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I'm just going to give you my experience and then leave it at that. At a certain point in my JFO stage, I realized that some questions aren't really conducive to the process. The answers to those questions don't matter. They don't inform your decision-making process. So, what I started doing was running my questions through the lens of "how does getting an answer for this question serve my goals", and if I mulled it over for a day or two and I didn't have a reason, I let it go.

We use the term "morbid curiosity" without really thinking much about why we say that, but the reality is that this kind of curiosity is wounding. It's pain shopping. It creates triggers.

Here's the deal though, I might have set up a personal hoop to jump through, but if I made that jump, I expected an honest answer to any question I posed. At that point, it's not like I hadn't give due consideration as to why I wanted an answer. This was my boundary and yes, I was willing to walk over it.

For me, the goal in R had to be reestablishing emotional intimacy. You can't be emotionally intimate with someone when you're walking on eggshells around them. There has to be HONESTY. At some point, you expect the R process to be far enough along that you're satisfied you know what you need to know. I wouldn't have wanted to still be using my "does this serve my goal" lens in five years, or ten, or twenty. That was a temporary tool for assessing my continued commitment. If I hadn't been assured of honest answers during the "stay or go" decision phase, I wouldn't be here now.

My boundary was that I expected an honest answer for any question I asked. My fWH did have my assurance that there was a contemplative process in my choice of questions. That way, he could feel confident that I wasn't just shaming him or making him relive his worst sins for no purpose.

You have a beautiful mind, CT.

Thanks for the update. We all have to walk our own path.

Not here to slap you with 2x4s when you already have keyed in on the issues.

Hysterical bonding is pretty good just don't let it cloud your judgement.

Edit: Regarding the D-word. We have chosen to not use it in fights. We will only say D if we want it for at least a solid week before bringing it up. Haven't brought it up since.

[This message edited by This0is0Fine at 6:54 AM, Tuesday, April 25th]

I do think too much of sex details is not helpful in reconciliation and healing. Aside from the basic details regarding sex, anything beyond that is counterproductive and hurtful. So, I don't think you are rugsweeping in this particular context.

Like This0is0Fine said, be mindful of hysterical bonding. Also, be mindful of the bargaining stage.

What I am saying is that in charting the path forward, patience and mutual understanding are called for. This is going to go over so badly on this forum,

There is nothing wrong with patience and mutual understanding during reconciliation but most often than not these two are used as a disguise for bargaining. Olive branch, amnesty etc etc are terms used by many in the bargaining stage. I am not saying you are doing the same thing or may be you are. I don't know. Only you know.
I am happy to hear that you are doing fine.

[This message edited by Lurkingsoul12 at 8:24 AM, Tuesday, April 25th]

Hey IH -

So that is where we stand. Things have stabilized.

Good to hear.

As for which questions you need answered and which ones you don’t — as long as you’re not avoiding answers or issues that can eventually erode whatever peace you find in your M, I think you’re good. Our forum here is replete with members who return 5 or 10 years later with a pile of resentments wishing they had more answers.

In my case, my imagination tends to fill in the blanks with far worse results than reality, so every answer I got (eventually) offered more peace than not knowing. As my wife’s confession was so many years later, I think it also helped her to ditch all of the secrets, and she knows today she is loved and accepted, faults and all — as am I.

I sit here this morning in a resentment free relationship. Something I didn’t even know was possible, but kindness and empathy sure go a long way when both people look at what can be given to the M, rather than what each takes from it.

I hope you find enough answers to get some peace and get a chance to start healing your M as a team.

I hope you find enough answers to get some peace and get a chance to start healing your M as a team.

I do think this is the key. I need to know enough to not feel a shadow in the back of my consciousness for the rest of my life. But once that is satisfied, then enough is enough. At this stage in the journey if she came forward and said she had a secret stash of saved messages between them, I don’t think I’d want to see it. I know it’s horrible. I know my beloved wife did unspeakable things. I just don’t need the Black Friday Door Buster experience of pain shopping at this point.

That said, it’s hard to know how much info is enough because it sinks in and ever so slowly marinates and begins to integrate into the mind. It might honestly take years to truly judge this, and in that time I have to have the discipline to not ask. Why didn’t someone warn me this was going to be really hard?

[This message edited by InkHulk at 2:32 PM, Tuesday, April 25th]

I think you're making good progress.

One thing about questions: I think that giving yourself the freedom to ask any question you want to ask is an important step for you to take. If you have someone reliable to advise on asking a specific question or not, it's good to get their opinion and adjust to it as appropriate - but you need to take responsibility for the decisions. It's one thing to avoid sexually Qs now. If you want answers in 6, 16, 60 months, it's OK to ask then. (I think you know and do that, Ink, but others forget about this point.)

It's critical for your W to figure out how to answer your questions, whatever they are. You're choosing to give her time to learn to answer despite her fear and shame, and that's fine, but R is a process of building an M that serves both of you. I can't imagine it's fun to have to stifle yourself. You get to decide what answers you want, so set boundaries. Teach yourself to maintain them.

