It’s so predictable when the pro-affair people wheel out the old ‘things aren’t black and white’ phrase. In affairs they are.
Except things aren’t black and white because no-one knows what goes on in someone else’s marriage. Of course affairs aren’t ok, but that doesn’t mean that everyone who has an affair is a cheating bastard/slut and that the cheated-on partner was the perfect example of a partner until the bastard had an affair and blew their world apart.
When someone has an affair it seems that every other wrong about the relationship is forgotten, and the cheated-on partner is sainted and all their past wrongs are forgotten.
I won’t justify having an affair, but neither will I accept full responsibility for the breakdown of my marriage.
My eXH isolated me from my friends and family. He prevented me from going back to work by finding a job which he had to commute to, meaning that I had no other option than to stay at home because he didn’t want the DC in childcare.
he isolated me from friends by always having a last minute reason why I couldn’t see them.
He gaslighted me by telling me he knew where I was and who I was with. He had tracked my phone, signed into all my social media, and when he didn’t find anything there despite following for months and months he put keyloggers on my computer and recording devices in the house.
He would tell me he wasn’t going to be home until a certain time then show up much earlier thinking he would catch me with someone else.
When my 1st DC was 6 weeks old he told me we had to have sex before my 6 week checkup to make sure that things were ok, I didn’t want to, but he told me it would be happening when the baby went for a nap, and it did. I thought I was in the wrong for not wanting to, it’s only recently that I have realised exactly what that meant.
There is a lot more but I think that’s enough, and it all happened systemically over a period of about 12 years. The bad times are few to begin with and you think that they’re just blips, and so you settle down and they become more frequent but by then it’s normal.
He used to tell me he wouldn’t go out with me dressed in a certain way “I don’t want to be seen with someone dressed like that,” Ironically he had an affair fairly early into our relationship but he gaslighted me into thinking I’d imagined it all.
When I met OM it was like a light switch had gone on, and I realised that relationships weren’t meant to be like this. We’d actually already talked about splitting up because the control had become far too noticeable and I was miserable, but he’d moved us away from all my support network so he could be sure I had nowhere to go.
Then I got chatting to OM and we became close, and then met up, once, and slept together. I never slept with my husband again after that, and I allowed the relationship to fall apart. He found out about the affair after we’d decided to split, and said he would take me back, but by then I’d realised I could escape, and suddenly there was a valid reason, even though that meant everyone would support him and not me.
And a lot of people did. Suddenly he was a saint who had never done anything wrong and I was the bitch who had cheated. And I suppose I was. But he certainly hadn’t never done anything wrong, and our relationship certainly hadn’t been a blissfully happy one until I had fucked another man.
And as time went on people told me that they’d realised what he could be like, even his own family who although they obviously are his family, refused to cut contact with me, because in his mother’s words “there are two sides to every story.”
I accept full responsibility for the affair I had, and I regret it and would never do it again.
But I don’t accept responsibility for the wrongs which occurred in my marriage. And I imagine that even on the relationships boards when posters find out that their partners are having affairs, there are likely some whose behaviour has played a part in their partner finding solis elsewhere.
That doesn’t make anyone “pro affair.”