Infidelity/WAH, my story pt 13, D busted

[PsySara]

Hi OneArt! I think I know who you are!

To summarize:

WH and I married after knowing each other 3 years, Within a year we experienced a miscarriage and then successfully got pregnant and had our daughter. He just started residency and I was finishing up medical school. I started my residency while pregnant with our second child and we had to commute. By my fourth year of residency (2015-2016) we were having problems. He lived in another state every other week for work and he suddenly became distant and mean. He was fixated on his cell phone and snapping at me for every little thing. In Oct 2015 I found out WH was having a EA/PA with a co-worker when he was away at work. I was 6 months pregnant with our third child, a child he had begged to have as I get very ill during pregnancy. My world turned black.

For the rest of my pregnancy WH went back and forth, breaking NC with the OW and by April 2016 he was cheating again. I did not know until June 2016 and the relationship had already died a natural death. I moved to my home state upon completing my residency and WH continued to work every other week in his work state and our marriage started to an uneasy reconciliation. I attended some IC and eventually tried MC which failed. One minute WH wanted to work on our marriage and the next minute he wanted to D, move away and in rare moments, he talked about abandoning our children. To say he was unrecognizable to me would be an understatement. I was using a DBing coach and trying to apply the DBing techniques (unevenly at best.) WH finally moved in with the family permanently in late 2016 and we had a lot of pursuit vs fleeing throughout. In 2017 I convinced WH to try Retrouville and it was a disaster. We even tried to leave early but the facilitators talked us into staying and completing the weekend. I even went to 3 aftercare appointments (sans WH) but it just wasn't a tool that I found effective.

WH continued to have poor boundaries, mostly with female co-workers and at one point I found he started using snapchat. Of course this app deletes messages automatically and this was no bueno. The fights we had were epic. Finally I gave up and filed for divorce in early 2018. WH continued to text/message females at work and I basically stopped snooping and started picturing myself single. I took my children for the state required classes for an approaching divorce, started looking around for child counselors and making my financial plans for the future. I was friendly and cordial with WH as my goal of good co-parenting was always my focus. WH started looking for nearby houses so the kids would not have to deal with too much upheaval. He even asked me to join him to look at some. While walking through one of the houses WH had a breakdown and literally became ill. We started talking about how we were going to manage all of this. He asked me for one last chance. I told him I was not giving him "another chance" but if he could win me back I might reconsider divorce. I put the divorce on hold (we can do that for 6 months) and sat back and watched. WH stumbled a lot initially and it even got to the point where we went to a second case management hearing to see how the assets would be divided. One night I walked away from WH when we were fighting (over something utterly stupid) and WH actually started doing a lot of heavy lifting. We are now both going forward with a beginners mindset. We have even started feeling limerance for each other. (something I didn't know possible after being married almost 10 years. WH has done some soul searching, some reading and we now have a lot of deep conversations. We have learned to disagree without fighting. WH has become more attentive and I have become less reactive. It is not perfect but I think for us, it's the closest thing to perfect we will experience. WH has extremely strong boundaries and shows 100% transparency. We laugh a lot more, joke a lot more and spend a lot of quality time together. We are happy most days.