Betrayed Spouse

[25yearsmlc]

[quote=dale165]To all the great people here, thank you for your replies and advice. Been 5 days of detachment. Last Friday was our 7 year anniversary, made it tough but I'm getting better. Since Im a math guy, I would put my healing at 3%.


okay real quick, ^^ this was my first laugh of the day. I have a brother who talks in math terms but unlike you, he has no math background~ Just throws out %'s all the time.
Bro means well~
Anyhow...


If I kept going the way I was, I may have been sent to a psych ward (joking but who knows, I was almost there). I was forgetting how to do menial tasks. Hard to even get a constructive email or post done.

We get it. The smallest of choices, even choices that were not necessarily triggering anything, seem hard...but worse when they trigger emotions, even indirectly.

Ex - I went to get a desperately needed filing cabinet for the enormous paperwork 35 years of memories and insurance and medical records & finances and Divorce related.....(h has the filing cabinets and ALL the paperwork but I was not in a position to get them, so that's life).

SO I "research" which filing cabinet to get...you'd think it was deciding which heart surgeon to use...but I finally (2-3 weeks later) decide on one, and I go to the store...

and oops, my car's trunk is not big enough. So I didn't get a filing cabinet. This was a month ago. My guest room "office" has piles of papers on the floor. Still. And I've been in my own place 100 days now.

The smallest of tasks, let alone emotional ones, seem too complicated or difficult.

Welcome to a barely functioning level of depression.

Know one thing; it gets better. I don't say that merely to console you, but to speak truth.


In my 30 years, I never suffered any kind of loss. No family, friends, or relationships since she was my first one. I was clueless and still am to a degree.

at age 16 my heart was broken. (To my surprise, that still counts as a top 10 most painful experiences of my life--No, no it does not hurt me NOW - but back then, I felt it very deeply & no r with another man hurt me again, till my marriage.)

By the time I was your age I'd lost a bff in a car accident and my dad to cancer.
Others who have faced loss will tell you this - in their own ways

-the pain lasts but it is not eternal - and it's deeply painful but it is not fatal.

My mind was constantly filled with trash such as how can I embarrass them? I need to jump on dating websites to find out who's left? Why me?

Grief books mention (OFTEN, almost naggingly) that one step we have to take is gratitude, or at least perspective.

Sheryl Sandberg (CEO of Facebook who lost her h suddenly) said she resisted the "gratitude" piece b/c she felt the exact opposite. She was not "grateful" that she managed laundry that day, and she was not "grateful" that she had so many good years with her h before he left (although she would not have traded those years for anything).

In time she conceded that her h's undiagnosed heart problems could have been triggered while he was driving her & the kids somewhere, and killed them all, rather than when he was alone, working out. She did cede that distinct possibility and that there was some "less than horrible/could have been much worse" dimension to her loss.

She pointed out that just getting perspective on bigger problems or worse things did help her with the one part of grief that felt self centered, the "why me?" part.

In the grand scheme of things - living in western cultures and developed nations means our problems of a broken heart might even seem like a luxury. A broken heart sure doesn't feel like a "Luxury"

but when pressed, I admit knowing most people in the world are wondering about where their food supply will come from, if their water is potable, or whether they''ll have marauding warlords in their village again, stealing their children and killing them, sometimes makes me stfu in my head.

Turning to my own community...There are so many divorces in our nation, it makes me sad to think about how many walking wounded there are all around us.


I've done some embarrassing things through this. One glaring example would be I spent almost all day going on any website and seeing if my wife's login/pw combination worked. I found some crazy stuff. Stuff I wish I could erase.


We get it. The desire for details is a strange invitation to more pain that most of us face. Maybe at some level we irrationally hope there will be validation of us - but that's just not at all likely, given the givens.

And this^^^ is something you can change and have learned from already. No more self inflicted pain, eh?


My relationship immaturity has shined through this. Even though what my W has done is despicable, she is still my wife and I need to show her some respect. I decided not to give up on my M but I have decided to let go. When I say I couldn't do it anymore, I really couldn't.

I think you're a fast learner.

Letting her go is not the same as giving up. Hope can remain - as long as it does not become attached to expectation or stagnation.

Hang in there