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.

Do you think that I would take seriously a stranger on the internet who wants to psycho-analyse me? I know myself and faults very well, thank you.
Your posts, like so many on here, remind me of the people who jump on bandwagons about various issues on Twitter and hound people until they do something drastic…and then those same people call for kindness.
You ask for sympathy and empathy but you have none. You’re using this to direct hate at me, at the op, probably because it makes you feel superior. It certainly doesn’t make you seem ‘nice’.

@EleanorRigby2U it's you that sounds naive, ignorant and cognitively dissonant.

I would read 'cheating in a nutshell' as likening your feelings to a betrayed is actually quite eye opening and shows your deep rooted selfishness and entitlement. You're not coming across as the kind empathic soul you think you are.

I think you should be honest with your husband. Tell him you do not love him, in as kind a way as possible, and that you have decided to leave. If he asks about the OM be honest and say you have feelings for him. Then leave.
Don't stay just because someone threatens to end their life.
Leave your husband.
Tell the OM you have left your husband and take it from there.
I also think what your husband said about going no contact with the OM was perfectly acceptable under the circumstances.

@Muddled54 I know first hand the absolute damage caused to a betrayed person with false reconciliation and that is what your current position is.

It is hard to read that you have left your poor husband reading all the affair recovery books and trying to work on things when you're sitting there still navel gazing and pining.

The damage you will be doing is horrendous.

My suggestion (but I'm sure you won't take it) would be to get yourself on Surviving Infidelity and their wayward forum. If you are remotely interested in doing this right with the least amount of hurt to a man you've described as 'lovely' then please do it. The posters will be hard but fair and have been where you are unlike many of the posters here (and as someone who had never cheated I count myself in that).

Most victims of affairs have a lifelong struggle with PISD a variation of PTSD. His pleas are just that, a cry for help ..
Time will not heal ...
As for the op, she should leave not keep herself and everyone else in a state of emotional impetuity forever more .....

Get me a sick bucket.

Not once do you talk about how apologetic you have been to your husband. Yes, he shouldn't be threatening suicide. But you are writing as if 1) you're writing a novel about yourself. 2) making out your the victim in this piece.

You write that the affair partner was loving, sweet and tender. Seriously you wrote nothing positive about your husband. And then you say you think he deserves closer and he won't forgive you for just shutting him out. Imagine if the shoe was on the other foot. He doesn't need bloody closure. He was having sex with a married woman! And now she's giving him the cold shoulder to be with her husband.

You're in an unhappy marriage. I dont think you can save your marriage. I feel like you want to be with the affair scumbag. Apologise to your husband and move on. If he threatens to kill himself, let his family know or 999.

Yes, exactly and she uses nice words to describe a pig that happily sleeps with married woman. And he is her soul mate. A real man with morals would stay clear. Not exactly a dreamboat. Yuck+

Well put, friend

The trial for you is when your affair partner leaves the workplace 100percent and you will have no contact with him whatsoever.

Yuck, really, that's your biggest problem

Yeah this so dumb, wanting to continue the friendship.

You should cut all ties.

How would you tell your husband that by the way, OP, I've restarted a wonderful friendship with affair partner at work as it was what we had before.

Hmmm

'I was hoping everything would settle down and that once feelings had calmed on all sides that I might be able to salvage the wonderful platonic friendship I had with my affair partner before we fell in love with each other and embarked on the affair.'

I hadn't read this. @Muddled54 I can not express to you how utterly destroying your behaviours and thought patterns are for your husband. You have ZERO remorse or empathy.

I am absolutely blindsided that there are so many posters on here who seem are implying this poor man is abusive for threatening suicide in a moment of anguish while reading your responses and your ongoing treatment of him.

You are devoid of any feeling for him. The pain he is going through must be tremendous. Just stop and wake up from your delusional thinking.

Fgs grow up

The casual cruelty is astonishing. And the op doesn't even see it. What word am I looking for?

If you have been with your husband for 35 plus years then you must be at least mid 50s? For goodness sake try to act like a mature woman.

Disagreeing with what others say on here - it's okay to make your life about you! Leave your emotionally manipulative husband and go and be happy with your AP if that's what you want! Live your life they way you want and not how others on the Internet think you should. Life life, be happy.

