A torn heart....serious long term but ended affair and long term marriage.

[Muddled54]

Name change for this one for obvious reasons...

I left my loving, soulmate affair partner of nearly a year (friends and colleagues for many years before this) to work on what I realised in comparison was a transactionally functioning but emotionally shallow marriage after confessing the affair to my suspecting spouse. If I’m honest I think I subconsciously hoped my husband would then instigate a divorce but instead, being understandably traumatised, he expressed that he’d rather committing suicide, actually waved paracetamol packets in front of me, than live without me. So I decided after 35 years together in an OK but not closely connected marriage, I owed it to him and our three grown up children to stay in the family unit and see why we weren’t connecting as I had managed for the first time in my life with my affair partner.

I knew I’d still have connection with my ex affair partner through work and think subconsciously I knew this meant I'd never 100% had to let him go, although would have drastically reduced contact at my spouse's understandable insistance. My spouse, having been so hurt I sense wanted to see that I was prepared to cause my affair partner and friend pain to show allegiance to him and I am ashamed to say that in my shock at the time I ghosted and gave my affair partner little/no proper closure and followed my husband's demands - he'd read up all about no contact in healing affair situations and I feel wanted me to apply everything that he believed would inflict pain on my affair partner as justly deserved punitive measures. I now feel I handled this tricky situation in an inhumane, inauthentic way as as a child from a broken marriage myself I now see my elderly father so much happier with his second marriage than he ever was with my mum who is also a good person but just they didn't connect I now realise.

My ex affair partner now has told me that this uncomfortable, artificial minimalist contact at work and also my decision of recommitting to my marriage is causing him so much stress and hurt that he wants to resign to allow himself and my marriage distance to heal if that truly is my choice. Now I am finally facing losing the one person on this planet who seemed to ‘get me’ and I feel full of regret and confusion. I did try and speak to my husband at the very first instance the affair started becoming physical and when I knew I had fallen deeply in love with my affair partner - I told my spouse that I had stopped loving him in a way that married people should but still had familial love for him, but his initial reaction was so extreme, again talk of suicide, that the affair continued in secret. Honestly as friends and lovers we were like magnets drawn together- it is not something I understand myself nor had experienced before this. there was nothing fancy about what we did - just walking in each other's company seemed like heaven and i felt for the first time on my life the joy of not feeling alone on some level on this planet. I am bereft but don’t know if I have the strength to handle a suicidal spouse, and the domestic upheaval and potential family fallout all at the same time if I end the marriage…and now having so badly hurt my loving, tender affair partner, he probably could never trust me any more for not seeing through ending the marriage when I should have done, right at the start of realising I’d fallen in love with him.

So bereft, so depressed, so stuck…I feel I’m giving up love with my soulmate out of duty for my loving, hurt husband and sense of duty to work on the marriage as he has asked. Has anyone else experienced this and did the marriage survive and repair once total no contact occurred with a truly loved affair partner? And as an alternative possible ending, if the marriage ends as healing proves impossible and you try at a later stage to reconnect with an ex affair partner you’d rejected and badly hurt, could that relationship recover or does that betrayal (yes, I feel I’ve betrayed my living affair partner in trying to recommit to my husband in all ways (psychologically and sexually!) leave too deep a scar? My husband knows how deeply I felt for the affair partner but he feels family and marriage vows trump all and if he's willing to try to forgive and understand why we didn't connect enough to prevent me finding a beautiful connection through an affair, I owe it to him after such a long marriage to try and work on it too.

Total drivel and a masterclass in shirking responsibility, gaslighting and showing a total lack of self-awareness. But the writing style is also quite familiar. Do better.

This is so sad and shallow. No person is perfect, to treat a father that way, if, if he had otherwise been a decent loving parent is fucking ridiculous! How entitled can people be !

But he wasnt a decent loving father.

He was a deceitful, emotionally abusive piece of shit who lied and took time away from his kids, joint money from his wife to get his rocks off with another woman. Manipulated the absolute shit out of her to hide his secret life.

