SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

I attended a celebration of life for my son’s baseball coach today. Many spoke and shared beautiful stories about the game and coach’s commitment to mentoring these boys. A great man indeed!
One of the speakers described coach’s incredible love for his wife.
He said that no man has ever loved his wife as much as coach loved his.

To be cherished. I thought I was……and on DD it all came crashing down.

It has been many years and I am healing but I won’t ever feel cherished again.

I know for 36 years I thought I was too. It’s been 5 years and I agree I will never feel anything special about myself or my 42 years of marriage again. I remember a couple of months after discovering what was really going on during his "healing" return to Vietnam saying I deserved to be loved and cherished in my marriage. He said he needed to look up that definition in the dictionary. He was so spiteful right after I found out. I don’t think I am capable of looking with love again.

I understand this deeply. Please understand what I’m about to say is not to minimize that longing to be cherished by someone else.

My childhood was rough. Very much so. I had been betrayed and abused by so many people who were supposed to protect me and love me. My first M ended due to infidelity and my ex-ass and his OW treated me horrifically.

JM was supposed to be the one who would never hurt me like that, never betray me. And his A just destroyed me. I felt like some toy that had been broken and then glued back together carelessly. And here is what I learned with some long hard hours in IC as well as 12 step rooms.

My worth, and your worth, is not determined by another person. Each of you is valuable and precious and beautiful. YOU cherish you. Take that little broken girl and perform kintsugi. Mend the broken pieces together with gold as you build yourself back together. I am actually on that path again right now as I have started back in IC to do some deep childhood and FOO work.

I hope this made sense. Again, I SO understand that hurt and desire.

I understand this completely.

I was driving home, one day from work, several years after D-Day, listening to the radio. The woman being interviewed was talking about her husband, she was some kind of author or something. She talked about how she loved her husband, more than anyone in her life, more than she's ever loved anyone. They had children, she said she loved her children, but not the way that she felt close to, and loved by her husband and loved her husband. She felt closer to him than to the children.

I've never forgotten that because my wife treated me very differently before we had children, compared to after, which happened relatively quickly after we got together. I always put her first, I treated her like that woman talked about how she treated her husband. Of course, my wife also had an affair when we had very young children, AND she didn't believe I viewed her the way that I said I did. Why? Because she had never believed people were being honest about such things, and she herself was not being honest about a lot (FOO issues).

But I think you have to keep it in perspective. Some people talk a great talk, especially around others, but are secretly cheating, they openly demonstrate this immense love and commitment to their partner, but underneath they're doing all sorts of deceitful things. You might think, "I wish my marriage was like that.", not realizing what their marriage is truly like.

Other people don't talk such a great talk but are much better in their relationships.

That is just to say, I wish my FWS viewed me the way I viewed her, the way that I thought she viewed me, the way that she openly treated me early in our relationship. However, I really don't think she's wired that way, for better or for worse.

Last month, for the umpteenth time, she forgot one of our two important anniversaries. She knows that it hurts, even more since the affair. We've talked about it over and over, but no change. When I reminded her, because I never forget them, she just looked at me blankly, then apologized, for the umpteenth time.

This despite her confessing to cheating on this day.

She's a much better person than she was prior to D-Day, but she is still herself. She tries to not hurt me, and prior to D-Day this type of thing didn't hurt, as I wrote it off to her personality, memory for dates, etc. But even 14 years after D-Day it feels personal. It does not make me feel cherished.

It has been many years and I am healing but I won’t ever feel cherished again.

Such valid and understandable feelings. I have struggled with this feeling, and for me this comes down to shame/fear based feelings. I have long learn in my recovery that our thoughts and feelings lie to us sometimes. Other times they are meant to be our guides. It’s hard to discern for others whether they are having a thought/feeling meant to guide them or if it’s just faulty output. I have had it be both.

So this feeling of not ever being cherished- for me this is what led to my affair to begin with. As a ws, I squandered opportunities for connection because I was unable to believe I was worthy of love. I had formed this belief because I spent my entire marriage up to this point over doing everything so I could earn it. The harder I tried the less it felt like it was obtainable. I just kept doing more and seeing less and less of myself. In truth, I was doing a lot of crap my husband couldn’t care less about and had little appreciation for.

