Affair with Friends husband

[rae_lana]

I feel gutted. Like I've been lied to this whole time. He doesn't really want me to go with him, that's how I feel at least.. I've said the whole time I wouldn't do that to her, he knows it. That's how I feel.

Maybe, possibly he thinks I changed my mind.. But I don't think so. I think he just wants me to be the one to say no.. And he can move away and pretend this never happened. We promised it wouldn't change our friendships.. I guess I know that was unrealistic but I really believed it could work.

[rae_lana]

Rae, I hope you consider getting some help for these sexual feelings you've always had..hyper sexual thoughts...possibly a sex addict? I'm not downing you, just being honest. When having sex supercedes all connections with friends, resulting in betrayals like this, then you have to consider if this is a healthy feeling, versus an impulse control problem/need for attention from someone who emits the same kind of vibes. I think he needs counseling too, btw. He's done this far too many times for it to be just healthy sexual libido.

It owns him. Don't let it own you. Good luck!

 

That's exactly it. I felt like we were so much the same.. I wanted his approval and attention .. I was sure he felt the exact same as me. I'm really sure right now that I was wrong.

 

I can't hate him. I knew he was damaged. I knew I would end up hurt. I just didnt think I would lose them in my life.

[KAOJ]

I feel gutted. Like I've been lied to this whole time.

 

How does it feel to be lied to this whole time? Crushing, isn't it?

[rae_lana]

How does it feel to be lied to this whole time? Crushing, isn't it?

 

I'm aware I'm a terrible horrible person. I get I've lied a lot. I get I was wrong. I'm still hurting really badly at the moment.

[aliveagain]

You need to think hard about this. This is a great opportunity(not saying you should) to tell your husband the truth. You can explain to him that when it came down to the crunch you chose your husband over other man, that will give him some of his dignity back. Last thing you want is this information coming to him from OM or his spouse. Take time to think about it.

[rae_lana]

I cannot tell my husband. I can't. The words would never come out.

[Trimmer]

I cannot tell my husband. I can't. The words would never come out.

You keep putting it in this way: "the words just won't come out."

 

Look, as this continues to develop, you at least need to be honest with yourself. At least admit to yourself that you are choosing not to tell him, and don't make it sound like it's something separate from you that is preventing you. None of this "I want to, but the words won't come out."

 

At the end of the day, I don't care what you say to me, but if you're choosing not to tell him, at least be honest with yourself.

[ComingInHot]

rae, through you pain, try to remember you Chose this. I understand you feel sad that things are not working in your favor But you are Not the Victim in all this. It hurts when we don get what we want However, when knowingly hurting others you claim to care about while crying poor me, doesn't go over well Anywhere...

 

What will work is action to be Better to those you say you love, including yourself. You obviously get off on a dangerously good challenge so I challenge you w/the most dangerous, gutsy thing and that's to face Yourself and fix the issue right there in your heart mind and soul.

[rae_lana]

rae, through you pain, try to remember you Chose this. I understand you feel sad that things are not working in your favor But you are Not the Victim in all this. It hurts when we don get what we want However, when knowingly hurting others you claim to care about while crying poor me, doesn't go over well Anywhere...

 

What will work is action to be Better to those you say you love, including yourself. You obviously get off on a dangerously good challenge so I challenge you w/the most dangerous, gutsy thing and that's to face Yourself and fix the issue right there in your heart mind and soul.

 

I agree. I did this to myself

[rae_lana]

We are going to use this to end a huge mistake. No matter how happy we may or may not be together I could not do this to our spouses it's so wrong. We will use this to go low contact and maybe in her future no contact. I'm going to seek individual counselling and try again to convince my husband we should get marital council.. I hope to keep somewhat of a friendship with her... His wife..I love her despite what anyone here thinks. We would be far enough away I would not really have a reason to see her husband .. Unless group situations are planned, and everyone knows those can be avoided. I feel like there's been a death in my family.

We have no kids, so I guess if my husband refuses counselling I can consider leaving.

 

 

I must not be a sociopath because this hurts like I've been stabbed. But it's for the best.

 

No I'm not confessing.

[rae_lana]

I feel stupid.

And I regret this ever happened. I would say that to anyone considering similar actions ..

[vla1120]

I'm not even going to read the remaining posts. You seem on the surface to be puzzled by your behavior, and claim that you wish it had never happened. You are using some obscure personality trait as an excuse for not feeling bad.

