2 - 5 years thing

[Queen of Sheba]

Right, so everyone says they hear 2 - 5 years to recover. Now I might say that because I keep hearing it. But who started that and based on what research does anyone know? Anyone past the 2 years who would disagree? Anyone past the 5 years and disagree?!

 

What is this 2 - 5 years? Is it to heal oneself regardless of recon or 2 - 5 years to recon? 2 - 5 yrs to trust WS again or 2 - 5 yrs to know you made right decision?

[Betrayed&Stayed]

Right, so everyone says they hear 2 - 5 years to recover. Now I might say that because I keep hearing it. But who started that and based on what research does anyone know? Anyone past the 2 years who would disagree? Anyone past the 5 years and disagree?!

 

What is this 2 - 5 years? Is it to heal oneself regardless of recon or 2 - 5 years to recon? 2 - 5 yrs to trust WS again or 2 - 5 yrs to know you made right decision?

 

I agree with the 3-year mark because that is what I experienced. I'm 5 yrs from D-day.

 

I have a friend who divorced his cheating wife, and he recovered much quicker because he did not attempt to reconcile the marriage. The 3-5 year reference is for the BS who remains in the marriage.

 

QoS, just focus on today. When I was a few months out from D-day I was just trying to survive from hour to hour. You don't have to make any commitments or long range plans or goals.

[anne1707]

The final time scale is completely individual. You recover when YOU recover. But I think it is fair to say that less than a year is unrealistic and that if trying to save a marriage 5 years post dday is also unrealistic if it still feels like hard work. We are 5 years past dday. The pain and memories will never go but we can talk about it in a calm and respectful manner. I have actually just asked my H to look at one of your threads as he may be able to offer his perspective as a BS. Progress is slow and sometimes it happens without you thinking about it. But at the end of the day it is up to you to decide whether progress is happening at a pace that suits you.

[Spark1111]

Are you reading some of the Infidelity gurus? Peggy Vaughn, Dr. Shirley Glass, Dr. Frank Pittman?

 

These are people who counseled 1000s of couples after infidelity. It may have been Glass who put that number out there in one of her books.

 

There are also many sites on the web, Marriage Builders (Dr. Hendrix Hartley?) and Surviving infidelity too.

 

if you do divorce, it make take as long as you will still grieve the relationship you thought you had.

 

Three years was also a turning point for me....not because of anything I did, or read, but because the pain just started to fade and I began to feel at peace.

[ChooseTruth]

Marriage Builders is Willard Harley.

[road]

It takes about 6 months for the BS's mind to process the affair. Which includes learning about what their WS's affair.

 

When the WS trickle truths and gets caught withholding facts the recovery clock gets reset back to the beginning. So the WS trickle truths for one year before the whole truth comes out the BS still needs six months to process the WS affair. So one and a half years used up.

 

Without trickle truth the it still takes the BS's mind six months to process the affair.

 

Now that six months have past many BS go through an angry phase with their WS. Anger phase can take six months. Still one year has been spent on the road to recovery.

 

After the first year. Or year and a half the healing part of recovery work begins. That can take several years.

 

So you can see recovery takes a lot of time. It also depends on how well the WS works at living transparent and making it easy for the BS to verify NC is in place.

 

Incase where the AP worked with the WS and the WS refuses to find another job, or the AP lives next door and the WS refuses to move away are examples of how recovery can get stalled.

 

So the two to five year timeline is based on real life examples.

 

And yes years can be spent trying to recover and the WS and BS divorce any way.

[BetrayedH]

I agree with what the others have posted.

 

Personally, I think it takes most people 2-5 years to heal from infidelity regardless of reconciliation or divorce. I'm a little over two years from Dday and a little shy of a year since we divorced. Some things can speed it up (such as a quick divorce from a short marriage with no kids involved).

 

I agree with Road's assessment that it takes 6 months to get your bearings. Anger set in for me at about 3-4 months. I also suspected my wife was lying (took 8 months to confirm) and she broke NC rules twice. Some of the circumstances in my situation were also particularly hurtful, although I think most people are hurt beyond anything they expected.

 

I scoffed at the 2-5 years when I first read it. Now I'm quite convinced it's pretty accurate. Many say the second year is harder than the first. The BS begins to feel "safe" and that's when the anger comes to the surface. This unfortunately coincides with a period where the WS may tend to let down their guard in hopes that things have returned to normal. It's natural for the WS to be "over it" before the BS is truly over it. Most successfully reconciled couples I've seen turned a corner around the third to fourth year.

