WS. Not telling the whole truth

[BluesPower]

Let's not be too, too hard on her guys. She was an idiot and she new better.

 

How many of us have done really stupid things before. Maybe it is just me, because I have been on both sides of this, But she does not need condemnation right now, IMO.

 

Look, V, you were a moron. We all have been that. This can work out even if it is really hard right now.

 

If I had a nickel for every time I was a moron, I would have no financial issues ever.

 

V, you just hang tough and love your husband, I know he loves you. You guys can get over this. Just hang in there.

[Violince]

I don't get the feeling you do. I think you are still focused on yourself and your pain.

You would also be wise to toughen up and go take your lumps on his thread which may help give him some solace, and help show him you are willing to put in the work and do the heavy lifting even if it is embarrassing.

 

On SI spouses are not supposed to comment on each other's threads. Is that not the case here?

 

I would also like to add that the feedback here last month really shook me up (in the way it should have done) and was instrumental in my beginning the document my BH opened, and pulling in my big girl undies to actually talk to him. The words have been on the tip of my tongue for weeks, but I'd been too much a coward to say them. And now it's too late to do it right.

Edited September 20, 2016 by Violince

[Rubix Cubed]

On SI spouses are not supposed to comment on each other's threads. Is that not the case here?

 

I would also like to add that the feedback here last month really shook me up (in the way it should have done) and was instrumental in my beginning the document my BH opened, and pulling in my big girl undies to actually talk to him. The words have been on the tip of my tongue for weeks, but I'd been too much a coward to say them. And now it's too late to do it right.

 

So now is your chance to do it right from here on out. Don't put it off. A good start would be telling the OMW the whole truth, as you should. As stated earlier this will help show your hubby that he is more important to you than the OM, and yourself. Save him from having to do it.

[Violince]

So now is your chance to do it right from here on out. Don't put it off. A good start would be telling the OMW the whole truth, as you should. As stated earlier this will help show your hubby that he is more important to you than the OM, and yourself. Save him from having to do it.

 

There is zero temptation to ever do this again, and less than zero feeling left for AP. I will contact her if my husband wants me to. I've been thinking about that for a while too.

[Rubix Cubed]

There is zero temptation to ever do this again, and less than zero feeling left for AP. I will contact her if my husband wants me to. I've been thinking about that for a while too.

 

This is your feeling right now, but in the future you hit a tough spot in your marriage and need someone to talk to like this time, what's to say you don't change your mind.My guess is you didn't plan on it this time either. It would be good insurance for you ,him ,OMW and OM.

Did you actually tell his Dad and he told you to stay mum?

That was extremely bad advice, as you now see why.

Edited September 20, 2016 by Rubix Cubed

[drifter777]

There is zero temptation to ever do this again, and less than zero feeling left for AP. I will contact her if my husband wants me to. I've been thinking about that for a while too.

All this reluctance to tell OM wife should have your husbands spider-sense tingling. I hope he insists that you tell her and listens in on the phone when you call.

[road]

On SI spouses are not supposed to comment on each other's threads. Is that not the case here?

 

I would also like to add that the feedback here last month really shook me up (in the way it should have done) and was instrumental in my beginning the document my BH opened, and pulling in my big girl undies to actually talk to him. The words have been on the tip of my tongue for weeks, but I'd been too much a coward to say them. And now it's too late to do it right.

 

It is common sense to stay off each other's threads. Each spouse needs a safe place to talk.

[Violince]

I won't post on his thread, but steadfast and cephalopod are dead wrong about the way I feel about the posom and my BH. It must be really nice to have never made a decision that you came to regret and then, in trying to come clean, to make it worse.

[GoldenR]

I won't post on his thread, but steadfast and cephalopod are dead wrong about the way I feel about the posom and my BH. It must be really nice to have never made a decision that you came to regret and then, in trying to come clean, to make it worse.

 

But you didn't really try to come clean, did you? You tried to lessen the severity of what you really did. That's like the opposite of coming clean.

 

I wish you luck in R....I really hope you two can do it. But the sex toy shaped liked OM....I think very few men could get past that.

[BluesPower]

Look you are going to get some S*** on his thread or yours.

 

You are going to have to deal with it. You are going to get more from your husband, so toughen up.

 

If you disagree with an internet poster, who gives a F***. You have to deal with what you have done, Not them.

 

Now you either love your husband and want to reconcile or you don't. Right now husband is willing and that is a good thing.

 

If you do, you need to keep doing what you are going to start doing from this day forward, in complete honesty. Love the man, find the spark, let him feel your remorse, and your pain for him.

