SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

InkHulk, I am going to do my best to try to summarize what I believe is happening. There are really two issues here:

1. Whether you can see a path from your WW's affair to R. For better or worse, you seem to be able to. You are running into two many MC who believe that the path is nice and grassy swept clear of pebbles (according to them they were rugswept by the wind into the woods I suppose). You seem to be more aware that the smooth grassy path leads into fields with nothing but cow manure and that is not acceptable to you. You are aware that if there is a path to real R, then it is a path with a lot of pebbles, in fact it is overall quite rocky and steep.

2. Whether your WW will ever be a safe partner with you. And this includes, for the next few years, walking with you on this rocky path towards R. That seems quite unclear. And what is also unclear is whether you are being too indulgent of her not carrying her weight on the journey of this path.

As for people telling you to set your faith at the door, I think what they are saying is that you may be getting confused on what forgiveness means. You can forgive your WW while simultaneously divorcing her. If you do choose D, you can give her a settlement that is fair and generous to her and you can treat her respectfully from there on out. In the parable where the man was forgiven of $1M but would not forgive $500 owed to him, I don't think anyone was asking the man to stay close friends with the man who owed him the $500, just forgive his debt and let him go in peace.

Inkhulk: Sorry, I didn't know you had replied to my question. Thanks for the answer.

Jesus tells a story about a man who was forgiven a massive debt, an amount the man could never hope to pay off. That man promptly goes on to try to collect a minor debt from another man. When asked for the same mercy he was given, the man refuses and has his debtor thrown in prison over a tiny fraction of what he was forgiven. The story doesn’t end well for that guy.

I don't get why this guy is considered bad. He was forgiven because his debt was non-payable. He had no ways to pay it. Hence, he was forgiven. But, the other guy's debt was tiny. He had many ways to pay it, but he still chose not to pay it. Hence, he was sent to jail. The difference is that one guy did not have a choice, and the other guy did. The other guy was punished for the choice he made.

Your wife's infidelity was a choice. She wasn't forced to commit infidelity. Right now, she is choosing not to fulfill all the reasonable conditions you put forward.

Vulnerability and humility
Deep answers to why
Empathy uninterrupted by shame
Passion, including sex
The full truth, to my satisfaction
Respect

So, until she fulfills those conditions, forgiveness should be off the table.

[This message edited by Lurkingsoul12 at 7:55 AM, Sunday, April 9th]

Is your WW as devout in her faith as you? Do you discuss the relationship between practicing her faith, her A, snd her malignant behavior you describe as part of her A? Is she bringing her faith into the R process all in as you are doing?

I think WBFA and Lurking had pretty similar posts, so I’m going to reply to both with this.

I don't get why this guy is considered bad. He was forgiven because his debt was non-payable. He had no ways to pay it. Hence, he was forgiven. But, the other guy's debt was tiny. He had many ways to pay it, but he still chose not to pay it. Hence, he was sent to jail. The difference is that one guy did not have a choice, and the other guy did. The other guy was punished for the choice he made.

I recommend you check out the source material, it has more to it than what I summarized here. If you google "parable of the unforgiving servant" it will come right up. My take on it is that it is not a question of choice vs no choice, but I invite you to make up your own mind. That story comes just after the statement that we should forgive "not seven, but seven times seventy times", and it ends with "if you don’t forgive your brother from your heart, the same will happen to you". (Emphasis mine) Forgiveness is a deadly serious question in my life.

And I understand that forgiveness and reconciliation are not the same thing. The cleanest distinction though comes with the offender being unrepentant, at which point all the victim can really do is forgive mostly for their own sake. But with a penitent person, it’s much harder for me to separate the two. I believe I could D if I wanted to, but right now I really don’t want to.

Your wife's infidelity was a choice. She wasn't forced to commit infidelity. Right now, she is choosing not to fulfill all the reasonable conditions you put forward.

