SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Please let me know if I am posting too much, I am just venting today as I am in a hard place so it is just my current thoughts.

I recently wrote about why I stayed faithful. I wrote about character, our children, my vows, and the fact that pain was never permission for me to create more pain.

But there is another side to that choice that doesn't sound nearly as noble.

Staying faithful did not mean I was happy. It didn’t mean I felt loved, desired, appreciated, or even noticed. It didn’t mean I was somehow less lonely than she was. It just meant I carried my loneliness differently, I carried it quietly. And quiet pain is incredibly easy to ignore.

There are no deleted messages proving how unwanted I felt. There are no hotel receipts documenting the nights I lay beside my wife feeling completely alone. There are no secret meetings showing how desperately I wanted to feel like more than a provider, a problem-solver, a chauffeur, and a coparent. There is no paper trail for the conversations I tried to start, the rejection I swallowed, or the number of times I convinced myself that this was just a hard season and things would get better.

There is only the fact that I stayed.

I went to work, I paid the bills, I raised our kids, I fixed what broke. I carried the responsibilities because that was what I believed a husband and father was supposed to do. I kept showing up even when it felt like nobody was showing up for me.

That is what faithful spouses do. We don’t always leave, and we don’t betray anyone but ourselves. Sometimes we just absorb everything. We absorb the silence, the lack of intimacy, the creeping feeling that everyone else’s needs matter more than our own. We make excuses for the distance because we love the person creating it. We become patient, then more patient, and eventually so patient that nobody notices we are slowly disappearing.

Because I kept functioning, everyone assumed I was fine. Because I didn’t create chaos, my loneliness never became an emergency. Because I remained dependable, my pain was mistaken for strength.

And then I discovered that while I was carrying the marriage, she had been stepping outside it.

That is the hardest thing to accept. While I was denying myself an escape, she was granting herself one. While I was protecting our family from my pain, she was using her pain to justify risking it. While I was telling myself that marriage means enduring loneliness without destroying everything around you, she was creating a second life where none of the responsibilities followed her.

Then, after discovery, I was still expected to understand. I had to understand her loneliness. Her unmet needs, her coping mechanisms, her childhood, her desire for validation. Her ability to compartmentalize, her fear and her shame.

I have spent more time trying to understand why my wife betrayed me than anyone ever spent asking what it took for me not to betray her.

My faithfulness didn’t happen because my needs were being met. It happened despite the fact that they were starved. I was lonely too. I felt unwanted too. I wanted to be touched, desired, and chosen. I wanted someone to look at me and see something more than a tool that fixes things and pays bills. I tried to talk and tell.

There were times when attention from another woman would have felt incredible. There were times when being admired would have filled something in me that had been empty for years. I had opportunities. I had the same easy access to phones, messages, secrecy, and validation that everyone else has.

But I understood that feeling deprived did not give me the right to become deceptive.

So I brought my pain home. I tried to talk. I tried to explain that I was lonely, that the intimacy was dead, and that our marriage had become transactional. I didn't always say it perfectly. Sometimes my frustration sounded like anger, sometimes I withdrew because I was tired of saying the same things to a brick wall. But I brought the problem into the marriage. I didn't take it outside and build a second one.

Faithfulness didn’t prevent me from being hurt. It prevented me from becoming someone I would hate, and I am so glad I made the choices I did. It allowed me to look at our children and know I hadn't gambled their stability for a temporary feeling. It allowed me to look in the mirror and know I hadn't forced my wife to question whether the years she lived beside me were even real.

But it didn’t protect me from the cost of carrying it all alone.

Parts of me became hard during those years. There are needs I just stopped expressing because being disappointed repeatedly teaches you to stop asking. There were times I accepted absolutely nothing because admitting how hungry I was felt more humiliating than pretending I was full. That wasn't strength. It was survival.

I am proud that I stayed faithful. I am proud that loneliness didn’t break my values, that rejection didn’t become my excuse, and that opportunity didn’t become my permission. But I am done pretending it didn’t cost me anything. It cost me everything I have and more.

It cost me pieces of my confidence, not in my self but others. It cost me years of swallowing things I should have screamed. It cost me the belief that if you love someone completely, they will naturally protect you in return. It cost me the certainty that the person sleeping next to me was carrying the same marriage I was.

Then discovery handed me even more to carry. The images. The questions. The humiliation. The ruined memories. The responsibility of keeping our children steady while I could barely keep myself standing.

I stayed faithful because I refused to make my pain someone else’s wound. She didn't make that same choice.

