One thing to keep in mind is that every fresh betrayal (even if it isn't actual infidelity) is like ripping a scab off. You will emotionally bleed and hurt all over again and have to heal all over again. It also won't heal as cleanly. So, when your husband got all flirty face with that friend of yours, it started your healing process back to square one : over an existing scar, no less.

It's understandable that you're slow to trust, slow to let go, slow to move forward. Of course, if you can enclose yourself in a bubble and protect yourself from the outside world, but you'll also suffocate. That's no good. Firmly setting yourself into the mindset of, "This is the way it is," will make it inevitable. Who knows? Maybe it IS inevitable, but if that's your mindset, that you can never fully give yourself over to a relationship, well, yeah, that's how it's going to be.

Maybe you want that. Who am I to judge? If that's what you need to be happy, then that's the way it is. If you can accept that and your husband can, then blessings to you both. Me? Well, I will never believe in unconditional love. But I never did before. It is my opinion that if you are putting your basic well being and health at serious risk for anyone - or anything - then that's not love. That's just my belief, though.

However, I do believe in opening up and taking a calculated risk because it feels REALLY nice to have someone so close to your heart and mind and body and soul. The more open, honest, and wall-less I am, the more I enjoy sex/conversation/connection with my husband. I don't want to miss out on that, even though it IS a risk letting him in.

One thing that has helped me is to take one day at a time. I don't try to envision 10 years down the road and all of the "what ifs" because there are too many branches in too many roads. I just can't do it and it drives me crazy. The more I live in the NOW the more I can invest and the better I can express needs and appreciation.

I have to stop and put myself in the moment:

Is RIGHT NOW enjoyable?
*Yes? Move forward and enjoy it and express gratitude for that joy.
*No? OK let's talk about this, dude, cos stuff is not ok.

Is he hurting me RIGHT NOW (setting aside past hurts, even if past hurts are irritating me in the moment)?
*Yes? Point out my feelings and how his actions are effecting me. Suggest courses of actions. Be open to his suggestions to alleviate the conflict.
*No? Come to DS or talk to friends or go to counseling or read books or meditate or self soothe or self nurture in ways that help me move through the PAST into the NOW. I am not at a place yet where I can talk to my husband about hurts of the past without it turning accusatory, so I take it elsewhere. Hurt is like a disease: it likes to spread. I want to stop it, not contribute to it's plague-like continuance.

It isn't about every day being perfect. It isn't about every day feeling blissful. It's about knowing that most days are ok, some days are fabulous, and we're both invested in working through the crappy days together. That's just ME, though. That may not be enough for you. Only you can decide what you want, what you're willing (and able) to invest, and whether or not your "calculated risk" is worth it. Do you get enough of a payoff being with your husband, and are you able to give enough to him to make it worthwhile for both of you?

I love that Cole was able to 100% throw himself into saving his marriage. He never seemed to questioned whether it was worth it or whether the outcome would be good. He just dove right in and said, "Let's do this," and he and Gabrielle did. I always lovelovelove hearing their story for that reason alone.

My story? Notsomuch. But I'm not a "dive into the deep end" kind of girl. Ever. I'm always a "one toe at a time" kinda person. And honestly? I think that's ok. My method of getting there has been different, but I don't feel like it's wrong. Your method isn't wrong, either. If you need to hold back for a little while and "wait and see" - maybe that will help you to rebuild the platform of your relationship to a point where eventually you will WANT to invest and let go and just BE together. I hope so! And if not, like I say, if you're both willing to settle for what you have, far be it from me to say it isn't right. We all do what we have to do to get by in this world.

"the kind of unconditional love I believe marriage is all about."

^^^^ That's the part I struggled with for a long time. Upon further reflection I'm not so sure that marriage is about unconditional love at all. It's pretty conditional!

As far as acceptance goes - hopefully at some point you'll get to the "it is what it is" stage. And it will magically become more about what a dumbass thing your H did and less about how it affected you. I don't know why that is, other than we get tired of dealing with it and hand it back to them where it rightfully belongs. We stop struggling to figure it out because its not really our issue. We just happened to be standing in the splash zone when they self-destructed. (Many BS seem to get to this stage between the 3rd and 4th years after Dday).

