Life, One Day at a Time (22 months)

[Accuray]

Doh! Posted this on the wrong thread, moving it here. Sorry!

Adinva,

Re: the sex shop charge -- I didn't mean to set off such a big debate. I've been following your thread since the beginning and I've noticed that like me, you have a tendency to play chess in your head with your relationships. My suggestion is that if you "just ask" you can usually instantly confirm or refute your initial assumption and that can save you a lot of time and angst.

For instance, when you were traveling for work and H was texting you pictures of drug paraphernalia, etc., you assumed that he was doing that to antagonize you and you got upset about H's perceived motivations as a result. He may have been antagonizing you, or he may not have known what to do and lacked the skills to solicit your help in a more productive way.

When you went to the family gathering over the holidays, your SiL did not give you the support you expected, so you assumed that she didn't care about you or had written you off in some way. At the time I suggested you just talk to her because she might not even know about your sitch or how you felt about it. You posted a bunch of angst here over that relationship, but when you then talked to her, you had a very positive experience and discovered that your initial assumptions were off.

I know I do this too, and it helps when people point it out to me, so I'm trying to help you the way that I like to be helped and maybe that is misguided.

Rather than making a big deal about the details about the sex shop charge, I should have made the more general statement that a policy of "just ask" is probably going to help before you go down the road of "...and that means he thinks X, and that means he's going to do Y, and that means I should feel Z." Going down these paths wreak havoc on our emotions and if it's based in an initial misunderstanding, then its good for nothing.

In this case, no, I don't think you should ask H now because you've already gone through the emotional turmoil over it and you're probably right that "it speaks for itself". It's more in the moment that you see it, before you start down the "this means.." road, ask about it. If you can ask in a nonchalant way "hey, I'm just going through these statements you gave me, what's this charge about?". If there's a 100% chance it's going to upset you with no explanation, and a 2% chance that his explanation may avoid the pain, then it's probably worth asking, that's all. No need to role play, no need to work out the next three moves, just ask a simple question and see what he says. If you get a non-answer are you worse off? That's what you had already, but now you're not making assumptions without giving the other party a chance.

In my sitch way back when, I found an e-mail W had sent to OM saying something like "I hope you enjoyed your birthday, you asked for what you wanted and you got it." Naturally I assumed the worst possible interpretation of that and it literally tortured me for days. When I finally asked her about it, she obviously didn't know what the heck I was talking about. She was truly surprised and had no memory of it. It turns out, it was referring to the fact that he asked for a chocolate cake to celebrate his birthday at work and the office manager had gotten one for him. I guess he was hesitant to suggest it and W had encouraged him which lead to the e-mail. I was able to confirm this at the time with a third party. When I see people heading down that road based on seemingly damning scraps of information, I'm compelled to try to say WAIT! make sure you confirm before you ride the roller coaster to the bottom.

WRT how you're feeling about this, boy do I get it! There are fewer things more painful than seeing your spouse open up to someone else in a way that they won't open up to you. My W throughout our marriage has denied me the opportunity to delight her, and has avoided emotional intimacy at all costs. I assumed "that's who she was" and figured that what I was getting was what she was capable of giving. With OM, she was extremely emotionally intimate, and was lobbing him softball opportunities to delight her. When we started reconciling I thought "Great! She's in touch with this new side of herself that we can use to improve our marriage!" Wrong -- what she offered to the OM she shut right down again in returning to our marriage.

My MC said what people put forward in affairs isn't "real". They don't have the emotional capacity to sustain it. It is only the context of the affair that allows it to come out. i.e. the women you witness your H being affectionate with would be no better off than you are if they were in a long term relationship with H, because the *real* H is the one you see, not the one they see.

I don't know if that helps or not, but I'm very familiar with the pain you feel over this particular incident, and I'm very sorry you're going through it. At this point I do think you should let it drop.

Accuray