Journey Through Adultery - 12-12-11
Well, I'm way overdue for an update. An interesting thought I had today. The 11th marked our 7 month anniversary since dday. Her whole series of affairs lasted about 7 months. Don't know if that means anything, other than maybe we've actually lasted longer on this side of the A than the actual A did. Not sure what that matters, but I guess it is some kind of marker along the journey that is good to see pass by me.
My wife has continued to make progress, for which I'm very happy. It seems like every few weeks, a new milestone gets added to the list. Our priest told her again that she is doing very well. To remind folks, she goes to confession weekly and the Lord's Supper is being with held from her. In the early church, that would last for a minimum of two years if I recall correctly. Now days it is more of a year I think, or in some cases less. We keep wondering if he might decide to give her a "present" and return her to communion for the Christmas service. Possible, based on his comments, but he's never given us a timeline, even a minimum one. So who knows. And for myself, I don't want her back on too early. So I'm trusting that he'll put her back on when the time is right.
But that process has been very helpful to her, I think, and is probably one further reason why she has done so well. She gets held accountable to someone other than me for her spiritual progress in dealing with this, so she can be healed in a fuller manner.
There have been other little steps over the past months since I posted here last. Stuff like she realized she had kept some parts of herself hidden from God in a "closet" so to speak, and she needed to give those over to him. Stuff like her shame in doing what she did, her guilt, feelings for the OM, etc. And her feelings for the OM have continued to be less and less over time. She said she saw him drive by the house she cleans in his neighborhood, and she felt nothing for him. Didn't react either with desire or pain.
She still cries almost daily about what happened. I'm not sure she's made it through a church service without crying at least once. I'm hoping she can effectively deal with the guilt at some point. I can only imagine how hard that must be. I've often thought if she'd been seriously hurt or died when I did my stupid thing back when we were dating, how horrible I would feel, and I would blame that I'd done that over some stupid macho desire. I was lucky that didn't happen. But when you realize you've done something horrible to one you've said you'd love through better or worse, it would be hard to heal from that.
But I know it can happen, and I know God forgives, and I've forgiven her. Now she needs to get to the point of forgiving herself. I know she doesn't feel like she deserves it, but who does? No one. We've all blow it big time. If not with an affair, then in some other area. I'm amazed at the human capacity to rationalize the most reprehensible acts. We're good at that, so much so we often don't admit to doing anything wrong.
For myself, I think the whole concept of the identity shift that I talked about on the forum is sinking in. This still has a ways to go before I feel this is settled in. Part of me has looked back at what happened, and seen it more as a horrible part of my life that I now have to somehow adapt to. I don't look at my W the same way. Oh, I love her. I'm committed to her. But she is different now. She feels different now. And it is sort of like these changes are not just one's she's having to deal with, but me. The innocent, trusting girl I married is no longer here.
Not that she's totally different. But enough has changed that it is still a big shift. Our lives have changed, both positive and negative, and the new "us" has yet to feel solidified into a new reality. And I look at her and wonder how things will be in a few years. Will we slowly shift back to our old ways, and life return to our varied interests and we spend less time together again? Or have we learned our lesson, and the current interaction is now going to be the norm from here on out.
One thing that relates to this is our sex life. Her change about sex happened with the start of the A last Oct. (For a reminder, she went from maybe twice a month at best to everyday desire.) So this change in her has been going on for over a year now. One year and two months to be more accurate. And already this change is feeling more and more like "normal" to me. I'm less and less wondering if this will end next week or next month, and seeing it as the new normal. But for the longest time, I couldn't believe this would continue. She went from being ho hum about it, to desiring it and willing to do things I never thought she'd ever be willing to do. Stuff before I could hardly get her to consider and was gross to her, suddenly became something she *wanted* to do.
I'm still amazed at that change, and that it lasted for more than a couple of weeks. She's literally fulfilled all the sexual fantasies I had that she could fulfill, but I had decided a long time ago "that would never happen." But while there is still a sense of amazement that it has happened, it isn't the same as it was for a long time, where I expected it to end at any time. I even thought once dday happened, that as she went out of the fog, the constant sex would go bye bye too. But even though her affair-primed libido has simmered down, she still wants that daily for the bonding time and because she still enjoys it. It's like her sex drive finally caught up with me, though it took over 28 years for it to get there.