Instead of being a normal person and seeing I was loved for me, I saw it as always falling short. After confessing to the affair this transmuted into feeling even less worthy of being cherished.

Fast forward to three years later finding out my husband had been having an 18 month affair. And presto! I decided I deserved it. I had spent a lot of time in that three years recovering from the additional shame I brought to myself through cheating. And now, I was experiencing a different type of shame: the shame of the betrayed.

Of course I didn’t deserve to be cheated on. No one deserves that. But my marriage was an even bigger dumpster fire. I had to decide if these new feelings were guidance towards pulling the plug or moving forward with the marriage. Like most, that first year there was no decision except whichever moment I was on. I found little pockets of time like most saying I will wait and see, and then wake up in the middle of the night in a pool of sweat with my subconscious screaming at me to decide something.

I went through a big phase of anger next. I started to think I cheated because we were never what I wanted for us to be, and that we should have just divorced a long time ago. I couldn’t picture a way forward.

However, over time, I returned to my recovery efforts. I had learned as the ws that my thoughts were distorted. That shame took away my feelings of worthiness. And at some point, I was able to recognize that shame had come to roost a different way.

I felt shame that this was my marriage. We had both failed and yet here I sat to marinate in inaction. I felt shame that it would never be this pristine pool of love and devotion. And that what comes around goes around and I was a fool to think differently.

I returned to a book that I read during the first year after my affair. It was called "the power of now" by Eckhardt Tolle. It’s a dense book with a lot of things that sink in slowly and with practice.

And through the course of rereading it and practicing being mindful of my thoughts and that the only thing that really exists is the present moment. And most of our present moments are just fine. If we add to it gratitude over what we are experiencing, there is this alchemy that occurs that produces joy.

I found things like joy at the beginning of this to be fleeting, and actually took note that I felt afraid to feel it. The other shoe was going to drop at any moment, I just knew it. So I returned to therapy to work through this new awareness that I wasn’t allowing myself the full range of emotions in life. I stuck to what felt safe. And unfortunately what felt safe was to stop believing that certain things were possible for me.

If we don’t allow ourselves to want, then we won’t feel disappointed was what became my guide. And it was so faulty.

Coming to believe that I am worthy of joy, I am worthy of being cherished, or being loved, and feeling connected. And when I started to look through that lens, it was a better guide. Over time what I began to see is either my h was going to be part of that or he wasn’t, but I was going to have that moving forward.

And for me, it led to him being part of that. But I wouldn’t have recognized he was giving me that if I had stayed in the mode of believing it wasn’t possible. I invested in hope over hopeless, and it was scary to do that. The only reasons I felt comfortable making that step is complicated. I had figured out my relationship with myself in which I had to give myself love and compassion first. If I had it to give myself, I didn’t need it from others. This allowed me to assess things more objectively.

My betrayed self had to start giving myself compassion for keeping this marriage. And recognizing there were things in life I wanted that I wasn’t willing to sacrifice. My ws self had to learn to keep moving forward and stop looking backwards so much. And my human self, deserving of love and connection gave me purpose in seeking it.

For a long time it was looking at things day to day. And what I found in those days was a lot of love and grace and compassion. And together we cultivated a way of cherishing each other. And I think for us, it’s not so much about a period of time starting seven years ago, and all the time that was lost. It’s about starting new and this time more intelligently. I am not the woman he married. He is not the man I married. We are better humans today and I like to think we will be better humans tomorrow.

If he hadn’t done the work (or vice versa) one of us would have ended it. But we didn’t, we are choosing to cherish each other now. And if we weren’t choosing that, there would be no reason for us to stay married. I know that’s not true for everyone, for many there are many reasons for staying that may not include happiness or satisfaction.

I think it’s important to believe you deserve to be cherished and you have to allow yourself to be. And to give yourself permission to divorce if the other person isn’t going to give you that.

it’s hard to overcome the fear in either circumstance, but it’s worthy work.

[This message edited by hikingout at 1:14 PM, Monday, April 1st]

Looking back, I don't think I was ever cherished in the 27 years I was with my W. Not because I'm unworthy, but because she was and continues to be incapable of feeling that. Some people are just not wired for it.

