Reply to LD wife working on relationship- just found about DH "emotional affair"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP here
Above post kind of nails it. There is this need to reconnect, reclaim my DH without fully forgiving him. If he felt under appreciated/undesirable   to begin with how to start the healing?[/quote]

I've posted before, but OP I really think you are going to get yourself in trouble if you don't deal with his affair front and center.  He claims to have only had an emotional affair (which is, honestly, unlikely In light of the holding her all night text, etc.).  So just having sex with him won't fix this.  Nor will complementing him till the cows come home.  [b]There is something in him that made him able to cross a boundary that is unacceptable and, to use a term from infidelity world, makes him not a safe partner. [/b] That is key.  You are not to blame for the affair, he is.  I'm not saying this to let you off the hook.  I'm saying it because if you believe it is your fault or you deserve it, he won't do the hard work to make him a safe partner.  He has to understand the full breadth of the situation or I worry that this will repeat itself down the road if you go through another rough patch.

I'm not saying you should be a bitch to him and scream and yell and not accept anything wrong on your part UNRELATED to the affair. If you want to stick it out ( and it seems way too early to really know now), definitely work on yourself.  You seem to have been doing that anyway.  You can tell him what you want and that you're willing to do hard work, but he does too.  If he was truly sorry, he would not insist on keeping this "friendship."  You can't lose yourself here.

FWIW, my husband cheated on me and I just knew I wanted to work it out in the beginning.  He was very sorry, it seemed.  But as the months go by, I wonder if I'm making the right choice.  I'm focused on being a good and more emotionally present person, which is good for me and him.  But he is not doing the same work.  [/quote]

That may be true for some men, but not all.  The only reason I had an affair was years of constant sexual rejection from my DW.  When, after multiple conversations, she finally decided to prioritize our sex life, I broke off the affair and we are happily ever after since (she never found out, thankfully).

Some people may be defective.  Others are merely human who do what humans do when they get lonely - find someone to connect with.  It doesn't make him defective to cross a boundary, it makes him human.[/quote]

I'm the PP you're quoting.  I'm not trying to be mean, but, respectfully, I think you are blaming your wife for your affair and that's not healthy.  My husband broke it off with his mistress before I found out.  I had been working on our marriage and we were having a lot of good/great sex.  That's when he broke it off with her.  When I improved.  So I thought everything was my fault.  If I had just been that way all along, then he never would have had the affair.  He thought the same thing.  Then I found out and we went to counseling and after months I am beginning to realize I was not just being a less than ideal wife in a vacuum.  He was not being an ideal husband either.  Neither of us are bad people, but he just zeroed in on how his needs were not being met so he had an affair, and he didn't really think long and hard about why I might be acting the way I was.  I have realized that I have years of repressed sadness about him invalidating me in a whole host of ways that I never really deeply thought about.  I am the type of person to blame myself and just assume I was in the wrong.  Now I am just beginning to realize I am not the source of every problem.  Without knowing about his affair, and him having to deal with my sadness about it, he would just have gone on his way thinking that I was the source of all of our problems and now I was better so he could just be happy.  But that's not fair.  What happens if we go through another rough patch?  I would hope we would talk about it now, but that's not what he did before.

I don't think cheaters are just all evil people.  I think that a lot of them are/were in pain.  But the mindset of blaming the spouse for their cheating ways is really destructive to a relationship.  I suspect the OP is somewhat like me and quick to accept blame and think she is at fault.  I am just telling her she shouldn't just brush herself aside in the pursuit of keeping things together.  I think they probably both have issues that predated the affair.  But it's going to take him accepting responsibility for that part to make the marriage whole.[/quote]

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