Reply to Post affair, husband tired of me bringing it up

Forum Index » Relationship Discussion (non-explicit)

Reply to "Post affair, husband tired of me bringing it up "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]All of the people telling you to let it go have never been where you are, OP. I have. You need information, and your DH should be willing to answer every single questions you have until you don't need to ask them any more. T[b]he mind movies you experience, the need to know every detail - it's so you can heal, not to punish him.[/b] And he should know that. My DH answered every question I had, even ones I had already asked. He said he had the absolute responsibility to help me heal, and that *I* got to decide what that looked like.

Four months is absolutely nothing. Of course the cheater wants it all to be over. But it isn't FOR YOU. So ask your questions. And find a decent therapist, cause neither mine nor my DH's would ever say that four months was adequate to get over this.[/quote]

Everyone in the thread saying "stop punishing him" needs to read the bolded. This is a super fresh wound. OP is trying to heal, not to harm her husband. When you hurt someone really, really badly, you need to understand this dynamic. The guilt and shame you feel? That's coming from you, it's not something your hurt spouse (or whoever) is trying to make you feel. They just want to understand, process, figure out a way forward. And that might mean talking about it, asking questions.

I think OP is trying to figure out how deep the harm goes. That's what the questions are for. How bad was it? What exactly is she forgiving him for? She wants to know the details to understand if, knowing them, trust can be repaired. It has nothing to do with punishing him and everything to do with her getting the information she needs to know whether this can be mended, or to know what needs to happen in order for it to be mended.

Avoiding the conversation is not going to solve it. [b]He needs to be ready for total honesty and for it to take months to get through it. [/b]I don't think you can start arguing that it's time to stop talking about until at least as much time as elapsed since discovery as the affair went on. At LEAST. OP isn't even halfway there yet. [/quote]

... if he wants to stay with her, and she with him. I'm not trying to defend what he did (I've never cheated). You just have to be realistic about what might lie ahead, and preparing for this possibility as well is part of protecting yourself. If all you do is lay yourself bare and vulnerable because he HAS TO be there in the right way, then what happens if he just bags out? Don't let the first time you seriously consider it be with tears on your face while you are still insisting on what you need, and he is giving you the name of his attorney for your records. [/quote]

But perhaps the only way to get to that point is to lay it all out.

He's the one displaying avoidant behavior, so I don't think he's eager to divorce, despite the affair. He wants to "forget about it" specifically so they don't divorce.

One thing about many men is that even if they hate the sexual confines of marriage, they otherwise LOVE marriage. That's because marriage is set up to benefit men more than women. I've known so many men who cheated or otherwise betrayed their wives (financial betrayals, years of lying, you name it), but when push came to shove, they were begging their wives to stay. They didn't want to actually adhere to their marriage vows, but the idea of divorce was terrifying to them because they still wanted a woman to take care of them and make a home for them. This is true even in marriages where both partners work and you think of it as egalitarian -- women offer a lot of benefits to men just in terms of making life nicer, and many married men are terrified of what bachelor life actually looks like.

I think OP wants to know the details so she can decide whether the marriage is worth saving. And her DH knows it, and wants to withhold the details so she can't get too mad. She wants to address the issues and resolve them (and one possible resolution is of course divorce) but he wants to avoid the issues because that one possible resolution scares him too much.[/quote]

No disagreement on that analysis from me, other than to point out that many men do want to stay, and avoid leaving for just those reasons, but some do not. A lot of them move on, and then it's "did you hear that he got married again right away" and "who does that?" People who don't deal with themselves well, who don't have an inner peace and integrity, that's who does that. Cheaters. The people who can't deal with hard emotions. The ones who never learned how, or don't really care to when it comes down to it, or just can't. They don't like being unmarried and not being taken care of, and they don't have qualms about fixing that situation (or don't acknowledge/deal with those qualms they should have.

Cheating is a nuclear bomb to a relationship. Some people can and will stay to repair the countryside and heal other people. Some won't. It's not always the ones you think, either. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics