Thank you all for your support and kind words and all the cyberhugs were needed and appreciated.
SbyS - I agree, I have turned back into the true me since finding DB and it has given me a strength and belief in myself. Had this happened 6 months ago, I would have been in a serious mess. The tears come from time to time but it isn't a lost marriage that I cry for, it's the humiliation and the lost years. I do not fear the future at all in spite of living overseas and no house to go home to and no money to go with. I have a house here with many things that have been with me for years but I could walk away from it all knowing that even if I have nothing, I will be happy. I will survive, no matter what.
Chelsea - I too feel very let down to have gone straight from a success to a complete failure. However much work I did, it didn't work on him!! But it did work on me. It still makes me smile when someone says I have superior DB knowledge. I only managed to read halfway through the book before I lent it to someone who (I thought- Ha Ha) had bigger problems than me and needed it more. It is helping her no end, I believe. I will stop by now and again and let you know how thing are. There are a few of you who I always check up on to check progress, even if I don't post.
Bruce, Missy, Rondo - thanks. It is true wha you say Rondo. We all let go of the past to start again afresh but in order to change yourself and learn to do things differently, you have to acknowledge the things that you did which didn't work, or caused problems between you. I would have been very, very hurt if he had been truthful with me but I know it would have been short term and I would have accepted and appreciated that he was being up front and honest, no matter how else I felt about it. If he had told me about 10 affairs and had followed it with his commitment to change and acknowledgement of stupidity and betrayal, I would still have felt better than finding it out the way I did. I don't believe in 'what you don't know can't hurt you'. It hurt our marriage in a big way, whether I knew or not. It was me who didn't know why.
Having said all this, the intensity of my reaction when he told me was something even I hadn't reckoned with. But what has made it so much worse is that I know even then he lied about it. Saying it was only for six months, 3 years ago. I know that is a lie. She sent him a valentine card on 14.2.00 and that's hardly 3 years ago. We don't even live in the same country now but it is only a 30 min flight away. I know he was making arrangements to go back there to live and work just before he was offered this new job and that was only a week before he moved back with me. But none of this came from his lips. I also know that this went on for 2 years and not six months. And as for the past 2 years, who knows what has gone on.
He wrote me an e-mail today and followed up his phone call to apologise to me for his behaviour. He didn't tell me anything I didn't know. He said no excuses, no justifications. What he didn't say spoke volumes. Not a word of love or care, not a word about what HE is going to do about any of this, not a word about how he wants to or is going to change. No sincerity and no passion. He just wants to talk so that I'll fix it as usual. This man isn't on another planet, he's on one which hasn't been discovered yet! He's still feeling more sorry for himself than he is about anything else. I did send him an answer, but not what he wanted to hear.
So I'm looking forward to peace and harmony in my life now. He can run off to his OW and carry on repeating the process of his life. This is his second marriage down the tubes. You'd think he would have learned something by now if he'd ever bothered to grow up.