Have you ever done those dot-to-dot puzzles where there are, say, 100 dots with numbers on a page and you have to connect them to make a picture? Consider all of the different events, statements, feelings, conversations, intuitions, and thoughts that gave you the picture you currently have of your H. It might take several years of positive events, statements, feelings, conversations, intuitions and thoughts to help you reconnect the dots into a different picture. That's totally normal and *WISE* to need to see some positive patterns form before putting your trust out there again.

If you were dating someone who said they loved you on the first date or proposed marriage after a week of knowing you, you'd probably think they were psycho and worry for your safety. Likewise, I don't think its possible to completely trust someone who's just betrayed you on just about every possible level - and if a BS honestly did there night be something seriously wrong there.

Well, most certainly this will take time. I'm unusual in that I reached the acceptance stage early, at 9 months. Partly my personality. Partly because I probably think about all this differently from most. No feather in my cap, just who I am.

I recently read the introduction to the book, "The Monogamy Myth." To be honest, I'd considered reading that book, but shied away from it, thinking by the title that she meant monogamy doesn't exist and we shouldn't marry with the expectation of being monogamous. But I caught a whiff that my initial perceptions weren't totally on the mark. The author has the introduction online, so I read through it.

Now I'm more on board with where she's going with it, though she may be overstating her case. Mainly the "conservative" divorce statistics seemed much higher than what I've seen. But she wrote that in the 80s, and may not have had the same data points we do now. But she concludes that statistically, over 80% of marriages will experience at least one spouse who has more than one "partner" over the course of their life, whether through infidelity or divorce/remarriage.

She based that on statistics that showed 60% of men experienced this and 40% of women. She made the assumption that no more than half of the women would be married to men in the 60% category, so came up with 80%.

But, I just realized, the statistics I've seen have been separate between divorce and infidelity. Not everyone who experiences infidelity gets divorced and remarried. Not everyone who divorces for that matter gets remarried. The conservative infidelity rates I've seen is 40% of men, roughly, and 25% of women. Add to that the people who divorce for other reasons and remarry, and one may get close to her numbers.

Anyway, the point being the odds are certainly against anyone being monogamous practically speaking. (That also depends on how one defines monogamy: one at a time or one person your whole life? Obviously the later would be a small percentage. The former would coincide with infidelity statistics.)

Because of that, her premise is that most people go into a marriage believing they are so in love with each other, etc. etc., that it would be a cold day in Hell before either of them ever cheated on the other. Because they don't think it could happen to them, they don't take preventative measures to ensure it doesn't happen. They have a blind trust. That "fully letting yourself go" sense, believing the other would never hurt you like that.

Her point is that kind of thinking is a myth. One can't ignore the potential for it to happen. One shouldn't go into a marriage or relationship of any kind unaware you are taking a risk of getting hurt by that person. It's like investing. The greater the risk, the greater the rewards. Marriage is the ultimate relationship risk. When it works, it is out of this world. When it crashes, you can lose a lot. Even yourself.

i fit that picture. After 29 year of marriage, I never thought it possible she could do this to me, and pull it off so convincingly. I never imagined she'd be capable of this level of deceit, at least to me. I was living the monogamous dream to the max. Neither of us had ever had sex with anyone else prior to her A. I fully expected, without a doubt, that we'd grow old that way and I'd die in that state. Well, I guess I'm still monogamous, even if our marriage no longer is.

I, like many BSs, did (and still feel that sense of loss, just not with weeping and gnashing of teeth anymore) experienced great regret at losing the innocence of that blind trust, the freedom from worrying or thinking about the likelihood of it happening. I'd lived in that state for so many years of marriage. It was my normal. I trusted her implicitly.