Yep they are 100% entitled to decide what type of people they wish to have relationships with and he it isn't one of them.

It's not "entitlement", it shows how deep the wounds of cheating can be for some people.
Cheating affects more people than just the partner, particularly in a long marriage, & can blow families apart which can be very damaging for children.
It's never a good option.

I really feel for your husband and I hope he finds the peace and happiness he deserves.

Everything he said was a direct reaction to your appallingly behaviour. Yes he shouldn’t have said some things. But you caused it all.

You will get very little sympathy on Mumsnet.
However, I don't think you'll be happy staying in your marriage. In my opinion, you can't stay with your husband simply because he's threatening suicide.

I would go no contact as much as possible with ex affair partner. Very difficult if you are connected through work. I have been in a very similar position and it only got easier when he left the company. This enabled me to clear my head and try and work out what I wanted. Despite how unhappy you have been something is keeping you in this marriage. The reality of an affair partner becoming a partner to do life with is very different to just having an affair. Also he started this by having an affair with a married woman would he do this again with a different woman down the line?

Okay, this may come across as harsh, but IMO I am being fair.
You are living in a romantic fantasy world. Of course you can't go back to being platonic friends with your ex affair partner. That idea is nuts.
I think you need therapy to learn to live in reality. You did not find a "soul-mate." You had a sleazy affair with a sleazy guy. A man who fucks married women and willingly, cheerfully cuckolds her husband is a predator. He took advantage of your unhappiness to get some thrills and an ego boost for himself. There is nothing beautiful about that. It is actually quite hideous. So is your continuing to yearn for this man while saying you want to repair your marriage. That is pure hypocrisy. The truth is that you don't want the marriage at all, you just don't want to look bad by leaving him when he is suicidal. Get him some psychiatric help and leave. I see you are considering divorce. That is good, but do not stay in your ex husband's life. You will only be a reminder of the trauma. Thinking you can be friends with him after divorce is yet another fantasy. You broke his heart and destroyed his mental health and you did so by your own choice. Friends don't do that, only enemies do. Wake up and join the real world fgs.

Many people get genuinely suicidal over affairs due to betrayal trauma, so there is no way you can say it proves her husband had dysfunctional coping mechanisms before the affair.
I had great coping mechanisms before it happened to me. I had been trying to connect emotionally and the cheater was coldly rejecting my efforts. So I had no part in the lack of connection. I recognized my responsibility and acted on it. He, otoh, did not. So it does not always go both ways, that's nonsense. It's the kind of shite online relationship gurus spout. They say things like; "Marital problems are always 50/50." Total bullshit. Is abuse 50/50? Infidelity is a form of emotional abuse. It's also a violation of sexual consent.
Don't listen to the tripe spouted by relationship gurus.

Betrayal trauma destroyed my mental health and my healthy coping mechanisms were temporarily lost. I got them back by leaving.

You’re posting on a zombie thread and it might be an idea to read the whole thread

Agreed. I think my sentence was a bit 'coarse'. Affair "reveal" is a time for great upset, so suicide threats could be "normal" to some extent (although unhelpful).

What I am trying to say is although OP's affair is clearly not HIS responsibility (she did it, clearly), the lies that go with the affair can only occur when a marriage is disconnected.

They mean that the person having the affair is omitting to say things that THEY KNOW would bother their their partner.

Therefore to get to the bottom of and reduce the likelihood of lies, affairs, betrayals of all sorts (this goes for a relationship with the same partner or a new partner or even with yourself!), you need a superb communication system which involves excellent emotional self regulation.

If you are, on the whole, an excellent loving partner (as confirmed by your partner's feedback, ie they choose to spend time with you and genuinely enjoy it) but you are not seeing any effort to connect emotionally, then it is better to draw a boundary and insist on either counselling or separation. Because the relationship is clearly not working.

Agreed. Good points.