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Infidelity


Mlle. Zabzie

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Oh Board Hive Mind - I need your thoughts.

About three weeks ago, I accidentally discovered that my husband (of 10 years) had been having an affair for 3 months with New Orleans stripper (he swears it was basically just texting/sexting, but (i) I have gotten myself tested for the full STD panel because, not dumb and (ii) he did send her what I consider a lot of money).  As a twist, he is also an alcoholic, and had been drinking heavily since December (I have some amazing stories, but that's for another thread).  He has finally admitted that he has a major problem with alcohol and is in treatment.  I had actually started seeing a therapist in April (i) because I could tell something was off and (ii) what I thought was going on was that the drinking was way out of hand and I wanted to get some tools to deal with it (or to decide that I couldn't).  We are currently in couples counselling.  He claims to be desperate to save the marriage, and trying to work it out, and his current behavior bears it out.  Three days out of five, I'm certain that this process ends in a (fairly amicable, actually) divorce.  I'm financially independent, so I'm certainly not trapped.  BUT, we have three small kids, and we work at the same place, and, except the fact that he's a lying liar who lies, I really like the guy when he is sober.  (Also, there is a possibility that he is coming to Worldcon so I've totally burned him, but you know, you guys are my friends :))

Here's my question.  It isn't should I stay or go - I don't know the answer to that.  Like I said, 3/5 of the time I think that it's over (that was always in my head my deal breaker, and I never understood why people would stay together - I get it a bit more now).  But for the 2/5 of the time, I wondered your thoughts - is it ever possible to rebuild trust after an infidelity in a non-open relationship?  Any experiences of it working out?  Any of it flaming out spectacularly?  Any people who were the unfaithful person want to chime in on their thoughts?  Thanks.

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Oh Zabs. So sorry to hear you're going through this. I don't have much to offer except to say that dealing with the alcoholism is going to be part and parcel of dealing with the infidelity. Holding you and your babes in my heart. :(:grouphug:

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Aw hell, Zabs. :(

I really can't answer you as to how to rebuild trust. From my own perspective, I would try to understand the underlying trigger that made him make terrible decisions (and it's not the drink -- the drink is only another symptom, so don't let him snow you with that excuse). And then, if you can accept/handle/deal with the underlying reason, you will have to make a leap of faith. There's really no such thing as a continuous path all the way to "trust." There's a lot of steps along the way that he'll have to take...but in the end you will either feel comfortable/secure enough to make the leap, or you won't. It will be up to you to be honest with yourself when the time for the leap has passed and you weren't able to do it, and then you have to gracefully let go. 

:grouphug:

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It happened to me, complete with the drinking, and personally I'm very happy to be gone from that relationship- despite him being other than the bad stuff someone I really, really liked

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I'm so sorry. That really sucks.

I guess for me, the answer isn't whether or not you can rebuild the trust, but whether or not you can have a good relationship with someone that you can't trust entirely. I would imagine that for the rest of this relationship no matter what happens you'll constantly be looking for signs that he's drinking again, or doing shady things, that sort of thing. Even if you say you trust him and even if he acts trustworthy, you know that there are parts of his disease that will make those things possible. 

So can you live like that? A lot of people absolutely can, and do, and there's nothing wrong with it. 

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Zabs :hugs:

 

I'm so sorry you are dealing with this.  I don't have any advise to offer you, other than to make sure you take time for yourself, and have somewhere safe you can vent / cry whatever you need.

 

There are no easy answers.

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Thanks all.  Really appreciate it (and you all sound like my therapist :)).  Have a lot of support - parents know, have been relying on an Aunt I am close to, a good friend invited me to Puerto Rico for a weekend, which I did, so from that perspective all is good.  Haven't really been able to cry except when I think about not having all holidays with kids and how nice people who know have been.

Kay, mind if I PM you?  Would love your perspective in a bit more detail.

