SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Male - in relationship for 28 years. 18 years ago (10 years into our relationship), my OH confessed to being unfaithful over a period of the preceding 5 years, with multiple partners. We stayed together, had two kids now in their teens. I've never got over it. I managed to conceal my true feelings, hurt, humiliation, inadequacy etc, and deal with it, until recently, but never really got over it. But over recent years I find myself obsessing over it, literally daily, 24/7 it's on my mind. And I can't help ask her questions, scrutinise her accounts of events, and often find implausible her accounts. It's dragging us both down, but I don't now what to do. Concede defeat, accept I'll never get over it, separate and free us both, or what's the alternative? I love my family, my kids in particular, family life looks happy. How do I make us all genuinely happy though?

I will be honest with you--in my many years of being here, and listening to other people's stories, it is extremely rare that the couples have a healthy reconciliation by avoiding the issue. I don't know if you tried to sweep your wife's affair(s) under the rug, but that is kind of the vibe that I am getting. One member used to use the analogy of taking a deep breath of poison....and holding it in for the next x amount of years without exhaling. In the meantime, it erodes, decays, and destroys the inside.

Be brutally honest with your wife. There is no statute of limitations on her infidelity. If you need answers to process thoughts, then that is what you need. And if your wife is really sorry for her past actions, then she will want to give you the answers you seek...even if it hurts. That is the difference between a spouse with remorse versus one who isn't---they are willing to put your well-being in front of their own. They want to help you heal, even at their own discomfort.

Is your wife willing to do this?

I try and discuss it, ask for details etc, but she just won't entertain it. Shuts the conversation down.I find myself now, 18 years later, digging for detail and finding inconsistencies. I never thought I'd feel like this 18 years later, that's 18 years since she confessed/i found out, nearly 28 together and 2 teenage kids. For the first time in those years, I'm starting to think maybe I should be planning an exit. Not now, it feels like a bad time to leave for the kids, but is there ever a good time/age? They're both in high school.

If she won't even discuss the issue, I'm afraid you have little choice but to plan your exit.

Ultimately, she betrayed you multiple times. Many people wouldn't have shown the understanding and grace you have by staying with her. Frankly, given this, she should be offering you absolutely anything you need to heal; she's the one who created the wounds.

Reflecting on the Past

Consider these crucial questions:

* What happened at the time of discovery?

* Do you feel she did any work back then to help you move past it?

* Why did you decide to stay?

* Was she truly remorseful back then?

* Did she have any consequences? Perhaps social fall out, or things you imposed on her.

All of these are relevant to your current situation.

Looking to the Present and Future

I'd also ask: Are you certain she's been faithful since? If you haven't gotten to the root cause of her serial cheating, it's generally unlikely that people just become moral and faithful without doing the necessary work. Especially serial offenders. Especially especially... If she had no consequences.

[This message edited by DRSOOLERS at 7:05 AM, Thursday, July 17th]

Welcome to SI, WandaGetOverIt

Your pain is felt and heard, for nearly all of us, at some level, are or have been where you are now.

….but I don’t know what t do. Concede defeat, accept I’ll never get over it, separate and free us both, or what’s the alternative? I love my family, my kids in particular, family life looks happy. How do I make us all genuinely happy though?

Conceding defeat is an option. Accepting you’ll never get over it is an option as well. Separating is an option many have taken, staying together is one as well. But having the power to make someone else happy, that is tricky if not impossible. I have little faith one can do the work for someone else.

Be kind and patient to yourself WandaGetOverIt for you and I think most of us, are all amateurs at this stuff.

Hello, Wanda. Welcome to SI.

Your "years later" story sounds a great deal like mine, but I am the WS. My BH (boyfriend at the time) and I were college students in an LDR when I developed a crush on the guy across the hall from me. Over the course of several months, I broke boundary after boundary and eventually developed a full blown affair. I finally ended things with the OM and realized what a terrible mess I had made, and I was tempted to hide it. However, this was at the height of the AIDS crisis in the US, so I realized I had to come clean to my BF because of the health implications.

The next time I saw my BF, I confessed to the sex and "I love yous," mostly expecting him to break up with me. I was prepared for anger, but not devastation. I immediately started trying to limit the damage. I decided that BF needed to know about the sex because of HIV, but he didn't "need to know" that it was a planned event on a weekend getaway. He didn't "need to know" that I spent almost every night in the OM's room, or that OM actually tried to propose to me in the last days before the end of the A. I convinced myself that these were irrelevant details because I had given him the highlight reel. The decision in front of him was whether he wanted to break up with me for having sex and love for another man. He knew that I had, so I justified hiding the rest.

It sounds like you have a deep understanding of how cruel and flawed this logic was. It's not possible for information to be simultaneously so inconsequential that it doesn't need to be disclosed and also so damaging that it could end the relationship. However, WS are excellent at that kind of pretzel logic. Meanwhile, my BF knew that OM wanted nothing more than for BF to put a foot wrong and drive me back into his arms. I was apologetic and supportive for a few months, and then I started to run out of patience, asking if there was any point in tormenting each other if he was never going to forgive me. BH panicked and rugswept, and a few months later, we got engaged.

There are many other details to how this evolved that I'm leaving out (the old timers here know what they are) so I can stick to the part that is most relevant to you. My BH did not recover as the years passed by. We got married, had kids, and built a life together, but all that unprocessed pain was brewing under the surface. It became particularly strong at times when he was struggling with something else in his life, like issues with his father or a period of job loss. Anything that prodded at feelings of loss, insecurity, or inadequacy ripped that wound open again. I was unaware of this. I knew he had periods of depression and anxiety, but I thought the A was in the rear view mirror as the decades stacked up.

In 2018, my BH decided that he couldn't hold it in any longer and started asking me questions about things that had never added up. He knew me well enough, especially after 30 years together, to know that I was not the type to suddenly fall in bed with someone else. There had to be more to that long ago story that I was leaving out. I panicked. I had spent those years burying the truth, trying to hide it from myself as much as him. The girl who prepared herself to be dumped at the time of the original confession was now a middle aged woman with enmeshed finances and three kids. Telling the truth felt suicidal, and so I doubled down on the lies.

I can't tell you what your WW is thinking, but I can tell you these things from my experience with my husband. You need and deserve all of the truth. Your pain is valid. If I had come out with the truth -- every last bit of it -- 35 years ago, then my husband would have had the agency to make an informed decision about marrying me. He might still have ended up regretting it, because it's impossible to know how the journey will end when you're just starting out. But until I finally let go of the outcome and told him everything, 8 weeks after he started asking in 2018, healing simply was not going to be possible.

I hope that you learn from the collective wisdom of SI and get the support you need. The most important thing my BH learned was to forgive himself for his pain. It wasn't water under the bridge, it wasn't irrelevant, it wasn't any of the self-blaming things he told himself about how long it had been or how young we were or how he should be over it. It was a chronically infected wound that needed to be cleaned out. Now he has a scar, but a scar is far easier to live with.