 

He is really hurting and over time only you can help him, only you.

 

If you think that you just really can't stick it out, then get the marriage over with.

 

If you can, then start dealing with the reality of what you have done with a clear head and the truth that it out there.

 

You are not a monster, you suck, but you are not a monster, get that through your head.

 

You, I believe, can do this and I believe that it can work out in the long run. Today you started over, tomorrow is D-Day plus one. Just start loving the man you married and move forward.

 

Hang tough...

[Violince]

Neither of us slept, everything is broken. He's staying only because where else would he go? He's not sure he still loves me. He's never been so angry. He wants his heart to stop. He's rewritten the entire marriage to be about the betrayal and thinks i never really loved him. It's every bit as bad as I feared. I don't blame him. I will be here regardless, whatever he says or does, and if we have to be just roommates for a while, even a very long while, before we can climb back up, I'm here for that, too. And if he files? I don't know where that leaves me. I love him and him alone even If he doesn't believe it right now. I had some massively ****ed up ideas about love (I read a lot of Heinlein as a teen and my closest HS friends are poly, and I believed for a long time, too long, that love didn't have to be exclusive to be true. Instead I've left this in my wake. Now that I can finally truly see what we had, it might be really gone. He also told me not to lose hope and I won't, for him.

[Just a Guy]

Hi Violince, I have finally managed to read through your entire thread, sometimes having to re read some of the posts by the good folk here to get a grasp of what they have been trying to convey. Firstly, I must say that yours is a very sad saga and the ups and downs have, indeed, been a painful journey for both you and your husband. I must commend both you and your husband for sticking it out and giving your marriage a chance, even though an EA can be a dreadfully poisonous dish to serve up by a WS to the BS.

 

Now that everything is out in the open and your husband has all the details (Whether he wanted them or not), both of you can start to repair the horrendous damage that has occurred in your lives. I just wanted to say that throughout this thread you had one refrain, and that was " How could you shed the heavy feeling of guilt which hung over your head like the sword of Damocles". The fact is that guilt is the product of our conscience and the latter resides in the sub conscious mind. Fortunately or unfortunately for us, the sub conscious mind cannot be manipulated by us to do our bidding. It is like a 'Read only' memory in our human computer system and only puts out what has been programmed into it during our formative years and by the belief system that we were brought up on. Any changes to it can be effected over a period of time and not suddenly as can be done in our conscious minds. Conscience is a complex value system some which has probably been put there by genetic programming and cannot be altered even if we wish to do so. So guilt which is produced by our conscience will only get removed if the conditions which produced it in the first place are altered suitably. In your case coming clean to your husband about your EA and deception would be the input that your sub conscious mind would have been looking for and once that was satisfied your conscience would remove the guilt feelings that you were burdened with. This is also the reason that you were unable to shake off the feelings of guilt because you were not meeting the requirement of the sub conscious mind.

 

I also wanted to ask you why, if you were hung up on your AP from your college days, did you not marry him rather than your husband? How did you meet your husband and how long have you two been married? Also, you were aware that your husband had suicidal tendencies and was a victim of depression before you married him. Why then did you go ahead and marry him knowing fully well that you would face relationship problems because of his disability? I know the old saying " Marriages are made in Heaven" but sometimes we on earth can modify things so as not to run into problems. It takes a special kind of person to be able to partner someone who has a psychiatric problem. I know this from personal experience because my mother was in that situation and my father had to be a pillar of support for her most of her married life. He was psychologically and emotionally very strong because of which he was able to handle her condition. Any other man would have abandoned her at the first sight of trouble. I guess this has become very long so I'll close this here. Wish the both of you the very best!

[BluesPower]

V he feels that way now and he may for a while. But he loves you, and what is more, you know that he does.

 

You guys are going to work this out, because you both really love on another. There are no guarantees with any of this, but this will be ok.

 

It will all hurt for a long time, but it will workout. Anger and hate are not the opposite of love, apathy is. If he is angry, it is because he loves you.

 

Stay strong and hold on to your love...

[Violince]

Just a Guy, thank you for your thoughtful reply.

 

College guy broke my heart. I carried that with me for years. I should have kept it. Marrying him was never an option, both because initially i wouldn't have him, and because I could at least recognize he wasn't partner material when he finally got his head out of his ass and apologized. In all the years we've been married, I've never considered him "the one" (as opposed to the one that got away) except for a short, senseless time during the A.

