It took me about 2.5 years to get back to "happy again" and mostly trusting and not thinking about it. O maybe I should say I still think about it occasionally (especially when on DS) but its not painful anymore. Time and distance work wonders.

Hang in there!

Just over 4 years here. Not better. Not better at all. I'm just working up the courage to file. I should have divorced him as soon as I found out about him.

hdp10
To be honest with you, I do not think anyone "gets over it". Some say they are, but does anyone truly get over the fact that another person was with their spouse? It has been almost 6 years and I come across the constant reminders.
If people are over it, then why are they still here?
Why do we keep coming back? Instead of dailystrength, it should be called dailyreminder.
There will be plenty of triggers in your life, smells, things you see, sex with your spouse. Somehow, little things will remind you of what happened. Even things that have nothing to do with the affair.
I watch a simple movie and am reminded of it. I see a car like his and I am reminded. I hear a song that she liked at that time and wonder if it was their song. I could go on for days.

All I can say is, make the decision now. Can you live with it?
Do you want to throw away 6 years?

Good luck to you and I am so sorry you are living with this.

Jimmy

Hi, Jimmy. I know exactly what you are talking about with the triggers. As we come up on the time my H started fooling around last year, I wonder about so many things. Was he texting her and me at the same time? Did he "get off" while texting her? Did he tell her he loved her? Did he text her on his commute like he does me? I found out he also stole a bunch of money from my family and hid it in a secret account. I wonder the worst of all - did he text her on the way to deposit money in his secret account? It seems like nearly everything is related to the affair!

I have decided that even if I left, I would still wonder these things, but alone. I choose to live with these realities in order to be in a marriage with a man I love. I will NEVER trust him, and I have forgiven him for my own sake. Forgiving is one thing, forgetting is another. Only a fool would forget!

It's been 15 months for me and I am going through the same thing.I feel like I will never be happy.I hate him today,maybe not 2morrow..When I really think about what he did my anger just takes over.This sucks.

I go for weeks of being ok then bam I am pissed and depressed for days. I do love him not sure in love with him anymore. I don't think me and my kids way of life should have to change because of his selfishness I know that sounds hard but that's what's there at moment. I keep thinking I don't ever want to be humiliated again and wonder if I should make him take a yearly lie detector test. I just don't know.

We were both with other people before getting married and I hope it eventually feels like that. Something that happened a long time ago that isn't relevant to our life together now. A girl can hope ...

Sextinischeating

I have to live with the fact that I heard her tell him I love you just 10 minutes after holding me and telling me she loves me. How sick is that?
Not once, but many times. Then, I have to live with hearing him tell her "you fealt so good the other night". After sex if I smell my semen, I have to live with his semen being in my mouth. Talk about TRIGGERS!
This crap can make you freaking NUTS!

You are speaking my thoughts.

I wish I knew; I wish I had the answer.

All I can say right now is that things have been getting better with time.
Maybe that's what it takes . . . lots of time.

Takes time, yes. But it also takes both spouses being 100% committed to rebuilding, which is work. Mainly the CS needs to be at that level of commitment for it to work, because if they do what they should, they have to dig deep within themselves to identify what character issues allowed them to chose the destructive path of cheating to address marital problems or their own personal problems. Then work to address and fix them.

That is not an easy task. It takes courage and guts to face one's own demons and wrestle them to the ground until they cry "uncle!"

But the BS has to be committed to healing as well, or the work of the CS will not save the relationship. If either falls short of doing all they can to heal, that is when you have "rebuildings" that go on for years and still the BS is unhappy or miserable, wishing they had not wasted the past whatever years.

It takes time, but it takes a lot more too if healing is to take place. I'm personally nearing the two year mark (oh this seemed so far off almost two years ago), and I've been pretty happy since about 9 months after dday. A lot of people do fall apart between one and two years because a lot of them expect to be "over it" by one year, and when they are not and the new normal settles in, they don't like where they've ended up.

But in my case, we healed relatively faster than most. I think a large part of that was due to my W's commitment to rebuild, doing all she could to make sure this worked (even though she slipped a few times, mostly in the beginning weeks). As I told her, I would be able to heal as she healed. She healed fast, and so did I.