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16 minutes ago, Dickwad Poster #3784 said:

I'm so sorry. That really sucks.

I guess for me, the answer isn't whether or not you can rebuild the trust, but whether or not you can have a good relationship with someone that you can't trust entirely. I would imagine that for the rest of this relationship no matter what happens you'll constantly be looking for signs that he's drinking again, or doing shady things, that sort of thing. Even if you say you trust him and even if he acts trustworthy, you know that there are parts of his disease that will make those things possible. 

So can you live like that? A lot of people absolutely can, and do, and there's nothing wrong with it. 

This is also a great comment. 100 percent support.

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19 minutes ago, Dickwad Poster #3784 said:

I'm so sorry. That really sucks.

I guess for me, the answer isn't whether or not you can rebuild the trust, but whether or not you can have a good relationship with someone that you can't trust entirely. I would imagine that for the rest of this relationship no matter what happens you'll constantly be looking for signs that he's drinking again, or doing shady things, that sort of thing. Even if you say you trust him and even if he acts trustworthy, you know that there are parts of his disease that will make those things possible. 

So can you live like that? A lot of people absolutely can, and do, and there's nothing wrong with it. 

(And XRay).  This is also almost a direct quote from my therapist.  And I do need to figure out whether the other parts of the relationship are worth it or if I'd be better off moving on.  And that's harder than I ever thought it would be.  Real life, rather than hypotheticals, always is. 

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And as to personally...

About 20 years ago now, I found out that my then-girlfriend was cheating on me. I knew she stopped, and I never confronted her with it. And we stayed together for 3 years after.

But I never trusted her fully again. When she'd go to bars alone with mutual friends I'd do things like ask other people I knew to tell me what happened. I wouldn't trust her to go to places that she said she was going to (and was right occasionally, though as far as I know she never cheated). I caught her lying to me several times.

I didn't bring it up, once.

Me not pushing it meant we stayed together, but it also meant that when I did end up breaking up with her that it was much more messy and confusing. And to this day, 20 years later, I absolutely regret not getting it off my chest and telling her, even if it meant that we would have broken up. Because at that point I knew that I wasn't going to live my life with her and that I was essentially having a good time with someone I loved, but would never trust again. If I had broken up with her then my whole life would have been very, very different, and possibly for the significantly better. It would have helped my self esteem quite a bit. 

For me staying with someone I didn't trust wasn't worth it. That said, I didn't have kids, I didn't own property, I didn't have a major life with her. That would change a lot of things for me. I'm mostly saying this because it wasn't about rebuilding trust - it was about having a relationship with someone I couldn't trust fully, and how guarded I personally had to be with her even at our most intimate times, and that guarding ended up eating at me until eventually I could not take it any more.

 

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15 minutes ago, Dickwad Poster #3784 said:

 

For me staying with someone I didn't trust wasn't worth it. That said, I didn't have kids, I didn't own property, I didn't have a major life with her. That would change a lot of things for me. I'm mostly saying this because it wasn't about rebuilding trust - it was about having a relationship with someone I couldn't trust fully, and how guarded I personally had to be with her even at our most intimate times, and that guarding ended up eating at me until eventually I could not take it any more.

 

And that's almost a direct quote from the couples person.  She noted that I obviously have built some pretty high walls as a result of everything and a question is whether it is possible for them to come down.  And I don't know yet.  It's too new.

(And thanks - this is all super helpful)

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Dear Zabzie,

I sympathize completely with you and feel nothing but empathy for you and your plight, since I posted in this forum a very similar thread 7 years ago.

My then girlfriend and soon to be fiancée, I hoped, was cheating on me. In desperation, and consumed with grief and pain I tried to keep the relationship going for a while longer to see if I could work it out. I couldn’t. The infidelity was more than I could stand, and I saw it within me that I would never ever be able to trust that person again, no matter how much I thought I loved her.

