Keep Your Hands Offa My Mojo

[AlexEN]

Quite a ways up, @Smiley made some comments that didn’t get a whole lot of play in the subsequent “Wow”-ish dialogue, but which resonated loudly and clearly with me… And, besides, if @A&K can make a cameo appearance, what the heck, I can, too…

You made your choice, and you chose {Signore Schmuckatelli}. When you said to him and everyone in your world who knows about him that you just couldn't go without having him available to you - you chose.

Let me put it in the words you used to me to rationalize and justify your affair. You said to him, to your world, and to yourself that your relationship with this "distraction" with whom you'd had the "briefest of one-night-stands" (something so trivial you could hardly remember it, with a person so easy to blow off after he acted like a jerk that it "was like swatting a fly") that relationship was worth eating crow over to publicly acknowledge your desire for a continued connection.

You chose to declare through your actions that that relationship with this man whom you yourself described as "an irrelevance" was worth keeping alive. Your marriage? No, that wasn't worth it. But {Signore}, who'd made you feel so "repulsive" because "he wouldn't even use you for sex?"

Well that must have been an affair to remember.

That choice is your privilege.

But privileges still come with a price. When you chose it you also chose never to know me as anything but the kids' father - and your *sshole ex-husband - again. I have to assume the price is worth it.

This and the follow-up comment, in my book, deserve much more consideration and discussion, because I, too, wonder if others disagree, as I know I couldn’t agree any more…

I think it's a fair boundary to say, "Hey, you want to sustain your relationship with the man you cheated on me with and left me and the kids for, that's your right; but it's my right to perceive that as a rather direct slap in the face and not to want to engage with you on anything but the one area of mutual interest we have, which is the kids."

Talk about cake-eating, right? She wants to be able to get together with Signore AND ex-Husband? "I wish we could just get past all this and be close again." Well if wishes were horses, even beggars would ride.

That attitude strikes me as being quite disrespectful -- or do you disagree?

In fact of all the things I’ve lived through in the last couple of years, this is the second-most difficult “angle” to deal with (the first is being witness to the enormous strain and pain this has caused the children, but I don’t want to digress too far). I can get past an affair (or two); I can get past the lies; but, as @Puppy often points out, and as @Smiley comments here, it’s respect, or the lack thereof, that is perhaps the hardest hurdle to overcome. In my sitch, it is manifested exactly as in Smiley’s… My W has made it abundantly clear that she wants to be friends but that she also plans to stay in touch with supposedly “irrelevant” others. Ya know, the affair(s) have nothing to do with why we are getting divorced; it (since she doesn’t consider the EA to have been an A, too) was irrelevant. Okay, BUT, if that’s the case, and you want to be friends (or even friend-y) how is it that I can maintain any self-respect when her words and actions distill to, as @Smiley says, the unmistakable conclusion that an irrelevant relationship is worth keeping alive, but your marriage (and your family) weren’t?!?!?!?!?!? Yes, it is her right to want to choose as she wishes, but I have little to no inclination to want to stay “friends” with someone who takes that stand. One of two things is true: (1) the “irrelevant” OP is in fact irrelevant, in which case cutting them out of one’s life permanently shouldn’t be such a tall order (heck, at least lie about it and don’t flaunt the fact that you plan to stay in touch – you know, kind of like you did when you were having the affair ), or (2) the “irrelevant” OP is not in fact irrelevant, in which case I want to be your BFF because what?

I don’t think this is a matter of “staying above it” as, IMO, by perpetuating the lack of respect (on many different levels) that an affair represents, it cuts to the very heart of why “friend-i-ness” can be an ever-elusive-but-oh-so-altruistic yet, in this case, unpalatable end.

But, getting back to @Smiley’s question: Do others disagree?