Mine did @Strawberrina but on my terms from day 1 that I knew about it.
I love my husband too and have no doubt that if he’d left for his OW or I’d kicked him out I still would. Love doesn’t respond to reason, but never romanticise that as an excuse to cheat yourself out of what you deserve.
Love can get buried in time and busy-ness and taken for granted, even forgotten for a while, and can endure even through that, but its persistent endurance is never, ever a reason to allow yourself to be treated badly.
Marriages can go through Groundhog Day phases, big crises, get torn apart, still none of that necessarily kills love. But it can mean it gets lost for a while and that gets mistakenly seen as the death of it. People might give up and leave at this point, or decide to try to improve it and regain what was forgotten, but some people don’t want to leave, aren’t quite sure why they don’t want to despite feeling bad about something, somewhere….. so they stay put, don’t do the hard work of looking at their internal issues or self-reflection, don’t get honest and say they need things to change (probably themselves) . Instead, they self-medicate with all sorts of drugs: over-working, alcohol, other chemicals, porn…….and affairs…. the list is endless.
However, none of this excuses not getting honest and taking personal responsibility. None of it. And love sometimes isn’t enough. @Strawberrina it’s absolutely 100% not enough after an affair.
He need to prove his love for you now. Your love won’t be enough to save it if he doesn’t. If he won’t try, won’t acknowledge the hurt he has caused you, doesn’t apologise profusely and show utter remorse without a murmur, if he blames you or his marriage for something that was his personal choice to do all along, nothing to do with you, and if he doesn’t bend himself into a fucking pretzel to try to prove it and make you happy, I’m afraid he doesn’t love you the way you love him.
I’m probably in a minority on MN but I don’t believe affairs (except exit affairs which are a totally different animal, totally different motivations and dynamics at play and rare) are anything at all to do with love, despite getting mistaken for it pretty much every time.
I also don’t believe people are always so cynical as to want to go back to the ashes of the marriage they burned down for purely material reasons. They’ve practically destroyed their spouse, made things in their marriage harder than ever, have a willing AP ready to run into the sunset with, they even thought that’s what they wanted whilst in the affair, ‘I’m so unhappy at home’ ‘ Of course I love you and we’ll be together, I promise..’ but boom! Even though everything gets way worse on discovery, where still looks preferable? Even the marital bomb site they just created still suddenly looks way better than Schmookums in LaLa Land and even ‘I’m unhappy in my marriage’ doesn’t hold water any more or stop them wishing they could turn back time in a heartbeat.
That’s why the OW is left reeling and trying to rationalise why he’s gone and the wife is left wondering why the hell they did it in the first place if Dorothy suddenly wants out of Oz and back to Kansas.
As I said, I still think affairs have absolutely nothing to do with love.
Until he gets that, is on his knees putting this right, because he still loves you, your love will be wasted.
I still love my husband but that wouldn’t get in the way of divorce if he ever squandered the chance he absolutely never deserved, but got given anyway. He has the sense to realise what he has now and as for me, I learned the hard way that pedestals are for stone statues with no feelings or desires, not real people.