[jnel921]

I agree it takes years...it totally depends on individual circumstance. My first M ended in D and it took about 5 years to shake off the feelings and work on me. this second betrayal with my current H may take a long time too although we have decided to stay together. We are trying to rebuild our love and create new and better memories.

[seren]

Before H had the A, I had no idea a betrayal could or would take as long to stop having such a hold over how I felt. After all, A's happened to other people, then when it happened to me and I found myself on Infidelity sites I thought surely we could move before the 2-5 years everyone talked about along once we had decided to reconcile. But, the timescale proved to be pretty accurate. The end of the A and D Day is the beginning of it for a BS. It doesn't matter if the A was for 1 night, 1 week, 1 month or longer. It is the betrayal and all that goes with it that are the hurdles to cross.

 

After a year I think the sick feeling was getting better, the anger was not so raw, but still popped up just when things were going well. The, it's getting better, but look out and don't let defences slip, feelngs had me get angry just when I thought the anger had gone. After 2 years it calmed somewhat, but only around the 3 year mark can I say that I didn't have the incilnation to go over it, to have the same story repeated and to feel safe.

 

It was never about the OW, it was all about us and how hurt the lies made me feel. I have never checked up, insisted on passwords etc, but I did insist on honesty and for H to have counselling for his issues, it is a long, slow process. We are over 5 years from D Day, now it is a scar on our marriage, but one that I look at and think shows how strong our love is to have survived.

 

I hope it gets easier for you QOS, there are nor hard and fast rules, but we all seem to go through a similar process, very akin to grief and loss. Each of us does what we need to do to get through it, the support of our WS is paramount, actions, not words meant such a lot to me, I hope you are seeing action from your WS. LS was a great help. Now the A makes me feel sad, but it was then, this is now, I felt indifference toward the OW and while I feel sorry for her and her still attempts to insert herself into our iife, I hope she finds peace. My view of A's hasn't changed one iota, how I dealt with it, is so different from how I thought I might pre D Day. Take care of you, do what is best for you and settle for nothing less than what makes you happy.

[ChooseTruth]

I agree it takes years...it totally depends on individual circumstance. My first M ended in D and it took about 5 years to shake off the feelings and work on me. this second betrayal with my current H may take a long time too although we have decided to stay together. We are trying to rebuild our love and create new and better memories.

I recently asked my mother how long it was before she felt normal after her divorce....she said without pause "5 years":eek:. She was a BS and didn't know it until 1 yr after D was final. They were married 10 yrs, 11 by law.

[Betrayed&Stayed]

I scoffed at the 2-5 years when I first read it. Now I'm quite convinced it's pretty accurate. Many say the second year is harder than the first. The BS begins to feel "safe" and that's when the anger comes to the surface. This unfortunately coincides with a period where the WS may tend to let down their guard in hopes that things have returned to normal. It's natural for the WS to be "over it" before the BS is truly over it. Most successfully reconciled couples I've seen turned a corner around the third to fourth year.

 

The second year was the toughest for several reasons. I was emotionally exhausted by the second year. So many false plateaus. So many ups and downs. Two steps forward, one step back. "How much longer am I going to suffer?" "Is this the best that it gets?" It's long dark tunnel.

 

Then there's the WS. They're "over it" and expect the BS to get over it. Frequently when I would bring up the affair, I got the "stop dwelling on it" vibe. My WW would get defensive which would frustrate me.

 

It was during the second year when divorce became a real option for me. It was also the period that I decided to go on ADs. I couldn't take it anymore. It's easy to lose hope at this point. I did lose hope many times.

 

By the second year I had processed the affair and was able to put most of the pieces together. Once I had the big picture, then I was angry again for different reasons.

[Snowflower]

Agree with what everyone says here.

 

I also thought initially that 2-5 years seemed way too long. I thought either A. we would be one of those special couples who would come through it quickly and be stronger than ever or, B. End up divorced because I wasn't sure I could hack it for that long.

 

Year 2 was the most difficult. I was so confused most of the time and my H seemed to want us to move on from it. I was battling myself about why I had decided to stay with him.

 

For me, 4 years was the real turning point. I let a lot of things go at that juncture and realized that I could not control what another person (my H in this case) could or couldn't do. I told him that he knew where the door was if he wanted to leave. We had been having some lingering difficulties with trust and commitment--ours was a difficult reconciliation. But yet, he stayed, I stayed, and we are really doing well now.

 

Finally though, it was the nature of life itself that really helped and the passage of time that changed my perspective. Life has changed a lot in the intervening years; you know though, the whole "life goes on" thing.

