How long have you been feeling ambivalent? What are you both currently doing to strengthen the marriage?

A common misconception for rebuilding is thinking that once the betrayed spouse says/thinks/feels "ok I forgive you, we can stay married" that everything is good and fine. This is so very far from the truth. Forgiveness and willingness to stay together is only the first baby step. Afterward comes the really hard and sometimes grueling work.

My husband and I are in the best place we have ever been in our whole 20+ year marriage - but things will not stay that way. Things will get rough again. We will have disagreements and conflict. And most importantly, if we don't keep working to make things good, we will fall back into complacent "settling" - that point of "I guess this is good enough" which is NOT good enough. Not anymore.

If you are not in your "dream marriage" or at least taking active steps towards making it your (plural) dream marriage, you will never be able to truly invest heart and soul. The "should I leave?" feelings will always resurface and you'll always wonder if you did the right thing.

There are times now when I wonder, "are we on track?" Or "am I doing all I can?" But never times when I want to leave. This is because even when I am frustrated or even angry or scared, I can see the awesomeness we are working on and I can keep my eyes on the prize, so to speak.

I hope you and your husband are able to define what it is you both want in marriage and are able to work for it, but there is no shame in moving on if you both can't genuinely invest. Just staying isn't good enough and sets a dangerous precidence for your children. You want to teach your kids to work for what's inportant for them and not to just take whatever comes along, right?

If you want a divorce nobody will blame you. But you can not only survive this your marriage can be better. I know it doesn't seem that way right now. You might even be rolling your eyes thinking ... yeah right!
If you have no plan in place you will be right back where you started. Feelin the A is over and knowing it's over are 2 different things.
1. No contact (NC)
2. Change cell phone numbers and email
3. Transparency .. Exchange passwords to everything.. And check them frequently
4. Get off social media
5. Check for other forms of texting.. FYI apps have the ability to IM other people... Games, Pinterest, scrabble, snap chat, just be aware
6. Read, read, read.... This link is for him : http://www.lindajmacdonald.com/HOW_TO_HELP_YOUR_SPOUSE_HEAL_FROM_YOUR_AFFAIR--ljm2.doc
7. Keep no secrets... If his A is kept a secret.. What will keep it from happening again? http://www.marriagebuilders.com/graphic/mbi8111_exposed.html
8. Spend time together... Really together, every week.. Do something fun, no phones, no kids, something you both like to do... Working out, hiking, art museums... Something that you both enjoy and will encourage talking about anything positive.. During this time, don't discuss your "issues" .. Try going on vacation

My H and I are doing well, our relationship is much better than before A. We are aware of behaviors that could get us into trouble. We work at it together every day. We talk a lot.. This is a new thing for him.

Good luck

My marriage has gotten a lot better, we are doing most of the things that have been mentioned. My issue is now not being able to forgive myself for staying, I think. I have been needing to change my focus.
I disagree with the secret part, however. A few close and supportive friends know, but I don't need to give people fodder for gossip.

If you feel a need to forgive yourself for staying, that would indicate you perceive that staying was a violation of what you believed before dday; what should be the right thing to do in response to discovering infidelity. So that belief should be the focus of your evaluation.

For instance, not suggesting this is what you think, but it is a common one. Many spouses say prior to finding themselves in this situation, "If my husband/wife ever cheats on me, he'll/she'll be out the door in a minute!" Prior to experiencing this, many people don't believe they'd ever put up with it, and anyone who does is weak and pitiful.

The reality is, however, once such people do experience their spouse cheating on them, their perspective changes. Suddenly, you don't want to lose what you've spent the last years investing yourself into. In your case, the last 25 years and the family you've built together. In my case, my wife started cheating on me 28.5 years into our marriage.

I think the real dividing line between being strong and weak when it comes to infidelity isn't whether to leave or stay, but in how you deal with the issue. One can be strong by either staying or leaving. Likewise, one can be weak by either staying or leaving. That isn't what defines it. For it takes a strong BS to successfully rebuild properly. Let me illustrate what I'm talking about.

A BS who is being weak in staying believes their spouse's cheating was motivated or caused by something the BS did or didn't do. This leads to enabling behaviors in the CS causing them to avoid facing their character and internal reasons why they could allow themselves to betray and hurt the one they've pledged their to love all their life. Which means it will likely happen again since nothing has changed within the CS, which is where the problem really lies. The BS ends up allowing the CS to get away with it, with few, if any, consequences for their actions.

Meanwhile, a strong BS who stays doesn't accept blameshifting the by CS, and puts the onus on the CS to fix the damaged trust and relationship because they were the ones who inflicted this significant damage to it. True, there may have been other marital issues that in the CS's mind may have contributed to their decision to cheat, but none of that excuses their decision to cheat. I've likened it to a spouse who sees a fire in the kitchen, and instead of putting it out with water, throws gasoline on it instead. Cheating never fixes a marital problem, it only makes it 100x worse and that much harder to deal with the other marital issues in the aftermath. The real issue to deal with in cheating is why the CS chose to allow that to be their method of dealing with any marital problems. Until that is addressed, any rebuilding efforts will be fruitless.

