I'm in crisis: he had an affair

[blueweeknd]

I feel quite in crisis. It happenned a couple of years ago but I only just left him. I am not sure why but this feels like the worst I've felt.

I think leaving him made the real pain and weight of it crush down on me all of a sudden in the realisation of it all.

How was he capable of the things he did?

Why wasn't I valuable enough not to do this?

What is real or not real?

Who am I? Who I thought I was, was his precious girl. His best thing. If I'm not that, who am I?

Do all my memories mean nothing now if I wasn't enough?

Why did the affair partner get the best of him? When I got this traumatised, self loathing wreck?

Did I matter?

I feel also this crushing sense of the loss of everything that felt most important to me. Him. Us. The days. All the smiles.

Chinese takeaways
Christmas movies
Lucozade being brought to you when you've got flu
The beach
Wednesday night date nights
How his face lit up every time he saw me
The house we were going to buy and never did
Kids playing board games
Sunday morning breakfast

If it all felt so absolutely incredibly wonderful and valuable to me, but clearly not to him, then are my happiest times just mirages?

It's like a 50 tonne truck is sitting on top of me and the things which are most precious to me are gone and there's absolutely nobody there to watch it go.

I don't want to hear that he was a bad person, because he wasn't. I'll never understand why he did all he's done but I suppose I will need to accept that the same things weren't precious to him. He says they were, but how can that be true.

He intensely dislikes the person he had an affair with now. So why was it so easy to do, for something so seemingly transient?

He seems worn down by my anger and pain and everything that was once great is now misery. I kept because I dont want him to remember me like that.

What if he remembers his affair as joyful and fun and passionate and he remembers us as hard and sad and unhappy? That feels unfair. We loved each other. We wiped away tears and made jokes and he thought I was funny.

I feel cheated out of that. I want him to remember me like I was. Us like we were. I want to at least have that.

I don’t want to hear that I need to look after myself or do nice things for me or see friends or as if anything can ever be all right again because it won't.

This will always have happened and nothing is ever going to make it all right. I might eventually stop hurting and go on and have some kind of life with someone new or with a rescue dog or hiking some mountain in Peru.

But life will always be worse. This'll be something I carry around inside of me forever. There will be dreams that never happened and grief that hits me like a mack truck when I'm I'm Tesco and some brand of fish fingers reminds me of his face.

What I want to know is what thoughts I can use to comfort myself when it feels unbearable. When it feels like there's no possible way that I can endure another second of how much it hurts.

I can't go to my happy place anymore because my happy place was always him. Holidays to Greece, the little boat we were going to sail around the world, how he used to look at me.

Now my mind is just full of pain and poison and confusion and grief that feels so big that I almost can't breathe.

Tell me what to tell myself so I can keep going.

I feel all the pain of what you are going through.
Can you bring yourself to say how he betrayed you.
Why did you stay two years and now decide to split.
I'm six years post affair and still with him, some good days some bad.

I’m 2 weeks post affair, 16 years together. I feel your pain and my children feel abandoned and rejected. However, I realise it’s not me. As previous poster so elegantly worded, my now ex dh has a huge character flaw which was lurking underneath and I couldn’t and still can’t believe he did what he did. However, they appear serious enough with each other to buy a house and I have to accept that maybe he’s found someone who he feels is more suited to him. I can not begrudge his happiness. For at least 13 to 14 years, I believe his love for me was genuine. However he fell out of love with me and in love when he met this person. Only time will tell how it will work out for them but I genuinely wish them well (between fits of anger and depression).

you’ll never be good enough for the wrong person.
your worth is defined by YOU. And you only.

As @Thewookiemustgo says OP- your post could easily have been written by herself or myself at the time and so many other women on here.

It was never about you- but it's hard get past that I know.