 

OP, my advice is to just take it a day at a time. Don't feel you have to rush things or drag them out. I always advise to wait 6 months to a year to make any big decisions one way or the other, if at all possible.

 

Hang in there, you're doing fine!

[janedoe67]

I think like most things, the 2-5 year thing is a guide. If you feel at peace at 22 months instead of two years, no one really has place to say "No! You can't feel that! It hasn't been two years!" And if things are tough and at 6 years you still struggle from time to time it doesn't mean you are broken.

 

We humans always want 2+2=4. But because we are HUMAN there ARE variables.

 

Formulas work in math. They don't work in emotion.

[road]

I think like most things, the 2-5 year thing is a guide. If you feel at peace at 22 months instead of two years, no one really has place to say "No! You can't feel that! It hasn't been two years!" And if things are tough and at 6 years you still struggle from time to time it doesn't mean you are broken.

 

We humans always want 2+2=4. But because we are HUMAN there ARE variables.

 

Formulas work in math. They don't work in emotion.

 

It is not a guide but a range of real times. I have not seen recovery done in under two years.

[AbeNormal]

The second year was the toughest for several reasons. I was emotionally exhausted by the second year. So many false plateaus. So many ups and downs. Two steps forward, one step back. "How much longer am I going to suffer?" "Is this the best that it gets?" It's long dark tunnel.

 

Then there's the WS. They're "over it" and expect the BS to get over it. Frequently when I would bring up the affair, I got the "stop dwelling on it" vibe. My WW would get defensive which would frustrate me.

 

It was during the second year when divorce became a real option for me. It was also the period that I decided to go on ADs. I couldn't take it anymore. It's easy to lose hope at this point. I did lose hope many times.

 

By the second year I had processed the affair and was able to put most of the pieces together. Once I had the big picture, then I was angry again for different reasons.

 

Thanks for this post. I need to process it. When this thread started, and before you posted, I considered asking whether there is a "two year itch". Or a "two years and I have had enough"... In my case there was nine months of trickle truth-ing, so I guess I need to decide on when I should "start the clock".

 

My ghost writer (Jim Beam) would like to jump in here now, but I think it is best that I do it myself at another time. He joined me shortly after my wife confessed to the full sex thing. He has not been a particularly good friend (and, as my ghost writer, has made some lousy posts over the past few months). So I will will defer a complete response until he is out of the room.

 

Thanks again for your post.

Edited July 19, 2013 by AbeNormal

[dichotomy]

It has been 8 years... and no full resolution. In couples therapy last night our therapist said she sees a couple where the affair occurred 30 years ago and they still occasionally fight over it...but they stayed married and are seeing her for therapy.

 

I don't believe there is any magic eraser, or switch that flips at so many years, in these things.

Edited July 19, 2013 by dichotomy

[lilmisscantbewrong]

Queen - you are so close in. Yes, it is definitely 2-5 years. I am 3 1/2 years out from my own dday and only 1 1/2 years out from my husband's dday. We are not completely healed and I am uncertain if we ever will be due to so many reasons (I don't want to h/j your thread to go into them here).

 

This I will say, though. After my affair my husband wanted things fixed immediately and he was very discouraged when the counselor told him a minimum of 2 years and given what I(we) had experienced especially with the church scandal it was like PTSD and would likely take longer. He did not want to hear that. So because of the trauma and my personal healing taking longer, he fell into his own affair which then lengthened our recovery time once again.

 

There isn't anything magic about it, but I do believe these time frames are probably arrived at by IC/MC's experience with couples. I suppose it could take less time, but I highly doubt based on my own experience.

 

Hang in there.

[janedoe67]

I don't believe there is any magic eraser, or switch that flips at so many years, in these things.

 

I don't think there is such thing as a magic eraser at all. There is time, remorse, trying to make amends, working to restore trust.

 

And then each party chooses how they will live with the stain.

[Queen of Sheba]

Thanks for the responses. I am not a patient person.... in any way for anything...

[Snowflower]

Thanks for the responses. I am not a patient person.... in any way for anything...

 

IMO, this above^^^is something for you to consider as you decide whether or not you want to reconcile.

 

As you already know, reconciliation is hard work and it takes the right type of traits to do it. You (general you) have to be very patient and be willing to endure the one step forward, two steps back progress and be prepared for things to improve in tiny increments.

 

This is why there are some/many people who simply cannot reconcile after their partner is unfaithful. The betrayed person simply does not have the ability/traits to do it: impatience could be one of these traits.