you don't need to wait for him to be sorry before you can forgive him. Maybe he's waiting for you to understand the SSM and the affect it had on him before he can forgive you. Maybe you're both going to hang about in this spot for ages waiting for someone to go first, and if you carry on looking at it as a transaction, you will both be stuck there forever. He doesn't need to be fully sorry yet, or express it in a way that is meaningful to you yet - but you can still forgive him when you are ready to.
And forgiving him doesn't mean staying married, or being married in any particular way, or that what he did was okay. It just means you forgive him and you're able to move on from where you are now.
But if you want marriage 2.0 then you need to grieve marriage 1 and feel all the feelings you need to about that for as long as you need to feel them. Dumping them on him or waiting for him to soothe them is a distraction.
My experience is this: I had to be really really angry for a long time (you will have noticed this on my thread...!) I needed to be bitter and petty and blame him entirely. It was a stage and I needed to pass through it, and whenever I tried to get my H involved in that stage of my own process, or he tried to get me involved his that stage of his process, we kept each other stuck. The separation worked for us - but maybe for you there is another way. But this is the gate you go through.
Then I worked on understanding. It meant moving past the anger and judgement and actually just understanding - right or wrong - that my H had been lonely, in pain, sad, had lost his own wife and marriage, had wounds from his own childhood, and had acted out in very human ways. It hurt me and it wasn't okay, but I understood it. It stopped me feeling both like a poor put upon victim and also like I had the moral high ground. Relinquishing those comfy positions of un-forgiveness is uncomfortable and necessary. I understood what he had done in this way I think even before he described it to me himself. I think I forgave him, or started to forgive him, before he felt sorry - because he was working on his own anger, and forgiving me (and he was doing that, I think, before I had the understanding of how I had hurt him, or how my own childhood wounds had shown up in the marriage to his detriment). When we get tangled up these days, it's generally over who has the 'right' to feel angry and need to forgive, and those conversations go nowhere. Better to avoid them, for us, and work on being compassionate towards my own anger and compassionate towards the pain that I can understand lay underneath my husband's behaviour. I do hate what he did and I would never tolerate it again. But I understand where it came from. And I do feel compassion for him when he was in that place.
