Choc, When you first find out, #3 is all you can think about. But as you go thru it, the disrespect and the deceit/lack of trust move to the top. Marriage is hard enough when you DO trust someone, but you just have issues to work on. When you don't trust them, don't love them anymore, and rarely even like them, it really is time to move on. of judge and jury role.
It isn’t that I’m trying to say I told you so, because I think it is easy to fire someone up, get them angry, guide them to step into their own sense of power and then swing start swinging that ax. Empowerment always feels good. When someone feels like they have been walking on eggshells for years, that sense of liberation is truly like lifting the weight of the world off your shoulders.
But what I have found is that it is still the easy way out, not as easy as staying in your old rut, avoiding responsibility, going back to old roles, playing martyr, etc., but a lot easier than the work it takes to transform a relationship and grow beyond the anger and resentment.
I’ve been where you are now and it does feel good. But your current path will still mean the end of your marriage. Maybe that is good. I don’t know. Maybe finding someone else will be better. Not sure about that either. But I do think that even for you the best outcome would be to have a healthy, recovered relationship with your wife, with your family intact and the history you two have shared together. It might well be that this is the only way to get there, that by divorcing, you two can come together later. Don’t know. Just don't get caught in placing the blame for your break up on your wife and her infidelity.
IMO, your statement about how you feel toward your wife is only valid for today. You are empowered now and I think you may feel like the world has opened up to you, which it has. But that does not mean the lack of feelings you have toward her now can’t turn around completely in the future. It was for your own lack of assertiveness (not blaming, just acknowledging that they were due to your own issues) that you allowed the world to become closed off to yourself. So think twice about rejoicing that you have somehow lifted this burden that your wife placed upon you. That's why I think basing such a decision as divorce on how you feel today will be misleading for how you might feel tomorrow.
1. Her disrespect of me;
2. Her deceit to me and our immediate familiy;
3. The actual affair itself.
All of these things are valid points. They are also only half of what happened because I suspect she could make very similar accusations of you, though with her own twist to it of course. So you have no regrets now. Now one ever does. Regrets come later, only after we have learned enough to look back and see the other side of the coin.
I'm not trying to blame you for filing, just trying to tell you that there is still a lot of hard work ahead. I suppose one good thing is the improve mental attitude and the self confidence you now have which will be an asset later, with someone else or in reconciling with your wife. My point is that this sense of confidence did not have to come about via divorce. There are lots of other ways. You did not run out your options yet. You just thought you did.
