Has anyone successfully recovered from infidelity with couple’s therapy?

[TreadingTrepidatious]

Infidelity was discovered within my marriage last night, and we have an appointment with a marriage counselor on the 24th (which feels like forever away!). Just wondering if it’s helped anyone to get their marriage back to a good place, and if you’d be willing to talk about the process. Thanks in advance

I wish you both a lot of luck OP. If you are both people who can understand the huge complexity of being human and having relationships and are able to work through it all, you’ll be an incredibly strong couple.

MN views here are generally extremely black and white and extremely vitriolic when it comes to cheating. Openness and sharing are the most important things. If you’re being honest now, you may end up in a much stronger and happier position than you started in.

and that he should stay tf away from married women

FFS. This the the thread that keeps on giving.

All utter crap.

Still not buying it that OP is a woman and the betrayed is a man.

Seriously - an actual flowchart??
What next? Villagers? Godzilla? A deus ex machina?

No need to explain again because I’ve read your previous posts, OP, but I really don’t understand how you couldn’t have predicted how infidelity would affect your DH.

I can understand not thinking about how it would affect him and pushing any guilt down, but the lack of understanding and empathy is something strange. Have you never worried about your DH? I mean worrying about him getting ill, etc? Worrying about losing your relationship somehow? When he ‘didn’t meet your needs’ or maybe stayed late at work or whatever, did you never have a moment’s pang of fear that he might leave you or have someone else? I don’t mean a pang of jealousy, but a pang of fear for the potential loss of your loving relationship?

The whole way you write sounds arrogant. You say your DH wasn’t meeting your needs, but could it maybe also be that you were taking him for granted? That you’d assumed he’d always be there, like a loyal worshipper? Perhaps it’s just the way you wrote to try to hide who the betrayer was, but you sound like you see him as beneath you somehow.

I don’t know whether the counselling will work as that depends on you and your DH, but I don’t think you should assume anything about your DH. Will he ever look at you the same way again? Will he trust you? Is he secretly making his own plans for the future? You see him taking the DC away as him doing it in consideration of you, but perhaps the main reason he’s staying in the marriage and working on it is because he’s afraid he might lose his children and they might suffer if the relationship broke down. I think you’re maybe over-estimating how much you are part of his motivation.

In marriage, it can be easy to get stuck in a rut a bit and neglect each other’s needs. The key to that is to kindly but clearly communicate them very early on as soon as there starts to be a problem. The difficulty is in doing this without the other person being put on the defensive. If nothing else, I hope the counselling helps you both to find a way to do this.

Same.

Yep you’ve got it!

No morals does that for you.

Thank you so much for actually listening!

I was using the tattoos and war analogies to try to explain not knowing what something feels like until you experience it. I knew that having the affair would “hurt” DH; I didn’t know the extent of that. I haven’t experienced that, nor do I think that I would feel the same way if DH cheated, and nor have I cheated before this. So I couldn’t accurately predict what it would be like for DH.

It’s a lot easier to make the immoral choice in a situation where you’re interacting with someone who enthusiastically makes you feel desired and talks for hours with you and relieves your loneliness that you’ve dealt with for years without even realizing what you were missing when you’re weighing it against drastically underestimated consequences of potentially “hurting” you husband. But understand now that I have witnessed the actual effects, and I wouldn’t ever do that to anyone again.

I made the flowchart because I was telling posters over and over again that I’m not justifying the cheating by detailing these unmet needs, but they kept insisting that I was and misinterpreting (to understate it) my words. So I thought a chart detailing the process by which I think a spouse with unmet needs should go about getting those needs met (and what their options are if they aren’t met. Cheating is not on the flow chart, most importantly) would help make it more clear… though it seems many people are not following the flow chart or understanding my intention with it. It just got discarded as “this person made a flow chart to justify their cheating.” Quite the opposite of the intended effect 🤦🏻‍♀️

And isn’t it interesting that people don’t believe women can make flow charts? It is indeed sexist, innit?

4 weeks, a whole 4 weeks!

Wow! Must deffo be over then….

You knew so little about your wife husband, you didn’t know the affect it would have? Really?

And you’re writing the script by the way, nothing physical, no way in six weeks was it not physical.

Eh I'm female and I make flowcharts all the time. But i make them for work/ research purposes. It wouldn't cross my mind to make a flowchart in the service of rationalising incredibly hurtful behaviours towards my loved ones. But i do know many men who would.

The problem to recognise when weighing an affair against a long term relationship is that you're measuring apples against oranges.
You need to measure the start of your relationship with your dh against the affair.
Your ap is dealing with your grumpy morning moods, cleaning up after you, having to run around after kids with you. You see the worst of your spouse at times when you live together - especially when parenting. You and your ap are carefully curating interactions to show each other the best of yourselves.
Likewise, your spouse has loved you despite knowing all your flaws and bad habits.
It's simply not a reasonable comparison.

My DH had a ONS (plus office flirtation) with a woman from work in 2018, I found out in 2019. We were able to work through it - ONLY because it was obvious he was genuinely remorseful and bitterly regretted it had happened. I won't lie, it was hell on earth, absolute hell on earth for a while and I didn't think I would ever be happy again. But - six years on from the day I found out we are rock solid. We came back from it. Most people will say don't bother trying, and I understand why, but one solution doesn't fit all. Every relationship is unique and different and only the people in it can know if it's worth trying - nobody on this forum knows you or your spouse so really only you can decide if it's worth trying or if it isn't. We didn't have counselling, couldn't afford it at the time, but we worked through it together. DH has been a different man since it all happened, I am right up there at the top of his list of priorities, whereas before I felt taken for granted. He grew up and faced what he had done and became a better person. My DH now has terminal cancer at the age of 45, and I am facing losing him anyway - but am so thankful and glad that I am by his side through this, I am so glad we stayed together. It was the right thing for us. We will be together until the end.

