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.

Agree.

This "connection" narrative is the same script as "my wife doesn't understand me but you do ".

Connection can't be fostered or nurtured when one party has decided to look elsewhere for it.

I don't need the stats thanks.
Knew them already.

Your opinion is just that. I'm not defencing affairs.
But it's quite possible for the 'innocent' partner to have faults and behave in ways that are unacceptable- and unwilling to even recognise that or change.

"There are no end of stories on here and elsewhere in which one partner has been happily going along and their cheating partner has given little to no clue anything is wrong.'

This text sums up my ideas in response to that :

The only way to get no surprises is if you share everything. If I know what my
partner is thinking, if I know how she operates, what her values are, what her likes and dislikes are, then what she does will not surprise me and I can relax. I may not like or prefer what she does, but it will not surprise me and I can be at ease with her.

Thus, if you want to feel safe with a person, you need to develop the mutual habits of sharing everything easily, comfortably, and readily. Simple.

Most people in our culture do not feel safe to share their inner workings, and thus they are careful about what they say. They selectively share. I think a foolish example of this is to share only nice things and keep awkward or negative things hidden. Sometimes this is called being polite.

While this may work with people at work, selective sharing in a long-term relationship is a problem. The secrets will surface. Thus, there will be Big Surprises, and with those surprises, there will often be a sense of betrayal.

But Big Surprises will scare people and to a state of unsafety, apprehension, and tension. This is nowhere more clear than in a marriage when an affair becomes public. At that moment, the burden of the unknown and unshared material becomes enormous. People, particularly the affaired-against-partner start asking many questions. They have become fearful of all that unknown stuff. The questions go on and on. I see this as an invitation to shift from the outer circle to the inner circle.

I don't at all agree 'The person betrayed doesn't always know there is a disconnection" in this case.

Why?

Muddled54 · 05/01/2025 22:31

"My husband believes this was the wakeup call we both needed and that we can work on feeling true connection again."

So while that doesn't mean he knew that she would have or had the potential for having an affair, he certainly knew there was something very important was missing. And he knew they had never addressed it - meaning he had not and nor had she.

None of this means she is not responsible for the cheating - she 100% is.

She would have been far wiser to talk. But she didn't. Why? No one on this forum knows. She made sense to herself doing what she did. He made sense to himself. How useful is it for anyone else to judge and point fingers?

It's pretty hard to accept that there is some kind of disconnection causing affairs when the deceived party very often has no idea or feeling that there is any kind of disconnection going on. It may be the case in some marriages but doesn't excuse it ( I will admit here in my first marriage I had an affair and to be honest had mentally checked out my marriage - due to the fact he acted as if he was single and I was just a useful childminder/ housekeeper I felt completely secondary in his life - , but my H was indeed 'unaware' that I had mentally checked out.

In my 2nd marriage I was on the receiving end and had what I consider a perfectly happy and very communicative marriage - H admits there was nothing at all wrong with us - he just enjoyed the buzz of an attractive and young 'someone else' texting and flirting and nothing about domesticity at a point when he was a bit depressed about our business and his mothers terminal illness.

I think we often try to find excuses and failings when there were none that we could have picked up on.

Someone once said on here 'women tend to have affairs because 'something is lacking' and men tend to have affairs because they want something extra and an ego buzz

That was my experience too and I've experienced both

I don't think it did cover it because it is not based in reality. People do not operate that way because we can't operate that way.

We do this because we are altruistic by nature, it is our instinct to not do or say things that would harm anothers sense of self. We desperately need other people to survive, we are slow and unarmoured, we haven't any natural weapons so we exist in a herd where we help each other and sometimes that means respecting bondaries around what we do and what we say to each other.

Why tell someone you thought about killing them, or that you think of someone else sometimes when you have sex, or that their family are a bunch of arseholes you wouldn't piss on even if they were on fire. Yes it's being honest and sharing but it's impossible not to harm a partners sense of who they are or your relationship with them by doing so.

Also one of the reasons people have affairs is because thye feel they know their partner completely and want to be surprised by the new and novel things we find out about different people.

There are also somethings you cannot share with someone because of how it affected you and how it might taint your relationship.

Your opinions and ideas are lovely, and it would be wonderful to live in that world but sadly people are complex and we are just not like that.

I don't at all agree 'The person betrayed doesn't always know there is a disconnection" in this case.
Why?

I've quoted this because I want to make it very clear to others reading this that this is your personal intepretation not mine.

In reference to your post below the one quoted

None of this means she is not responsible for the cheating - she 100% is.
She would have been far wiser to talk. But she didn't. Why? No one on this forum knows. She made sense to herself doing what she did. He made sense to himself. How useful is it for anyone else to judge and point fingers?

Which is why I didn't reference the OP at all in the post I made which you are responding to.

I’m glad you’ve found a resolution as cheating, and all the deception around it, is destructive to everyone involved. I feel like if we’re talking about a one night stand, or short fling, then I can understand reconciliation, but I’m not sure I understand when it’s a long-term affair and you have feelings of being in love with the ap. I suppose I just don’t understand why you would treat your OH or AP with such disregard if you loved either of them. It’s the thing I can’t get my head around with affairs: I wouldn’t want to be with someone I was capable of intentionally hurting so much.

