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Hi there! I have had an emotional roller-coaster the past few days. I feel like I am drowning. I am not finding any hope. He randomly texted me on Friday night and told me "Thank you for teaching me a lesson to not trust anyone blindly". Then I said I am really sorry. He is like it's useless. Then he got mad and thinks that I have swayed our friend to my side who had invited me to dinner earlier in the week last week to their place. I told him that I had reached out to this friend. So he was like why do you want to meet people? I asked him do you not want people to talk to me now? He is like that's what I thought people would do after knowing what kind of a shitty person you are. I told him I am hurting and depressed too. To which he said I don't have any rights to be upset because I am the one who caused it. And then he sent me a picture of his abs and like you gave this up haha and I told him I loved him. Before he had abs, while he was going to have abs, after he had abs in ever which way. And then he stopped responding. He was extremely mean and rude. I asked him if he wants me to move away and doesn't want me to exist, he didn't reply to that.
I don't know if this is all him lashing out at me or is he starting to mean something here like he is almost done and he really hates me?
The only thing I can see he has for me is hatred and resentment.
Yesterday, on Sunday, he just came and took away the cat we had. She was the only company I had (my husband is living with some roommates is what he has mentioned). I asked him if we could talk. He said he has nothing to talk. For some reason, it is really bothering that couple of people are still talking to me somehow. He told me that we both are in shock but he is handling it way better than me. Probably he is. He seems to be happy in the picture of a friend who had posted on her birthday. On the other hand, here I am falling more and more in love with my husband and extremely disappointed and disgusted in myself for bringing us to this juncture. He is an amazing man, my husband. Perfectly perfect! and this is what I have made of us. I am trying to gather together these pieces scrambling like crazy to put it together but not allowed to. I asked him if we could hug before he left. He said no, it won't mean anything to him. I said it will mean something to me. He is like "now should I do this because it satisfies you?" I said, okay you don't have to. He is like he is trying his best to see "how to make this works?". But he is not able to. Will he ever be able to?
He also asked me you have told me so many things but never have you told me why you still love me. So, i really want to put everything together and give him an elaborate list on that!

Right now, it feels like 1000 trucks of bricks have rammed against my chest and somehow it still has kept me alive and I am on life support. Everything hurts! Just Everything hurts. I don't know what any of this means.

How do I even get to talk to him? Communicate with him? We have not even been able to sit down with each other and have an end to end talk. He feels like he knows everything he needs. I think we have been able to talk i.e., only answer questions 2-3 times. Not even end-to-end. BH is of the opinion that no matter what changes I make, I will always be reduced to a cheater. It is not about what I will do in the future, but what I have done will decide what's next for us! Anybody treading this path? Any words of wisdom that could be shared?

Okay, I so read your original posts and this post to kind of understand what has been going on. A few things can be true here simultaneously, it is not so black and white, mostly gray!

First, your BH is hurting tremendously and you have completely up-ended his entire life in the swoop of an instant. While you were having your affair over the last 3 years, he noticed changes in you, but he could likely never attribute them to an affair until well...he was able to do so and so he has 3 years worth of interactions to rethink. I'm a Madhatter, which is our SI way of talking about how I both was a WH and a BH, but let me give you an example of something that really stuck with me for a long time. My wife and her AP had a getaway weekend that she sold me as a "girls trip" and when she returned, she couldn't hide the fact that she had a new tattoo on her right wrist. I remembered thinking that it was kind of odd that these girls, whom I wasn't as familiar with (red flag bells should've gone off in my head, but they didn't), got a tattoo that included a heart. I mean, sure, women can love each other and get hearts to signify that love, but in retrospect, makes no sense. Fast forward to her confessing that weekend away and that they both got the same tattoo in the same place as a sign of their "love"...yeah...that one took a lot of time for me to process and get over. Now, I don't tell that story to do anything other than to try and give you a perspective of just a little bit of what your BH has been thinking of, because again, I've been in your shoes and I've been in your BH's shoes.

