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.

I'm glad you've chosen to end your marriage, leaving your husband free to find his own partner for the next adventure life offers him. Will you reconcile with your affair partner, do you think?

@CarliLove35 I think so. I hope so. I am well aware that he has left it in my court now to come to him when I feel the time is right. I know I really hurt him when I cut him off out of utter guilt and disgust at how I'd been dishonest with my husband. This was following commonly given advice and was recommended course of action in a so-called 'marriage reconciliation book' we were subscribing to at the time which was recommended by friends of a similar age, who at the time we believed were in the process of repairing their marriage after a similar affair situation in reverse for the past 2-3 years but who have just told us this week that they too are now divorcing, so didn't work for them in the end). I also cut him off because having read this advice it was one of my almost ex-husband's requirements to for to prove my commitment to trying to give our marriage one last chance). I honestly think if I had that conversation with my husband now he would see that asking me to be cruel and to hurt my affair partner by now allowing us contact to at least talk calmly to explain the ending of the affair wasn't who he really is at heart. But we both totally see and understand that we all do things at the height of being hurt that we wouldn't do on reflection.

It's a tribute to my ex-husband to be that he now doesn't diminish my affair partner's no doubt hurt. With the friends I mentioned above, the betrayed wife is still vitriolic about the affair partner's role in her husband's affair years on and I see how, in comparison, my husband just has a more humane and probably more evolved emotional intelligence in this way. He really has chosen to understand that something in me needed some sort of connection that he just couldn't find a way to give me and I couldn't find a way to show him how to give me a sense of being more deeply connected. Actually I've just come to believe that whilst we all need to work at relationships (my marriage was very long!) sometimes there is something intangible about why people suddenly find they can bond with another after years of not finding love...and no, I don't believe it's always because of trauma bonding theories etc. Sometimes there just is a positivity and when that positivity takes hold it's hard to choose not to give it wings...

I'm just hoping that if he will have me, that my affair partner will trust me that I will never knowingly hurt him through not communicating again and regret and take full accountability for not taking time to give him proper closure rather than blindly following the, in my view, pretty rubbish standard marriage reconciliation 'rules' that didn't make any of us better people!

OP I’m glad your marriage has ended amicably and reasonably, and thank you for your reply. Whilst realising I only have what you have written to go on, I still remain unconvinced however.

” I also cut him off because having read this advice it was one of my almost ex-husband's requirements to for to prove my commitment to trying to give our marriage one last chance” of course it was OP! There never was room
for three people in your marriage and he can hardly be expected to think you are committed to reconciliation if you can’t or won’t cut off your affair partner. This is the “rubbish advice” for couples wanting to reconcile? Really? He was unreasonable in making this a requirement because it hurt your affair partner and your AP didn’t get ‘closure’? Ending the affair is the bare minimum and reconciliation can’t start until that is done. Pretty obvious really.
Not much if any mention of how much you regret that your husband was hurting at the time or that he desperately needed closure from your affair, rather your concern for how you treated your affair partner seems to show where your real regret and remorse lies.
I’d feel more comfortable with your insistence that you are remorseful for your part in this if you weren’t still minimising, rubbishing pretty standard logical reconciliation advice when you were never committed to reconciliation in the first place, and writing sentences intimating that you got carried away by positivity rather than you can face the fact that you made a deliberate choice to betray.
“Sometimes there just is a positivity and when that positivity takes hold it's hard to choose not to give it wings...”
I’m going to leave it here because you talk about accountability and regret then post things such as the above which sound more like the complete opposite.

How utterly marvellous. It sounds like things have just shown how utterly right YOU were about everything.

I'm so glad your husband will be getting away from you.

Reading your posts it comes across how well you have excused yourself from any actual betrayal of your husband.

You say you don't like the word "cheat" but you are and were and no amount of fancy words or navel gazing can erase that.

I am glad you are ending it with your husband. He deserves better.

The reason reconciliation advice is rubbish is because it’s all fake. Cut off the affair partner upon discovery even though you don’t actually want to, for instance. It’s just pretending. Which is why couples usually end up splitting up a few years down the line anyway, when it gets harder and harder to pretend.
betrayed spouses buy into it and believe it because they need to. The whole thing is cruel and pointless.

Absolutely agree. It’s a lot of flowery, naval gazing, therapy speak, sub Mills &Boon rambling but the basic gist is ‘me me me me me me me’

Hopefully the poor husband can find a better life away from this selfish, self obsessed, zero accountability lying cheat.

Wishing your husband the best after this awful experience and I hope it hasn't put him off trusting again. In truth he is the only one to walk away from this mess with a clear conscious and I admire his ability to put an end to his charade.
I sincerely hope the op takes time to reflect on this sordid tale and her role in it. She has had her head turned by a man on the rebound willing to have ego sex with a married woman. He risked nothing but the op risked everything. I heartily hope the grass is greener for the op considering what she has lost and the hurt she has inflicted.

One of the best posts highlighting DARVO.

How to twist and turn the purpitraitor into the victim, and the victim into purpitraitor.

This is the stuff which should be taught to victims of betrayal.

