good at relationship skills... which is why I'm so glad to have found someone, eventually, who doesn't require me to be skilled at anything except being myself, always, spontaneously, without the need for any kind of censorship or self-control, and who feels equally free with me.

I'm not discrediting Gottman's system -- on the contrary, I am sure it works, the way if I were stuck on a train for hours with someone I could find all sorts of ways to make the conversation more interesting. That doesn't mean I wouldn't get off the train with some relief! 😃

What's the point of learning all this stuff.

Well, I also think you can learn a lot about yourself when you learn these skills. In the process I have discovered to become much more chilled out about life in general to become kinder and much less judgmental. I have also become much calmer.

I am able to deal much more effectively with 'difficult' behaviours from my kids (sulks, upsets). I am also able to teach them to defend their boundaries. Things I think are really useful. Things I wasn't taught. I didn't have the language of emotions. It was just 'acted out'.

It's not about being more in love with your partner, but learning to love and understand everyone you come across.

I think you can learn and grow a huge amount in the process of being married. I'm not suggesting to anyone to be 'a doormat'.

Just be honest and ask if they are the best person they can be. (Their partner needs to do the same!)

There's so much good help around online these days. It seems a shame not to use it, to me.