Reply to If you had an affair, did you bury your feelings?

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Reply to "If you had an affair, did you bury your feelings?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I think it's important for everyone in a relationship to recognize their contributions to the successes and failures of that relationship. Affairs confuse that logic because the affair is a huge lightning rod that has a tendency to obscure all the other failures (and successes) present in a relationship.

I had an affair and ended up getting divorced as a result of it. What led to it? PPD (mine - I'm a woman), a relationship that was already emotionally unhealthy and disconnected, a partner who didn't take those things seriously, and someone who seemed to appreciate/understand me more than my husband did. It did not take long for me (and my AP) to realize that the affair was not what either of us wanted long- or short-term. I told my husband, and we separated. We tried to reconcile, but like OP's husband, I was morning the loss of the affair and was not able to get past or conceal that. Our reconciliation was not successful, and we have been divorced for several years.

In the aftermath of our final separation, my ex and I spent a lot of time hashing out Why This Happened. To his credit, he was willing to listen to my reasons for doing what I did, without blowing them off as 100% moral failings that indicated poor character (or any of the other things that people on this forum say about people who cheat). To my credit, I have never shied away from how damaging what I did was or how I hurt him. I have not blamed him, except in so far as that my decision to have an affair didn't happen in a vacuum. It happened in the context of an already crappy marriage that was not 100% my fault.

Affairs cloud everything. It's hard to see good aspects of your marriage (and there are almost always at least a few, even in the crappiest of marriages). It's hard to see the flaws of your AP as well. It does not sound to me like he is compartmentalizing well at all. Compartmentalization would mean that he was emotionally available to his wife, if he was interested in his child, and then had this other thing going on. He is not walling off his feelings. He is shutting his wife out and keeping his feelings front and center, while minimizing her feelings.

There are ways to reconcile, but it does not sound like the OP's husband is actually invested in doing that. [/quote]

The crappy marriage was not 100% your fault. Did he also have an affair as well?[/quote]

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