I don’t regret keeping my word. I don’t regret protecting my children from choices that would destroy their sense of safety. I don’t regret remaining faithful, even to someone who wasn't being faithful to me. What I regret is how long I believed that being dependable meant I was supposed to live without being cared for. I regret how much of myself I allowed to die while trying to keep the marriage alive.

Being faithful shouldn't require you to vanish. Love shouldn't mean starving quietly so everyone else can stay comfortable.

My integrity protected my family from my choices. It did not protect me from hers.

And even knowing what it cost me, I would still choose faithfulness again. Not because she deserved it, and not because the marriage was always worthy of the sacrifice.

But because I deserved to remain the man I believed myself to be.

I don’t regret protecting her. I regret that the person I protected didn’t protect me.

Great clarity. Hindsight is always 20/20 isn’t it?

What you wrote here is transformational.

It’s a manifesto of what you no longer will accept moving forward. We always hear about the sacrifices in marriage, but in reality a healthy marriage requires little sacrifice. It should help us lead a fulfilling life not one that drains us.

Whether you choose to reconcile or if you choose to end this marriage and eventually have other relationships you will now build up skills and awareness that allows you to do so without the self abandonment.

That decision is likely still a little down the road but I know that despite the infidelity, my husband and I both learned:

-to create win-wins.

-to become responsible for our own happiness

-to communicate our concerns, no matter how small and work as a team to resolve them.

And I think about intimacy struggles that we and most couples face, where the higher desire person never seems to have enough and the lower desire person feels they are expected to behave as a machine. We finally learned that showing our desire for intimacy was a limited experience that needed to be expanded in a way both people felt desired rather than one feeling like they aren’t and the other feeling like they are there to be an outlet. The freedom in the way we show love physically and the inclusion of emotional intimacy has created an entirely different dynamic.

Why I am I saying these things? To say it’s still possible, even in the marriage you are in but most certainly in a future relationship as well. You are allowing the lessons to be learned.

Because you already have identified the issues you present in marriage that have assisted in cultivating your loneliness. Self abandonment is common in marriage. By refusing to do that to yourself any longer is a way of taking your power back.

The frustration is in the stall. While you can continue to identify where things went wrong for you and what you allowed, you are still faced with healing trauma, and the waiting game of what should I do with this marriage. You see the changes she is working in, but obviously feel no trust or guarantee or security in that. Of course, you could divorce tomorrow and still experience the stall because you have healing to do and a new relationship will take time.

In the meantime, these revelations are still powerful. It’s a shift you are describing. A proclamation. There will be some time here to find self forgiveness and self compassion. You can practice communication (which by the way is so hard for us to see that you may not be good at it-you are excellent at it here).

You do not have to have empathy or understanding for your wife right now to move towards reconciliation. You should both look at this as a time for self-recovery and healing. You are doing a great job as self assessing and feeling your feelings. Feeling anger, indignation, foolish, shame for staying, at times disgust yourself by still loving her…it’s a lot of conflicting emotions at once.

But I suspect given some of your history you are gravitating towards the very things that will heal you. Everything you are saying sounds very healthy and leaning into oneself is usually the hardest thing to get a bs to see.

So post away. I think we are all gaining things from the way you express yourself. There are bs in this site, some who mainly lurk even that you are putting your finger in so many things they can’t pinpoint for themselves. The courageous and reflective writing is helping so many other people.

Outrage is the only sane response to what you are going through. But you are doing it also with self reflection of how things will need to change moving forward. That’s not a statement of your relationship, it’s a statement of what you will and won’t accept and that clarity is priceless.

[This message edited by hikingout at 5:04 PM, Wednesday, June 17th]

These are great insights and the conclusions you may draw from them is something I'm trying keep implementing in my marriage with my faithful wife for years now, with success so far. She also had childhood trauma and destructive coping mechanisms (though not infidelity related), all gone as far as I can see. I can't relate with guys that bitch about their marriage and my wife says that soon she will have no female friends, because they find her unrelatable and she makes them feel worse about themselves.

In the modern era in modern countries there is barely any sense in marriage other then love, affection and mutual support. If these are missing, marriage is just a bunch of unnecessary commitments hanging in vacuum. But to actually be able to keep all the important pieces long term, both sides must be able and willing to engage in good willed and honest, yet assertive negotiations, where they are willing to show some grace and compromise, but also capable to fight back or walk out.

[This message edited by Itiswhatitis000 at 5:59 PM, Wednesday, June 17th]

Gemmy -

Please let me know if I am posting too much, I am just venting today as I am in a hard place so it is just my current thoughts.

The beauty of SI is there is NO such thing as posting too much!

Vent early, vent often.

80 percent of my posts are over my first three years hanging out here. Maybe 90 percent.