Your BH is just searching for a place to safely put his feet on the ground. That place was your shared home, but on account of your actions, at least for now and perhaps permanently, it will not be that home. I mean, the one person who was supposed to be his protector and have his back no matter what has let him down in the worst way possible. This isn't something that can be gotten over in a few days or weeks like a bad fight. No, this cuts so much deeper than you could ever imagine. His whole sense of self is completely up in the air right now and he does truly ride the emotional roller coaster. I do not know your BH, but I know actions, if he didn't still care about you and perhaps, love you, he wouldn't still be in your life. I don't say that to give you hope or promise of R, but just to point out that he may be an emotional wreck, as-is expected in his situation, but he still knows that you have been a part of his life for a long time and he doesn't just quit you. A very important thing for you will be to respond to his anger outbursts by acknowledging his feelings are valid and by owning up to your role in that situation. In response to him after an angry comment, "You are right to feel angry with me. I made a terrible choice to cheat, a choice that I deeply regret and one that I'm going to work on in therapy so that I understand why I chose that path and how I can establish boundaries to make different choices in the future."

The important part here is the follow-through, you are going to have to go into therapy with the goal of understanding why you are conflict-avoidant, why you require external validation, and what your relationships are with male attention and sexual attraction so that you can understand why your boundaries were not strong enough. For example, and this is not projecting onto you, but sharing with the hopes that it can enlighten you on your journey to your whys, a close friend of mine from high school, she was one of the first girls in our school to begin her development and by the time we were 14, she had the bust and curvy body of an adult woman. A 14-year-old girl with the figure of an older woman...attracted a lot of attention from fellow 14-year-olds like myself, but also a bunch of older guys, some as as old as their mid-20s. Well, let's just say that my friend developed a very fucked up relationship with the male gaze and her sexuality because it was getting all the wrong attention from the wrong places. She was seeing these older men and the only thing of value she was bringing to the relationships with men was her sex and so her unhealthy relationships with men continued until she was a 19 year old mother to a much older man's child. To say that fucked her up is the understatement of the century and I'm so proud of her for working through it today, but it took her 20 years to sort through. If we do enough shadow work and think through our youth, there are things we all internalized growing up that lead to us being susceptible to cheating.

Also, like I said, you and your husband can both be hurting. In the aftermath of an affair, sometimes forgotten, is that the WS is also hurting. Of course, the focus in the immediate wake of discovery is that the BS is the hurt partner, and while that is absolutely true, pain is not a zero-sum game here, you are both hurting tremendously. You are mourning the loss of a relationship with the AP, no matter how superficial it was, you still had a closeness with this person that you can't just shut off. While you are not going to get any sympathy from your BH on the mourning of your loss of the relationship with the AP, it is important that you grieve the loss of that relationship properly so that you can move forward and heal, because before you betrayed your husband, you betrayed yourself and your self-proclaimed moral code of fidelity. At some point soon, you will have to grapple with how you betrayed yourself and being able to forgive yourself. If you are not able to forgive yourself, you will never be able to properly ask your spouse to forgive you, should you get to an R situation.

Hello again, tea. I posted on your other thread about the self-exploration that's required if you want reconciliation. You need to do that work regardless of whether R is on the table. I'm now concerned about some of the details I'm seeing in your follow-up, so I'm going to refine my advice.

I believe you should impose a period of no contact with your husband. Rage can drive people to do things that they later regret (or ought to regret). The interactions you're describing are not healthy for anyone involved. You need support -- not enabling support, not minimizing "support" that says affairs are not a big deal, but healthy connection to remind you of your potential to learn from your poor choices. Your BH has no obligation to provide that support, but a campaign to completely isolate you, right down to taking your cat away, is troubling.

If the "issues" you describe in your marriage include physical or psychological abuse, then please stop pursuing reconciliation until your BH is in a condition to manage some basic boundaries. I would say the same to him if he were here on SI. Just as infidelity is not a valid response to marital grievances, abuse is not a valid response to infidelity. Divorce is a valid response. Refusal to tell you where he's living is a valid response. Refusal to give you a hug, or to give you hope, or to listen to your side of the story are all valid responses. And I think that most WS probably owe their spouses some grace for name-calling, throwing things, etc in the immediate aftermath of D-Day. I do not believe they are owed that grace on an ongoing basis.