I'm pretty hardass around Q & A. At the same time, within a few months of d-day, I made my W's journal and notes to herself off-limits at her request. She answered all my questions to the best of her ability, so when she asked for that privacy, I was willing to give it to her. The M I wanted had to serve both of us, as I wrote above. W is an autonomous human being whom I usually don't want to control, and I usually recognize that.

*****

The following is more for myself than others, but I want to get it down on paper. I've spent a lot of sleepless hours during the previous 7-8 nights (due to meds), and I've been filled with memories. I've remembered hurting my W - inadvertently, to be sure, but that doesn't mitigate the hurt. I've remembered the myriad ways W supported me in the decades before her A. That support was a gift. She wanted something in return, I imagine, but I was free to give a return or not; the return was as far from a requirement as it could be.

None of that made her A hurt less; it might have made her A hurt more. I'm pretty convinced, however, that her support when I was far from my best was part of the reason I gave her a chance after she became far from her best.

I'm just sharing that. For many of us, the connections with our WSes really does play a big part in the D/R choice. Maybe for all of us - when the connection is there, we R. When the connection has been irretrievably broken, we D. When we're unsure if the connection is strong enough, we take time to decide between D & R.

Just musing....

Have you noticed a pattern yet, InkHulk?

Have you noticed a pattern yet, InkHulk?

Sure, lots of them. What stands out to you?

It's basically impossible for you to ask your wife any questions or request any accountability without her having a meltdown, casting herself into the victim role, and making you feel like garbage for even daring to ask. That has to be so demoralizing and exhausting... and maybe that's the point.

Sometimes it does seem to me that you are married to a child, who, as BluerThanBlue says, has these catastrophic meltdowns which get you to heel (but not heal). BUT, it is your life and this is clearly what you want.

[This message edited by WontBeFooledAgai at 7:49 PM, Tuesday, April 25th]

which get you to heel (but not heal)

It's basically impossible for you to ask your wife any questions or request any accountability without her having a meltdown, casting herself into the victim role, and making you feel like garbage for even daring to ask. That has to be so demoralizing and exhausting... and maybe that's the point.

My wife has no reference point for be an offender of this magnitude. She doesn’t know what to do, and she doesn’t have a community like this she has attached to for guidance. She has always buried/rug swept issues, thinking herself a good forgiver in doing so. But that actually been the stuff that has resulted in resentments and was why I had to be the one to dig deep and really put pieces together about the way I hurt her.

She is also an abuse survivor and emotionally stunted. I’d guess this examining spotlight is excruciating for those reasons alone.

And yes, she has a prideful streak and she doesn’t really want to do this.

But at this point I’m 99% sure that we will be thru my list of questions in a few weeks. I have to travel for work soon and we have guests coming into town, so there will be some delays. And my list is not that short, so it will take time. But she is calmed down and fully committed to going thru them. She feels a sense of comfort of having them vetted by the MC, and it’s going to happen. She wants to walk thru the fire to get on to rebuilding and she knows I won’t skip this step.

I’m going to reflect on conflicting messages that I’ve heard on this board. When I was a quivering puddle of a newly betrayed I was railing about not getting the information I wanted from her fast enough. I was advised that I was making a mistake in counting on her for my own personal healing, that I had to heal myself, and then we could see if the M was salvageable after that. Time has proved those messages accurate in my case. My mental health is finally coming back to normal. My mind is sharp, I’m worth my pay check again, the world doesn’t feel dangerous anymore. Turns out I didn’t need this information from her to personally heal. To recover the marriage? That is a different question. To rebuild the M, I need transparency for the intimacy that CT so eloquently described. This being a secret would be a cancer in the relationship. I gave myself a year to make my decision on R or D. Still got 2 months before my first anti-versary. It’s gone slowly, but I’m pretty sure that if I was the hard ass that some seem so desperate for me to be that we’d just be divorced and hate each other. Instead I perceive that we’ve stumbled thru the dark to a place that we both can work with. We’ve both done some personal healing, with tons more to do and historical trauma’s to deal with. If you haven’t pegged me as having massive daddy issues, you haven’t been paying attention. But I’m hopeful today.

This has been a wonderful discussion and I thank all of you for sharing your histories and points of view.

Here's how my situation went. DD#1, 1982; we'd been married 10 years, had two young children. He was an active alcoholic. I was going to leave but I ended up feeling sorry for him and stayed and he went into rehab and I suppose we rug swept it all but at the time, I was in AlAnon and we were both working so hard on ourselves, I saw it as us overcoming forces outside ourselves or something like that. In fact, after a 2-3 years, we were busy raising our kids and rekindling his career now that he was sober and I realized I didn't even think of the A anymore.

For the next 34 years, the thing in my life that I was the proudest of was saving my marriage and keeping my family together. It had been a lot of work but I had been all in and made personal career sacrifices that I didn't regret.

