Can a marriage recover after a long affair and years of limbo?

[ZanyRoseNewt]

I’m 52, married 24 years with four children (16–23). After discovering my husband’s six-year affair with a work colleague three years ago, revealed through a chance discovery, we’ve been in repair phase trying to find a way to build a new chapter together.

A lack of emotional connection (not enough sex for him and not feeling that he makes me happy) was the driver for the affair. He said he had wanted to end the affair after a couple of years but felt unable to face the fallout, especially the effect on our children. The revelation floored me; I had no idea he was leading a double life and the scale of the deception has been hard to process. The level of deceit and exceptional skills for lying was something I’d never have believed would exist in him. I trusted him implicitly.

I also discovered that many of his family members and close friends knew about the affair months before I did. I’ve tried to contain the fallout, telling only a couple of trusted friends and shielding our children but it’s left me feeling inauthentic, like I’m observing a life I never chose (and the worry that at some point the truth will be out and everyone will then know, which could be worse). Until now I have suppressed questions and truth seeking, carrying on stoically, while internally trying to process and eventually make peace with what’s happened.

Our marriage has always been respectful, considerate and steady, with typical ups and downs but nothing major. But now I’m reflecting on our relationship and what may have been missing, seeing everything in perspective, analysing how our relationship was stacked up and triggering the need for this affair.

Now, I feel stuck, unsure how to shape our future. We love each other, but something has always felt absent, as if we never reached that deeper level that makes a relationship truly exceptional. But relationships are not like Disney movies in reality – they need work, I appreciate this relationship could be fantastic if we worked hard. But how is this realistically done? If that isn’t possible, should we just accept this is the best level we can achieve? People have much harder, difficult and painful lives than what we currently have. We should feel grateful for the chance to repair and appreciate the family unit we have?

He’s been dealing with significant work-related stress and anxiety for several years, so we haven’t yet started regular therapy as he doesn’t feel he’s well enough to tackle this right now. Keeping the job and providing for the family is his priority. For now, we’re coasting, focused on keeping the family running smoothly, which we do well. I am absolutely certain that any contact with the affair partner ended 2 years ago and I’m sure that he would never embark on another affair whilst married to me.

Eighteen months after discovering the affair, I had a serious medical event and was lucky to survive. It sharpened my sense that I need to honour my life and purpose. With my parents gone and no family beyond my husband’s, the weight of this journey feels huge.

I’m financially independent and believe I have the strength to build a new life if needed. But I feel lost, unable to move forward with clarity or decide which direction to take. Living in this limbo is exhausting, ground hog day never ending.

How do I find the lucidity and confidence to shape the second half of my life? Is counselling (which type?) the answer using it to honestly confront what needs work for couples therapy to brutally expose the areas to work on or appreciate that we should respectfully decouple or fashion a different type of marriage?

For those who’ve been through something similar, I’d really value learning what skills, frameworks, philosophies, or (radical) constructive approaches that have helped you. I don’t want to walk away based solely on the magnitude of the infidelity without first exploring whether the relationship can be meaningfully rebuilt and reshaped.

Thank you for reading.

he feels I have resentment around his infidelity

What the actual fuck……. Seriously?

I suggest that, instead of searching for reasons to end the marriage, you look at reasons to stay. Hint: there ain’t none.

Your marriage, through no fault of your own, is a shitshow of the highest order. And yet, inexplicably, you are still pretzeling yourself to try and find a way to work this out.

Stop analysing, stop looking for rational explanations, stop working on the marriage - just give him his marching orders.

You WILL feel better if you do.

Blooming audacity to blame you for having resentment over his infidelity. Tell him you’ll shag a colleague or a bloke at gym for 6 years, hide it from him and then revisit conversation about resentment.
Seriously op I’d end it now.

I have to say @ZanyRoseNewt, there would only be one thing that is even more outlandish and mind-boggling than his self-absorbed, irredeemable way of thinking: If you actually decide to go along with this whole circus he set up. He completely destroyed everything that should be between two people in a romantic relationship, utterly, to the ground. Mind you, most people couldn't look past one occasion of cheating (I know I wouldn't), and he has done it to you countless times, for multiple years. There has to be some shape of self-respect in you that can bubble up and not go along with this absolute nonsense.

