Can Our Marriage Survive My Affair? I'm Doing Everything I Can.
A year out from affair discovery, an unfaithful wife fears her husband won't be able to recover.
Dear Lauren,
It’s been a year since my husband found out about my affair. At that time I immediately cut off contact with my affair partner, changed my number, and blocked/deleted all contact info. I started individual therapy to work through the reasons I chose to go outside my marriage and be dishonest. I’ve been open with my husband and have answered his questions about the affair the best I can, about my therapy sessions and what is discussed in them, and the reasons why I did what I did (knowing no reason is justified).
My husband has access to my phone (he was able to read through all messages between me and my AP - majority of the relationship was texting, we only met in person once) and social media accounts. I offered to share my location (he declined), and have limited the number of times I go out to see friends and family without him to maximize our time together and minimize any triggers.
We recently started couples counseling a couple months ago and I do feel like our communication has improved and good days are happening more often than the bad ones. However, recently my husband expressed to me that he feels nothing has changed since the day he found out. He feels no forward movement and feels something needs to change, but doesn’t know what. He also feels like he shouldn’t be the one to figure out what needs to change since this was my mistake. He feels like our relationship was a lie, he can’t look at our wedding photos anymore without feeling disgust, and he says he feels alone even when we’re together.
I have so much regret for being the cause of his pain when I was supposed to be the one person he could rely on not to hurt him. I feel he is coming to his breaking point. He still is open to working on things and giving it a chance but this won’t sustain for much longer. I need advice on what I need to do to help ease some of his pain and help feel like our current situation is moving forward, even if only a little bit. I’m desperate to save our marriage and hopeful that we still can.
Sincerely,
Desperate Wife
Dear Desperate Wife,
Your efforts to do all you can to save your marriage is a testament to how much you want to right your wrongs. As you do your part, your husband remains hurt and hurting. And so there’s a frontier to his healing, and to your healing as a couple, that remains to be discovered.
He isn’t sure what’s at the root of his difficulty feeling progress toward healing, though from what you describe there has been tremendous effort. I encourage both of you to remain curious, and also know that healing from infidelity takes a lot longer than one might ever expect.
In fact, when it comes to trauma, there really isn’t such thing as being “healed” from it. Rather, it’s our ability to learn to live with it in such a way that it eventually fades into the background of our lives, and we manage it when it arises. Like a broken bone that re-sets but still throbs when bad weather comes, or shows a scar at the surgical site.
His difficulty feeling progress might be rooted in your affair inciting a sort of existential crisis for him — a shattered sense of self cohesion, a dread that the person we thought would be our life’s partner, the one to never hurt us or deceive us, has been the source of our greatest pain. That can lead to a deep uncertainty about the value of love and commitment… and the love and commitment we thought we had.
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