This is the stuff which sends the innocent into madness.

Any agreement or acceptance your husband speaks of is just protection from anymore lies that will be twisted in your favour, your logic is twisted and your councillor is niave and dangerous. I hope your children havn't bought into this abusive madness.

Your h needs to be far away from you.

@tigglywink but that’s exactly what I was saying.
If you’re not all-in and don’t really want to reconcile the advice is rubbish to you, totally useless. But it’s only rendered useless because the person allegedly “following” the advice isn’t fully committed to doing so and doesn’t really want to. Therefore it would never work.
You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink, as the saying goes, but that just means the horse never wanted to drink in the first place, not that the water would never have quenched its thirst.
No amount of good advice in the world will help somebody who doesn’t actually even want to follow it.
In AA the advice is to cut out alcohol completely. That’s not rubbish advice if you really want to get sober. If the person following this advice has another drink, it’s their attitude to the advice that’s caused the failure, not the advice itself. Attitude and brutal honesty about why you want to do this is everything, you need to be all-in and want to do it.
How many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb? Only one, but the lightbulb has to really want to change….etc.
What causes reconciliation to fail is usually either the betrayed spouse deciding they can never move forward, despite the unfaithful spouse’s efforts, or more often the continued deception and lies from the unfaithful spouse who is not being genuine about reconciliation. The reconciliation advice to stop lying and get honest remains sound advice to those who want it.
Some people genuinely don’t want to continue their affair, don’t want to skip into the sunset with their affair partner and never really wanted to end their marriage in the first place. They feel relieved when the affair is over and want their lives back. They hate the lies they told and want to be an honest person. These marriages often have a successful reconciliation because both parties genuinely want it and the unfaithful partner is remorseful and takes full responsibility. Remorse is doing these things because you genuinely want to fix what you broke and genuinely regret it, doing them because you think you ought to or just to avoid the difficulties of a divorce is just doing it out of guilt. Guilt and remorse are two different things. Guilt never works in reconciliation, the only chance you have is with remorse and even then things might be too broken for the betrayed partner to continue.
“It’s just pretending. Which is why couples usually end up splitting up a few years down the line anyway, when it gets harder and harder to pretend.
Betrayed by spouses buy into it and believe it because they need to. The whole thing is cruel and pointless.”
Not everyone is just pretending. Reconciling is only cruel and pointless if the unfaithful spouse is still lying and just going through the motions. Their pretence is cruel, not the advice given to those genuinely wanting to try to save the marriage. To lie and say you want to reconcile when you are still secretly mooning over your affair partner and just pretending is the real cruelty, not the advice itself.
Marriages break up when the betrayed spouse discovers that the unfaithful spouse was pretending, still lying and still cannot be trusted after all they promised about reconciliation. The betrayed spouse rightly blames the unfaithful spouse for putting them through a false reconciliation, they don’t blame the advice they were supposed to be following.
Those who rubbish what is good advice are often doing so to remove their guilt over knowing they were really just failing to follow it, to assuage their guilt over still lying to their betrayed spouse about their commitment to it, then not being committed enough to see it through.
“It didn’t work, therefore the advice was crap, my lying, only pretending to be committed and subsequent lack of commitment had absolutely nothing to do with it.” is what they are actually saying. This is a common denominator in unfaithful people and one of the ways in which people allow themselves to cheat, or deliberately pursue any kind of what they know is wrongdoing. When they fail, they won’t take responsibility for their actions, they look to blame externals for their selfish choices or blame other people for making them do what they did, a common hallmark of those who choose to cheat. Not surprising then that it’s easier for them when they fail, to blame reconciliation advice rather than tell the truth about their real reasons for even agreeing to try it, ie possibly guilt or financial security or to be able to stay with their children as a family etc. If you still don’t want the actual relationship it will never work. An allergy to honesty and tackling difficult issues is at the bottom of most cheating.
Lack of commitment to a goal means even the greatest advice towards achieving that goal might as well not exist. Great coaches can’t train athletes, even really talented ones, who aren’t really committed to the training. When they fail they blame the coach and try a new one, when actually it was them, not the coach.
The diet and exercise industry makes a mint from repeat offenders who find it hard to follow the advice given, which if properly followed, will make you lose weight and become fit. They love January when the New Year’s resolution brigade show up and sign up to FatFighters or get that gym membership. The wheels usually start to fall off habit change regimes in weeks 6-8. Early January the gym is busy as hell, by the end of February not so much. “I’ve tried every diet but nothing works for me!” usually means they fell off the wagon and stopped following the dietary advice. Their lack of commitment caused the failure, not the diet and exercise plan.
A good workman never blames his tools.

I would say that advice only works then if the cheater stops the affair and owns up to it without being found out and forced to stop. That would be the only true indication of genuine remorse and actually wanting to stay in the marriage.

getting found out, being forced to cut contact does not speak of someone who suddenly loves their spouse or is committed to their marriage. So for me it is rubbish advice because it ignores the blatant fact that the cheater is essentially only doing it because their hand has been forced.

I wonder if your husband recognises your version of your long marriage op?

