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Relationship Discussion (non-explicit)
Talk me off a ledge- other side of the world and just discovered cheating
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Anonymous
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OP here.
Re: the drinking- there were several spaced out instances (months apart from each other) where he was either drinkng more than he said or it was a weird circumstance surrounding drinking that otherwise didn't add up. I actually just went back through the depths of DCUM and found a post I made about it and almost all the replies tell me he's likely cheating. Dcum knew a year before I did. Feeling like an idiot. |
Anonymous
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OP, I think of you frequently and am sending positive wishes for your healing.
From everything you've shared, I think your relationship has true potential to heal. That's probably hard to imagine while you are in the abyss of pain right now. But I'm encouraged with how your husband has handled himself since all was discovered, notwithstanding the one blow up. Not to excuse him, but it sounds like outside of that episode he seems deeply committed to fixing this and remorseful. That's a +1 compared to others I've known who've found themselves in this awful place. I imagine he's dealing with his own version of stress/anxiety about this all and he hit a breaking point. Again, not excusing what he did, but I think it's understandable and that counseling can help you both navigate forward. It's probably unimaginable now, but I hold out hope that you both can find a joyful future again if you choose to stay in the relationship. In the meantime, sending positive wishes for the days, weeks and months ahead. You strike me as a very resilient person. You can do this! One day at a time... |
Anonymous
Please don’t beat yourself up, OP. DCUM thinks a lot of people are cheating who probably aren’t - even a stopped clock is right twice a day. |
Anonymous
Great idea to talk to your GP about trying meds for depression for the short term. This is absolutely one of those situations where they could help tremendously. And later you can get off them if/when you're ready. This is a common scenario (traumatic life event creates need for SSRIs on a short-term basis). You deserve some relief to help you with daily functioning, 100% worth setting up an appt. |
Anonymous
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OP, I posted many pages back about not doing MC before IC and that my DH was unable to do full disclosure.
TBH, I was not surprised to read your post about his drinking. Mine was drinking in secret as well. FWIW, I really didn’t understand the depth of the drinking until I started watching everything for several months - marking and monitoring alcohol bottles, searching the house, counting pills repeatedly. Turns out he was drinking way more than I realized or he admitted and also stealing pain medication from me and cadging Rx meds for anxiety that he was abusing. It is completely unacceptable that your husband would shout at you. He is trying to DARVO you - deny, attack, reverse victim and offender. Abusive men often do this when the victim partner is not buying the pretty story/apology. It is a way to intimidate you from asking further questions, and a way to threaten you by making you think that you have some blame in all this. And if you think to yourself, my partner wasn’t abusive - he abused your trust all this time. He manipulated you by not telling you about this woman precisely because he knew that you wouldn’t like it and wouldn’t stay. And now, he is manipulating you again - telling you everything he thinks you want to hear so you don’t leave and shouting and intimidating you when you don’t accept immediately what he is saying. Sorry to be so blunt. I know it’s probably not what you would like to hear or believe. A normal person would say, “I feel really overwhelmed by your questions because I don’t really understand myself.” And they would ask for time to see a therapist first. And they would do that without shouting. TBH, I would stop asking him questions for now. Simply say you would like some time to work with your own individual therapist and think about what you want to know. Suggest that sometime in the next few weeks, you two, together with your therapists, will decide about when and how to do disclosure. In the meanwhile, frankly, focus on seeing an attorney. You need to negotiate the terms of divorce - which will either be a divorce or will be a post-nuptual detailing terms of any future divorce and terms of you future household and career commitments. It is unwise of you to take on more house and family work while your husband takes on more work at higher pay and career advancement.The two of you will have to re-balance so house, parenting and career responsibilities are more equal; that is a consequence of the trust lost in cheating. While you are organizing that you can think about disclosure and write down your questions. |
Anonymous
At first I thought this read “houses” but horses is even worse. |
Anonymous
Curious what you did after that post? |
Anonymous
I replied "this crossed my mind but he literally never leaves the house so if he is, they must never actually see each other". Ouch. I did do a brief look through his phone and didn't see anything but he's never had a password and his phone is always out in the open and has never been off limits. We use it for GPS, music around the house, etc. |
Anonymous
Here’s the thing. If you were posting a year ago about your husband’s secret drinking, your life hasn’t been so picture perfect. And that is ok. But you seem to be idealizing what you had before you found this out. Don’t do that. I have no idea if this man is worthy of you or not, but a good thing to do in individual therapy might be to do a deeper dive into what was good and what was not good In this relationship. |
Anonymous
Yeah, I honestly forgot about that. It was a postpartum blur that clicked when he mentioned the drinking |
Anonymous
But there is a reason you didn’t confront him over the drinking and force something more to happen — this will be interesting for you to dive into with a therapist. |
Anonymous
| OP, think hard whether you want DCUM commenting further but If you do, you may want to link to your original post about the drinking. |
Anonymous
I agree with this. As weird as this sounds, he too is trying to figure out if there is glimmer of hope, a chance you both can reconcile. If you hope to reconcile, there are times when you'll need to signal that hope to him. That will be REALLY hard. Really hard. Because he hurt you so badly and you're rightly P.O.'d at him. But there's a balancing act here where if you want to work things out, he'll need to see there's a chance before he gives up. I am NOT excusing him, not at all. He created this mess and has a lot of work to do. From everything you've shared, I think he majorly screwed up, "compartmentalized" it, but didn't actually mean to hurt you, as weird as that sounds. He absolutely needs to get to the bottom of that in therapy---his drinking and lack of self-care and failing to nurture friendships are all signs of his own self-hatred at what he was doing. You are both in pain, different types of pain. This can be fixed if you are both committed to it, but I agree with the PP that learning tools to reassure each other vs destroy each other will be essential for that to happen. And it will be hardest for you who has understandle reasons to want to vent at him 24/7. Come here to vent to us instead. Or to your friend you confided in. We are here for you. |
Anonymous
Yeah, I'm the 8 years out lady and I said to mine, "You played Russian Roulette with our marriage where the BEST option was years of suffering, sorrow, and hard work just to keep our family together. You took away 'forsaking all others' and put it all on me to save you from blowing up our marriage at my own expense." It's a bitter pill. Obviously, I managed to swallow it. Like I said, for me, it was the least bad option. But they all sucked, thanks to his choices. |
Anonymous
This may be true; I can't speak for OP. But on the flip side, I would caution OP not to beat herself up about missing the signs. I'm a very honest person. I assume positive intent because I generally *have* positive intent. I take people at their word because I can almost always be taken at *my* word. I thought I married someone like me. Do people really go around thinking, "You are a kind, conscientious person who doesn't lie but also I should second-guess everything you say to make sure you aren't secretly a conniving psychopath?" Most people tell the truth. Most people, maybe not a huge majority but still a majority based on everything I've read, don't cheat on their spouses. And yes, when you see a red flag you should ask questions about it, and if you can't ask your spouse directly, "Hey, I noticed this, what's it about?" then that says a lot about your relationship. But ultimately it's not your fault that you didn't realize your life partner was bald-faced lying to your face. Relationships are built on trust and if one of the people in the relationship is a liar, well the sky is the limit in terms of what they can say if you start doubting them. Just sharing this in case OP or anyone in her situation felt the urge to beat themselves up for missing the signs. You can't second-guess stuff like that. Figuring this out a year ago wouldn't have stopped the affair from happening. Maybe it just would have made discovery happen when she literally had a newborn and she would have been knocked down too hard. |