But point being this is feeling more permanent, more solid, more like it will continue after a year and two months of it. I imagine when we draw close to two years, it will no longer feel like a "change" but part of who we are as a couple. Part of our identity of relating to one another.
So, these other changes which are only seven months old I feel somewhere between one and two years, will get solidified and no longer feel like changes. I may have moments when I think, "Oh, wow, I still can't believe we're here," but more moments when it will feel this is the new us.
We still have a ways to go. She's still healing, and I'm trying to figure me out. Not an easy task. lol. I mean, there is a lot of stuff to deal with. Sometimes I get down feelings. Even today, I had a thought it would be nice in a way to run away into the desert and live by myself for a while. Of course, I've always had those thoughts. Then I always remind myself it would be horrible of me to do something like that, to abandon my responsibilities and family, to leave them dangling. I know I could never do that, but sometimes the feeling of just wanting to escape is great when it gets pressurizing. Those usually pass, and today I felt it a little. Not anything serious. Just a kind of tiredness in dealing with it all. Relationships are so exhausting. I guess that comes from being an introvert. My "alone time" has been cut into and so I have less time to recharge. Then again, being unemployed has given me more alone time in some ways as well.
Not that I don't want to expend this energy for her, but it does mean i get less time than before for recharge and more time giving it out. So I'm still trying to find my own balance, I feel.
Tonight, something happened that I think threatened the identity thing. A repeat of pre-A struggles we've had when it comes to me listening to her. In times past, she would come in and start talking. I'd be deep into something, and she would get angry with me because I was "ignoring her." Sometimes it would result in a very stressed environment. That would happen about once every quarter for many years. Most of the time we'd get in a few words and she'd be off to bed and I would return to what I was working on. But she seemed to have very low tolerance for me not focusing 100% on her. And if I acted like it was a struggle for me to pull myself away from what I was focused on, then she would feel offended, as if I had said to her, "All right, what the hell is so all fired important that you dared to interrupt me, woman!"
One of the things I've realized post-A is that I didn't give her enough time. Now, I go to the store with her to buy groceries, I go to the gym with her to work out and swim. And honestly, I discovered that I enjoyed doing those things with her. And they have helped us to connect better and I know it has helped me to meet her need that I do find her important and fun to be with. So, like me getting what I'd always wanted in the sex department, she is finally after all these years getting what she wanted from me in the spending time with her department.
But I've had to make an extra effort to pay attention to her when I'm in the middle of something else. And by and large, I've been successful. But sometimes I get this strong feeling that I'm wasting time. I mean, we text a lot everyday, and we talk on the phone at least once, maybe twice a day when she's driving from one client to the other, or she's on lunch break. And we usually talk and spend time in the evenings, sometimes sex, other times, just talking. And oddly enough, I'm so bad at multitasking that if I am on the phone with her, and start reading an email or something, she can tell I'm not as focused on her. Then I have to push myself away from the desk, and do absolutely nothing other than talk with her, because if I don't do that, I will feel I need to get some stuff done while we chat, and she always picks up on that as me ignoring her and not listening to her, even though I am, just not at 100% capacity.
While I like talking with her, I find it frustrating that I can't get anything else done while we talk. Well, tonight she came in and was talking to me. I had been reading emails. While she was talking, I was scanning down my email list to note how many emails were in each box. I figured I could do that while listening. That didn't require a lot of focus. But while I was doing that, she decided to test me. So she pauses in the middle of a sentence to see if I'd notice. And I failed to appear to notice she'd paused.
Cause while I was listening to her, it wasn't in the foreground of my mind. Anything in the background has to wait is turn in the queue. And of course by the time I get to it, there is a good chance I will have forgotten what she said, even though I heard it. So she became angry with me that I didn't notice she stopped, and said I wasn't listening.
We rode in the car to the gym and she wasn't happy. She said she shouldn't have gotten so angry about that, but its like it was a trigger for her to go into a funk. But I decided what I did was trigger a fear in her that I was starting to slip back into the old patterns, and that the changes I made to our relationship might not be permanent. Just my hunch, she didn't verify that fact. But it is I think, one of the first times since dday that we've had that big a repeat of the pre-A dynamic.
