Quote: Oh, I do not blame myself for any of this! I gave this marriage more than a 100%--I have it my whole life and being. Literally, I made a point to be a loving, encouraging wife, never nagged, never compained; if I had a problem I would discuss it. I made it easy for him to love me back. I did not expect for him to guess what I wanted, I let him know. I did not expect to have a fairy tale wedding and for him to be the prince charming. I knew that we are real people in the real world.
Um, well, if you take NO blame for this, or at least understand that things may not have been as perfect as you describe them, then it will be hard to ever see your H as anything but a heartless, disrespectful monster, who could NEVER be worthy of your love or the perfect marriage you created for him.
From the outside looking in it seems a lot like the mothers who talk about how their little 7 year old pagent daughter is perfect in every way; she gets A's in school, is #1 in the state in dance, first chair in the band and always the picture of happiness. What they don't know is that is because it's what they expect of her and so she lives up to that on the outside. On the inside she is miserable and wants to be a messy, B student who has time for hanging out with friends and "being a kid".
Like I said, you may be perfectly correct in your assessment of all this, and I would suspect that due to the way H is reacting to you knowing about the A, that you are either 90% correct in your feeling that the marriage was near perfect and he has realized what he has lost, and he's now desperate to get it back, OR he is still reacting in that "don't want to let Now_Broken down" way, and thus ignoring the reasons why he strayed in the first place.
One additional thing I learned through all this is the idea of validation and not agreeing with the aliens, but validating that they have the right to feel the way they feel. This is what I am talking mostly about, NOT giving him a pass on what he did.
I think I should say that of course, there are men and women who would stray from being God's husband or wife just "because". There are people for whom relationships, no matter how good, have no holding power. I think you and I both know that our H and W are NOT those people.