Such long winded nonsense excusing your appalling behaviour. Your husband sounds a good person, I hope he moves on and meets his great love. He deserves it.

Completely agree. If this was a man justifying his cheating and gaslighting his wife into taking responsibility, every post would be calling him a narcissist, abusive etc.

I hope he finds peace in his life now and moves on from this.

@tigglywink but my entire point is that it doesn’t work for anybody who’s heart was never in it or whose hand is being forced!
You can’t force anybody to stop an affair, you can’t force anybody to change the way they feel, they either want to stop and stop or don’t, regardless of circumstances. If you have to force your unfaithful spouse to leave their affair partner then it’s all bound to fail anyway regardless of any advice. The advice to dump the affair partner is for the unfaithful spouse who truly wants to reconcile, not a rule to be enforced by the betrayed spouse. Again, the advice itself remains sound, it’s the motivation of the unfaithful spouse which renders it successful or useless.
Spontaneous confessions aren’t a guarantee either, it depends again on attitude and motivation. Some cheats only confess because their AP has dumped them for not leaving their spouse quickly enough and they are afraid the AP will tell the spouse the whole gory tale in spite. Better to get ahead of the game and confess personally to tell a minimised potted version than their spouse get all of it in glorious Technicolor from a vengeful AP. The AP might want to derail the marriage to force the cheat to leave their spouse or make the betrayed spouse kick them out and make them trot back to them. Not all confessions are brought about by a change of heart, so the advice wouldn’t work for every confession either.
It remains sound advice for those with the right motivation and attitude, a set of rules doomed to fail in angry resentment for those being forced or who don’t really want to do it in the first place.
Quality of advice remains the same, its success or failure hinges not on the advice itself, but the motivation and attitude of the person receiving it.

But why on earth would someone who voluntarily wants to stop their affair need to be ‘advised’ to do so?

The reason this pretty obvious point gets hammered home is because some cheats want out, but are afraid that an abrupt about -turn will provoke the AP into telling all and/ or exaggerating what happened or lying to their spouse. They prefer to slowly go cold and distance themselves at length, leading to the AP ending it themselves and walking away from it voluntarily than end the affair immediately and risk the wrath of the AP. The advice warns them not to do this and to end the affair as soon as possible, because if they decide to try this, if they lie about ending it to placate the betrayed spouse in order to achieve a controlled exit with the AP, the betrayed spouse won’t believe them when they find out there’s contact, and will more than likely give up and end the marriage.
Not all affairs continue after discovery because the cheat is undecided or unwilling, or wants the AP any more, the cheat daren’t just cut it off abruptly because they don’t know how the AP will take it and fear revenge.
Cheats are often cowards, delaying the end because they are hoping for an uncontested slow fade and to avoid a vengeful outburst.

The only reason a cheater would be worried about the AP ‘wreaking revenge’ of some sort is if they are concerned about more truth being revealed to the betrayed spouse, or controlling the situation or narrative in some way, so there’s still deception / putting their needs above their spouse and therefore false reconciliation.

being advised to end it in some ‘show’ of new found commitment - false reconciliation

essentially any scenario that entails the cheater being caught, and not ending the affair and confessing of their own free will, will not result in a genuine reconciliation. If a cheater has to be advised to do it as part of ‘reconciling’ then it is not something they actually wanted to do. Whether that is because they wanted to control the narrative (lie) or continue seeing them. That’s why to me it’s rubbish ‘advice’ based on a falsity. It makes it appear to the betrayed spouse they are ‘doing the right thing’, all ‘by the book’ and then there seems to be some kind of confusion about why it all falls apart later down the line. When I mean, obviously.

pointless, painful and unnecessary.

Well what an absolute pile of utter bullshit.

I actually laughed out loud about the bit about how much more emotionally evolved your husband is to give you a very undeserved out for your shocking behaviour, than the other traumatised betrayed spouse you know off.

And the bit about manipulating your kids was a gold star award for gaslighting.

Honestly if my mother came out with this level of absolute delusional bullshit I would seriously question having any sort of relationship with her and never mind my kids.

But hopefully your DH will enjoy his future.

I would actually consider the validity of this post but for the fact that there are actually people out there who feel they can manipulate everyone around them, these types do exist.

Regardless of the rules of afairs and betrayal the only thing I know is it was never real care.

Real care does not harm, let you down or make you unsure and unsafe.
Real care lasts.

Your husband has a great deal to get over
You never loved him.

I'm sorry, I just cannot hear this amount of gaslighting and not get banned from here.
So I will just say, OP, I'm very happy you have got away from your husband and he is , the bloody bastard, free to live his life away from the perfect wife.
I will leave it there.

The amount of gaslighting and flowery language will always give credence to a person who cheats, has sex with and emotionally checks out of their relationship.
Yep, it does.

This.
Men cheat, women have a flowery mils and boon cheating.
They are not the same people 🙄

Your husband is blackmailing you.

Next time he talks of suicide, call 999 and tell the operator he needs an urgent psychiatric assessment as he has threatened suicide.

There is no place in a healthy relationship for this kind of bullshit. Call his bluff.