Divorcebusting.com Forums Open Forums THE SEX-STARVED MARRIAGE Z-Bube's PA

ZB I looked up old dogs and children and watermelon wine.

"Old dogs care about you even when you make mistakes.
God bless little children while they're still to young to hate."
When he moved away I found my pen and copied down that line
About old dogs and children and watermelon wine.

The line Old dogs is what BB says makes her like dogs and pets. Bb knows the dogs don't care if she makes a mistake. But to me that is wanting to live in childhood, no worrying about doing things right or other peoples feelings, needs, etc in a real world where people do depend on you and you depend on them, Interdependency.

Do you guys have too much going on in your family? and not enough time for / with each other?

Lou

The thing about dogs is that we don't have intimate relationships with them and they never make any demands on us beyond "petmepetmepetmepetme, feed me, take me for a walk, and play fetch the stick". That's very little to ask for unconditional loyalty. People have higher expectations of each other and very rarely bestow unconditional anything on each other.

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The thing about dogs is that we don't have intimate relationships with them

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Well, the normal ones among us anyway (eeewwweee)

GGB,
Someone had to bring up bestiality. I don't think there are too many people who get into animals to that extent on this bb, anyway. We all seem way too concerned with the other people in our lives.

I used to work in a hospital. Anybody who goes to an ER (how shall we say it?) with an unnatural connection to an animal becomes fodder for the hospital urban legend mill.

I gotta agree, at least I sure hope that is the case. The ewe, was not referring to a female sheep in this case

Yuck, this is giving me the heebie-jeebies just thinking about it. Mea culpa though, I am the one who breached the subject!

Hi ZB, my name's Heather, I usually post in the Infidelity forum, but the title of your thread caught my eye today. I read through from the beginning of just this one thread and something stuck out and I was wondering if you would elaborate some, as I think I would find your thoughts on this helpful in my own situation.

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The nature of the guilt has changed as well. I used to feel guilty for having the affair; now I feel guilty for the damage I did to my M. I know it’s a fine line, but there is a difference...That difference is what has helped me to finally forgive myself.

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I too was the unfaithful partner in my M. My H has been insisting that I am sorry for what I did only because it goes against my morals not because I am sorry *to* him. I've been pretty convinced that there isn't a difference and that he was only saying that as a means to allow himself to continue to punish me and stay angry at me. But now that I've heard the same concept from the mouth of a stranger, I am compelled to give the idea some more thought. I would appreciate anything you can add to your statement above.

Thanks!!

Oh Heather,

Where to start…

This is really difficult. I haven’t read your story yet, but I’m assuming that if you’re the one who had the A, you felt justified at the time. I know I did. In fact, when I went back to W, I really still felt justified in what I had done. If you’ve read this thread and maybe the start of it (which you can find [url= http://www.divorcebusting.com/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=SEX&Number=950654&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=31&fpart=1]here[/url]), then you know that I went back to W because I felt that it was the right thing to do. It’s kind of hard to explain, but even though I knew that what I had done was wrong, I still felt somewhat justified. In fourteen years of M, I had been all but completely denied sex. So I went somewhere else. Yeah, I know I shouldn’t have, but come on – fourteen years of no sex… What do you expect?

So, for me, the guilt went through three distinct phases. I started off with a fairly mild form of guilt. It was only an intellectual guilt: I knew that I had done something wrong and knew that I should be sorry, but I really wasn’t. I was more focused on the mitigating circumstances than on the “crime” itself. It was only after we had been back together for a little while that real guilt began to set in. I think we had been back together for somewhere around a year when I finally confessed to the A and asked for forgiveness. I mean we both knew about the A, but it was one of those elephants in the room that nobody talks about.

That was phase two. I really felt that I had been wrong and I really felt guilty. I was finally facing up to the enormity of what I had done. I can’t say exactly when it started or how long it took, but the change from phase two to phase three was a gradual process. It was a gradual change from feeling guilty for the A itself, to feeling guilty for causing so much pain and so much damage to my M. Concurrent with that change, I also gradually accepted W’s forgiveness and gradually forgave myself. I know what I did was wrong, but it’s long past and we’ve both moved on. We’ve both accepted that we both had a part in the A and we’ve forgiven each other and ourselves.

In fact, I think that the acceptance and the forgiveness are integral to the change in guilt. The A is over. It’s done. It’s history. But some of the after-effects remain. W and I have both forgiven me for the A, but that can’t change the fact that I caused a lot of pain. It doesn’t change the fact that the idealism and the innocence we had pre-A is forever gone. It doesn’t change the fact that W will probably never have the total, complete, 100% trust in me that she had before. The truth is that I learned something and I’m more trustworthy post-A than I ever was before, but who could blame W for somewhere in the back of her mind, entertaining the thought that, “He did it before; he could do it again”.

So the end result is that I no longer feel guilty for the A. The guilt I feel now is for the damage I did to my M. My decision to get involved with OW caused changes in our M that can never be undone. That’s what I still feel guilty about. Like I said, I know it’s a fine line. But it is different.

Zufriedengestellter Bube

ZB, I'm curious about something... did your mind ever wander to a place where you've wondered if your W would have been happier if you hadn't gotten back together? By coming back to the marriage, you've locked both of you in the prison of this R where it doesn't sound like either of you is very happy. Is this better than the guilt? No offense meant... I really am wondering.

(((((ZB)))))