I value your opinions and appreciate your feedback very much. I am deeply disappointed that the integrity I attributed to H/XH appears not to be there. That is one of the main reasons I "stood" all this time. Now I am feeling as though the persona that I knew was a mask. ............and I guess on some level I have come to that realization slowly since the bomb. I understand now that he wears the mask (and to be honest a lot of us wear masks at times) because that allowed him to survive a traumatic childhood.
I don't have a problem setting this boundary. My problem has always been that I tend to be a distancer (because of my mother's frequent and unexpected rages during childhood) and I have really been trying to change. (Hence my reference to myself as a "demure ice princess type" a couple days ago here.) It would be the easiest thing in the world for me to fall back on that old behavior.
What I would very much like to do is to set this boundary in a more self-actualized way. I would welcome folks' feedback on what this might look like. I think that at the very least I would start by telling XH that I can't continue to play table tennis with him if OW#2 doesn't know what's happening.
But what I would like to say is that friends do things together and share one another's lives. If he ever wants to do that with me in a less superficial way I would be open to that, but that this so-called friendship has been unbalanced for some time and I deserve better than being treated like someone that he sneaks around with behind OW#2's back.