6 years later I still don't 100% feel the same after staying. In some ways I do but in others I don't- and that makes me sad too

I just got this message and I'm crying reading it because it's so bloody sad:

"I worry about you. I worry about you being there alone. I worry about you being in that village and being isolated because you don't know people yet. I worry about you crossing the road because sometime you don't look properly and there's electric cars now and they're really quiet. I worry that you will get frightened by noises, or that you will get sick. I worry so much 😩 I don't want to feel ready to say goodbye to you. I don't think you will ever be out of my mind. I can't bear the idea that you will be gone 😩 you are like a piece of me. I'm so sorry for it. I am so sorry for absolutely all of it. There isn't enough words left to explain all the things I regret. I want to cuddle you. I miss your cuddles so much. I can't bear the thought of not being with you. You are my precious girl. It makes me sad in a spikey, panicky way and also in a heavy, hopeless way 😩 I will get a payrise soon and get the house we were going to buy. It'll be "our" home. I want enough room in case you come back. I know you say you won't, but I want it there just in case you ever change your mind. I will just wait. I wish you were next to me. I miss you so much. I am thinking of all the things we did and I'm hyperventilating. I am so sorry for everything. I always wanted our life and I can't bear to think that I won't grow old with you"

I just feel like I'm dying.

I want to type out the story but it's long and probably boring. The short version is we lived separately during the pandemic. He's a doctor. I was caring for a sick relative.

He has some issues inside himself, felt alone, and befriended a woman at work. Said he didn't feel any infatuation with her, but enjoyed her company and I guess got carried away.

He cant really explain it. Said it was circumstances rather than anything more, but he can't really understand it himself. Hates himself for it.

Also, it was never worth risking. He knows that too and deep down he also knew that at the time. It was far easier for him to just not look.
If he’d really looked hard at what he was risking and what the consequences really looked like, I’d go as far as to pretty much guarantee he wouldn’t have done it. It was easier for him to shelve the reality of the risk and potential loss, to look away from the good things in his life, in order to calm down guilt and shame and justify to himself and minimise what he was doing.
Not once, I’d wager, did he ever really analyse what might happen and the impact it would have and think it through. Too uncomfortable and inconvenient in the moment of temptation to do that.

We, however, find out what they did and we look at it through different eyes. We imagine that that’s what they did, they did what we are doing, we think that they must surely have carefully weighed up the pros and cons of whether or not to give in to temptation. We think that they must have thumbed through all the good times and happy memories and decided they were worthless, and they just did it anyway, like they thought it through carefully and yet thought nothing of it.