Until DDay #2, May 3, 2017. By then we were retired, living in FLA, enjoying the grandkids and traveling a lot. Out of nowhere, my life was blown apart the likes I could never have predicted or imagined. The thing I'd been the most proud of turned out to be my biggest mistake. I had no retirement pension, no network of friends, no history of much of anything other than being his wife.

How long was I married? Technically, on paper and in legal terms, 45 years. But in hindsight, I don't think I was ever in a true marriage. I'm 73 now, very alone and will die without ever having been loved. Pretty pathetic for someone who thought she'd conquered life and had it all, eh?

So, bottom line is, it doesn't matter how you count your years married or unmarried or in with one foot or riding the fence waiting or whatever. Every person's situation is different and you all should just do what feels comfortable for your marriage based on your beliefs, your feelings, your wants and your needs. Tomorrow will be XWH and AP's 5th wedding anniversary. I still haven't gotten over feeling married to him. I saw an ad for Carhartt shirts on sale and almost clicked on it cuz that's what he wore every single day. After 6 years, I still head directly for the clearance section when I walk into Kohl's, looking for really cheap stuff for him to fish in. The old habits are still there for me and will probably never go completely away. I was 100% invested for a very long time; turns out, he never was. The alcoholic mind, whether drunk, dry drunk or sober, doesn't function that same way as normal people do.

(To clarify: I'm fine, I don't want him back, I can see so much that I couldn't see before and I don't even have any feelings for him anymore. I have a lot of regrets about my lack of insight for so long but I don't dwell on those. Much preferable that I try to figure out what I do for the next stage of my life.)

@InkHulk, I'm just hoping that you *get yourself out of infidelity* D or R, and if this is R, that your WW gives you what you deserve, and that she sincerely gets to remorse. So far she has not even come close, but it appears to be an encouraging first step that she has calmed herself down and appears to be willing to work through the questions. I and I believe the entire board, are rooting for you!

[This message edited by WontBeFooledAgai at 8:49 PM, Wednesday, April 26th]

Josiep, my heart hurts for you. I hope you find peace and love in this stage of your life.

[This message edited by InkHulk at 12:34 AM, Thursday, April 27th]

Had MC today. Might have to find a new MC because ours is giving up her office due to family reasons and will be going either virtual or walks in the park. I hate Zoom and the park walks seem kind of dicey. Ugh.

But we spend half the session today going thru questions, and it was good. It was a good start, probably got 10% of the way thru my list. My wife did well for most of it, but by the end she was struggling, kind of went off on a despair kick, said we could never get thru them all. She does that sometimes, catastrophizes moderately difficult things to make them sound impossible. Me personally I was doing the math and thinking it’s only going to take about 3 hours at this rate. Seems like 3 hours of discomfort is not worth divorcing over, but what do I know?

Only one answer caught me by surprise. I asked her in what ways she pursued him. She said that early on that she really had to dig to get him to emotionally engage. If anyone remembers my "Cheaters Handbook" thread, I have definitely had it in my mind that he was fairly predatory from the beginning, and that answer really undermines that narrative. EllieKMAS, if you still bother to follow me, you were right. And pretty much all the rest of you. So now I need to figure out why the fuck she would have done that. Session ended before we could get into that.

Progress!

[This message edited by InkHulk at 12:47 AM, Thursday, April 27th]

Part of your WW's response could be because she likes to introduce the drama llama.

The AP wasn't as predatory as you thought and your WW was more involved in creating the atmosphere for the A than you originally thought...much like a lot of us BS.

InkHulk, I'm curious, how many questions are on your list, if you don't mind saying? And how many did the MC take off? I have almost 100 questions I've written down over the last few years, and the cheating was more than three decades ago before we were married. She hates to talk about it. Whenever I bring it up she just says "give me the questions, when are you going to give me the questions!" I'm getting there..

Do you believe going through the questions and getting answers is helping you get past it and to heal? Not sure how many I'll eventually give her. Don't want to overwhelm her, but there's a lot I feel I deserve to know. We all deserve to know and should be able to expect that our spouses don't continue to harbor secrets they had with other partners..

I asked her in what ways she pursued him.

First, I want to give you kudos for a well-worded question. If you gave her a yes or no, you know she would’ve taken the no. But this forced her to actually think about it and give you a detailed response. No wonder she’s desperate to get out of answering these.

Second, I’m glad that the veil over your eyes has been ripped and you can now see that your wife was an active participant in this affair, not a passive victim. As we were all trying to tell you in The Cheater’s Handbook thread, this false perception has prevented you from advocating for your needs and holding her accountable for the choices she made and the actions she took. Casting your wife in the victim role denies her agency.

I think, in future conversations, you might be able to convince your wife that it’s in her best interests to answer your questions, dig into her whys, and take responsibility for her actions. Once you feel like she understands and owns the choices she made, and demonstrates a willingness to take a proactive role in your healing, you can start looking forward instead of back.

[This message edited by BluerThanBlue at 12:32 PM, Thursday, April 27th]