 

BH and I met in our dorm and became friends. Here's a red flag for you: by my junior year, I was engaged to someone else (my rebound after college guy; we'd gotten engaged largely at my insistence when i was 18). He had a lot of his own interests that i didn't share and was often away in the evenings, so I'd talk to BH instead. I fell in love with him. He wanted the same things in life I did -- prioritizing children and family over travel, as my then-fiance envisioned. He was sweet and kind and he would never have said it first, but I wrote him a letter and told him I had feelings for him and wondered if he felt the same. It got complicated with fiance because I wanted to have my cake and eat it too, to have the both of them (did I mention Heinlein? That was my ideal). I know I should have just broken it off as cleanly as I could with fiance before anything with BH, but I was young and full of stupid ideas and too busy pursuing my own happiness to thing about his.

 

BH married me anyway, having seen what I was capable of. I knew about his depression from the beginning and thought I could help him, because I loved him. I knew what depression was like, having dealt with it for much of my freshman year (see college guy), and I thought that would be enough. We got engaged at 20 and married just before turning 22. Life experience? What's that? But I have never regretted marrying him, although that's bound up in that senseless time as a wistfulness and a winner about what life would have been like with college guy. In the limerance, I had a lot of thoughts that later became unrecognisable and that is one of them. We've been together for 22 years and just had our 20th anniversary.

 

I've made so many mistakes and terrible decisions. The constant has always been my love for my husband and his for me, both of which he now doubts. I don't blame him; my actions were not loving, but at the time I did not feel any less in love with him, and wanted, as i had in college, to eat cake instead. No, that's not loving. But my belief in love as a thing that could be shared was very strong and I think that was at play. Along with some very strong self-delusions about what I was actually doing. It was all wrong.

[Violince]

V he feels that way now and he may for a while. But he loves you, and what is more, you know that he does.

 

You guys are going to work this out, because you both really love on another. There are no guarantees with any of this, but this will be ok.

 

It will all hurt for a long time, but it will workout. Anger and hate are not the opposite of love, apathy is. If he is angry, it is because he loves you.

 

Stay strong and hold on to your love...

 

I hope that he does. Or that it he doesn't right now, we can make it come back. The worst part of that is, his love for me has been a part of his identity -- who he is as a man. And if he loses that, what hope is left for him? My touch causes him pain. And he tries anyway. God damn it. We have to make it back. I'm nothing without him.

[Violince]

That's a lot of autocorrect typos. I hope it made sense anyway.

[Just a Guy]

Hi Violince, I guess sometimes you have to be on the verge of losing something precious for you to realize how valuable it is to you. From all indications it seems that you and your husband will be able to weather this storm and come out of it stronger, more resilient and of course so much wiser. You would have been through the proverbial Hell and High water and come out the other side alive and kicking! So as the Lord Jesus would say " Go your way and sin no more"! Warm wishes to both you and your husband.

[Violince]

Thank you. I've known for a long time now valuable his love is (without price and the single most important aspect of my life). What I had been missing was how fundamentally wrong my whole concept of love had been, and that no, I really can't hold onto one without destroying the other. I'm appalled that it took me so long. I had for so long accepted it as a part of myself. I was afraid that if I lost it, I'd also be losing a piece of myself. But it was part of me like cancer is. Made from the same stuff, but malignant. And that's why I am so certain, with all of my being, that this will never happen again. You don't go through chemo and surgery and radiation and then plop back down in the tanning bed. It should have come sooner. I should have sought out resources beyond "how to help your spouse heal" in the early days, completed the therapy that I started, come clean immediately. But I was terrified and alone and still so selfish. I can only hope it's not too late now, as he thinks it is.

[Violince]

He wants to leave now. It's too much, he says. What do I do? I can't. I can't.

[BluesPower]

Just try to get him to calm down a little. He is freaking out because he is in shock.

 

If that does not work, then let him go, I think he will be back.

 

It is not over yet!!!

[drifter777]

Neither of us slept, everything is broken. He's staying only because where else would he go? He's not sure he still loves me. He's never been so angry. He wants his heart to stop. He's rewritten the entire marriage to be about the betrayal and thinks i never really loved him.

You posted:

 

It doesn't help that I still have very strong feelings for AP, and have for more than half my life (since college).

 

Given that your OM is a guy who you admittedly have been carrying a torch for all of this time then I agree with your husband. You never did "really" love him in the way he would define love. Your definition doesn't matter as you add your own color and rationalization to it. His definition is all that matters to him.

 

Now he's left. Let him go and start working to understand your true motivations for looking for validation with an old flame. If you guys decide to try to reconcile, understanding yourself is one of the first things you need to do anyway.