Bloody hell OP. This marriage is going nowhere until he takes responsibility for his actions. He blames you for the affair and work for making him stressed. It is nobodies fault but his. What work did he put into the marriage before running into the arms of another woman...Ill bet none.
I,m sorry but we all have work stress it doesnt make us drop our trousers and fornicate with all and sundry.
You honestly believe he wont cheat again after he's been cheating for years with zero shame.
He has lied to you for YEARS.
You are living in cloud cuckoo land if you think he will change and you are wasting your own potentially happy life.

I shall tell you about my aunt.

She stayed, ended up married for nearly 60 years. To everyone else happy and content, perfect marriage and family.

He carried on cheating and she stayed each time because she knew how hard splitting up would be and she couldnt face it, as you say "Better the devil you know". Eventually she had a fractured relationship with her daughters as he was just as selfish and uncaring to them as he was to her, he didnt love her at all, just used them and her to bolster his "nice family man" image.

Then she got dementia, and he shunted her from care home to care home, no care of how it affected her he just wanted the cheapest care possible. She died suddenly and he arranged a direct cremation without telling any of us. No funeral, no chance to say goodbye to the woman we loved and who loved us and who we had tried to save many times.

That could well be your future too. Her kids didnt thank her for staying "for them", and no one thought better of her for staying.

I should add that she passed last October, at the age of 86. That was her whole life.

She tried to shield everyone from what he was like, but we knew including her kids.

Nah, he sounds like a prick tbh. Basically blaming you for him having a long term affair. So typical and tiresome really.

Agreed! You cannot fix it by yourself. He is just making feeble excuses.
Get into therapy, like go really deep. Sounds like you are completely detached from your feelings. What is it YOU feel? What do YOU want to do next?

I used to think I would never stay with my dh if he has an affair. But after being together for 26 years i look at him and think about day to day life without him at home. And it makes me so sad. I could see myself trying to forgive and try again. He is my family and father to my children. I understand why you want it to work out and try and get to a good place together.
Solo therapy may be really good for you. Especially if he can't cope with it at the moment.

I can’t really understand any of your thread or your mindset, as would have divorced immediately on discovering the affair. Given the age of the DC and how long you’ve stuck it out, I’d probably plan to leave when youngest goes to uni.

You sound like AI.
If you're not, please please find some self respect. Your husband does not love you. His needs and stress, whatever, are not your problem. He should have had a backbone and left you a long time ago. Six years! That is longer than one of my actual marriages. Leave the therapy speak behind and grasp the nettle. Your kids are adults and will cope.

I think the reason OP sounds like AI is that she is totally out of touch with her feelings. To be honest this is something she needs to get to grips with affair or no affair and marriage or no marriage.

OP, work on reconnecting with yourself. If it is convenient for YOU to have your cohabitant/H around then make the most of the positive sides to that. It's not actually a marriage anymore BUT you can rebuild yourself.

Whatever you do don't rugsweep this and pretend it doesn't exist. Confront it head on and feel ALL the feelings.

I believe your life will be brighter without that deceptive, wet weekend. There's no trust or love.

What the actual hell have I just read?! I don’t even know what to say, that hasn’t already been said, OP. He’s such a
manipulative, spineless amoeba of a wank-stain of a human being, it’s cringeworthy. He thinks YOU are RESENTFUL over his SIX YEARS of lying to your face, cheating and pissing all over your marriage and family?! Oh boo-hoo! Oh,
woe is him! Oh, waily waily! The man is a walking joke, but not in a funny way.

During lockdown I discovered my husband of 16 years had been cheating for 2 years with different mistresses. The moment of discovery immediately killed the love I had for him - he simply wasn’t the man I thought he was and that man perhaps didn’t really exist. Never mind ‘being resentful’, he’s lucky I didn’t murder him in his sleep! He is now an ex-husband and I am very happy without him. DC is almost grown and knows what happened - I won’t lie to cover ex’s back and never have - but she obviously loves her DF and sees him every other weekend. It was astonishingly easy to find a much, much better man than the ex and we are very
happy.

You must know that you are worth a million times better than this specimen. Think about what you are modelling about relationships to your DD’s because at some point they inevitably will find out about their DF’s behaviour - for them now, the most important thing isn’t what he did but how you react and handle things going forward. Please don’t protect him and cover for him or lie to your DC - it’s REALLY important that they know they have one parent who they can completely trust and you don’t want to damage their faith in you when their DF is basically full of shit.