The accepting of some of the blame, if not all of it, is a common reaction for BSs. One of the first things I thought on dday was, "What have I been doing or not doing that she felt drawn to seek someone else?" Society has us so programmed to think if someone cheats, it's because their marriage is bad. But the facts are cheating happens in good marriages and there are many bad marriages where cheating never happens. Cheating is a dysfunctional response to meet the perceived needs of the CS, often driven by a heightened sense of desire for those needs in an almost addictive state. Whether those perceived needs are valid or not is another question, but they are often exaggerated by the intoxication of the affair. So even minor marital issues can become fodder for "why I cheated."

What I quickly realized on dday, however, is that my wife had done significant damage to herself as well as our relationship. That this happened because there was something profoundly wrong with her. I think this is why, contrary to a lot of BSs, I never experienced a significant low self-esteem problem due to the affair. I think that is in large part because I realized my wife had committed a huge sin, was in spiritual danger with God, and that she had a problem that needed addressing. So after confronting her about the affairs and she confessed to them, one of the things I told her is: "I will heal from this to the degree that you heal yourself from what this has done to you."

You see what I did? I put the ball in her court. If she wanted this marriage to survive this, it was up to her to address her inner demons, to discern what in her allowed this to happen spiritually, emotionally, mentally, and socially, and to deal with those issues, painful as it might be, and fix them. Because I knew if that didn't happen, down the road we might once again have some issue that creates the same circumstances in her. She needed to be able to realize what was happening to her and take proactive steps to avoid going down the same road. Because every marriage has marital issues. Rare, if any, is the perfect marriage. So there will always be a reason for a spouse to cheat if they go looking for one to justify their selfish indulgence of their desires no matter how "good" or "bad" the marriage is perceived to be.

So I think holding the CS's feet to the fire to address those issues, is evidence of a strong BS whereas a weak BS will allow the CS to avoid doing that hard and painful work, to change not only their attitude and behavior for a time, but to change how they deal with their inner needs in the core of who they are permanently. Because true love "is not selfish." The "love" of an affair is all about being selfish.

Likewise, and this may be closer to what you may be experiencing, if you're staying just for the kids or for financial reasons, even though you don't feel that he is addressing his real issues as I've outlined above, or you're not seeing him wrestle with it (most guys just want to put it behind them and not think about it too much) so either subconsciously or consciously you realize "there is a high probability this could happen again," you don't feel staying is holding his feet to the fire, and leaving would be the correct response, but you can't bring yourself to do it or admit it. You don't feel he is attempting and/or making any progress on rebuilding your trust in him (which will take years, btw, even if he is doing all he should, at a minimum 2 years but could be more), and without that effort you don't think you could ever trust him again, so what kind of marriage does that make?

This can make you feel weak. You can't draw a line and say, "beyond this, it is over." Or if you do and he crosses it, you can't find the strength without yourself to make it over. Especially if he starts begging and making all sorts of promises and tugging on your feelings of guilt. Plus, leaving him results in this all going more public and it appears you don't want that to happen.

Or maybe there is/are other issue/s internally to yourself I've not touched on, that are particular to your situation. But in the end it has made you feel like you've violated your beliefs about what you should do or not do, and so you are struggling not so much with forgiving yourself (that goes against the definition of forgiveness strictly speaking), but in an identity crisis of who you believed yourself to be prior to dday, and you are no longer living up to that self-image you've developed over the years. Low self-esteem sets it because you feel you've "failed" at this marriage and have lost what is special about it.

While rebuilding is primarily done by the CS, the BS still has to heal and jointly rebuild the marriage to a better place than it was before the A. That is because the event of the A not only destroyed the identity of who you thought the CS was, and the "life story" you've built together over the years, it radically affects your own self-identity because your identity has been mingled with who you believed him to be. It is part of becoming one through marriage. What happens to one affects the other person. Part of your "job" is to begin working to reconstruct or rebuild who you are in light of this experience, and whether the CS can rebuild enough of an identity of who you believe they are that allows you to integrate them into a continuing relationship that is beneficial for both people. For the first few months, that may seem impossible or at least a long, hard road you're unsure you can both navigate successfully. I know personally, for almost a year, I wasn't sure if we'd make it. I could see we were on the right path, but there is so much that could have gone wrong that I knew the odds were stacked against us. As a matter of fact, when the one-year anniversary of dday rolled around, we celebrated the fact we'd made it that far in much better shape than I thought we would have been at by then. I seriously realized for the first time in our marriage that we might not make it, especially that first month or two. It seemed touch and go there for quite a while.

But that is why the BS has to ask so many questions and discover the truth of what happened during the time of the A, because that knowledge is needed in order to find a way to reconstruct the relationship story into one they can be happy with. Failure to do that results in staying in a dysfunctional marriage and/or divorce.

At any rate, I've gone on long enough. I recommend, if you haven't already, to seek out individual counseling to help you through this process. Find someone who has experience in dealing with infidelity cases. If they are good, they can get to know your specific circumstances and address all this in a more specific manner than we can on a forum like this where we not only lack the body language behind the words, but are not usually trained to probe and be able to discover the inner drives of a person that leads them to do or not do x, y, and z and the best ways to deal with them once you know. But hopefully some of this more general information will be an aid to refocusing your perspective to give you a better picture of what you are dealing with and how you might need to change as a result.

My husband never changed his phone number. That bothers me. He didn't want to for his work contacts, etc,... He finally got to the point where he begrudgingly acquiesced; however, I didn't force the issue and he never did. Things are better. But he's just not a very open guy. I don't want to overthink it, because I think things are going better. But I think I need more than he's giving.