It was her choice, made many times over and leading into even more offenses like dishonesty. She is working toward fulfilling my list. As Superesse observed and many others have said, the things we need from our WS’s for R is exactly the kind of things they lack that got them into infidelity in the first place. If we won’t allow for growth over time, we’re dead in the water.

So, until she fulfills those conditions, forgiveness should be off the table.

I don’t think that’s how it works. As just said, you can’t expect the Titanic to turn on a dime, and being overly punishing can break the damaged human spirit that we want to reconcile with. I think it’s much more like "she takes a step, I match that step". I decided to add the culmination of the parable of the prodigal son to my signature because I think that is much closer to my template. Not rugsweeping, the story doesn’t say that happened (IMHO). But having an attitude of being glad to see your betraying loved one come back home penitent. I want that heart. I want the people around me to have that heart.

Is your WW as devout in her faith as you? Do you discuss the relationship between practicing her faith, her A, snd her malignant behavior you describe as part of her A? Is she bringing her faith into the R process all in as you are doing?

Is she as devout in her faith as me? I think the answer is yes. There is a saying, the church is not a museum for saints but a hospital for sinners. Also, Augustine said "The church is a whore, and she is also my mother." I don’t believe her transgression says she is irredeemable.

Do we discuss how her faith intersects with the A? No, not really. It’s so comically antithetical to her faith that all that is left is "why the fuck would you do that?", and her figuring that out is going to take time.

Is she bringing her faith into the R process? Yes, I believe she is. I see signs that she knows how badly she fucked up (I genuinely believe she was suicidal), and her faith is in God is her framework to recovery. I believe she has a similarly deep interwoven faith in her life as I do, and it took amazing compartmentalization for her to be able to do this.

Reminder: There is to be no religious debate. Do not continue to bait InkHulk into defending his or his WW’s faith.

I certainly acknowledge that I’ve introduced religious topics. It’s pretty deeply rooted in all this for me. I want to respect guidelines while remaining authentic. I welcome additional input on where lines are there.

So some updates on the question of why did you start this hobby with the kids. Thanks again to CT for refocusing me on the question at hand. She stands by her answer that her primary motivation was to do something good for our son. He lost an activity he was excited about due to the pandemic, and it just so happened that POSOM’s hobby was a close substitute. My wife says she had a lot of reservations and fears about bringing in kids and OBS, but POSOM just dismissed those concerns and she caved. I find that to be in character and believable.
She also addressed the trip she took with them after the A had cooled off. She said she had put the offer out there in a time where the A was still significantly active. Tragically, what I’ve been told is OBS is herself a sexual assault victim and basically trusts her kids with no one except parents and they were too sick to take kids for an extended period of time. So the great opportunity was for my wife to go with and nanny. She says that when they did finally come back around and ask to take her up on her offer that she was wanting out of the A but felt a sense of obligation. She said it was almost a penance to OBS, but I’m also guessing she had loyalty to POSOM mixed in there too. So she ignored my strongly stated objection to this trip and went along.
And if the isn’t enough: as she was filling out this trip story for me, I realized that I had made some assumptions about when the sexting part of the relationship ended. I assumed it was after they last had sex, but apparently not, apparently that stretched out another six months or so. And as I put all that together in my head, I realized that the last time she went to go sleep with him that it may well have been within days after I got some scary health news. It doesn’t rise up to a new D-day, but it feels really heavy. It’s just hard to chalk it all up to fog. This is 18 months into it and she’s said the connection was fading at this point. I just don’t get it.

I think it defies answer and explanation InkHulk, except that it is good she is grappling with it. I hope she does reach the WTF ‘this is no way to live’ point, that it runs deep and is transformative.

Affairs tarnish and qualify so many memories.

when I was about 8 my father was having sex with his AP (future stepmother) in our home, in the marital bed sometimes, and on one occasion AP left the gate open on the way out. My dog got out, got hit by a car and had to have her leg pinned. We had a beach house at the time (sold in the divorce). We all tiled and painted it as a family to save money. And Dad would send us ahead. We thought he was so hard working but he was with his AP, the wife of a colleague and a family friend. I have a lot of good memories of that place, but the whole thing was also a dirty trick. The only good answer is that you can’t let yourself live or be like that. The negative ramifications span way longer than you might think, like 50 years or more.

