Working on acceptance and forgiveness

[AntoniaB]

Yeah me! I finally made a signature after all this time. Anyway thanks for the support, hope and IB. To make this all worse, at least for me, is the fact that my H and I were never intimate with anyone when we started to see one another. We had wanted to "save ourselves" for our married partner, and once we decided we were going to get married, we lost our virginity to one another. So for nearly 23 years, we had an amazing intimate life--and no one else was ever part of that. That's highly unusual in this world, and I'm not on a high horse about or saying it made us better than anyone else, but it was something we shared that was incredibly special. When he dropped the ILYBINILWU speech on me back in '09, he told me that that fact recently made him feel "like a freak" or "abnormal" for a guy. Yet when he ended up leaving me for the OW--he swore, and still does to this day, that it was "never about sex." To this day he insists that he never did anything but kiss her and the guilt of that alone was enough for him to make him not sleep for 3 days until he caved and told me he had to leave "before he did anything worse". That was when he moved out. I don't think it was much longer after that that he became intimate with her. I remember I asked him "how can you do THAT with another woman, after what we shared" and he said "I have to move on with my life." And yet just a few days ago, he emailed me to say he wanted me to "promise him I wouldn't get in a relationship for 'revenge or compensation' but only out of true affection." Like he doesn't want ME to physically be with anyone, but he can do it all he wants, because of course, he is "in love."

So that whole side of things makes this worse on me. I feel like I saved that part of me for one man who felt the same about the "specialness" of that as I did, and to what end? Look where I ended up. Hence I see a guy on match.com who looks compatible with me and I think maybe someone else WILL treat me better and I should abandon all feeling for my H.

Thanks for listening.