Will I ever Forgive and/or Forget??

[jenny85uk]

To cut an extremely long story short me and husband have been together almost 7 yrs and married just over 1 of them. he is 26 i am 24 and we have 2 young boys together.

Right background sorted, pretty much since we started going out I have always had reason to distrust him and usually when the computer was around. I was always finding pictures of girls on the computer and he was secretive with his phone.

Well once he admitted to me he liked to flirt with girls on the computer cos it was a release for him. I told him I was not happy with this and he promised he would stop.

Anyway at the beginning of this yr my husband decided he would like to go swinging and i couldnt comprehend it. On a works night out I was really drunk and ended up kissing a male colleague and we continued to flirt and text each other. I put this down to feeling unloved and unappreciated.

My husband found out and kicked me out which i was fine with because as far as i was concerned i was no longer 'in love' with him. He acted like a lost puppy and asked me to come back so i did and we got things back on track. he made me feel really guilty all the time but i deserved it.

3 weeks ago I was checking the computer and found out he had created about 40 email addresses and was able to access the profiles of some of his msn contacts. I added them and spoke to one who told me she met my husband and slept with him but he had said he was single. I told him i knew what he's done and he asked what and eventually confessed to meeting a girl off the internet when he told me he had a job interview. I realised this was a different girl. he then broke down and confessed he had a girl back to our house but they didnt sleep together did all but (because they had no condoms) this was a girl he worked with and decided to invite round while i was at a concert with my sister. he confessed that he slept with a girl in march and met another girl 3 days after our first wedding anniversary. i was so hurt i wont go into how i felt but i tried to get over it. we decided to put a password on comp but then he thought i was treating him like a baby so i took it off. i went to see take that last week and when i returned checked comp and found he had a girl blocked on msn and facebook so i contacted her and found out this girl was the one he met just for a kiss but they had actually slept together too. i told him i knew and he cried and said he didnt want to lose me etcetc. i now find out he has met a girl on his lunch break in work but they didnt even kiss.

he says its an addiction so he just wont go on internet anymore and im trying my best to forget but after all this hurt i dont know if i can??

Good Luck with the councelling!

Jenny I couldnt not answer your post, your relationship reminds me somewhat of my xp, who just could not keep it to himself. You ask can you ever forgive and forget, in my case I thought I could and fooled myself for 7 years that I could until one day I felt strong enough and hurt enough to leave. Everyone I knew told me to leave him as he was no good but I just couldnt accept it. One day I found out about yet another woman even though he had promised he never would again it was for me the final straw.

The only advice I can give is to make him sit down and tell you every woman he has been with, he has admitted to the ones you know about but beaware there could be more. Tell him unless he is honest there is no way forward for him. Be honest with yourself, can you see a life where you have to watch his every move? If you feel you will be happy with this then give your relationship another go.

Im sorry if I sound harsh and pessimistic but I now very much believe that men like him cant change, although I will keep my fingers crossed for you that he does change and makes me eat my words. Good luck stay strong but please remember that you do deserve better than how he has treated you and things cant go on the way they have been.

Thank you, everyone is telling me he won't change and i wish so much that i could just accept that but i'm pinning my hopes on the fact that me and the kids mean more to him than random girls he knows nothing about.

If he does stray again I WILL catch him out as I now know how he did it and he knows as well as i do that that will be it finito but i will agree it is that constant feeling of unease and worry that may start to give me ill health in time. i just wish i knew how to be strong or to forget

Jenny - you sound so much like me. I had a similar relationship from my late teens to mid 20's. I also kept hoping he would change but he didn't and the final straw came when he got someone else pregnant.

If you do want to give it another go (and its obvious that you do), then I think you need to be realistic. You are not going to be able to forgive/forget for some time and your dh needs to prove himself to you. You need to have lots of conversations with him and get counselling, both as a couple and perhaps on your own. Give yourself a reasonable time limit - say 1 year - where after that you will either put it all in the past and move on together (assuming he has behaved himself) or you will realise that you can't trust him and are not able to be happy in your relationship and make a decision to move on without him. Obviously, you both need to make it clear that if he does anything again in the meantime, then its definitely over.

I hope you can work it out and be happy one way or the other

thank you tilly that makes sense. he doesnt like discussing it because he feels ashamed and didnt enjoy it at the time, it was just something he was used to doing. i have contacted relate and he understands i cant forgive him just like that so i will see how it goes but yes we both know if he does it again thats the end

But Jenny, he is going to have to discuss it. Endlessly and tirelessly, everytime you feel the need to talk about it, he will have to. It does not matter how ashamed he is, he will have to face the music now, if he wants you to move on and lay it to rest.

Jenny you need to know you are strong enough to walk away and he needs to know that too.
There will be an awful lot of talking to do- and it is not an easy road to ever forgive and certainly you do not want to forget either.

You need to ask yourself if you are prepared to not let yourself become bitter.

Take some time to get to know yourself better and that you can survive alone.

Once you set those boundaries do make sure you stick to it.

Also dont think you have to stick to what you decide now - you are allowed to change your mind, It has to be a clean start and the past both good and bad has to become irrelivant. But if you feel you want to still be this man even knowing his faults then you can make a new start.

hi new to this but felt I had to say something because something similar has happened to me. Its very hard to forgive or forget, I still haven't but you can still try to make the relationship work. It will require a lot of hard work from both of you and there will be good days and some really bad days. You need to find if he is truely sorry and if he really wants to be with you and do you really want to be with him! Then you need to talk and cry and shout and be honest.I felt really weak because I wanted to try and save our relationship and I know once a cheat always a cheat but until you are in that situation you don't know how you are going to react.

What worries me about your specific situation (reading the thread again) is that he seems to think it's OK for him not to be monogamous, but that you are his property and cannot even flirt with other people. To me that suggests he has basically little or no respect for you, so it would be a lot harder to negotiate an open relationship with him (open relationships work well as long as all the participants have respect for each other and are prepared to negotiate and communicate.)
Sadly what you really want - a way to make him monogamous - just isn't feasible. He is very, very unlikely to change because fundamentally he thinks that his wishes and needs matter more than yours.

Why on Earth do you want to forgive and forget what this person has done to you over and over again.

He kicked you out for kissing a guy and he's been laying around like a rug?

I'm perplexed as to how you've sadly come to think so little of yourself.

You can probably forgive and forget after lots of therapy a few years after your divorce.

Get rid of him.

Problem is not the computer. The problem is him full stop. He has plenty of excuses for what he has done, and it is not surprising that these 'excuses' are based on you or blamed on you etc etc.

Put it this way, if I thought I was going to lose my DH and I wanted to keep him.....the VERY last thing I'd be doing would be meeting someone on the internet or otherwise. So his excuses don't quite match up TBH. He has choices, nobody forces him to do anything, he uses his own free will. He's also using the old 'poor me' line.

You need to look after yourself and don't put too much of yourself into this guy. You deserve much more respect than he is giving.

Goodness me, where to start?

You ask if people think he will stop shagging around.

No, he won't.

If you cannot accept this way of life I feel there is no future for your realtionship. You cannot control him (for very long, anyway), you cannot make him keep his dick in his pants.

I agree with sgb, there is massive imbalance here. He goes off at the deep end 'cos you have a flirty snog and few txts. He has dipped his wick repeatedly. Errr, poor old him can't control himself, he needs the "release".

I say give him his "release" love, with your foot booting squarely up his backside as he exits.

Fucking selfish tosser.