Again, I am troubled because instead of saying, "My BH has serious anger management problems, and I'm trying to find a balance between compassion and basic self-preservation," you're saying that the crueler he is to you, the more you love him. You look at a man in a very dark place, who is really giving his all to hurting and isolating you, and call him perfectly perfect. That's suggestive of some very problematic shit going on inside of you. He's not perfect. He's human, he's suffering, and it's affecting his judgment. You can understand that, and you can grieve it, but you shouldn't be drawn to it.

I don't have enough information to assess where your BH falls on the spectrum of monster to saint. Most people are somewhere in the middle, and traumatic experiences rarely push them closer to the sainthood end. You can be understanding of his struggle and still tell him that you won't be communicating with him until he gets a handle on his rage. He may not react well. He may call you selfish and cowardly for not taking the heat. I disagree. I think you do him more good by turning down his volume and starting your work than you'll do as an emotional punching bag. Of course, then you have to actually start doing the work. I haven't seen much of that from you yet.

Are you ready to stop writing about him and start writing about you?

[This message edited by BraveSirRobin at 12:10 PM, Tuesday, February 13th]

Thank you for the responses. I sincerely apologize for the delay in responses. My emotional roller-coaster had gotten worse so I could not respond in time. I still feel like I am jaded and do not have the emotional bandwidth to still lay it all out there. I am still in IC and diving deep into my whys and I can't stop focusing on my BH, no matter what. When I said I am falling in love with him more, what I meant was I am not falling more in love with him due to his anger and resentment towards me. I meant due to the fog lifting, I am able to see past his anger and resentment towards me as I am making him a request to work with me and heal with me and try to remember me past my infidelity.
However, my BH came home day before night and he asked for divorce. I was beyond myself to take that news was an understatement. We haven't even crossed 2 months mark since DDay and he seemed to have made his decision. I asked him, pleaded him, cried in front of him to think this through. I know he has built wall around himself something like to protect himself against me. I understand that. But the only people he is letting inside this wall are his family who are dead against even him giving it a thought of second chance. While he was with me, I asked him if he was seeing someone else. He confessed that he has been on dating apps since a week after Dday and had met someone for dinner and then been talking to people on apps but he doesn't really feel it. And with a few others, he explained the situation and they backed off. I was on bumble myself on BFF mode for the past couple of years during A desperately trying to get out of A and trying to make new friends who I thought I could get help from. So, after my husband told me about his dating expedition, I did a creepy thing and switched to dating mode and saw his dating profile. It was heart shattering would be an understatement) to see how in detail he has added the descriptions which makes me think he really is out there to date and not just to take revenge. I know how much more worse he would be feeling to have known the details of my A. I am ready to do anything, anything, trade anything in this world to fix that.
Anyway, coming back to the point, when he asked for divorce, he said he spoke to a lawyer and that it cost a lot of money. So, will you contest if I apply for a divorce, he asked. I told him, no I will not. But I begged and pleaded for him to think this through and I asked him if he had informed his family of his decision, to which he said "So do you accept this decision?" . I don't know if he asked me that because he wanted to see how badly I would fight for this relationship or if he asked me that to see if I was going to contest his divorce or not. But after 3 hours of back and forth, he asked why do I still love him and that he still needs an answer from me and not that he is a nice guy kinda bullshit. I told him if he went aggressive on me, I would go into FFF mode and my brain stops working. I asked him to calm down a little bit. Then I had to sit him down and explained what I truly felt about him. He had a couple of questions. I answered. Then he walked away for the night saying he will think about it. Now, I am really scared. I do not know what to do. Any advice, gentle words of wisdom, or potential advice on ways where I could show/help my husband to understand that I am still here for R could really help. Please be gentle with your responses if you can. I feel really vulnerable and depressed right now even though I don't deserve to.