But I now know that was wrong. It was unrealistic. I had a lot of reasons to buy into the myth. But the truth was, it isn't real. Oh, I'm not saying monogamy doesn't happen. There is a percentage who pull it off. A significant percentage if you assume one at a time and believe the more conservative estimates of infidelity: 45% of men, 25% of women = men+(women/2) = 68%, leaving 32% monogamous.

The myth is: it won't happen to us. The myth is I can trust my spouse to never do that to me. I've now come to believe not only can my wife do that to me, any other women I might marry can as well. Indeed, I could do that, if I'm not mindful of boundaries. I don't think I would, but it is still possible. I can no longer assume that blind trust is a good place to be.

In essence, the blind trust I had pre-A was a lie. Not just because Gabi proved it was, but because it is for everyone. No one is immune, and the assume you are leads to not preparing for it, not respecting boundaries, not respecting the power of one's passions to lead one to do the unthinkable.

That's exactly what happened with Gabi. Even when she was knee-deep in sex-texting that first man, she'd convinced herself it was just a fun game, and that she would never cheat on me. That she would never hurt me that way. Because she thought that, it allowed her to cross boundaries she shouldn't have, believing she could "handle it."

She couldn't handle it. None of us can. If we realize that up front, we're likely to trust in a balanced way. Knowing the risks, but trusting and loving anyway.

That''s where unconditional love comes in. Not romantic love. Not a feeling of love. Not the chemistry. Even in a healthy relationship, that will ebb and flow. When something like infidelity happens, that kind of love takes a big hit . . . specifically because it *is* conditional. It is all dependent upon how you feel about the other person at any point in time. Fact is, infidelity is a very unloving act. Not too many other actions can say, "I don't love you, I don't want you anymore" any louder than being cheated on. That may not be what the CS intended to say. But that is what it says. It takes some doing to return to a place where the conditional love feels safe in loving again.

Unconditional love says I love you as a person, no matter what you do. It says I'm going to do what is best for you, even if that is something you don't like. It is easiest to see this type of love in one's children. They will do plenty to break our hearts as they grow up. Sometimes, we punish them, allow them to experience the horrible consequences of their actions, specifically because we love them. In the hopes they will repent and learn from it. Even if they disowned us and ran away, not returning for years, we'd still love them.

In the same light, as I've told Gabi all through this ordeal, I will always love her and want what is best for her, no matter what she does. Even if it means I should divorce her, because of her actions, because staying would be to enable and participate in actions that are destroying her life and soul. Unconditional love, like forgiveness, doesn't mean shielding them from the consequences of their actions. Sometimes the most loving thing you can do is to cut them off. Because it isn't based on what makes you feel good, it is based on what is best for them.

That may be why I healed so fast. From the start I viewed what happened as her sickness, a problem in her, and if I could help her heal, because I did love her. I knew it might not work. I knew there was a big chance we'd get divorced. But I had to try. Despite her unloving actions.

Going into a relationship not taking into account the inherent risk involved and preparing/planning for it is like an investor who invest not taking into account the risk of losing everything. They often do lose it all.

I pretty much told our therapist I didn't believe monogamy was possible last summer. My husband was surprised. Indeed, he's proven himself incapable. Over and over.
But, I now struggle with the temptation. All I can say is I have very good boundary reactions. So, when a man shows any interest, I can shut him down pretty quickly. I have tested what happens if I am not so quick to raise the shield. Interesting how a man with a wedding ring ignores mine and starts to cross boundaries so quickly. But, Im a die hard monogamist.
So, I am changed. I know what Cole talks of is true. I have to stay vigilant try to protect us from being weak ti temptation. We had pretty much stopped talking about us and he started flirting. But I am tired. I don't want to try so hard anymore. It should really be easier to live day to day with someone. If he is willing to "accept the live he thinks he deserves" from me, which will never be what he wants, I am doing the same.

Why is leaving him not on the table?

I think life is too short to where if a year out from my wife's affair I felt like you did, and basically saw settling for less than I deserve, I would rather be alone and throw myself into hobbies and activities unburdened from another.

Kids

And I still have hope...he has done so much to restore my belief in his love and takes care of me every day, but he's just an idiot who is really good at begging forgiveness.