Thank you for being patient for me to respond. I am scared to answer you for fear I will get ridiculed by everyone here for talking about myself.....but, here goes.
What held me back for so long and why do I think you should trust your husband? If your husband is truly repentant, as I feel I am, what he feels right now is hurt and shame. I feel so alone, living out of a suitcase with nothing to show for my life. What I want is for my wife to believe in me! That is what I want. Why should she??? Well, I can guarantee that that would be a 180 that would make me run to her!!!!! Why is this stress and cat and mouse so much better?? But, she has and deserves the right to be guarded!!!
How can you make your husband prove to you he is being faithful? Ask to accompany him on things that you normally wouldn't for example. As for what held me back from coming home for so long was that I felt my W was holding something back. I played a game and said I won't come home until she stopped holding back. I didn't expect her to sleep with me, but I did expect if she was fighting that she would fight with me and not behind the scenes. Well, I have done a 180 and realized that my thinking was flawwed. I was thinking about how I would fight and how I thought she should be fighting and not listening to her and what she wanted and needed from me. What I want now is for my wife to just talk to me. Lord knows I understand the anger she feels. Not because she cheated on me, but because of what made me vulnerable in the first place. YES, I KNOW I MADE THE DECISION TO HAVE AN AFFAIR. But I know the anger. The DB book says that forgiveness is a decision one makes. What I want desperately, so badly I cry myself to sleep every nigth wishing I could have it with my wife, is the ability to talk to her. We never shared the intellectual intimacy before and because I can't talk to her now, it is as if we are keeping secrets from each other. It seems silly and stupid but it is what I feel.
What is your husband feeling.....he wants to know what you are thinking, and not just the negative thoughts. Yes, you may be contemplating divorce...and I imagine if you talked that is what you would tell him. But you wont tell him is that you desperately want to trust him, and that you ache for him, and you are scared. What he wants to hear is the second part. Why????? Because if you told him the anger part, he wont dare think the potential part you feel. But if you tell him the potential, he will KNOW you are also thinking about divorce. So in telling him the negative you further reinforce for him how despicable he is and he is likely to trust less that you want to be together. It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Let me ask you, what would he say or do if you showed him you believe in him??? Would it be bad to have positive reinforcement for him??
So, let me try and sum it up like this. What would drive me back to my wife every day, not away, but back is the idea that she and I talked about what we were thinking. I want to profess my love for here and be the best husband in the world and best daddy for my kids. Right now every day is a riddle and I am forced to guess. Some days I feel like I am being punished and if I used her logic that failure to disclose everything is lying, then some would say she is lying to. But I would submit that if you really want to trust each other you have to know each other and that requires communicating. That is a terrible thought process. But, right now I feel alone and scared and I dont know what my W is thinking. If you truly love your husband and are scared, talk to him and say so. If he loves you there is a HUGE chance he will open up and show his humility and excitement for you coming to him. All I want is for my wife to come to me!
I am not sure I can answer how can you really trust him? Tell him every time you are scared! Give him the chance to respond and reassure you! I can guarantee if you are insecure and don't tell him he is not going to guess it. If he doesn't guess you punish him or withdraw from him and he is left to wonder why you are angry and withdrawn from him. Deal with it out in the open! Tell him you WANT to believe in him, not that you dont! In telling him you want to believe him you put the ball squarely back in his court to prove to you where he was and what he was doing.
Does this make any sense?
Originally Posted By: fooled again
Hi Lousy,
Thank you for replying to me. What you are saying is the same thing my H has been saying. And some of the way you describe your marriage sounds like ours. We have hurt each other, we made each other feel insecure by our actions and inactions, we stopped telling each other what we needed, we stopped showing each other how much we loved each other. Part of it had to do with our daughter becoming my sole focus, and part of it had to do with his traveling for work too often. We drifted so far apart that he felt I didn't love him anymore. I didn't know he was feeling this way, but I did know that our marriage was not great. He said that the OW made him feel good and gave him what he needed.
But I have a lot of trouble believing that it's now over and that he is totally committed to us now, even though he keeps telling me. You see, he told me on several previous occasions that his affair was over, but he simply continued seeing the OW. He lied to me so many times about so many things for so long, and each time he told me it was over, it took me a long time to open myself up to him. Eventually, though, the lies started to show through and I became suspicious each time, eventually finding out that the affair was still ongoing.
I understand that your affair lasted a long time, part of that time your wife was aware of it. Now your affair is completely over and you are honestly trying to show your wife your sincerity, love, dedication, honesty and faithfulness. I want to believe that my H is at that place too. How can I tell for sure? How do I know that he is not seeing the OW anymore, that he is not trying to have his cake and eat it? Recently little things and one bigger event has made me suspicious and upset and I am afraid that he is back with her again, or maybe the past couple of months of him trying to convince me have been a ruse. I wish I could know.
Sometimes I feel so crazy with the thought of him still being unfaithful - I feel sick, I can't concentrate on anything, I can't eat, I can't sleep. The only thing that helps is to not talk to him, not tell him how I feel, pull back into myself and put up a wall around me to protect myself from being hurt. I know this is not how to save my marriage, but the alternative is to be so obsessed with the affair that I can't function. I don't want to end up putting up a wall so thick and high that eventually I stop wanting to make my marriage work. I wonder if that's what your wife has done - create a wall that insulates her and that is why she won't talk to you and let you know what she is thinking or doing. These secrets that we keep from our unfaithful H's give us strength, make us feel protected, less vulnerable. When we open ourselves up, we don't feel safe anymore, and if we can't depend on our H's to protect us because they were the ones who hurt us, we focus on protecting ourselves, controlling our world in order to survive.
I feel in my heart, right now anyway, that I will continue to fight for him, or wait for this thing to be over so that we can finally do the work we need to do. But I can't commit to working on our marriage if I think he is still being unfaithful. And I don't know how many times I can do this, I don't know how many times I can be beat down, before he completely destroys whatever love I have left for him and I give up on our marriage.
I want to ask you, what could I do to make sure that he gives her up for good (that is, if he is still seeing her, and I don't know for sure either way)? What did you need from your wife that would have made you give up your lover? What could she have said or done? Or was it simply a matter of you coming to your own realization of what was truly important and nothing your wife could have done would have expedited the process? And when it was really over, how could she know for sure that it was over? What did you do to show her?
I feel that you may be the only person who can answer these questions for me because you are on the other side, and I suspect that you have been for a long time. Please help me understand.