One more thing my husband tells me is that he does not believe in "Affair fog". He thinks that is a made up word for waywards to do whatever they want. He thinks I was truly in love with my AP. I have dug deep, still digging and trying really hard to understand why do I not feel that love towards AP? Why do I feel like I was not deeply in love with AP? But when I communicate this to my husband, he seems to think otherwise. He seems to think that I am lying that I don't love AP or that I was not in love with AP. I have wondered if I have been dumb to feel that way? If not, then how is it that my husband is unable to even want to understand the complex layers to this. When I ask him that, he just said he is a cut and dry person and that he expects his partner to be as well and that he does not want to understand anything as complex as this. I do not know how to navigate this dialog.

When I said I am falling in love with him more,

Please understand that I am a fellow ws and I just want to say here that you maybe realizing your love because you need chaos to feel it. It may even be you need someone to be unemotionally available to you. The AP may have been appealing to you for this reason. Something to think about in therapy, I am sure they are starting to look at your childhood and I am going to guess that too was full of chaos. I was very much like this, if things were too good or easy it made me feel bored or like something was missing. I say this because self awareness takes a lot of time to develop and these are the first steps.

What I am about to say is going to seem counterintuitive. After dday, we are full of shame. Shame is an emotion about what we did.

The difference between shame and guilt is that shame says to us that we are inherently bad, while guilt is more about what we did was bad. Remorse is about fully seeing what we did to the other person.

I know that you feel badly for hurting him. But you need to come to terms with some of your other fear based emotions in order to demonstrate that. You feel out of your depth because you are. Your desperation is going to be overwhelming to him and feel very weak.

Slow down and take a breath. You will not convince him tomorrow. If he decides to give you a second chance, it will be a long road back before he sees enough action on your part to start to settle in.

You could write 1000 reasons why you love him, but the actions you have taken will make them ring empty right now. I would still give them now that he is asking but I probably would tell him that you know you don’t deserve another chance. If he needs space you will respect it, while you continue therapy to figure out how you could betray him and yourself the way that you have and that you are going to fix your character based on these findings. And then mean all of it. Space might be a good thing, time to calm down and figure out if you miss each other. Focus on healing and working on yourself. Try to stop being reactive because even if he says yea to reconciliation the first year is a roller coaster and it takes many after that to be fully through it. So there is no urgency, only your fears are telling you that.

I am also concerned about safety if for no other reason brave sure Robin is detecting it. She is one of the most perceptive posters I have ever encountered so I will just say read her post again carefully. People can be driven to do all sorts of things in the heat of passion and many have died in the throes of a domestic disturbance because it truly can be maddening for some people. It’s a huge trauma.

Also affair fog, that sounds to a bh as an excuse as if you were a zombie and something took over your brain.

You are best to take accountability over your actions from an honest place. It’s scary to do that, but honesty will begin building trust from this day forward. If he catches excuses or lies this is only putting gasoline on the fire. Be completely honest. If he agrees to try, then you are going to need to give him full transparency over your whereabouts and devices for some time. And answer every question honestly. He is trying to come to terms with the idea that the last three years of his life was a lie and he didn’t even know it. Try and develop empathy over that and give him what he needs.

Do not be in any contact whatsoever with the ap, and your husband hates you have people around you because he feels they will tell you it’s okay. The friends who knew about the affair (if there are any) will need to be no longer friends because he will feel that you are surrounded by enablers.

If he catches you lying it’s going to be a set back. You are going to be very tempted to minimize what you did and that is going to make it worse.

For what it’s worth, I believe there is an affair dog but it is after the affair is over when you are trying to reconcile reality with the lies you told yourself during the affair. It’s highly irrelevant to him and probably sounds insulting.

Also don’t do marriage counseling yet. It’s not a problem with the marriage, it’s a problem with you that you can fix. It’s worthwhile work because your longest relationship is with you and the more you can learn and grow the better off you will be. The more you dig into it also the better chances you have for saving this marriage if you are given that opportunity.

