SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Thank you both so much for these replies.

​Bruce, thank you for that explanation about the ED medication. Looking at it as the 'price' he had to pay to keep that dopamine hit and validation coming makes a tragic kind of sense. It explains why he put in so much bizarre effort for someone whose looks or personality certainly weren't the prize.

​b3199, your words hit deep. You are completely right—right now, I am trying so hard to make this work while leaving myself entirely vulnerable to ongoing trauma. What you said about my husband's definition of 'reconciliation' being a simple return to the status quo, no matter how much I am suffering, is the hard truth I’ve been wrestling with. He wants the emergency to be over so he doesn't have to face it, while I am left holding the burns.

​The hardest part of this daily reality is that whenever I react to his coldness and indifference, I suddenly become the problem. For the last couple of weeks, he has been completely cold and distant; when I ask him why, he just turns it around and says I am always the angry one, completely ignoring that my reaction is a direct response to his emotional absence.

​The idea of divorce does terrify me, but the thought of living in this endless anxiety and emotional limbo forever is even scarier. Shifting my mindset away from fearing the end of the marriage, and toward refusing to stay in a marriage where he refuses to do the work, is the exact strength I need to find. And I will definitely take your advice to ask The1stWife what her game changer was.

​Thank you both for your kindness, your wisdom, and for keeping me grounded. It means the world.

Hi Pat77,
I'm so sorry you are going through this, it is not fair and you did not deserve it.
I'm here to validate your suspicions of chemical and/or psychological manipulation. I am a person who has experienced something similar. Even if there was no outside chemical drug used on him (although I think it's possible he was drugged) the psychological manipulation is also 100% chemical. Others have mentioned the dopamine addiction an affair can cause. But it takes a special kind of abuse and emotional manipulation to get a person do things they do not want to do, like having sex with someone they are not attracted to, even when there is no physical arousal.
I can't 100% say what the situation with your husband and this other woman was, but I am pulling together some small threads in your story that make me suspect he was manipulated and probably psychologically abused. Do not discount this as an area of exploration.
I'm afraid this post is going to be really long and I don't want to get off in the weeds. But it took a least a year for me to START to tease out what the real story was. Because at first he said it was an emotional affair, but the more we talked I kept getting these "wait/what?" moments of things that just did not make sense. For context my long story short is: We hired a sociopath as an employee in our business. They trauma bonded my husband for entertainment and special treatment. They coerced him into betraying me for leverage. When they were found out they claimed sexual harassment, threatened to sue, tried to extort us (because they had no case). It was extremely difficult to get my brain around because of the trauma (yes, you are probably suffering from PTSD) and he had not yet been able to face the abuse. He had been conditioned in this other relationship to take the blame for everything, and he continued to blame himself for the whole debacle, when really there were plenty of "receipts" to show the manipulation and control this person was after. I have the benefit of having worked with this person as well on a day to day basis, and had some context for many of the incidents, even though they were happening below my radar.
This woman your husband was involved with was a stranger, so there may not be a lot of checking you can do. But I’m pretty confidant based on what you have said that this woman marked and targeted you husband for abuse. I can’t say why she did it but leave open the possibility that she is just a sick person who needs to control others to make herself feel powerful. You said, "It seems she just used manipulation to trap him for a good life", so maybe the motivation was the help he gave her? Was there financial assistance? It doesn’t really matter.
I’d love to say more, but you will need to tease out for yourself what is true and what is an excuse. For our relationship, I have to say there is no excuse for the betrayal (We do not call it an affair anymore). Emotional abuse and manipulation are reasons, but my husband is 100% accountable for not protecting himself, and our relationship from it. It is devastating. But the fact is he was not well, he was batshit crazy – and some of that crazy he did to himself but a lot of it was designed and constructed by this shitty person. When it comes right down to it, we all want to know "How could you do this to me?" For us the only answer that feels true and allows us to continue reconciliation is "I was bat shit crazy".
Last thing, I want to encourage you to get into individual counseling. I don’t think a marriage counselor can help as this isn’t "a relationship issue". It’s a him issue. He did something very wrong and hurtful and you need help healing from that, whether he’s willing to be involved or not, and frankly I don’t think he’s earned the right. I don’t think he is going to be safe until he figures out what happened and takes some ownership of being vulnerable to this attack. If he can get his own counselor and start to understand why he made all these bad decisions and allowed himself to get trapped in this onesided dynamic, there is some hope for your marriage. We have been at it for 3 ½ years and thigs are getting better.