They actually didn’t do that, they didn’t do anything or think about anything that would have got in the way of what they wanted to do back then and might make them feel bad about it. They only thought and acted in the present moment, any guilt due to post-rationalisation that kicked in later would be swatted away by maximising the affair advantages and minimising the good points about the marriage and us.
Affair thinking isn’t the usual way of thinking, it becomes a one-track mind which does not allow anything good from their primary relationship to pop up and trigger guilt. They avoid facts which might mean they have personal responsibility and accountability and don’t allow them to get in the way. A bit like an addiction: full awareness of the good life they have when they are sober, but it doesn’t stop them when they just want one more drink.
So abandon your thoughts about what he thought was precious and what he thought wasn’t, because he wasn’t thinking in those terms. He probably actively avoided the pain of looking hard at himself, looking at the true value of what he was risking ruining.
The affair was a crutch he was using to fill some void he has within himself for whatever reason. It wasn’t something better that trumped what you had. Ot had nothing to do with what you had, it had everything to do with him. Just him. He got hooked to the high of it and became blind to everything else.
If it had ever been the answer to filling that void, he’d be happy with her now. He isn’t, he doesn’t want to be. It isn’t and wasn’t actually a better life than he had, it was just a novelty and exciting and flattering and felt good, allowed him to be somebody else, the flattery meant he could be that fantasy, fantastic faultless guy, avoid seeing the flaws and failings he knew he had, because the new situation and new person was showing him and saying exactly what he wanted to hear about himself.
None of this excuses what he did, but to see how people think and behave during an affair can help stop the asking yourself why he thought so little of everything else. Help stop it soiling your happier memories.
It’s not that they didn’t value it, they just avoided thinking about it to keep the high from the affair going.
You and he can see the real value he placed on it now that the scales have fallen from his eyes, so to speak. He’s a wreck. If he’d never cared about it, he wouldn’t now. He does and he did.
He made stupid, selfish, wasteful and reckless choices and didn’t look at the consequences. Teenagers know the danger of reckless driving, excess alcohol and drug taking, but they still do it. It doesn’t mean they don’t care what happens to them, that their parents’ and friends’ feelings don’t matter, it just doesn’t stop them in the moment of madness. No excuses, by the way, this does NOT excuse what he did, this is just an explanation of how good people end up doing stupid, shitty things, despite having so many good things lying right at their feet. How something they see as so obviously senseless with the benefit of hindsight, could have made sense to them at the time.
The better someone is at compartmentalising things, people and feelings, the more likely they are to engage in reprehensible and risky behaviour. There’s none so blind as those who refuse to see. That’s what he needs to explore about himself, what he erroneously thought the affair was fulfilling, and how he managed to mentally shelve everything else to enable him to sidestep his morals and values.
But that’s his issue, his problem, not yours.
Your responsibility is to yourself now, to rebuild and heal. Of course it soils things for you, of course he should have thought hard about all of these things he was lucky enough to have, but he didn’t. He did value it, he just didn’t think.
I think if the temptation is strong enough and they are weak enough, they will stuff all the things which might make them feel guilty or make them think that it’s not worth the risk to one side, a messed up mind desperately side-stepping the good things they have, in order to pursue the temporary high of those they shouldn’t.
If rational, deep, honest thinking and clarity of what the real consequences of infidelity are ever troubled somebody at the point of starting an affair, I’d bet most people would run a mile.

Don’t let it soil your memories, he valued them too, I can’t believe he’d be so devastated himself if he didn’t.
He loves you and knew what he had was a good thing, but when tempted he was ultimately selfish, reckless, weak and stupid, and it took hurting you to see that about himself, sadly. Take care of yourself OP, nothing he did was a reflection of the value he placed on your relationship, it’s a reflection of the hole within himself, the mistaken value he placed on chasing the high. X

@PeacefulPottering

Why did you stay two years and now decide to split

He struggled with the guilt and shame and got quite ill with it. I never felt like the pain or questions went away. It just broke us both really.

Urghhh I’m sorry, I write way too much, just really want you to see that affairs aren’t about us, about the marriage or that they didn’t value us or the marriage or the happy times. Its about them abd how screwed up they were/ are.
It’s hard to get your head round that but it’s true. x

@Thewookiemustgo your posts are amazing. I want to find you and hug you.

@Thewookiemustgo

I did post briefly, moments before you the very brief circumstances but what you said in your post is pretty much exactly right.

He didn't weigh it up at all. He just did it, and never really understood the pain he'd cause. He hasn't admitted it but I suspect (yuk) he thought I'd never find out.

I do think he'd never even dream of doing it again, but like you say you can't get a do over.

Sorry I think that's a very manipulative letter. So he's going to carry on and buy your joint dream home with enough room for you to come back. God he really hasn't learned anything has he?

I think it's him clawing at things because I was sad that we never got the house.

I told him not to buy it.

I think he's just feeling as lost as I am.

But was he worried about you when he was shagging her?
Was he worried about you when he was planning on meeting her?

Probably not. That is a very manipulating letter.

No, he was obviously not worrying about me then.