[This message edited by hikingout at 8:05 PM, Thursday, February 22nd]

@hikingout - You are spot on in recognizing and identifying all of that. You are! The reason you see urgency in my post is because he has asked for divorce now. If he starts to act on it, there is no turning back for him or for me considering that he is already talking to dates and making an elaborate dating profile and actually making efforts to go out on these dates. He is just not ready to see beyond these walls and that makes me feel like I need to take some sort of action now atleast for him to see that I am working on myself which I am through my ICs. If he is in no intent to actually see that and make decision solely on the text exchanges he saw between AP and I, and through his discussions with his family, I am then not sure if the decision is truly coming from him or from an influenced version of him. That is why you see the sense of urgency in my post.
And yes, the number of times I have planned to end this life and elaborate ways to end it have been countless. Makes me feel like I need to give my husband a full chance to come around. If and when he does and I am not here, that is unfair to him and me and I am hanging on dearly for just that, right now. And of course, not to hurt my parents.

@hikingout - Yes, I am completely taking care of all of that. I am going through the IC and efforts and everything. But him just taking a decision without much time to heal at all, it is making me feel miserable at this point.

@hikingout - You are spot on in recognizing and identifying all of that. You are! The reason you see urgency in my post is because he has asked for divorce now. If he starts to act on it, there is no turning back for him or for me considering that he is already talking to dates and making an elaborate dating profile and actually making efforts to go out on these dates.

Listen, there are hundreds of bs who filed for divorce in this site and are still married today, and I can think of a handful that actually got the divorce and remarried.

You are not in control of what he does. You are only in control of what you do. For some people they know they will never be able to reconcile with a spouse who cheated. And in the end he could be saving you both a lot of pain by knowing that.

On the other hand he could be just being as reactive as you are. Let him have the room to do what he needs and try and not catastrphize it. Rather try and empathize with it.

I wasn’t thinking that you were saying you were suicidal, but if you are I hope you will seek deeper help immediately. I think maybe you should go stay with your parents or someone you trust. I don’t think you need to be alone.

[This message edited by hikingout at 8:42 PM, Thursday, February 22nd]

@hikingout - Ultimately, he is in control of everything and all decisions made towards this relationship. So, yes I will agree to what he wants out of the relationship finally. But I just hope that the decision is not something that was made out of anger or influence or something else that he or I or we would regret later.
Right now, I do not want to be an escapist or go some place else. I feel the need to be here for my husband if ever he wants to come talk to me or meet me.

ut I just hope that the decision is not something that was made out of anger or influence or something else that he or I or we would regret later.

This early out there is no way he isn’t making the decision rashly. He is being reactive but it will remain to be seen if he follows through.

Keep in mind he is hurting and wants you to hurt. So he maybe being honest or he may just need to punish you right now.

I respect your stance about him knowing where to find you. That is wise if a) you aren’t afraid he is going to be violent and b) you are not going to self harm.

Just breathe. I know it’s hard to get calm and centered. But you will make your best decisions and responses if you focus on your healing versus what he is doing.

Try and make sure you are eating and sleeping and getting a little exercise. Find projects to occupy you. Guided meditation can be helpful. If you are trying to be prepared I one hundred percent recommend working on how to self sooth. If you both stay reactive nothing good is going to come of it. You need to get yourself settled so that you can be strong. If opportunities appear to interact focus on him and his feelings. If you keep making this about what you want or need that is going to repel him. He needs you to be stable for both of you.

And if he doesn’t come around, please know you are worth stabilizing yourself. Google ways to self sooth and try even the ones that sounds stupid. You may not even understand why I am saying eat, move, and sleep. But by doing those things you will be more functioning, self care helps regulate our nervous system, and it signals to our brains we love and care for ourselves. I know you hate yourself right now but that isn’t what you or him need. A lot of this happened because you didn’t love yourself or cope with life well. It’s time to step into that role. You can do this.

[This message edited by hikingout at 9:16 PM, Thursday, February 22nd]

@hikingout - that really was soothing to read. Thank you. Do you think it is a good idea for for me to suggest him about this platform? I don't know if ever he stumbles across my stories it might trigger him more. But if it is something that helps him, I care about his well being and making sure that he is heard as well. I don't know if this is a crazy thought. But it is still just a thought.