As pp’s have said, probably a good time to think about things. It sounds like you would need to make amends and reassurances for a relationship with your AP to work too. Like I say, affairs hurt everyone. The person in the relationship & having the affair is usually lying to everyone around them.

So you can broaden your understanding of affairs and how they happen but this same logic is not put in place as to why people keep hurtful thoughts away from partners.

Politeness, respect, and kindness are what are to be expected not blurting out hurtful thoughts, it's not hard if you care, but when you have inately selfish thoughts it may be harder.

And you think that truthfulness will lessen the big surprise of an affair, that kind of thinking is only thinkable if you are summing up how a big surprise could be controlled in increments along the way.

Your bizarre thought process could be the musings of the OM, in my opinion.

Very manipulative posts.

The point is that you build trust and being known by sharing the most awful or weird things about yourself to your one intimate partner (as opposed to everyone else who you are just 'polite' with).

You allow yourself 'to be known' and it doesn't taint your relationship, it strengthens it.

You have a kink for dressing up as a monkey? Don't share it with your neighbours, but do share it with your (one and only) partner, because sharing this brings you deeper into intimacy with them.

You have a secret fantasy to read about gang rapes? As above....

There is really nothing you really can't say, once you trust you won't be judged.

You can keep from your partner that you don't like kissing them because they have bad breath to spare their feelings.

But how will they feel when you end the marriage after 20 years because you can't figure out how tot tell them they have bad breath, and tell them 'I'm divorcing you because I've never enjoyed kissing you because you've had bad breath"?

Which would they prefer, to know or not to know at the beginning, that this is what you think?

That is pure fantasy.

"Why tell someone you thought about killing them"

I can cite an example of a podcast where I heard a Catholic woman who told her husband in front of their counsellor "I pray for your death' (because she "couldn't" divorce him). He went silent.

On the way home they were crossing a busy road: He turned to her and said as a truck was arriving "now's your chance".
At that moment she looked at him and realised how awful she had been to say that and that she did not really mean it. It was a turning point in their relationship.

Just that example came to mind.

The podcast was by Ellyn Bader, author of 'Tell Me No Lies: How to Face the Truth and Build a Loving Marriage'

"Everybody lies. Friends lie to friends. Children lie to their parents. Politicians lie to constituents. And, inevitably, husbands and wives lie to each other. Lies between lovers have tremendous potential to both nurture and destroy a relationship. It is easy to underestimate the power that lies-even seemingly harmless lies-can wield in your marriage. Tell Me No Lies explores the complexity of honesty versus deception in marriage and reveals the many reasons behind the lies we tell our partners (and ourselves). "

People say stupid things in the spur of the moment that they don't mean and 1 podcaster spouts some random pseudo therapy stuff. Not sure this is making your point.

Listen for yourself ;-)

You are quoting people who are just podcasters with an opinion, not experts in their field.

She makes the points very clearly

People don't ask themselves what's important to them or know want they want because they have not introspected

People avoid conflict and avoid sharing difficult truths about themselves

In doing so they don't differentiate themselves from their partner and express their wishes and desires.

Many years later they find themselves disconnected from their partners but still having a strong desire to be known by someone.

At this point an affair partner may loom into view and temporarily offer up a plate of non judgmental listening

https://couplesinstitutecounseling.com/ellyn-bader-phd-palo-alto/

ELLYN BADER

She is considered by many to be the preeminent expert in couples therapy training.

Ellyn and her husband, Dr. Peter Pearson are creators of the Developmental Model of Couples Therapy. Ellyn and Pete are pioneers in the field of couples therapy, being among the first to specialize in it. They literally “wrote the book” on the subject. Their textbook, In Quest of the Mythical Mate, is used in graduate training programs across the country and is in its 16th printing. As a therapist, Ellyn combines her keen perception with her unparalleled command of theory and practical application. She was a visionary when the field of couples therapy was in its formative years, and she is a visionary in her practice, where she helps couples see beyond their current situation to create the relationship they wish to have.

Ellyn Bader is a member of the American Psychological Association, the International Transactional Analysis Association, and the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists.

Meh I find your flowery excuses for your appalling behaviour pathetic OP. You need to grow the fuck up.

I do. Very much in real life. My FIL has zero to do with his kids cause they all think he is an absolute piece of shit for what he did to their mother. No relationship with his grandkids either.

And he isn't the only one any of our friends in our wider circle all have minimal to virtually no relationship with their cheating parent. They just don't respect them and value a relationship with them.

My fault, sorry I don't bother to look up podcasters because most of them spout utter shit.

I still think that quote of hers is too generalised to be useful and very American "everyone is lovely if they dig deep enough, listen to me and follow my every word and it all works out well if you are perfect" LaLa land therapy shite too.

Sorry I don't buy this "tell me anything and I'll never overlay my own personal experiences, prejudices, and judgements on you crap" through real lived experience, it will no doubt work for some instances but not for others.

She's not the author of the first quote.

The point is not that when you tell your partner something they don't initially have some form of negative reaction. They may well do. The point is the truth is out there, whether you talk it about or not doesn't make it not exist.

The issue of truth telling and lying including all forms of self deception is a huge one in our society and I believe contributes massively to divorces.

@tigglywinkbut that is the point as I keep saying, it’s pointless, not rubbish!
All good advice is pointless to those who don’t need it, won’t listen to it or lie about taking it. The attitude is rubbish, not the advice.