I didn't read your last thread, but I read this one. You did NOT waste 9 years of your life because your STBXH left you for an affair. Life doesn't work that way. Besides, you are YOUNG! Really!!!!
Control what you can control. You can't control him. You can't control OW. You can only control yourself.
Are you GAL'ing? Are you doing 180's? DB is marketed as a "last ditch" effort to win your spouse back, but what I found over the last year was that it has been WAY more about making myself a much better version. I took all the time and energy I would have WASTED on my XW and used it to upgrade myself. While I was in the worst of it, I did GAL with an empty feeling. I did it because this site taught me to do it. But it really did make a difference in my life going forward. I worked out a lot, ate better, dropped like 50 freaking pounds. Went out, made new connections, made new friends, GOT A LIFE. It saved me from imploding.
Divorce is hard. Getting cheated on is hard. Being the LBS is HARD. But this was not about you, TJT. This has always been about your spouse. You are NOT deficient. And even if you were, that is not a reason to cheat. Just reading what you've written here gives me the impression that you're a caring, thoughtful, and intelligent woman. Listen, you were good enough to get him to marry you in the beginning, and you're good enough now. It's not about that. It's about your H being a cheater. They don't need REAL reasons to cheat, and they will even MAKE UP reasons to justify their actions. They don't live in reality.
I've gone over my failed marriage a lot lately since myself and WW have decided to reconcile post D. I have asked her a lot of questions trying to understand why she left me for a loser. She really had no good reasons. There was never any comparison, to be honest. The OM can't hold a candle to me in any way. She had a mental breakdown and left me because she ran from her situation and went to someone else because they were new and she saw a way out. Now that is different than your sitch, but I tell you this because I want you to know that you are not at fault, no matter what your self-perceived deficiencies might be.
I wracked my brain to figure out why my XW left me. I eventually realized that none of it had to do with me. A year later, she verified that that was 100% true. She remembers every hateful word she told me, but she cannot explain why she was so vile other than she was doing her best to try and make me leave her alone. Which I did, through NC... yet she still persisted through contacting me for no reason. I can say that nothing she did made sense during that time, and she has no explanations either.
So it doesn't matter if your H is a WH WAH or having a MLC. Not many of their decisions are going to be rational, so the best you can hope for is to understand that you simply can't understand. They can't be rational to the rest of the world because they can create their own reality and justify their actions based upon that.
Stay strong. The first thing you have to save in a divorce is not the marriage, it's yourself.
Save yourself. Nobody is coming! BD:11/2017 Filed:12/2017 Final: 2/2018