I am convinced that part of the thrill of affairs is a nascent sense of just how high the stakes are. It is so corrupt and sad.

[This message edited by straightup at 3:50 PM, Monday, April 10th]

Me personally I was legally married for decades. Since wh was a liar from the beginning I consider myself never actually married.

InkHulk, forgive if this has already been addressed, but has your WW written out a detailed timeline?

It was helpful not just to my husband but to me, as well, to write out the details as it happened. It helped me understand some of my own feelings as the A developed. I think this could be particularly helpful with the timeline around the activity and leading up to the trip.

I can almost guarantee that she herself doesn’t have a good understanding of her thought process and motivation during this time. Of course she will land on what makes her sound and look "less bad" during this time. It takes a pretty deep dive to get to point that we understand which part of us is driving the bus. Most people want to be perceived as "good". To admit that our intentions are less than good would be to admit that we have a darker side. Your wife has teeth and she is capable of biting. She will need to be able to admit that without shame. To do so will require work to understand what motivated her to bite in the first place. You can’t bite with good intentions, rather with purpose.

InkHulk, forgive if this has already been addressed, but has your WW written out a detailed timeline?

I guess it depends on your definition of detailed. This lasted for over 3 years, a fully detailed accounting would be a novel. And it’s complicated in my mind by the way things played out in the first week. She put together a rather detailed story at first that turned out to be a mishmash of details from different times. I think she pulled those in to make a sort of believable story, but it didn’t fool SI. So then when she broke with that lie and gave me the story I have now, I still worry that I have details mixed up from the first lie. And the second wasn’t nearly as detailed, either sexually or chronologically. I could potentially still ask her to do that, but honestly I think at this point I understand it. The A was very sexting heavy due to distance and I have a bolus of questions around that that need to get answered soon. I had enough information to put that connection together with my health scare, I’m actually surprised I hadn’t made it yet. I’ve asked her if she realized that connection, haven’t gotten an answer yet (I fired it off during a fairly disregulated moment upon figuring it out). If she knew this was hanging out there, it feels deceptive. And if she didn’t ever think about it, it makes me feel all the more invisible.

It was helpful not just to my husband but to me, as well, to write out the details as it happened. It helped me understand some of my own feelings as the A developed. I think this could be particularly helpful with the timeline around the activity and leading up to the trip.

I think at this point I need her to be driving things that are for her sake. I’ll advocate for what I need, seems like she has to drive her own healing.

I can almost guarantee that she herself doesn’t have a good understanding of her thought process and motivation during this time. Of course she will land on what makes her sound and look "less bad" during this time. It takes a pretty deep dive to get to point that we understand which part of us is driving the bus.

Yeah, I think she is on a pendulum swinging from self hatred back around to a more positive self outlook. I don’t think the self hatred is tempered enough to help with introspection and the high self view probably doesn’t see the need. I worry about this part, about her really even caring to deep dive herself. I think she is in broad terms in understanding her inner critic and people pleaser tendencies. The idea of her digging into specific things like this, I’m not holding my breathe.

(Editted: forgot to reply to part of the message)

[This message edited by InkHulk at 6:04 PM, Monday, April 10th]

Me personally I was legally married for decades. Since wh was a liar from the beginning I consider myself never actually married.

That sounds brutal and like a lot of ongoing cognitive dissonance. I’m sorry it’s been that way for you.

What do you get for getting up to 500 posts?

Just had a conversation about the convergence in time of my health scare and the last sexual encounter. She said that she didn’t realize it, it wasn’t tied together in her memory. Which puts me down the "I was invisible" path, which sucks, but isn’t surprising.