I regret that the person I protected didn’t protect me.

I felt that regret too, for a while. I also felt most of the pain you are describing — I carried mine during all the years my wife kept her A a secret, and then for a while after her much belated confession.

Ultimately, I have learned regrets don’t serve me well.

I can’t regret holding up my end of the vows or focusing on my sons, or keeping my family together.

I guess I see my pain as part of the deal. Pain I didn’t deserve or ask for, but certainly tolerated.

I can only operate each day with the information and experience I have. In order to heal and live better, I had to learn and adapt.

In other words, I protected me the best I knew how at the time.

Today, is so much better, because I start each day with choosing me and my path forward.

Infidelity sucks, but it gave me the reset to build my life around what I want and need. To be more selfish.

Being more selfish, as it turns out, can bring back self-love and self-care.

I spent plenty of time with regrets, they never helped me. I spent time blaming, and that didn’t help me either.

Bad horrible days happened, now what?

I own my path forward. I get a voice in everything around me. I get a vote on how I respond to good things and horrible things. Now. Today.

I think you’re finding your way, because you have reviewed what you didn’t like about NOT taking care of you.

Time to focus on you — as you get your feet back underneath you.

Very well said, part of my anger stage was realizing that while I was pushing the cart uphill she was in it loading it down. I knew our M was not well but the harder I worked on it the further she moved away. I hate calling it the "pick me dance" but that’s what it was.

Not only did she betray me and the family. She piled on pain and got to escape it. But 7 years later, she still has to live with what she did, while I have a clear conscious. I don’t bring it up or remind her, but she still battles with the scars.

Occasionally there will be a thread asking "Would you rather be the betrayed or the wayward". Overwhelming the answer is neither, but if I have to choose one I would rather be the betrayed, because I get through this with my integrity in tact.

I don't think I have a lot to add to this excellent insight, just maybe a warning of potential hazards ahead.

Then, after discovery, I was still expected to understand. I had to understand her loneliness. Her unmet needs, her coping mechanisms, her childhood, her desire for validation. Her ability to compartmentalize, her fear and her shame.

Yup, nailed it. Don't give in. I don't know what your status is with marriage counseling, but if you are doing it or considering it, be very wary of this becoming the focus. This belongs in her arena. Her IC. Her self work. If you do anything jointly and this becomes the focus, it can quickly feel like your pain is the problem that is oppressing the "broken little girl". It's professional DARVO. If she wants to be a marriage partner, she needs to evolve beyond being a broken little girl and start being a functional adult. And you should only work within marriage counseling with a functional adult.

It really is an extra kick in the balls when you realize that the person who created the distance/silence suffocating the marriage thru avoidance is also the person who stepped out. Marriage counselors and even friends and family aren't prepared to recognize that level of moral inequality, which leaves you with few options to turn to to express it. I'm glad you found us.

I also gave and gave and gave. Both inside my marriage and outside. I had to wrestle with part of that coming from codependent tendencies in me created from an alcoholic father. Not saying that is you, but it's something to consider that our virtue taken out of proportion can become a problem, we can create covert contracts instead of giving joyfully and freely.

Thank you for sharing yourself like this, it really is a gift to this community.

Occasionally there will be a thread asking "Would you rather be the betrayed or the wayward". Overwhelming the answer is neither, but if I have to choose one I would rather be the betrayed, because I get through this with my integrity in tact.

Agreed, plus its long term thinking. Long term you can start fresh meet some loyal. You can dump a cheater, can't dump yourself.

[This message edited by DRSOOLERS at 6:24 PM, Wednesday, June 17th]

There is a member here whose tag line reads: "Damaged people are dangerous; they know they can survive."

At some point in the near future I would encourage you to seek out therapy to help you unpack why you're constantly in "survival mode." You briefly mentioned the abuse and abandonment in your childhood in your last thread. You survived that (or so you might believe) and, it seems to me, it's kept you in survival mode ever since.

Now here you are, determined to survive infidelity, which I've no doubt you'll do. What scares me is that this is your only goal - to survive.

What I hope for you is that one day you'll stop embracing survival and begin to thrive, to deliberately seek out life and joy rather than simply endure suffering, rejecting the "nobility" of living in quiet desperation.

I kept showing up even when it felt like nobody was showing up for me.

Start showing up for yourself and I think you'll find the peace you've been missing for so long.

Unhinged that is probably a very fair assessment.

You are not writing too much. Keep it coming. You don't realize how much your musings justify and help other people's experience. Thank you for writing.

Gemmy, I don't think there's such a thing as posting too much here. I've made quite a few posts myself just venting, and I wish I had the skill you do with expressing myself. I think most of my posts tend to meander and read like scattershot. You have a way of finding the right words and organizing them in a way that resonates with many of us. Even some of the veterans.