Live life. Be happy. But try not to be a deceitful, cruel tosser at the same time?

Your husband isn't suicidal really. For starters paracetamol isn't an effective method of suicide. I know this because I researched suicide extensively when my exDH found out about my affair. I also didn't tell him. I wanted to end my life not have him stop me.

I understand about the deep friendship and connection. I had that too. But unfortunately it just can never go back to the friendship. So that won't happen, either in or out of work.
You need to accept that you've either lost this man forever or you need to leave your DH to be with him. There can be no middle ground of having a friendship. For starters your DH won't accept it (quite rightly).
Your marriage doesn't sound fulfilling and personally I think leaving sooner rather than later is better but if you really want to work on it then you need to get both of you into counselling pronto. I don't think you can do this alone.
Good luck

There's something not quite ringing true here, OP; not saying you're making things up or deliberately withholding, but it doesn't make emotional sense to me. You seem to be saying you have a chance of leaving a boring and unsatisfying marriage to live with the soulmate who made you deeply happy during a year long affair, but you have turned it down to stay with a vulnerable and manipulative husband who is unrealistic in believing you can ever be truly happy together. Your children are grown up and though they would no doubt be upset by you leaving him, you wouldn't be leaving youngsters at home in the care of a grieving, unstable dad.
It sounds as if you can't possibly make your husband happy by staying in these circumstances and that he is desperately clinging on to the idea that you might, because the thought of losing you is terrifying him. Meanwhile, your true love is devastated and so are you.
I hope that you will bring all this honestly to the relationship counselling because if you focus on 'trying to reconnect' with your husband without admitting this background, the counselling is unlikely to go anywhere. Good luck.

I think you’re afraid to leave your H, you’re afraid of your adult children’s reaction and worried that if you leave and it might not work out with AP@Muddled54. You’re worried you might end up alone and would rather be with H than single. What if it was the other way round and it was your H wavering on staying or leaving the marriage? Can you imagine the anguish you would be in? I think personally it would be better for your H, for you to leave as you’re not happy and even if Ap leaves your workplace you will never fully commit to making it work with H. He can then fully grieve the end of your marriage and move on instead of being in limbo waiting for the axe to fall. It’s no good trying to explain with H hoping he give you his blessing to leave, and to absolve you of any guilt, that’s not going to happen but you can leave and make it as amicable on your side as possible. This time next year you could be happy and H could have found someone who loves him and be happy also.

This. Stop feeling sorry for yourself, think about the hurt and chaos you have caused and take responsibility without all the wow is me. Seriously, I have just waded through your flowery post. You are an adult. Behave like one. You have caused damage to your family. Fix it and stop pining like a teenager.

Name changed because 20 years later I'm still ashamed.

I had an affair in my early 30s as was not happy in my marriage , had asked husband previously that felt marriage wasn't working and we needed to do something to put it back on track , he couldn't be bothered , and just carried on as normal .
I was also suffering with my mental health and when asked for support from him was told no and never mention it again to him.

So all of the above killed any feeling I had for him .
So I had a short affair , but when admitted it and said it was because of not having a good marriage , he cried and promised to change even getting on his hands and knees begging me to stay .

Whilst I found that heartbraking , I knew for myself , that whilst he'd shown all that emotion , it was his emotion , and not mine . His emotion was for him , about the change of life that was coming . All my previous heart break about our marriage and my mental health had been ignored.

So I took the decision to divorce . Within a short while he was dating women much younger than him , and then moved in with a woman around the same age . That ended and he has been with someone for a good few years now . I guess happy.

My affair partner and I are married and quite happy .
But as my initial sentence says I still do feel shame about the affair and it was short before ' I confessed ' ,
so didn't lie to ex for long . But I did chose my happiness over his .

Couldn't put it any better. You made your bed, now you get to lie in it. Leave your poor husband and do him a massive favour.

Exactly this!

You sound delusional OP. You and your husband both need therapy and probably a divorce. If it's meant to be with the other guy he can wait until you have ended your marriage properly. It's hard to believe you have adult children, you are writing about this like you are a teenager.