Divorce because I betrayed her trust - I regret it

[DaB35]

It was down to me being too introverted. My family are quite quiet and we don't really express our emotions very much. However my wife's family is very much heart-on-sleeve, loud, opinionated, sweary, almost hot-headed. It was a shock when I met them all the first time, particularly her sister.

Her sister gave a really bad impression to me when I met her as she had a massive go at my wife when she was my girlfriend at the time, berating her for not having a good career or sorting her life out at 23 when she was already married with 2 kids. I thought it was inappropriate to fight back for her as I was in her parents' house with her entire family there! But I've always been weary of her since then. My wife is thankfully not like that, but is always seeking approval from her sister; she's always trying to tell her how to live her life and pressuring her to have kids etc. Perhaps that was why I uploaded the innocent photo of her sister in that chat, to take her down a peg or two...? Anyway that's done.

When I was younger I always got things right. When you get older of course, you make mistakes but I don't cope with that well, I hate failure. Therefore even tiny things I'd do wrong I'd dwell on. For example, we paid £140 for new blinds in our house and I measured the window frames incorrectly. So when it came to fitting, my wife discovered only 1 out of the 3 we ordered (bespoke) was correctly fitting! She had a go at me but I really dwelt on that for months after. Hence the use of p**n - I used it as an escapism, to get out of my negative states from building up lots of instances when I'd messed up, however irrelevant they may seem. Now, my therapist is working on my increasing my 'tolerance' for mistakes - it's OK to mess up! It's how you deal with it that counts. Using those sites meant I could project a 'fake' persona and do things totally out of character with no consequences (well, so I thought). You are anonymous and "using a fake username so it's ok". Then once you 'act out', you return to normal life and go about your daily business. But then a bad thing will happen again, and then you feel guilt about acting out, so you act out again to get rid of the negative state. The brain becomes 'wired' to always going down that path to escape feeling bad about yourself.

Interesting.

I am GALing (love all the abbreviations on this site!) certainly.

She has texted today asking me to get some estate agents to value the house this week (she is abroad on holiday with friends).