When I see one of your posts I always jump straight to it. Even if I don't always reply, I always check them out because I know it's going to resonate. I've read a few of them to my wife. She agrees you have a gift for writing. You moved her to tears with your letters to self. I'm glad she heard them.

So yeah, don't stop, and certainly don't apologize. You add a lot to the discussion. I agree some of your posts could be pinned or added to the library.

As a staff member, the guidelines are my bible. There's nothing in the guidelines that mentions - much less defines or warns against - number of posts. As a former IT guy, I know a person - even hundreds of people - can't type fast enough to overload the system.

*****

Then, after discovery, I was still expected to understand. I had to understand her loneliness. Her unmet needs, her coping mechanisms, her childhood, her desire for validation. Her ability to compartmentalize, her fear and her shame.

Gently, every BS is fully entitled to disappoint those expectations.

The BS's pain does not depend on the WS's why(s). The BS's pain is independent of the WS's FOO issues, even when the 'FOO issue' is terrible abuse.

And IMO, the BS's main focus when betrayed is processing the pain out of their body, not taking care of the WS, however wounded the WS may be. After all, the WS is the ONLY person who can heal the WS's wounds.

The BS is, likewise, the only one who can heal the BS's wounds, and the faster the BS realizes that, the faster the BS will heal. That's a tough message to hear, but I'm convinced that hearing and acting on that message is the BS's best course of action.

*****

I have the same wish for you that Unhinged does, that you aim to thrive. Sometimes, though, I forget that one must survive before one can thrive, and surviving is messy.

So I'll be frank. I have some concerns about what your writing may mean for you. You seem to know you're a work in progress, and that's a very positive sign.

Keep writing. That's the only way I can think of to find out what it does mean to you. Besides, your writing helps others.

[This message edited by SI Staff at 5:24 PM, Thursday, June 18th]

@sisoon

So I'll be frank. I have some concerns about what your writing may mean for you. You seem to know you're a work in progress, and that's a very positive sign.

What concerns do you have? I really thought I was processing well, but both you and unhinged seem to see something I do not. I would like to dive in deeper.

Fantastic post! Beautifully written and helpful insights. Your last two lines are the loudest for me. Keeping ourselves intact and not regretting being there for them when they weren't there for us. And recognizing our own pain in the marriage and how we handled it with strength for our families.
Keep them coming for you and the rest of us.

A couple of responses to my post have stayed with me. This has side tracked my whole afternoon at work

Unhinged suggested that I have spent much of my life in survival mode, expressing concern that surviving may have become my primary goal. Sisoon had concerns about what my writing might mean for me, while also encouraging me to continue because writing may be the only way to discover the answer.

Neither comment felt dismissive, neither suggested that my anger was wrong or that I should be directing more empathy toward my wife. They seemed to be asking a much harder question "Am I processing what happened, or am I simply becoming extremely good at describing it?" is how I am reading this and that is extremely thought provoking and fair.

That question bothered me because writing has been one of the few places where I have felt clear. At first I took it as a slight by Unhinged but have come to realize he may be a hundred times more insightful than I.

In ordinary life, everything inside me is tangled together; rage, grief, humiliation, love, disgust, responsibility, fear, and the constant pressure to make decisions that will affect my children. When I write, I can separate those things. I can name them, I can turn something shapeless into something I can understand.

But understanding pain is not necessarily the same as releasing it. I can explain exactly why I am angry and still be angry. I can identify the wound and still live inside it. I can describe survival beautifully and still have no idea how to live beyond it, as that is all I have ever known.

That is difficult for me to admit because survival is the one thing I have always known how to do, and do it very well.

Long before infidelity entered my life, I learned to endure. I learned that pain does not stop the responsibilities. You still get up. You still go to work. You still protect the people around you. You make yourself useful. You solve problems. You carry what needs to be carried because nobody is coming to relieve you. That ability has kept me alive. It has also allowed me to remain in situations that were slowly destroying me, even if I didn't recognize it at the time.

I have often confused endurance with strength. I believed that because I could tolerate something, I was supposed to tolerate it. Because I could continue functioning without care, I convinced myself that care was optional. Because I could swallow disappointment, loneliness, rejection, and resentment, I kept swallowing them. Eventually, being needed became easier than admitting I had needs.

Perhaps that is part of what my writing has been exposing. When I describe myself as the person who stayed, provided, protected, repaired, absorbed, and endured, I am telling the truth. But I may also be describing a role I have occupied for most of my life. I am the one who carries everything, I am the one who remains standing. I am the one who does not get the luxury of collapsing. There is pride in that identity, but there is also profound self-abandonment.