How you doing @ZanyRoseNewt ? Is this marriage still limping on?

I’m sure that he would never embark on another affair whilst married to me.

Sorry and I mean this kindly but you're whistling to keep your spirits up with that one. He's done it before, he'll find it all too easy to do it again. Why are you purposefully kidding yourself?

You’ll never be able to trust him the same way again. In my opinion, no amount of therapy can fully fix that...not deep down. Maybe some people can move past it, but I think that takes a lot of naivety.

So if the choice is between staying with someone you can’t truly love or trust anymore, or being an independent, proud single woman… I know which one I’d choose. And I know which example I’d want to set for my children so that they'd do the same if it ever happened to them.

This is an important point.

Let us be explicit, @ZanyRoseNewt.

How are you sure?

This is not a rhetorical question. I think you might learn something by attempting to answer it.

I know we aren’t encouraged to do this but when you think about the relationship are you able to ask yourself - what’s in it for me? What do you get out of it and whatever it is, is that enough for you?
Don’t be afraid of change - it sounds as though what you have currently is a very diminished way of living together and you may find that it’s worth considering the other options

It isn't surprising that you feel numb, lost and unsure, @ZanyRoseNewt. Ten years ago you had a pretty good life, all shaping up to be the sun-dappled future of a successful couple with a successful marriage and four lovely children, right? Sure, there'd been a few ups and downs but everybody knows it's hardest when the kids are small.

Now, as the youngest turned seven, life was set to settle into a pleasant series of routines and rituals. So much to enjoy as a family and individually; finally there would be space for you and H to rediscover yourselves and each other, strengthen the bonds that were forged in the furnace of the nursery years.

Except it didn't quite happen. H seemed somehow to be slipping away, despite being present as a father and available for the basic activities expected of a couple. Often physically absent, he came over as rather detached or dismissive of you in some important ways. Not to worry, though, right? It's normal when work is stressful and children's schedules take up so much time. Everything was good: we don't choose the pressures but we can choose how to handle them. You chose to be less demanding.

In order to get through life with any kind of equanimity, we have to take some things for granted. The sun will rise in the morning and set at night. We will wake up tomorrow in the same place we went to sleep. Our central relationships will sustain us. Efforts are mostly rewarded. We're mostly safe. We may plan for the holidays, save for the future, pre-order a sofa, with reasonable confidence the necessary elements will remain in place.

Removal of a necessary element causes tremendous shock. Nobody knows what this feels like until it happens - someone dies, a cataclysmic event occurs, savings are stolen - there are many events that completely destabilise a person's world view, that cancel their future. Very few of us get through a whole lifetime without this, but each of us suffers an intense shift of fate as if it were the first ever. It feels as though the ground melted beneath your feet, the landscape altered before your eyes, you were cast adrift without a compass.

You had two of these events within three years. You found out you were married to half a man, the other half being attached to someone else. You were forced to understand the previous six years of your family life as a lie. And a health crisis forced you to understand that we can't be sure of waking up tomorrow. These are very big things to get to grips with.

When my dad died unexpectedly, the most useful advice I received was that you don't get over it, you get used to it. There was a metaphor about a large, ungainly and immovable piece of furniture appearing in the middle of your living room. You can't get rid of it but, in time, you find you've rearranged your life around it and barely notice the thing is there.

The shock is the period when you can't believe what's happened. Then you hate the bloody thing, keep bumping into it and hurting yourself. You stare at it for hours on end, hating it and wishing the fucker would disappear as easily as it appeared.

This is where you're stuck. It's understandable. It is not, however, helpful. I'm glad you've started a thread because it means you've at least started to consider how to rearrange your life. It could be great! Your 'ugly wardrobe' may not be so bad - you've enjoyed 20 years of functioning marriage, longer than most, and have created four fabulous young people. I bet you can turn the wardrobe into a meaningful work of art, representing your past and the strands of life coming together in a bright, new pattern for the future.

Please read this. You are strongly encouraged to click on any of the included links that catch your eye, and to carry on exploring Chump Lady with humour and enthusiasm: https://chumplady.com/how-to-get-over-betrayal/