Confronted spouse...now he wont come home

[Nblost]

It's been another week and my husband is still coming home on the weekends and sending me some friendly texts when he is gone. He's silent about the affair, but that leads me to believe it is still going on.

I am going to read him this letter this weekend. It's not exactly fitting the divorce busting philosophy, but I am at the point where I am not willing to live with his affair indefinitely. I am trying not to give him an ultimatum, but yet I won't sit here for months while he cheats on me. If he can't recognize the pain he is causing, this will never end.

My counselor helped me with some of these concepts and trying to stay focused on myself and the marriage versus his sins.

Dear X,

I wanted to share some of my thoughts with you on what has been happening to our marriage.

The past few months have been very painful for me. I am feeling devastated and I have a constant pain in my heart. I don’t think anything could be harder than when I am alone and you are away in an intimate relationship with someone else. I am also struggling to be here with our daughters knowing what is happening to our marriage. I would never want them to go through this and feel this pain.

Deep down, I know why I am trying to endure and survive. I believe our marriage is worth fighting for. Your affair has been a huge wake-up call. I think I told you that in a way, I am glad this has happened. I don’t want to live the rest of our lives how we had been living. Our marriage and our lives needed to improve. I wish we could have gotten to this point in a different way, but we are here.

I know I am to blame for a lot of what has happened in our marriage. I can understand why you are very angry with me and why you have distanced yourself from me. I know if we decide to work on things, I will need to understand those things even more. Our marriage hasn’t been given the attention and passion it deserves. I didn’t give you the intimacy you needed and when you asked for it, I shut down. I know you tried to talk to me about problems in the past. I truly regret not listening better, not getting help and not doing everything I could to improve things. I am sorry. When I think of how I want our marriage to be, I don’t want what our marriage has been like. I want to feel connected to you, I want to have intimate conversations, I want to be passionate, and I want us to be happy. I don’t like living as roommates. I want us to be truly together.

Through this experience, I feel like a lot of layers have been peeled away from me. I feel more open and more in touch with what is important in life. I guess through feeling like I’ve lost control of our marriage, I’ve realized I was trying too hard to control unimportant things before. I let things bother me and didn’t know how to communicate my frustrations to you.

I miss our marriage. I miss really feeling like a family. I miss being able to talk to you and laugh with you. I care about being there for you and I have always loved being your partner and supporting you. I want to have things to look forward to together.

I want to fight for our marriage and work to regain my trust and our love again, but that feels impossible when you are building a new relationship with someone else. If we are going to make our marriage work, we need to both invest emotionally in our marriage and in re-connecting. I have had a hard time seeing how disconnected you are from our marriage and from our family. I have had to start distancing myself from you in some ways too. I can’t be as vulnerable as I need to be until I know you are only with me. It hurts too much.

I am willing to give you some time, but I can’t go on very long like this. I want to move forward and start working on forgiveness and improving our lives. I am scared, but I wanted to let you know how I am feeling.

I also know that words on a page are not enough. I need to prove myself to you and I hope you will give me a chance.