Get personal counseling to help you grown in character and in empathy so that this does not happen again.

No contact with the affair partner. Block everything and let your husband know if this guy keeps trying to contact you.

No more personal relationships with guys as this was the beginning of your slippery slope.

I'm sorry that you are in this awful situation. Personal counseling is good advise, but those of us who found ourselves in these circumstances are not always lacking in character or empathy. We are decent people with a moral compass, but who don't always recognize red flags and lack the skills to set healthy boundaries. Many times because we are empathetic and want to help those who abuse us in the end.

My AP (a long time friend of both my husband and myself) manipulated me from day 1 and I allowed it because I loved him and thought I was helping.

You are taking all the right steps. Tell your husband everything. Get as far away from the other guy as possible. It will be very hard to not fall back into their pleas and rationalizations. Resist. These people know how to manipulate us.

There is some reading out there for cheating spouses, but l found it severely lacking in describing our the emotional side of this end. Here is an article that helped me understand a bit about how l got here:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/why-happy-people-cheat/537882/

I'm almost a year past the beginning of affair and about 8 months since ending it. Happy to listen, help in any way l can or share my own journey. Please reach out if you would like.

When I was first coping with my guilt, someone told me (and also backed up their words with an article) that guilt is there to help us realize that something is wrong, that something needs changing. So guilt at this stage is helpful, as hard as it is to bear. Use it to learn what had caused you to fall into an affair - look hard within yourself to answer your questions. So that you can understand what you were looking for, and prevent yourself from falling into one again (if you dig deep, you will be astounded by how much you learn about yourself).

Once you have learned what you needed to learn, however, you should not hold on to the guilt, for there would be no more purpose for it. Excessive guilt is damaging in the long term because it ceases you from being productive.

Stay strong and good luck!

What looks like empathy/character isn't always what it seems.

A rescuer/white knight character is acting out of need to feel important, needed, and superior.

It is used to fill an internal void and/or self esteem. It is very apparent when the spouse is far superior to the affair partner in quality.

The CS may fear abandonment or inequity of such a great spouse because of low self esteem reasoning of, "why would he/she stay with me or love me?"

The broken object of "need" comes into the picture who the CS can save, and therefore earn praise and is now deserving of love, filling up the ego tank like an addictive drug. The CS no longer feels like the "reacher" but rather the superior "settler".

In the end the "helping/saving" in these situations is self serving.

Not being able to acknowledge your shortcomings and need for growth will make it impossible to move forward and grow.

That being said boundaries are very important because your level of integrity or moral strength minus the level of temptation = whether you make the right or wrong decisions.

Ie. We assume celebrities generally have poor character (which may be true to some degree) but we forget to consider the amount of temptation and opportunity they have.

Forwardmotion, you are making assumptions and generalizations and this is not only erroneous, it is not helpful. Not all celebrities have poor characters, not all "white knights" are self-serving and not all cheating spouses lack in empathy. Each person is an individual. For all people, our characters exist on a spectrum of good and bad. No one is all good or all bad. Each has their own struggles and I agree that those challenges and pitfalls must be faced in order to move forward.

By all means, recommend that someone needs counseling or a deeper understanding of their flaws, but do not project your understanding of their flaws and assume they are blind to them because of their questionable character. It is not helpful and is another way of shaming.

I understand from other posts that you are a betrayed spouse. You have your own experience and perspective and that creates a bias. Your input is valuable and most of what I have read shows that you have been through this and have come out the other side. Please allow that cheating spouses are going through their own experience and are raw and hurting. Allow that they are mostly good people (I hope) and that they made serious and damaging mistakes. Beyond that, it is their own journey.

A couple of straw man arguments there.

I made no absolute statements about celebrities and made sure to state it was a degree and didn't say to what degree either. As well, it was counter example of how celebrities are looked upon more poorly than they likely are compared to the general population so I'm not sure why that was even a point.

I never made any absolute statements about good/bad people or denied that it lies on a spectrum. It is an issue to assume people are good because they think they are. We get placed in that spectrum based on the decisions that we make and the strength of the character traits we possess or don't.

White Knight Syndrome related relationships are born out of codependency so it is self serving and destructive even if it isn't related to an affair.

Someone who helps others in a healthy manner with altruistic intentions would not be labeled a white knight. The descriptor of a white knight implies an unrealistic fantastical ideal due to that reason.

You claim there is bias and absolutely everyone has bias. The point is that humans are logical and rational and can overcome bias with facts, ideas, and study. Identity politics is a poor way to debate.

Without an agreed universal standard of how good/bad decisions are weighted it is hard to say where we lie in the human spectrum of "goodness".

Either way to assert that cheaters are mostly good people is as erroneous as saying betrayed spouses are mostly good people. We can't assume merit unless there is evidence for it.