I turned the page reluctantly, severed completely ties with her and may have had the best time of my life philandering and enjoying myself utterly until I met –and I can’t thank God enough- the person who was to become my wife and settled down once and for all.

Years down the road, a marriage, a settled life as a family man, extra weight on, financial obligations, and all that goes with it, I do not rue for a single second my decision. I still reflect occasionally on my ex and our time together, with a bit of melancholy and longing perhaps –which is natural I believe after having loved someone intensely, but I’m glad I managed to pull everything we had at that moment behind me and spare me years of mistrust, mistakes and anger.

At the end of the day, the answer to your question depends on you entirely. Once infidelity appeared, it was impossible for me to keep trust with that person. I would have been caught in a relationship based on doubt and pain by my side for years to come. Of course your situation is far more complex than the one I lived since there were no children involved or an underlying problem of alcoholism.

I guess you are on your own Zabzie, you’ll have to reach a tough compromise with yourself: whether to try and work it out or not. My situation was however very different than yours since there were no strings attached. I guess you also have to make a decision based on the best interests of your children, and not your own solely.

Best of lucks!

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4 hours ago, Xray the Enforcer said:

Aw hell, Zabs. :(

I really can't answer you as to how to rebuild trust. From my own perspective, I would try to understand the underlying trigger that made him make terrible decisions (and it's not the drink -- the drink is only another symptom, so don't let him snow you with that excuse). And then, if you can accept/handle/deal with the underlying reason, you will have to make a leap of faith. There's really no such thing as a continuous path all the way to "trust." There's a lot of steps along the way that he'll have to take...but in the end you will either feel comfortable/secure enough to make the leap, or you won't. It will be up to you to be honest with yourself when the time for the leap has passed and you weren't able to do it, and then you have to gracefully let go. 

:grouphug:

 

3 hours ago, Dickwad Poster #3784 said:

I'm so sorry. That really sucks.

I guess for me, the answer isn't whether or not you can rebuild the trust, but whether or not you can have a good relationship with someone that you can't trust entirely. I would imagine that for the rest of this relationship no matter what happens you'll constantly be looking for signs that he's drinking again, or doing shady things, that sort of thing. Even if you say you trust him and even if he acts trustworthy, you know that there are parts of his disease that will make those things possible. 

So can you live like that? A lot of people absolutely can, and do, and there's nothing wrong with it. 

So I'm not sure what I have to say really gets any more of value across that hasn't already been said in these two, but I wanted to post some agreement that might help this settle in even more.  I think these are the two ways you can continue in the relationship - if you can truly understand the place he was in, what was driving him and why he made those decisions then you might find in yourself the capacity to accept that he did it, and in combination with an apparent genuine commitment from him he'll keep communication open, and if things start heading that way again he will bring it up and you'll at least know what's going on instead of just being lied to and can work from there (and potentially agree to end the relationship at that point).  With this it is possible to end up trusting a person again, but it comes down to the circumstances and the reasons why it happened, there are certainly some I can do this with...from the very limited information here I don't think this would be one of them though.  If you do this, you need to be prepared to truly accept it and move on, it can't be something that simmers in the back of your mind, poisoning attempts at trust, causing resentment and anger - that just does not end up in a healthy relationship, to truly accept it then it's just something that happened in your shared past, you can acknowledge it but its not something he needs to atone for, or you hold over him...he needs to change how he is so it never happens again, but that's about improving future behaviour not making amends for the past.

Alternatively you can attempt to stay in the relationship despite never trusting him again.  As Kal said, a lot of people can live like this and you'd do it for plenty of different reasons, you might find the other elements of the relationship worthwhile without having the deep trusting connection. You might decide that it's worth staying in a relationship that doesn't entirely fulfil you for the sake of the kids.  The reasons are valid, and if your personality can make it work then it's an option. I certainly could not do it though.