One very important thing I must stress though is that the partner who cheated MUST be genuinely remorseful of what they have done. If they try to hide anything or make excuses or are impatient for their spouse to 'get over it' then it simply won't work, and I would go as far as to say they don't fully understand the pain they have caused and are, therefore, not to be trusted going forward.

You sound abhorrent. He deserves so much better.

I can't really tell you what will happen in counselling but I can tell you that trying to stay can sometimes be akin to the initial denial and bargaining stages of grief ("This doesn't have to be the end even though I'm heartbroken") and choosing to go to counselling so early after a discovery is probably part of that too.

The person who has cheated has all the information and details and has probably had more time to process and think about why it all happened and what they want before confessing to infidelity, or before the infidelity is discovered another way. The person cheated on will feel like they've been chucked into a whirlpool at this stage so you need to remember you will be in very different places.

I hope you both get what you need from counselling.

That’s not an equivalent analogy.

I value my life, I know my family values my life, and I know what it feels like to lose someone. Murder is wrong because it deprives someone of life and deprives their loved ones of the victim. It’s not hard to understand how bad the consequences are.

I don’t think I place as much value on my partner’s fidelity as most people do. I don’t know what it feels like to be cheated on, and prior to this I’ve never closely interacted with someone who had just experienced infidelity. Infidelity is wrong because it violates someone’s trust (and several other reasons, as I’ve learned, but I’ll keep it at that to avoid writing a whole book here), but I didn’t understand how bad the consequences are.

OP have you been diagnosed with autism? How you speak, the pie chart, the overuse of analogies (and words in general) reminds me exactly of my friend who has Asperger’s. She comes across arrogant and selfish but actually just doesn’t understand how to communicate effectively. This could be part of the problem in your marriage and why you felt that having an affair would be more preferable than trying to talk things through with your husband (and then trying harder when your initial attempts didn’t work.)

For your marriage to survive I’d imagine that you’ll need to work on your communication style and be a little more open to criticism and other people’s perspectives. Communication isn’t being able to build arguments and waffle on until the cows come home, it’s about having empathy and trying to understand where somebody else is coming from. And being able to admit that maybe you are just wrong instead of saying ‘yes I’m wrong but let me list a thousand reasons why this is and why I am misunderstood/ why I’m NOT wrong). Just sit with it and accept it and learn from it.

@TreadingTrepidatious

I haven’t read all of your responses because I lack concentration but I think I get the jist.

6 years ago, I was in the same predicament. I stupidly had an emotional affair. I know people say there’s no reason to cheat & I 💯 agree, but I wasn’t getting the attention at home that I needed. I stupidly grew close to a man who called me beautiful & I was drawn to him because of that.
It lasted a month until I told my DH because I just felt so guilty. Things weren’t great at home because I’d broken the trust but without couples counselling, we talked a lot & rebuilt the trust, we are very happily married and It has never been mentioned since. He knows I’d never do it again because it was truly a mistake.

wishing you lots of strength & hope you’ll be okay.

If you found out you were cheated on last night, you would be devastated and/ or angry. That is not the tone of your messages. So you have known about the cheating for a while are not upset=you are the cheater.

If you truly were the innocent person who was cheated on, you are so sanguine and accepting, you clearly don't need therapy.

If you are, as I suspect, the cheater, your attempts to deflect blame and try and calm everyone who is judging you make me feel confident that your wife doesn't need therapy, she just needs to leave you.

Accept the blame. Accept her anger. Or set her free. She can do better

What a ride this has been!

Didn’t see the reveal coming, OP the cheater, a woman, home alone with the kids. I’m here till the end 🙃

OP why are you arguing with people over the color of the sky where you are? Why are you taking the bait on debates that are totally besides the point? I know from personal experience posting on MN that people will state facts about your OP that are objectifiably provably false. Like they will make assumptions that are very simply wrong and tell the OP they are right. Why argue? I’m also a very experienced based learner so I don’t find your comments about how experiencing cheating schooled you on its effects outrageous. You seem super reactive and you’re just letting pps lead you around on debates instead of sticking on topic and ignoring stuff that’s totally besides the point.

*Home alone without the kids

You genuinely wouldn’t be upset if your DH was telling some other woman how wonderful they were and making plans behind your back to have sex — sex that he is very excited about having. You didn’t think that would bother you much?? I find that hard to believe since you have said all you want is to feel desired. But to know he desired someone else wouldn’t actually break you inside?

I have seen that you are a woman. But other than that, everything I said still stands

Could be the OP was the cheater .

It's worded ambiguously

@TreadingTrepidatious just when I thought I'd read everything on Mumsnet, along comes this banger of a thread. I really think you have the makings of a bestselling novel here. Call it "In conclusion, I was right" or maybe "Flowcharting Fidelity".
My gosh, you have some monstrous ego, don't you. Hope your wife cops on and dumps you, you sound truly obnoxious.

They are, revealed (or let slip) later on.

Well you're in denial then. You don't have an affair if you truly love someone.