Of course, there is a big difference from back then. Back then, about the only contact we had with each other except for certain days and events, was the five minutes or less of chatting we had each evening before she went to bed. So if that went south, that was it. Today, we spent a good hour plus at the gym swimming with each other, sitting in the hot tub, etc. And we talked on the phone today, and texted each other today, and had sex when she got home. We even cooked dinner together. Today, I would estimate, we spent over three hours of time with each other. That's probably fairly normal now. Not the mere five minutes or less that was standard before.
But I've got to remember that I simply can't read or focus on anything else when she wants to talk with me, because I simply can't do both and make her feel like I'm listening. Or she needs to learn to at least give me some time to pull away from what I'm doing. I've got to resist the feeling that I'm wasting my time. That's the attitude that had me in the wrong place to begin with. Even though sometimes it feels I get interrupted so frequently that I can't get much done.
Sort of a rambling journal entry. Overall, I'm positive about the rebuilding process so far. Stuff like the above are little bumps on the road. I don't see things as ever going back like they were before. The new normal will eventually shift into place, and the journey continues.
My wife has continued to make progress, for which I'm very happy. It seems like every few weeks, a new milestone gets added to the list. Our priest told her again that she is doing very well. To remind folks, she goes to confession weekly and the Lord's Supper is being with held from her. In the early church, that would last for a minimum of two years if I recall correctly. Now days it is more of a year I think, or in some cases less. We keep wondering if he might decide to give her a "present" and return her to communion for the Christmas service. Possible, based on his comments, but he's never given us a timeline, even a minimum one. So who knows. And for myself, I don't want her back on too early. So I'm trusting that he'll put her back on when the time is right.
But that process has been very helpful to her, I think, and is probably one further reason why she has done so well. She gets held accountable to someone other than me for her spiritual progress in dealing with this, so she can be healed in a fuller manner.
There have been other little steps over the past months since I posted here last. Stuff like she realized she had kept some parts of herself hidden from God in a "closet" so to speak, and she needed to give those over to him. Stuff like her shame in doing what she did, her guilt, feelings for the OM, etc. And her feelings for the OM have continued to be less and less over time. She said she saw him drive by the house she cleans in his neighborhood, and she felt nothing for him. Didn't react either with desire or pain.
She still cries almost daily about what happened. I'm not sure she's made it through a church service without crying at least once. I'm hoping she can effectively deal with the guilt at some point. I can only imagine how hard that must be. I've often thought if she'd been seriously hurt or died when I did my stupid thing back when we were dating, how horrible I would feel, and I would blame that I'd done that over some stupid macho desire. I was lucky that didn't happen. But when you realize you've done something horrible to one you've said you'd love through better or worse, it would be hard to heal from that.
But I know it can happen, and I know God forgives, and I've forgiven her. Now she needs to get to the point of forgiving herself. I know she doesn't feel like she deserves it, but who does? No one. We've all blow it big time. If not with an affair, then in some other area. I'm amazed at the human capacity to rationalize the most reprehensible acts. We're good at that, so much so we often don't admit to doing anything wrong.
For myself, I think the whole concept of the identity shift that I talked about on the forum is sinking in. This still has a ways to go before I feel this is settled in. Part of me has looked back at what happened, and seen it more as a horrible part of my life that I now have to somehow adapt to. I don't look at my W the same way. Oh, I love her. I'm committed to her. But she is different now. She feels different now. And it is sort of like these changes are not just one's she's having to deal with, but me. The innocent, trusting girl I married is no longer here.
Not that she's totally different. But enough has changed that it is still a big shift. Our lives have changed, both positive and negative, and the new "us" has yet to feel solidified into a new reality. And I look at her and wonder how things will be in a few years. Will we slowly shift back to our old ways, and life return to our varied interests and we spend less time together again? Or have we learned our lesson, and the current interaction is now going to be the norm from here on out.
One thing that relates to this is our sex life. Her change about sex happened with the start of the A last Oct. (For a reminder, she went from maybe twice a month at best to everyday desire.) So this change in her has been going on for over a year now. One year and two months to be more accurate. And already this change is feeling more and more like "normal" to me. I'm less and less wondering if this will end next week or next month, and seeing it as the new normal. But for the longest time, I couldn't believe this would continue. She went from being ho hum about it, to desiring it and willing to do things I never thought she'd ever be willing to do. Stuff before I could hardly get her to consider and was gross to her, suddenly became something she *wanted* to do.
