Thanks for taking the time to produce such a balanced, helpful post on forgiveness. I think that, whether or not a marriage is saved after a breakdown or affair, forgiveness is absolutely necessary to either partner in order to be able to heal.
In my case, I had been a sexually abused child who spent 22 years going through the almost impossibly difficult process of reclaiming/saving myself. During this time I got married, had children, etc, but my marriage suffered because I was often acting in ways that were not yet healthy. Of course, my H, too, had physical and verbal abuse in his past that he minimized and had not yet addressed.
Quite unexpectedly, the abuser became quite prominent (nothing to do with his sexual proclivities), and I became distraught and almost suicidal. Someone suggested I needed to forgive him, and at first I though I couldn't because he was unable to admit his guilt or take responsibility. However, I learned that the forgiveness had nothing to do with him; rather, it was a way to remove him from being a figure of any importance in my life.
Forgiving him was the best thing I have done in my life. Soon, he became irrelevant. I stopped having the nightmares, the depressed periods, the feelings of being a victim, and felt a sense of peace and being "present" I couldn't ever remember having had.
A week or so later, my H started raving about this amazing woman at work who was brilliant, the nicest person there, needed a ton of help from him to get the job she really ought to have--the whole OW deal. And a part of me thought, I always wondered why I was chosen never to have a normal childhood, etc--but now I think part of it was so that I could learn to forgive. And now I'm going to be tested on that....
My H's MLC and EA eventually ended. By then we'd both done a lot of growing, and knew how to love each other in a mature and non-codependent way. I learned to forgive myself for everything I'd done wrong in the marriage, but in a compassionate, "you did the best you could at the time with the resources you had, but how would you like your best self to act from now on?" kind of way. I went through the process of forgiveness for my H when I was finally ready to do it without anger, and eventually he forgave himself for the EA as well.
Like Saffie, I didn't forgive the OW, though I did allow myself to feel some compassion for someone who is so obviously damaged, but she has receded to some unimportant place in my mind.
Forgiveness truly is a gift you give yourself. It's the difference between fumbling around in the dark tripping over obstacles, and turning on the light to see a clear path in front of you--it gives you a sense of peace and clarity that is invaluable.
