The truth is, your sitch strikes very close to home. It is eerily similar. I the cheater, come to my senses (in a big way), wife won't give me another chance.
Was your H truly remorseful for what he did? Do you believe he really loves you? Was there anything he could do that might cause you to pause or reconsider?
This was a quote from another person's post, but it is the closest thing I've read in a while that captures what I was feeling when I was making the decision to try to work on the marriage after finding out about the affair or to divorce.
He kept asking what he had to go to get back...it was still all about him. Replace he with she in this, and I wish I had written it.
Quote:
Originally Posted By: gucci loafer
And you are STILL making this all about what you want. She says she wants out, but YOU want her to come back.
So you are still being the same selfish person she always saw in you. IF she wants out then so be it. LET her go. Stop contacting her. Stop trying to win her back. Anything else is making it all about you again. You are basically tellling her once again.. "I don't care what you want, give me what i want. I want to stay together, I want you back, I want another chance"
She doesn't want that right now. Let her go.
I guess around Thanksgiving, my stbx-H asked a similar question: how sorry do I have to be for us to get back together?
I don't remember what I said at the time, but it finally occurred to me why relationships might falter after an affair: it turns into one terrible bean-counting exercise. I've talked about this with my therapist, but essentially it's like he wanted it to be a numbers game. It almost felt like when I played with my kids when they were toddlers, I love you 100x much, I love you a millions times much, I love you a billion times much, I love you infinity plus one! (giggling since my kids are older now).
Anyway, in my situation, there was line that he could cross, no magic number, no series of "I'm sorries" that would be the correct number.
I knew he was sorry, I knew he was deeply, honestly, and profoundly sorry. It was (and still is) terrible to see him still beating himself up over it. He has remorse, but remorse became less and less of a factor, to the point where remorse was not even a point of consideration at all.
TulsaTime, I don't know what your wife is like, so I can't say if there was anything that my stbx-H could have done to make it work. It just didn't matter after a point.
It's like asking what's the best car to buy, and someone tells you 3:30p.m.