For some strange reason, I keep on getting the image of Keyser Söze (The Usual Suspects) in my head whenever IH posts about his WW....

InkHulk, this thread is past 200 posts. What have you gotten from this thread? Any new insights on getting yourself out of infidelity in particular?

You had originally asked "How long have I been married" and a few of us--I guess myself especially--have expressed some rather strongly worded opinions and may have gone too far. BUT, looking back, **you** were the one who asked the question "How long have I been married" and so you seemed to be asking how you should view the situation.

You have the patience of Job. You have committed to R even though your WW doesn't seem to be a candidate for R. You seem awfully focused on your WW's healing, but what about your own? You also have anger and rage--when will it be your turn. (You seem to be thinking a lot about not overburdening your WW instead....This and the commitment to R before your own healing....Hence the "rugsweeping" comments on your threads) Does she have the strength to get down on the carpet with you? Will she ever. Your WW still frankly seems concerned about herself--HER shame storms etc.

I mean I know we all have to find our own path through this life, but...damn

[This message edited by WontBeFooledAgai at 8:20 PM, Tuesday, April 11th]

InkHulk,

I’ve read most of your dozens and dozens of posts and am still baffled about what it is you really want. It seems to me that by totally focusing on your poor, delicate WW and all her FOO issues you don’t really have to confront her or yourself and ask the tough questions. It appears you’re trying to grasp anything that will allow you to stay and not D or even demand full participation in R from you WW. You keep saying and doing the same thing and expect a different result. It’s just not going to happen.

She said that she didn’t realize it, it wasn’t tied together in her memory. Which puts me down the "I was invisible" path, which sucks, but isn’t surprising

This really resonated to me. I was incredibly timeline-focused. I spent the first year going though memories of things that happened during my H's 8 month A and 'adjusting' them (or re-processing them) in my mind. A few years ago, my husband was talking about a really fun ski trip we'd been on years prior and I immediately commented, "oh the one that happened a month prior to D-day?" and he just looked at me dumbstruck. He actually thought I must have been mistaken at first - but I was able to go back and find a picture which proved that yes, it had occurred during the A. It blew his mind. He didn't remember it that way. He truly remembered special things WE had done and moments WE had had during the trip. Which is funny, because those were the memories I would have had too until I learned of the A. In his mind, those memories were still in tact - his AP played no part in it. In my mind however, they were inexorably tied together.

I feel like it really hit home how completely he had been able to compartmentalize his feelings during those times. When he was with me, he really was being present. He wasn't thinking about her or wishing she was there instead. I can see why he FEELS that he loved me during that period of time (even though that is clearly not how he acted). I believe him when he says that is the way he FELT. I was his real life and his A was just this little thing that he put in a box and did not think about when I was around. It's almost incomprehensible to me because my mind just does not work that way, but he and I are clearly not the same person.

how completely he had been able to compartmentalize his feelings during those times

The book The Mind is Flat really opened my (flat) mind to how people think.

This picture is an illusion because first we see one thing (gaze at the prongs) then we see another (eyes move to the base of the fork). Back and forth, back and forth. It’s an illusion because we never see the whole thing at once. What we think is a broad lens we look through is actually a pinhole we peek through, scanning all around.

The author makes the argument that it’s the same effect with our awareness. We are aware of one thing at a time. When we on that, we aren’t on the other thing. Just like the contradiction of seeing the optical illusion, we absolutely can hold two different conflicting mindsets, because we don’t actually hold them simultaneously. It’s one than the other.

Someone can wish they’d gotten a divorce 20 years ago, yet be endlessly thankful for the children from the marriage. Mind is on one or the other, but not at the same time. No conflict in their head, though obvious conflict logically.

Etc.

To answer the first question only, I'm on board with Emergent's suggestion and it's actually what I say ... I've been married for 39 years with an asterisk. If people ask, I just say, well, except for a couple of weeks here and there, and leave it at that. The people who know us know that there was a brief separation which served to shake him out of the fog.