But many CSs don't put that level of commitment into it, including falling out of love with their affair partner, so it is easy for that pot to get stirred back up years later. Too many of them don't work at it, and think that time alone will kill that love.

hdp10? When you ask yourself that question, how do you answer it? I think it's all about honoring what your gut tells you. There are certain things that we all figure out along the way. The number one thing is that there is no way you're ever going to forget....not possible without a swift and blinding kick to the head and even then there's no guarantee.

Knowing that you'll never forget; what are you willing to accept? I think any of us who decide to stay have to ask ourselves honestly if we're willing to accept the fact that we're never going to trust them again and we'll probably always have triggers and other reminders of what happened. Is that worth the price of admission to you? If it is, then I think it's something that you have learn to deal with. If not, then it's perfectly acceptable to walk away.

Infidelity either ruins or severely alters (permanently) the relationship that you're in. There is no shame in walking away from that if that's how you feel and there is no statue of limitations on it.

Sending support

I had written a long post about my recent experiences, but I don't want to hijack the post.

I will say that trusting someone after you have been cheated on is the hardest part. I can understand why thing happened, I can believe that things are over, I can have moments of joy w/ my wife, but lurking in the background is the knowledge that she betrayed me, and I have no real guarantee that it will never happen again.

Trust is like Humpty Dumpty. Or at least it feels like that. I hope I am wrong.

On the positive side, I would bet that there are a lot more success stories out there than what you will hear in this post. I think the people that have succeeded in rebuilding trust do not feel the need to post on these boards for the most part.

You may as well stay with your spouse. No illusions are possible perhaps, and that is terribly painful. But it seems to me that all I encounter in many years "dating" is ..... MORE liars and cheats.

I wish I had known; better the devil you know.....
OTOH he dumped me for the sexowrker that subsequently dumped him when the money ran out.
Its not like I had a choice. But after 3 years of exhaustive search.... I might as well have stayed with him.
Too bad he didn't want me.
I guess the lucky ones here (if anyone on the receiving end of infidelity and betrayal can ever be called lucky) are those that can be happy alone or with just their children. When you seek a new partner, you may find .. what I have found.
It leaves me in utter despair.

A lot of that will depend on your spouse and his actions. It has been 3 1/2 years for me. If she had stopped with the EAs when i discovered them, it would have really helped. But , for me, once they have cheated, that's it. The trust is gone. At the moment I choose to stay. A lot of that is to do with our child. I keep thinking I will get to happy again. I need to try something different. maybe that 180 thing that is mentioned so much on these boards.

2.5 years since dday... I am not "over it" but I'm a slow healer. I hold on to things. That's my issue... cos frankly, our marriage is better than it was before the affair.

I won't go so far as to say I'm grateful he had an affair. I wish against all wishes that we'd found a better, less painful path back to each other and learned to be good partners without the devastation, but we didn't. So here we are.

I don't think about the affair every day. Not even every week. And as long as I don't get stuck in a negative loop, most triggers smack me on the nose and then move past me, instead of stabbing me in the gut and leaving me bloody on the floor the way they did in the early days of recovery.

So yeah. It CAN get better. But it doesn't get better for everyone. For us, the key was for him to accept responsibility and to apologize - a lot. For me, it was key to accept responsibility for weaknesses in our marriage and to take control of the things I COULD control - namely my own self and behavior.

I expect the next part of my own personal healing is accepting the things I do not, can not, and never did control and just letting them exist in the universe without trying to fight them. Even typing that makes me mad.... raw nerve. *sheepish smile* So yeah... we all move on our own paths and at our own paces.

If you don't trust him and if you sometimes hate him, he may well still be engaging in behaviors that are unacceptable to you. I don't mean he's still cheating, but it doesn't have to be cheating to be inappropriate.

It was at about 15 months post DDAY that I finally sat huz down and we had the "no friends of the opposite gender that are not friends of the marriage" talk. It flew like lead at first, but then he came around when he realized I wasn't about to budge on that rule. It was even longer than that before we started delving into the messier parts of our relationship and cleaning those up.

We're slow. But. We didn't have a strong and healthy relationship pre-affair, so we didn't have a lot to build ON - we had to start from scratch with a LOT of stuff. The good news for us is we had almost nowhere to go but up. Heh.