 

When I was 7 months pregnant with my youngest (now 17) my middle daughter (5 at the time) told me when I came home from work one night that she saw my H and my best friend kissing "like they were married on TV." The BF lived two doors down. I stayed because I was 7 months pregnant and had young children. Stupid me. 17 years later, I'm finally getting a divorce. Reading your posts just brought ALL those feelings, the anger, the betrayal, the pain - I felt like I wanted to die - right back to the surface. THAT is what you are doing to the husband you claim to love and your "best friend". Stop kidding yourself. Go ahead, take it to your grave. I guarantee they ARE going to find out. They ARE going to feel hurt, betrayed, angry. I hope for their sakes, they do not have to take THAT to their graves.

[rae_lana]

So now it's his fault?

 

No you're not a sociopath. You're just an extremely selfish person.

 

Even when you hurt a man that has been loyal to you for many years, all you care about is YOUR feelings. You should leave your husband for the other guy. He seems to be the same way. You two were made for each other.

 

With all do respect you do not know my husband at all. I've never ever used his actions as an excuse for this but you have no idea the things he has done or says to me daily at all.. And he refuses marital counselling and has for years. I had a lot of issues in my marriage long before this guy came along and they'll still be here. That's obviously not all on my husband I never said it was.

I'm scares of individual counselling but I want to learn how to talk to my husband and he's never agreed .. I got him too once but it only lasted a few sessions

[rae_lana]

I'm not even going to read the remaining posts. You seem on the surface to be puzzled by your behavior, and claim that you wish it had never happened. You are using some obscure personality trait as an excuse for not feeling bad.

 

When I was 7 months pregnant with my youngest (now 17) my middle daughter (5 at the time) told me when I came home from work one night that she saw my H and my best friend kissing "like they were married on TV." The BF lived two doors down. I stayed because I was 7 months pregnant and had young children. Stupid me. 17 years later, I'm finally getting a divorce. Reading your posts just brought ALL those feelings, the anger, the betrayal, the pain - I felt like I wanted to die - right back to the surface. THAT is what you are doing to the husband you claim to love and your "best friend". Stop kidding yourself. Go ahead, take it to your grave. I guarantee they ARE going to find out. They ARE going to feel hurt, betrayed, angry. I hope for their sakes, they do not have to take THAT to their graves.

 

If I could take it back I would in a second. I'm not going to try and justify it.

[Lillyfree]

If I could take it back I would in a second. I'm not going to try and justify it.

 

but you can't take it back. it's been done.

 

you need to face the mess you created, stop hiding from it. if you do so everyone is going to be better off in the end, especially you.

 

living a lie is a horrible, horrible existence.

[LBean]

I've been following this a bit out of a morbid curiosity to how you make out with all of this.

 

This is doomed to be found out. You're a little S.O.L. with this one, it's too big, and far too close. You took a huge $H!T where you eat.

 

His moving away will solve nothing. This will come out. You two are mourning the loss of each other and YOUR friendships. You both know why this is happening. You're far too self involved right now to realize that your husband an his wife will also be losing the friendships, but at first they're not going to understand why.

 

Don't you think his wife and your husband are going to find it a little odd that you all go from doing EVERYTHING together to NOTHING? You two are not the only ones in this. Your husband and his wife are friends too. what happens if she calls one day to get together and your husband answers the phone? How are you going to get out of that?

 

This is going to come out eventually, everyone is going to be asking questions, and as much as you may think you can just sweep it under the rug, you can't. It would be better if it came from you, but you don't want to do that, so I suggest you make sure you get your ducks all in a row and prepare for the fallout when he finds out, cause he's gonna.

[ex sex fiend]

after reading most of this long thread

I have to say ,you have made progress rae_lana

 

 

may I offer a good suggestion that helped me in the past?

 

I noticed you have focused on your feelings quite a bit.I would suggest you focus on your actions.Take the actions you feel are right for you and in time your feelings about yourself will improve.I was told to do the right thing and in time my feeling would follow.I always was concerned with my feelings first,and I was still doing wrong things and I always felt like crap.I wrestled with my mind and emotions a lot,and I always lost.

When I turned it around and did the opposite,I got better.I found better self esteem,and calmer emotions and quite a bit of peace.I also found a better quality of life for myself and family.

