No children to draw him back.....no what???

[NikB]

Please don't assume there's no hurt or pain - you can't read his mind, so you just don't know. Most of what he's doing is most likely to hide/cover the pain.

Someone who is in a happy, healthy, loving marriage doesn't just wake up one morning and decide to have an affair. There is a LOT of pain that the person went through before that happened. It's just so much more sudden for us as the LBS, I think. What the WAS has been thinking about for months or years (and while they've been working on detaching from the R that whole time), the LBS has to take in all at once.

I honestly haven't seen anything that you love or want about HIM specifically, in any of your posts. It sounds like you want a significant other in your life, and you loved your idealized version of him (which is not the real him). This is definitely normal and natural to want! But I hope you're really stepping back and looking at that.

My H asked me once in the beginning of all this if I truly loved HIM or if I just loved our life together and what I thought we had. Rather than answer right away I really thought it through and found that I DID in fact love him specifically - but it really is something important to think about.

Maybe try visualizing your ideal R - what would it look like? Who would YOU be in that R, and how would you act? What would you want from your partner? (don't make this about your H - write down what you would truly want in a perfect world).