Still struggling as 1 year anniversary comes round

[Somewhereonlywevebeen]

This time last year, I found out my husband had been messaging other women, and was having an emotional affair. It was devastating, and the difficult period carried on through to Christmas.
Since then, we’ve both worked hard on ourselves and our marriage. Things are genuinely better than they’ve ever been: we communicate well and we’re very happy together.
But now the anniversary is coming round, I can’t stop thinking about what happened. I’m worried it’s going to hang over me until Christmas, like it did last year.
I feel bad bringing it up with him and making us revisit everything when we’re doing so well. But I’m also wondering whether keeping quiet will just make it build up and come out later.
Has anyone been through something similar? Did anything help you get through the anniversary period, and how did you talk to your partner about it without feeling like you were undoing all the progress you’d made?

You have every right to bring this up OP. He caused thie hurt by his behaviour and it's not something you can get over easily. He massively betrayed your trust and it's up to him to listen to how you feel and do everything to reassure you.

I’d be interested to know how you’ve worked on it, specifically him. What has he done to become a safe partner to you again? What does ‘worked on it’ actually look like?

There are some statistics into infidelity that indicate it takes at least 3yrs for a relationship to recover from infidelity. And ‘recover’ doesn’t mean if goes back to ever feeling the same again.

You’re still in the beginning stages here, so don’t beat yourself for feeling this way. I do think, however, that if you choose to stay, then these times are part of the journey.

From my experience of people around me, the relationship is never the same again and in some cases it might have been better to have a clean break. My friend had an affair 20 years ago and she stayed with her partner but every day for the past 20 years the partner has brought it up. The same with my parents, years later, in fact for the rest of his life, my dad was still going on about the affair my mum had.

I don't mean you shouldn't mention it, I'm asking would it be more healing to leave it all behind and have a fresh start?

I’m happy that you feel that you’re better than ever however you need to bring up your feelings. Just because youve decided to try and rebuild the relationship doesn’t mean you have to bottle up delayed feelings from this situation.

I don't think that "anniversary" ever really goes away, but that's OK. You have to remember that our brains form connections to things to hold memories so the same way as particular times of year or music remind you of happy things they remind you of sad ones.
I think you have to be open that it's hard, it keeps that communication open and if you really want to continue to move forward then that is key.

Id also want to see how you have worked on things and how much of it has been driven by you.
My marriage broke down after an instance of cheating. It was me who who took control of working on things, I drove the communication, I went to counselling etc and that meant I resented the fact that he cheated and it was all on me trying to save us.
Each year on the anniversary of me finding out I went into myself, and even now I am reminded of it, but I see it as a badge of strength now as after 7 years I finally left because I realised that he didn't care enough to want to put the work in and for him, staying together was just easy for him.