Sanderika - with apologies to Cas for the threadjack.
I read your post several house ago, and have been thinking a lot about it. Like me you have been at this a long time, although our circumstances are different and I am now divorced, and out of contact with my xh [although this took 5 painful years]. I do think that MLC behaviour/affairs, and other affairs are somewhat different in character There is a very good article by Frank Pittman on infidelity which is available on line, explaing that not all affairs are the same. BUT they are all destructive.
I am not letting the MLCer off the hook here. What they do is hurtful and inappropriate. I also think many of us here become very, and perhaps over-focused on getting our marrige restored. For most of us that relationship was the most important thing in our lives for many many years, even if we had successful careers.
There is a phenomenon that economists among us wil know about called 'sunk costs' Basically it explains why people, even sophisticated investors, continue to invest in no-hope schemes and businesses that are failing because they have alraady invested so much they can't see at some point they have to cut their losses. Because they have invested so much in money and hope and time they feel it MUST come good at some point.
Now, I am an advocate of marriage, of DBing, and of forgiveness, but we all have to ask ourselves to what extent is this a habit - of waiting and hoping, and to what extent also is it a sort of game - can I 'win' this one. I will be honest and say I didn't like the perceived 'failure' of my marriage. I also loved my husband and desperately wanted back what we used to have.
I have come to see that perhaps there is a point at which we say 'enough', and recognise that there does have to be repentence, remorse, and a willingness to act on those feelings on the part of our spouse. Not enough just to have the feelings, and feel bad, but for them to realise that they are responsible for the devastation. Whatever was going on in the marriage, real or imagined, was no justification for an affair. We as spouses did not 'cause' our husbands to have an affair and to behave as they did. They chose that path, and need to own it.
The OW, as we know, is a symptom of something very wrong with them Yes, there may be things wrong with us, and with the marriage. Our problems and issues we fix, and the marriage we fix together. Until the OW is out of the picture and there is real ownershp of problems, I would suggest extreme caution in rebuilding anything other than a very tentative friendshp with a spouse who has cheated and behaved as ours have done.
I am not saying rebuilding is impossible, but I have seen a number of instances of where the spouse has returned to a forgiving spouse, without having really owned their problems, and the whole things starts again, months or years down the line. These people are damaged goods.