I wish you the best on your quest

 

Tommy

[Princekilljoy]

It seems to me that what really attracted you at first was the acceptance. You felt you weren't getting it from your husband and so you sought it elsewhere, perhaps subconsciously. I know how that is, being afraid to communicate and seeking what you desire from someone else.

 

From there, this entire mess stemmed. If your friend knows he is attracted to you and has admitted that she knows he'd seep with you if given the chance, then she likely has some resentment that you either can't or won't see. This is going to blow up in your face eventually, I think the best thing you can do is try to beat it before it does.

 

The bottom line is that you are going to have to choose one or neither. It seems to me that you aren't happy with your husband and that he isn't giving you what you need, thus you sought it elsewhere and, in the process, are betraying people you love. If you choose to stay with your husband, I'm not sure you'll be able to stay friends with the couple. Ideally, this choice would lead you to confess what you'd done to your husband and seek to fix it with him.

 

To me, it sounds as if one big reason you're with your husband is because you feel, in some small way, that you owe him. You mentioned he's a good friend and has taken good care of you and is a good provider. That's all well and good, but you also said he judges you and isn't giving you the acceptance you need. You might consider leaving him, for it doesn't sound like you're a fit couple anymore.

 

In the event that you do leave him, I am not entirely certain that you could have a relationship with the other man because it seems that he is untrust worthy and you're likely to have happen to you what you've helped to happen to his wife and your husband. I know you all have mutual friends and it seems coming out with all of this and putting a realistic end to it would blow up your life, but you did this to yourself. Both of you. You shouldn't have done it if you weren't prepared to handle the outcome and, unfortunately, blowing up your life is the outcome. I think, whether you choose to end it truthfully, choose your own happiness, or choose to end it with a lie and act as if nothing happened, you will eventually have to face the true outcome of this and it won't be pretty.

 

My advise to you? Choose the path that makes you the happiest and is fair to your loved ones. What makes YOU happy? That is most important, as its your life. But you can't achieve happiness while cheating on your husband, who trusts you, or betraying your friend. Find a way to become truly happy. Yes, it'll be messy at first and may see, endlessly painful, but in the end you'll be in a better place.

 

Good luck.

[rae_lana]

He says he would rather move than live as we are. Not because he doesn't want to stay but because he's exhausted. He said nothing about feeling guilty or bad, only that loving two people is making him crazy, he can't focus, he can't eat work or sleep properly. He knows he has to pick one of us and that he'd have to leave this area.. If I won't leave my husband, they are leaving. My husband IS suspicious now because its sudden news.

I am exhausted too. But I really would rather stay exhausted than lose them from my life.

 

Is it possible his reason is the full truth?

[leftfordead2]

You say that no one would know about the affair as long as both of you do not say a word. How did the wife find out about MM's one night stand from a year ago?

[Trimmer]

I am exhausted too. But I really would rather stay exhausted than lose them from my life.

 

Is it possible his reason is the full truth?

Does it really matter? And if it does matter, and his reason isn't the full truth, what are you imagining might be the rest of the "full truth"?

 

And either way, considering what else is about to break loose, is this thought process about his reasoning really an effective use of your energies right now?

 

He says he would rather move than live as we are. Not because he doesn't want to stay but because he's exhausted. He said nothing about feeling guilty or bad, only that loving two people is making him crazy, he can't focus, he can't eat work or sleep properly. He knows he has to pick one of us and that he'd have to leave this area.. If I won't leave my husband, they are leaving. My husband IS suspicious now because its sudden news.

OK, so you will have a decision to make here. Previously, you believed in the fantasy version of the future where as long as you kept your mouth shut (and your OM did the same) then everything could go back to normal.

 

You imagined that you could continue forward by passively lying to your husband, simply by "doing nothing", by not speaking to him the full truth of his situation.

 

The situation is about to change - your husband is now suspicious (not a big surprise) and will certainly be wanting to talk to you about it. You will have to decide whether you will move forward by actively lying to him, or whether you will be honest.

 

Thus begins his anguish. At first it was probably a nagging feeling that something wasn't quite right, but he probably wrote that off somehow - he trusted you and the obvious fact that you guys are married (she would never do that!), and assumed his perceptions were off, maybe. And you could participate in that passively, simply by not doing anything.