OP I think you’re right, you know him best, but this doesn’t sound like a calculating, cynical man deviously trying to manipulate, this is a desperate broken man who is trying to think of ways to make it up to you, to say he’s sorry and try to win you back.
I also believe him, for what it’s worth, but sadly it doesn’t change what he did or how you feel about it.
It’s so incredibly sad, yet another successful, intelligent man who let his ego run riot when somebody gave it what it wanted to hear. And yes, OP, you’re also spot on right about this, that’s how they minimise the risk: they think we’ll never find out.
The situation you explained was a perfect storm for this way of thinking. My husband got a new job sixty miles and an hour’s rail commute away from our home and from everyone who knew us. Total reinvention of self, fantasy affair bubble self-contained in his work life which was totally separate and literally miles away from me and his children. Seemingly happy and normal at home, but acting like James Bond (his own words 🙄)miles away at work. He thought I’d never know and I didn’t. Until he got careless and I did.
Highly successful, highky educated, highly paid, lovely guy and well-respected at work and at home. The last guy everybody thought would ever do anything like this, very much including me. Shock when I found out didn’t begin to cover it. Bizarrely for him as well as me. Because they shelve it all, they can be as surprised as we are when the two worlds collide that they ever did such a terrible, terrible thing. So bloody many of them it’s very depressing. 😢

@Thewookiemustgo yeah, I think he's genuine. God knows he wouldn't have stayed through these years if he hadn't loved me. I know he did.

Everything you say sounds spot on, but I think I'll never stop asking why. I guess because I'll never stop being sad at what we lost.

Can I ask if you divorced?

Blimey that's quite a letter, sounds like he's ramped up the love bombing since you've left him, quite an infantalising letter no wonder you're confused.

Do you have children?

What was he like during the last two years when you lived together ? not quite as much high octane, I should imgine.

One aspect of this is his apparent devotion and how everthing he does, he does it for you, buying the house, his pay rise is for you, his career probably, the thing is if you dissapear out of his life he will have still done these things, these things are for himself.

He's panicking that he's losing control, that you will find another, his talk of anxiety is the fear of his loss of ownership.

You are still believing him, that's the problem here, you still have rose tinted glasses, I'm not saying he doesn't want you to be his primary partner, I'm saying his number one is himself.

He sounds narcisistic to me.

Be careful, these types of men do not like it when you properly move on and it appears he is not allowing you to do so, this is what he wants, you pining for him until you come back, these relationships are addictive and create so much co dependancy, I hope you regain your equalibrium, but cutting all contact will be the only way to get over this man.

It's a really shit situation, you love them so much but hate them at the same time, but you know your peace of mind is basically shot.

As for the future, I would never trust a man who has had an affair, the capability of deceit without guilt is always there, no matter how remorseful their forgive me dance is.

@blueweeknd

I’m so sorry.

Can I ask if you and/or your DH have been to see a counsellor? I think it would help you both massively

I will be honest.
I think this relationship is worth fighting for

I agree, and believe me OP I don't say that lightly. x I think Covid sent waves through so many lives, and it sounds like yours was more disrupted and extreme than most.

Sending you a deep and heartfelt hug.💕

This is so true. Having never craved the 'happy ever after', I count my blessings that I never feel this kind of pain; I get dumped but that just bruises my ego. You have so much more of your life to live now, relish your new freedom (when you're ready of course)

People do stupid things, he didn't just cheat on you, he isn't a serial cheater - the circumstances matter.

Counselling can help, have you tried it?

I am not you, in fact I was your husband (over a decade ago). It was a horrible time and I wish to God it had not happened because of the pain I caused. We did separate but then decided to get back together. We worked really hard on our relationship because what I did was terrible but it was a direct consequence of being left to be "the mother", providing a full time wage, up all night with babies who didn't sleep, forgotten about, I felt inhuman and hated. I just wanted a connection and to feel wanted but after all I felt was sick.

We are excellent now, I thought I would never forgive what he did to me before the affair, he thought he couldn't forgive the act. But we did and it took years. Our relationship now is completely unrecognisable.

Just trying to give a different point of view, I'm sorry you are going through this.

You're grieving the loss of your relationship.
The only thing that will help is time. 🙏 X

You have betrayal trauma. Please look it up and work on empowering yourself xx

Flippant I know but does he look like Captain Birds Eye? You said a pack of fish fingers remind you of his face!

Could you try counselling? I realise I am unusual but I don’t think infidelity need be the end of what was a good relationship.