I'm still amazed at that change, and that it lasted for more than a couple of weeks. She's literally fulfilled all the sexual fantasies I had that she could fulfill, but I had decided a long time ago "that would never happen." But while there is still a sense of amazement that it has happened, it isn't the same as it was for a long time, where I expected it to end at any time. I even thought once dday happened, that as she went out of the fog, the constant sex would go bye bye too. But even though her affair-primed libido has simmered down, she still wants that daily for the bonding time and because she still enjoys it. It's like her sex drive finally caught up with me, though it took over 28 years for it to get there.
But point being this is feeling more permanent, more solid, more like it will continue after a year and two months of it. I imagine when we draw close to two years, it will no longer feel like a "change" but part of who we are as a couple. Part of our identity of relating to one another.
So, these other changes which are only seven months old I feel somewhere between one and two years, will get solidified and no longer feel like changes. I may have moments when I think, "Oh, wow, I still can't believe we're here," but more moments when it will feel this is the new us.
We still have a ways to go. She's still healing, and I'm trying to figure me out. Not an easy task. lol. I mean, there is a lot of stuff to deal with. Sometimes I get down feelings. Even today, I had a thought it would be nice in a way to run away into the desert and live by myself for a while. Of course, I've always had those thoughts. Then I always remind myself it would be horrible of me to do something like that, to abandon my responsibilities and family, to leave them dangling. I know I could never do that, but sometimes the feeling of just wanting to escape is great when it gets pressurizing. Those usually pass, and today I felt it a little. Not anything serious. Just a kind of tiredness in dealing with it all. Relationships are so exhausting. I guess that comes from being an introvert. My "alone time" has been cut into and so I have less time to recharge. Then again, being unemployed has given me more alone time in some ways as well.
Not that I don't want to expend this energy for her, but it does mean i get less time than before for recharge and more time giving it out. So I'm still trying to find my own balance, I feel.
Tonight, something happened that I think threatened the identity thing. A repeat of pre-A struggles we've had when it comes to me listening to her. In times past, she would come in and start talking. I'd be deep into something, and she would get angry with me because I was "ignoring her." Sometimes it would result in a very stressed environment. That would happen about once every quarter for many years. Most of the time we'd get in a few words and she'd be off to bed and I would return to what I was working on. But she seemed to have very low tolerance for me not focusing 100% on her. And if I acted like it was a struggle for me to pull myself away from what I was focused on, then she would feel offended, as if I had said to her, "All right, what the hell is so all fired important that you dared to interrupt me, woman!"
One of the things I've realized post-A is that I didn't give her enough time. Now, I go to the store with her to buy groceries, I go to the gym with her to work out and swim. And honestly, I discovered that I enjoyed doing those things with her. And they have helped us to connect better and I know it has helped me to meet her need that I do find her important and fun to be with. So, like me getting what I'd always wanted in the sex department, she is finally after all these years getting what she wanted from me in the spending time with her department.
But I've had to make an extra effort to pay attention to her when I'm in the middle of something else. And by and large, I've been successful. But sometimes I get this strong feeling that I'm wasting time. I mean, we text a lot everyday, and we talk on the phone at least once, maybe twice a day when she's driving from one client to the other, or she's on lunch break. And we usually talk and spend time in the evenings, sometimes sex, other times, just talking. And oddly enough, I'm so bad at multitasking that if I am on the phone with her, and start reading an email or something, she can tell I'm not as focused on her. Then I have to push myself away from the desk, and do absolutely nothing other than talk with her, because if I don't do that, I will feel I need to get some stuff done while we chat, and she always picks up on that as me ignoring her and not listening to her, even though I am, just not at 100% capacity.
While I like talking with her, I find it frustrating that I can't get anything else done while we talk. Well, tonight she came in and was talking to me. I had been reading emails. While she was talking, I was scanning down my email list to note how many emails were in each box. I figured I could do that while listening. That didn't require a lot of focus. But while I was doing that, she decided to test me. So she pauses in the middle of a sentence to see if I'd notice. And I failed to appear to notice she'd paused.