I am trying to provide help in what is best for you and honestly now that you have expressed suicidal thoughts I am not sure that you will be able to handle that. He is not going to be able to express himself freely here because you will not be able to refrain from reading what he is writing. And I think your fragility will be increased by reading what others write to him. I think inviting him may bring him here to read what you are writing and I doubt he would then even post.

Right now I think that would be a royal shit show for all parties involved. Instead, I would say wait until things are a bit more stable and you have had time to talk to each other and you may find it to be a tool both of you can use.

I also think he will reject the idea with the assumption that he will be greeted with people trying to talk him into staying, even though that’s highly unlikely. I think this site is beneficial to bs’s but I feel like right now it would add gas to the fire. There is no way you two would be able to use it without heightening the toxicity of all this to another level. Know that a lot of people are going to disagree with me for this, but I simply can’t put you in a situation that’s going to increase the chances you harming yourself.

Again, I think you need to stop trying to guide his actions and guide your own. You are like at a level 10, and you need to let him do what he is going to do without trying to direct him. Right now he sees you as a source that he is likely to do the opposite of anything you suggest. Give things some air.

@hikingout - Thank you for walking me through this! This has really been helpful. You are probably right. There is no point inviting him to this platform right now. I needed that clarity. He definitely loves to do everything opposite to whatever I suggest right now. But the problem about giving it some air is again the fact that he has brought up divorce and seems to remain stern on it. And that is causing me a lot of anxiety and panic attacks.

But the problem about giving it some air is again the fact that he has brought up divorce and seems to remain stern on it. And that is causing me a lot of anxiety and panic attacks.

I know that’s why I want you to work on self soothing. You can’t control what he says or does. And all this reacting is going to feel suffocating for him. You need to put in your big girl panties on and wait. Breathe. Work on panic and anxiety exercises. While you are in this state you are your own worst enemy and everything you do will backfire.

He is not going to change his mind tomorrow. Anything he does will be a process. Read about the stages of grief. He is going to bounce around in many of those phases because grieving is not linear. Many people go straight to mad because the other feelings are more vulnerable. There is a saying anger is sads bodyguard. But anything you are doing because if your panic is making him stay mad.

Can you get more IC appointments? You have got to get yourself stabilized. This is going to be a long drawn out process no matter what direction he goes in. You need to sit and think about what you would do in that situation. Don’t you think you would go nuclear? When I found out my husband cheated I kicked him out. Give it some time and air, you won’t be divorced tomorrow or next week. Focus on working on yourself as fast as you can so that you can react more calmly. That IS the way, honey. Trying to direct him is the opposite direction.

[This message edited by hikingout at 10:38 PM, Thursday, February 22nd]

Are you on any meds? You may need some to help with your anxiety and depression. I am very worried about you.

@hikingout - Thank you so much! So, would the recommendation be not try to contact him until he gets back? I am still drafting him that letter. I am writing and re-writing and re-editing but haven not had the guts to complete it and send it to him. Should I still do it or just wait for him to calm down a bit and send it to him or would that be too late?

@hikingout - I am afraid to take medications because I think I might misuse it when I have bad thoughts and I don't want to live with the side effects. I am doing my best with everything I can to self-control and self-protect as well.

I would do whatever he has asked and deliver it however and whenever it’s been agreed upon. I would say being compliant is important to any requests he makes that are not meant to abuse or humiliate you.

Trying to direct him is a no.
He is not going to trust you to help him
Do not make excuses.
Do not make it all about you or try and make him feel badly for his reaction or how you feel.
Do not try and manipulate him to get your way.

Please understand that because you are coming from a desperate place the temptation to Manipulate him might be strong. I know these things I have been there. I don’t say that because I think you are evil, but because you will want to persuade him not to divorce. Just tell him why you love him, explain you know you put him in the position he is in, and that you are in IC Working on yourself because you do not want to be this person you have become. And mean it all, honestly and authentically or don’t write it.