I accepted the treatment because of my complex FOO issues and the physical, emotional, and psychological abuse I suffered at the hands of my mother. Without going into much detail, thatcabuse has and will continue to affect me, even in my 50's. This is one reason I am not a supporter of "staying for the kids", especially if the relationship is toxic. They will pattern their expectations after your modeling.

One of the byproducts of not being cherished or valued in either my childhood or my M, is that in order to survive, I had to learn to self-validate or die. I knew that no one else was going to tell me I was valuable or worthy, so I had to convince myself of that. Unfortunately, that voice of validation was not loud enough to be heard over the other noise in my world, so it was a constant struggle.

Funny thing, even to this day, I struggle with receiving a compliment. They actually prompt a cringe response in me. I go so far as to request that I not be publicly recognized for my volunteer efforts in order to avoid he spotlight. I prefer to remain in the shadows.

So back to being cherished. Yeah, I have no idea what that feels like. I think I would probably like it though.

That loss of being cherished (or being "special" or "enough" in Chaos speak) is something I struggle with to this day. And even though I am far removed from DDays - it still hits out of nowhere from time to time.

My father wasn’t always faithful. I don’t know the extent of my father’s betrayals, but he had at least 2 if not more. When he died, he was eulogized very similarly. Most never knew. As my mom grieved the loss of her husband of 52 years many spoke of his great love for her. She felt it. She was devastated when he died. She’d lost her partner and best friend. I guess my point is we rarely know anyone’s marital story. My mom never forgot his betrayals, but knew they were his shame, not hers and that he was not the same man the later half of life as he was the first. She felt cherished in the end and I believe she was. I believe my husband cherishes me now. Oddly, it doesn’t much matter to me. I don’t spend too much time worrying about what anyone thinks or feels about me as it’s impossible to know for sure what another is feeling. Hell, I don’t even truly know all the thoughts my own kids have about me. Instead, I prefer to focus on how one treats me and how "I" feel about them.

T/J

they were his shame, not hers

BOOM! Mic Drop! OnTheOtherSideOfHell wins the Internet today.

End T/J

I won’t ever feel cherished again.

Do you cherish yourself? Do you feel truly proud and joyful that you get to be you in this world? That's all you need.

This is a very good conversation. It has revealed to me a feeling that I've had about the A and the AP. About a year into recovery I got my self esteem back and did not give the AP's anymore head space. My WW did affair down, she found lowest of low men, men that have no problem being with a married woman. She search the trash to find these men. They are not in my league so I never compare myself, my sexual skills or anything else to these "men".

Her value of me, our M, and our family, became so low that she was willing to throw away something so priceless, for nothing more than to get her dopamine hits. It is like the drug addict that will rip off their Grandmother and sell her priceless silverware pennies, just to get their hit.

She did not cherish Me, our M, or our family.

Thank you for the focus back on what’s essential here.

Healing.

I do cherish myself and I am proud to have the opportunity to be me every moment I am allowed on this earth.

I’ll work next on dismantling the flawed belief I hold around the need to be cherished by my husband, by my love. I wanted to feel that for so long, then I felt it, then it came crashing down

To be cherished. I thought I was……and on DD it all came crashing down.

It has been many years and I am healing but I won’t ever feel cherished again.

This… exactly this ….

My story is almost the same as yours and others mentioned here .
I always felt special if not cherished during our years of marriage . He treated me as of I was his special girl.

Of course I loved him dearly and showed it to him on my daily life , but didn’t know he wanted more words of affirmations …
Then an old college friend ( never a gf) reconnected during Covid epidemic , after an online class reunion. Her marriage has been broken for a long time and has been in IHS with her husband . She was hungry for a relationship and showered my WH with attention and affection , sending him the ILY words several times daily . And he got hooked !

They had had online virtual sex for 5 months when I found out. I also found out that he treated her special too throughout their A , while he acted very distant towards me.

After Dday , he sent her a NC Letter , is remorseful and has been affectionate again towards me but it feels fake !
I realized that he is able to give his romantic affections to anyone he fancied! I am not special after all and this is heart breaking !

It has been almost 3 years but I haven’t found my trust again and sadly, that special feeling being cherished never came back . ..

I just want to let you know that you are not alone .
HFSSC was right , I quoted her …

your worth and my worth is not determined by another person

Stay strong ! Hugs .