#65 finally!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[faithisbelieving]

Strangely, they often do this when they want the affair to end, not the marriage.

I totally disagree with this statement. I think it's the other way around. They don't have the guts to end it so subconsciously they want YOU to do the ugly part. "You filed, not me."

Please don't be surprised if your stbx's remorse morphs to open hostility at some point

Totally agree with this. I wish to post something that was posted by Iamlost on her thread several months ago about cognitive dissonance

The engine that drives self-justification, the energy that produces the need to justify our actions and decisions — especially the wrong ones — is an unpleasant feeling that Festinger called "cognitive dissonance." Cognitive dissonance is a state of tension that occurs whenever a person holds two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions) that are psychologically inconsistent, such as "Smoking is a dumb thing to do because it could kill me" and "I smoke two packs a day." Dissonance produces mental discomfort, ranging from minor pangs to deep anguish; people don't rest easy until they find a way to reduce it. In this example, the most direct way for a smoker to reduce dissonance is by quitting. But if she has tried to quit and failed, now she must reduce dissonance by convincing herself that smoking isn't really so harmful, or that smoking is worth the risk because it helps her relax or prevents her from gaining weight (and after all, obesity is a health risk, too), and so on. Most smokers manage to reduce dissonance in many such ingenious, if self-deluding, ways.

...Thanks to the revisionist power of memory to justify our decisions, by the time many couples divorce, they can't remember why they married. It's as if they have had a nonsurgical lobotomy that excised the happy memories of how each partner once felt toward the other. Over and over we have heard people say, "I knew the week after the wedding I'd made a terrible mistake." "But why did you have three children and stay together for the next twenty-seven years?" "Oh, I don't know; I just felt obligated, I guess."...And the pitiless remark said by many a departing spouse after twenty or thirty years, "I never loved you."

The cruelty of that last particular lie is commensurate with the teller's need to justify his or her behavior...

When the divorce is wrenching, momentous, and costly, and especially when one partner wants the separation and the other does not, both sides will feel an amalgam of painful emotions. On addition to the anger, anguish, hurt and grief that almost inevitable accompany divorce, these couples will also feel the pain of dissonance.

...If you are the one who is leaving, you also have dissonance to reduce, to justify the pain you are inflicting on someone you once loved. Because you are a good person, and a good person doesn't hurt another, your partner must have deserved your rejection, perhaps even more than you realized. Observers of divorcing couples are often baffled by what seems like unreasonable vindictiveness on the part of the person who initiated the separation; what they are observing is dissonance in action. A friend of ours, lamenting her son's divorce, said: "I don't understand my DIL. She left my son for another man who adores her, but she won't marry him or work full-time just so that my son has to keep paying her alimony. My son has had to take a job he doesn't like to afford her demands. Given that she's the one who left, and that she has another relationship, the way she treats my son seems inexplicable cruel and vengeful." From the DIL's standpoint, however, her behavior towards her ex is perfectly justifiable. If he were such a good guy, she's still be with him, wouldn't she?"

The other phrase that some people use here..is...monstrification.

Hang in Kalni. We all support you. Whatever you do, DO NOT BLAME YOURSELF FOR H'S POOR CHOICES, LYING, LACK OF INTEGRITY AND LEADING YOU ON.

Stay strong. FIB