The danger is that betrayal did reinforce it. Once again, I have been placed in a situation where survival feels noble. Once again, I am carrying pain while trying to keep everyone else stable. Once again, I am proving that I can withstand something that should have broken me. That perhaps is not something to be proud of, and I must be wary of staying in the "victim" mentality.

And perhaps I have spent so much time asking whether this marriage can survive that I have not spent enough time asking what kind of life I actually want to live. Survival asks, "How do I get through today?" Thriving asks, "What would make tomorrow worth reaching?" Survival asks whether I can tolerate more. Thriving asks why I believe I should have to.
I am actually close to tears writing this as I believe I may be having an epiphany in real time.

I do not yet know what thriving looks like for me. That is not false modesty; I genuinely do not know. I know how to be a father, I know how to work, I know how to solve emergencies. I know how to analyze what went wrong, I know how to protect people. I know how to turn pain into words that help someone else feel less alone.

But what do I enjoy when nobody needs anything from me? What brings me peace rather than temporary distraction? What would I choose if I were not choosing based on obligation, guilt, history, or responsibility?

Who am I when I am not carrying someone?

Those questions are much harder for me than deciding whether my anger is justified. I already know that it is. I already know that my wife’s choices were hers. I already know that I did not deserve what happened.

But I do not want the worst thing she ever did to become the central organizing fact of the rest of my life. I do not want to remain permanently cast as the betrayed husband any more than I wanted to be cast as the neglected husband before discovery. I want my identity to become larger than what I survived.

That does not mean abandoning the anger before it has served its purpose. It does not mean forgiving prematurely, reconciling, divorcing, understanding her childhood, or pretending that the moral inequality between our choices does not matter. It means recognizing that moral clarity is supposed to free me, and if it helps others in the wake all the better.

I think my writing is helping me, it has allowed me to say things I spent years suppressing. It has helped other people put language around their own pain, and that matters deeply to me. But I also need to be honest enough to examine what happens after I write.

Do I feel lighter?
Am I discovering something new, or presenting the same evidence in a more powerful way?
Am I writing toward a future, or documenting the destruction with increasing precision?
Am I processing the pain, or keeping it close because I am afraid that releasing it would somehow minimize what happened?

I do not have the answers yet. Maybe that is the point.

For most of my life, I have judged progress by whether I remained standing. I am beginning to understand that standing is only the first stage. Survival may be necessary, but it cannot be the final destination.

I have spent a lifetime showing up for everyone else. Now I need to discover what showing up for myself actually means. Not just keeping myself alive. Not just keeping myself useful. Not just enduring another unbearable thing without becoming unbearable myself.

Building something that contains more than responsibility and pain.

I survived what happened to me. The next question is whether I am willing to stop making survival my entire life i suppose. I will keep writing and may sometimes back slide but I do understand what has been presented and accept the premise with open arms.

So I'll be frank. I have some concerns about what your writing may mean for you. You seem to know you're a work in progress, and that's a very positive sign.

What concerns do you have? I really thought I was processing well, but both you and unhinged seem to see something I do not. I would like to dive in deeper.

But understanding pain is not necessarily the same as releasing it.

It’s not the same, but it is part of the slow process. Brené Brown says that her research leads her to believe that the words we use to describe our emotions have a feedback loop to the emotions themselves. Her book Atlas of the Heart is basically a glossary of emotions which go way beyond the big three of Mad, Sad, Glad. She says that the bigger our emotional vocabulary, the richer our emotional experience. I think your ability to explore and describe your chaos is also helping to open the pressure relief valves. That was my experience anyway.

I am curious about what Sisoon has to say about his concerns. The only thing that I note about your writing is it seems to come out so fully formed, and almost written to benefit others. This is a safe place to not know the answers, to let your chaos show, no one will judge you.

I write and re-write, then re-write again looking at how it will come across. So I guess I edit for the benefit of others no doubt about it.

I spent the better part of ten pages on a mental exercise of whether my ex wife may in fact have been a victim of her AP. These good people more than tolerated my bullshit and in the end I came around and a ton of wisdom was written down for lots of people to see.
Maybe to the point of you thriving, you not worrying so much about others, just let this be what you need. Regardless of how it may come across. Because one important lesson in that is you don’t really know how your message will be received by others. Let go of trying to control that, maybe it’s a microcosm of choosing yourself.

I do feel that the rewrites help me process more thoroughly. My response to Unhinged and Sisoon took almost an hour because I was trying to articulate exactly what I meant, not just make it sound better. I believe this is part of my process.