 

Look - if you had done all this sexting with some random guy it would be bad enough. But it's your Ex and your husband is correctly putting 2 + 2 together and recognizing that you prefer a fantasy life with that guy to the real life with him. At the very least you have to agree that this fact taints your entire marriage. I think carrying a torch for an Ex is a very sensitive subject for all married couples because of the deep-down fear that exists in all of us that we are not good enough. Now you've verified that for him and I don't know what the consequences of that is going to be and, likely, neither does he. One thing I can promise you is that no matter how badly hurt and damaged he is right now that, since it's an Ex, it is going to get worse.

[harrybrown]

You can't control him, but you can show by your actions your desire to stay with him.

 

When I told my wife I was leaving, she said she was coming with me.

 

Do tell the OM's wife, and burn the toy that looks like the OM's parts.

 

You have to show him that you want him.

 

Good luck. try the divorce busting website, or see if you can get him to go with you to affair recovery.

 

You can find them online.

[Imajerk17]

These flowery words of regret are nice, but I find myself wondering this OP: If you hadn't gotten caught, would you still be carrying out this affair?

 

I wouldn't be insulting your OM so much, YOU were the one who cheated on your husband. So you're just as bad as he is.

 

I'm not sure that you are truly sorry for cheating, you are instead sorry that you GOT CAUGHT.

Edited September 20, 2016 by Imajerk17

[heartwhole]

I feel like some of these posters have not read your story carefully and are just jumping on the "bash the WS" train.

 

Anyway, as a BW, I'll say that you need to dig deep and stay the course if you want reconciliation to work. It's pretty understandable that your husband would consider leaving now. I mentioned this when you first posted - that it's so much worse to carry on rebuilding on lies.

 

But that doesn't mean that he won't decide to give it another chance. You've made a lot of progress in your perspective, had ended the EA entirely on your own, and were (probably) going to come clean about the lies and half-truths you had told. So he may decide that if was willing to work on the marriage a week ago, he has reason to work on it now too. You need to give him the space to feel his totally justified anger, and you need to bear it without panicking and wanting him to reassure you and saying, "Woe is me! This is just as I feared!" These are your choices coming home to roost. Now is the time to dig deep and become a stronger, better person who can face the storm head-on.

 

If you do lose him over this, then you still need to move forward being the best you that you can be. You'll both be OK either way as long as you are working on yourselves and making healthy choices.

[Violince]

Given that your OM is a guy who you admittedly have been carrying a torch for all of this time then I agree with your husband. You never did "really" love him in the way he would define love. Your definition doesn't matter as you add your own color and rationalization to it. His definition is all that matters to him.

That's fair. Thank you. The way he would define it, no, because it wasn't (to my lasting Shame/remorse/regret etc) exclusive. I truly hope he would not see it as not love at all, once the shock of this wears off.

 

Now he's left. Let him go and start working to understand your true motivations for looking for validation with an old flame. If you guys decide to try to reconcile, understanding yourself is one of the first things you need to do anyway. [/Quote]

He's still here, for now, but says I should begin to prepare myself mentally for what a separation would look like. I have a therapy appt on Thursday.

 

Look - if you had done all this sexting with some random guy it would be bad enough. But it's your Ex and your husband is correctly putting 2 + 2 together and recognizing that you prefer a fantasy life with that guy to the real life with him. At the very least you have to agree that this fact taints your entire marriage. I think carrying a torch for an Ex is a very sensitive subject for all married couples because of the deep-down fear that exists in all of us that we are not good enough. Now you've verified that for him and I don't know what the consequences of that is going to be and, likely, neither does he. One thing I can promise you is that no matter how badly hurt and damaged he is right now that, since it's an Ex, it is going to get worse.

God, I hope not. I do not prefer a fantasy life. There was a brief but horrifying period where I felt hopeless in the fantasy relationship, and believed it would be better if it were the real one. I will never forgive myself for that. What I wanted from total disclosure was to be completely honest with my husband, to show him that I was no longer holding anything back, for the sole purpose of rebuilding, in the phrase several posters have used, on an honest foundation. That I could be completely vulnerable.

 

I didn't really consider, beyond lip service, that when I said "this could end things" it really might. I find such awful irony in knowing now that actually being honest, after having lied so long, means he can't believe anything at all. In trying to do the right thing, the most wrong consequence might be what happens. Now that I finally, finally understand what love is supposed to be, now that I can be the woman he's always wanted -- who loves him and him alone -- now he may not be here. I know nothing in adultery is fair, but this... None of it feels real. This is so, so wrong.