Cause while I was listening to her, it wasn't in the foreground of my mind. Anything in the background has to wait is turn in the queue. And of course by the time I get to it, there is a good chance I will have forgotten what she said, even though I heard it. So she became angry with me that I didn't notice she stopped, and said I wasn't listening.
We rode in the car to the gym and she wasn't happy. She said she shouldn't have gotten so angry about that, but its like it was a trigger for her to go into a funk. But I decided what I did was trigger a fear in her that I was starting to slip back into the old patterns, and that the changes I made to our relationship might not be permanent. Just my hunch, she didn't verify that fact. But it is I think, one of the first times since dday that we've had that big a repeat of the pre-A dynamic.
Of course, there is a big difference from back then. Back then, about the only contact we had with each other except for certain days and events, was the five minutes or less of chatting we had each evening before she went to bed. So if that went south, that was it. Today, we spent a good hour plus at the gym swimming with each other, sitting in the hot tub, etc. And we talked on the phone today, and texted each other today, and had sex when she got home. We even cooked dinner together. Today, I would estimate, we spent over three hours of time with each other. That's probably fairly normal now. Not the mere five minutes or less that was standard before.
But I've got to remember that I simply can't read or focus on anything else when she wants to talk with me, because I simply can't do both and make her feel like I'm listening. Or she needs to learn to at least give me some time to pull away from what I'm doing. I've got to resist the feeling that I'm wasting my time. That's the attitude that had me in the wrong place to begin with. Even though sometimes it feels I get interrupted so frequently that I can't get much done.
Sort of a rambling journal entry. Overall, I'm positive about the rebuilding process so far. Stuff like the above are little bumps on the road. I don't see things as ever going back like they were before. The new normal will eventually shift into place, and the journey continues.
Replies
I\'ve been reading through all of your journal tonight and what I\'m saying may be somewhere further along...but I am a bit disturbed by this entry.
You are doing a lot to save your marriage and so is your wife - I commend you both.
But as someone who is an introvert and loves to write - I also see the need to have time to myself to do so. Respect needs to go both ways and she needs to find a way to stop and say something like, \"Is this a good time or should I wait while you finish what you\'re working on.....?\" and give you a chance to finish what you\'re doing. It can be hard to be in the middle of a thought and then turn away to listen - particularly if it is something that CAN wait...
Just my .02 - I do agree that you need to listen to your wife and turn away from the computer - BUT - I think she also needs to see you have some boundaries to take care of your needs with the computer/writing, etc.
Thanks, BunMother. It actually has become better in that department. For most of the first year, I think she felt the need to communicate with me a lot because she felt clingy, maybe afraid at some point I would up and say, \"You know, this just isn\'t working out. I\'m out of here.\" I think to some degree she both felt the guilt of what she\'d done, and the need for confirmation that I wasn\'t leaving, that I still loved her despite that.
So for the first months, she texted a lot. When I was fired, we started talking more on the phone, and the texting grew less and less. Now, our routine is I text her good morning when I wake up, and she\'ll usually respond back. Before, there would have been a long text conversation, but that rarely happens anymore. She usually calls me when she\'s on lunch break or driving from one client\'s house to another, or coming home.
And sometimes, she realizes I may not be listening and is okay with it. She simply stops trying to have a conversation. But her emotions fluctate with her periods, and like earlier today, she picked up that I wasn\'t fully paying attention to her. Mainly because I wasn\'t responding when she thought I should. So I stopped reading, but as she continued talking, I had to assure her I was listening to her.
And I can understand the situation. It is frustrating to talk to someone, only to discover they weren\'t listening and don\'t have a clue what you just said. She actually does that to me as well from time to time.
But I think once she dealt with her guilt more, the need to be so \"clingy\" has died down with it. We still communicate a lot more during the day than we ever did before (never texted or called each other except on rare occasions).
This post was written about 7 months after dday. We are now at 15 months, more than double. It was interesting to read over it, where I was at. I do feel now like the \"new normal\" has become more normal feeling. It doesn\'t seem nearly as odd or still trying to break things in.
And I\'m still not writing a lot, but I have written some fiction. And I\'m working on some non-fiction, and regularly write blog posts. So I am *writing,* just having a hard time getting back to writing fiction regularly.
Thanks for the comments.