I’m glad to hear you’re out and about, but I understand the surreal feelings.
It’s that oddness you feel, when you discover that life just ploughs on around you as apparently normal, with absolutely no regard to any personal crisis. You recognise it as normality, but you feel like an alien in it. Life has a nasty habit of one day everything being normal and the next day a whole new set of circumstances panning out in what yesterday was a ‘normal’ backdrop. Normal will become normal again in time, don’t worry that you’re struggling, it’s to be expected sadly. One day at a time.
Don’t try to be superwoman, take a rest, a step back, do something nice for yourself that you’d usually enjoy.
It’s bound to feel like a struggle. Even typing that looks like the understatement of the year. Be kind to yourself, this is early days yet and his moping around like a wet rag won’t be helping you.
I agree with the term “affair fog”. It in no way excuses anything, but crikey O’ Riley, people in the middle of or the immediate aftermath of an affair are not their normal selves, I swear to God. The illogical crap coming out of my husband’s mouth when I found out turned him into somebody I didn’t recognise and you could almost see the shock and confusion hit as LaLa Land unravelled. I said to him once “Seriously? Can you actually bloody hear yourself?” And he burst into tears.
They’ve brainwashed themselves into a whole new set of filters to run stuff through and are shocked when reality hits, to find their new, self-constructed (through lies, bullshit justifications, excuses, blaming others, minimising) parameters don’t seem to function in the real world outside their affair bubble. They’ve told themselves that even shit smells of roses by the time reality hits. People say cheating men cry crocodile tears and are still lying to garner sympathy and get forgiven, but I don’t think they do in all circumstances. My husband is super intelligent academically and an expert in his field and discovered to his horror his capacity for being able to lie, manipulate and hide stuff because he was actually too cowardly to face the truth and deal with anything uncomfortable. That he could risk me and his children for an entitled thrill. He realised his ego was so huge that he was too arrogant, too easily hurt and bitterly resentful, to accept what had happened to him in his career as a direct result of somebody else’s incompetence. He realised he could lie to himself as convincingly as he could lie to others and that excitement, lust and a secret thrill ain’t love. He’d risked his whole life for that, for a pile of teenage level crap. Couldn’t believe that he could do it or believe it, it actually scared him. My tiny violin was sadly at the repair shop and all that, but it was real. Boy did he bitterly regret it and he almost took his own life.
If his feelings for her pan out to be real, and some affairs become a real relationship (tiny amount in comparison) then he’d be guilty and sorry, sure, but not saying what he’s saying now.
The penny drops either pretty much immediately (in my case), a bit more slowly after drastic decisions start to look like colossal mistakes (I think this is your husband) or later, when OW turns out to be less fascinating in real situations.
Sometimes they plough on because of sunk costs fallacy and post rationalising because hey, if I’ve done all this damage, this really has to work and I have to prove to everyone that I have made the right decision. Boy, will I ever look like the biggest arsehole if I’m wrong…… Or, they just ditch it all and try to get their life back, sadly when it’s too late, the damage is too great.
Cheating men are many things, ‘enormous idiot’ being just one of them.