 

Next, though, the evidence stacks up to the point where he can no longer either ignore it, nor explain it away. And that gets to be a tipping point, because not only will new information continuing to stack up bring things into focus, but that also brings the earlier nagging suspicions into play again, and that has a kind of a cascade effect as it builds to bring the real story into focus all at once.

 

(How do I know all of this? I lived it.)

 

So, as your husband's suspicions build, will you transition to actively lying, or will you come clean? (And not coming all the way clean is still effectively lying...)

 

You talked about being exhausted now. Hoo boy, let me ask you this: if you decide to continue to hide this from your husband, do you have the energy to:

a) weave plausible stories to explain away everything he is suspicious about, on the spot, each time he asks?

 

b) spin those stories with sufficient skill that they will mesh seamlessly with any information he gets from your

OM

and/or his wife?

 

c) remember all these fabrications well enough to make sure your own tales are all

internally

self-consistent?

 

d) live with watching your husband and his confusion between trusting what you tell him and what he can piece together has actually happened?

Around here, this process is referred to as "gaslighting": allowing a spouse to twist and turn in confusion and anguish, while feeding them lies to continue and support the deception.

 

And gaslighting is widely considered to be the cruelest part of an affair. Yes, the actual affair is the worst - a horrible, mean, betrayal, but we still maybe chalk it up to a character flaw, or a stupid mistake that got out of hand, or "just wasn't thinking" or whatever. Even the betrayed spouse can participate a bit (as a protective instinct) in minimizing the affair itself, because we view it as something outside the marriage, something not really about us.

 

But the gaslighting is just plain and obvious cruelty, right there between the spouses, right out in the open.

 

Your marriage is transitioning. Which way will you go with it?

Edited August 11, 2013 by Trimmer

[rae_lana]

I just thought I'd say.. I regret some of the choices I made because of the timing, and who I hurt. we could have went anout things in a much better way.. but I do not regret finding this man and I don't regret changing my situation to be with him.. I love him more now than I ever have anyone before with the exception of my kids. I made the right choice but at the wrong time.

[lollipopspot]

Can you say more about how things worked out and how everyone is doing?

[rae_lana]

We've both been living seperate from our spouses since we admitted to the affair at the beginning of October. Seems like so long ago but really like yesterday too. It happened very fast.

Me and my husband have not had too much contact but have had a chance to talk and it wasn't as terrible as I was waiting for. We are focused on our kids and being civil and his family has been really helpful in being our go between..

 

 

Other man, is still living in his house and we are not on an open relationship or anything, people do know what happened but I was not close to most people in town so it hasn't been hard to avoid people. It's only been a couple months, I just mostly stay home and take care of my kids and work..

We see each other but don't go out together.

 

We do want to eventually live together but both agreed not until we are divorced and we are supposed to live seperate from our spouses for a year before we can, it could be sooner because of the infidelity. We'll know that soon.

My kids see him as a great family friend too though. So right now it's still pretty quiet, we are never affectionate or even acknowledge the relationship as different in front of anyone else.

 

His soon to be ex wife and my former best friend .. She is living about 3 hours away. I miss her like I can't explain. I ache for what I did to her and I miss her so much everyday and know that I really did want her and him in my life I wanted them both.

Hard to explain her stance. She has asked me to stay away from him and work on my relationship with her. I am unable to do that but I wish I could.

 

 

But me and him do want to end up together I just don't have any intention to rush. If we actually are supposed to be together then waiting a year is nothing.

Edited December 1, 2013 by rae_lana

[Survivor12]

We are going to use this to end a huge mistake. No matter how happy we may or may not be together I could not do this to our spouses it's so wrong. We will use this to go low contact and maybe in her future no contact. I'm going to seek individual counselling and try again to convince my husband we should get marital council.. I hope to keep somewhat of a friendship with her... His wife..I love her despite what anyone here thinks. We would be far enough away I would not really have a reason to see her husband .. Unless group situations are planned, and everyone knows those can be avoided. I feel like there's been a death in my family.

We have no kids, so I guess if my husband refuses counselling I can consider leaving.

 

 

I must not be a sociopath because this hurts like I've been stabbed. But it's for the best.

 

No I'm not confessing.

 

I'm confused. In this post, you said that you have no kids, but in your last post, you mention having kids...You also said that you were going to seek individual counseling, but now you're afraid of it? You know, there are a lot of caring people here trying to help you, but unless you tell the truth, they are simply wasting their time.