There is something else I want to say though, and perhaps its a bit indulgent to quote my own post from another thread, but I said this on a different topic but still talking relationships and I think its applicable here:

Quote

[There is a concept talked about in some polyamorous discourse of] the 'relationship escalator', you meet someone, fall in love, move in, everything goes great, your lives intertwine and you are together forever and always after that.  Any deviation from that means the relationship was a failure.  Even after I stopped accepting this paradigm, this framing was still very potent and continued to dominate my thinking, specifically how I thought about my marriage until I caught myself recently.

There are two ways to look at it, one is the failure lens: I went over there, the relationship didn't work out long term, we hurt each other a lot in the break up and I came back home with a lot of financial loss.  Certainly a failure if that's how I want to see it.  From another perspective though, I learnt more about relationships from my ex in a year than I had in the 15 years before that. I learnt who I was, to the point of realising I was a woman and that I needed to transition.  I learnt that when I'm confident and truly want a relationship with a woman, I can go after it and still be respectful about it.  I learnt that my father loved me far more than I thought, enough to stand by me through everything that followed and this knowledge was central to me having the confidence to face that.  After the initial conflict, I also gained a friend I will love for the rest of my life, who knows me better than almost anyone else, has seen the ugliest side of me and although we aren't right romantically, when I was in a terrible situation last year she was there for me emotionally without me having to ask.  All of that is worth far far more than the superficial failures.

I'm not saying that every relationship works out that way, and plenty *are* failures, I'm just saying that sometimes a relationship ending isn't a terrible thing - you were together for a time and helped each other through that, then moved on. And maybe there were fuck ups made during the break up, because you're both human and that shit is hard, but when it's right you can forgive each other and find real intimate friendship on the other side of that, and the relationship was an immense success. Not a failure.

If you're even slightly vulnerable to societal messaging about relationships, there will be at least be a part of you that will feel like you are somehow failing if you choose to end the relationship.  I'd encourage you to tell that part of yourself to go jump if at all possible.  I don't know your husband, and I don't know your relationship - if you do end it, I don't know what things you will carry with you through the rest of your life as a result and whether they are good or bad.  But I do know that because of this relationship you have three beautiful kids that you seem to like having around, and that's a big positive to start with.

I know this is a long post, so I'm going to bold this part as the main thing I'm trying to say here. If you can manage to look at the relationship as having been a success if you leave it, and your dominant feelings are a genuine desire to stay then you can trust that that is what you truly want.  If you are looking at the relationship as a failure if you leave, it's hard to trust the desire to stay as genuine rather than a choice made under pressure.  I'm happy to talk further as well if you want, but you don't know me anywhere near as well as Kay so don't feel obligated - at the very least I'd be happy to elaborate on my thoughts around circumstances where I can see how it can be accepted vs those that can't.

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Oh Zabs, I'm so sorry you are dealing with all of this. Sending you big big hugs. :grouphug:

I think Kalbear's reply is spot on. Once trust has been broken it's extremely hard to forget it and move on with your lives. There will always be doubt at the back of your head, you'll always wonder if he's doing something he shouldn't, if he's lying to you. Like Kal asked, can you live like that? Sometimes, you can't imagine a person leaving your life and you can put up with a lot more than you thought you could. Sometimes, you try and you try and you just can't make it work, because there are voices in your head doubting his every word and action. It's not going to be an easy choice.

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Really sorry to hear about this, Zabs.

I'm going to echo a lot of what other people have said, but also note for the record: I'm not a fan of absolutes in relationships. For some people, trust is very much like that - it's either total or it's all over. I think that's an unrealistic standard. People screw up.

What's more important is to understand why it happened. I've been cheated on before but it didn't lead directly to the end of the relationship. I moved past it: but over time I came to understand the underlying reasons for it, and that those weren't going away, and that they were a huge obstacle to our relationship in the future. Not just in terms of fidelity, but in general. I didn't blame her for that, but I did recognise it, and that eventually led to the end.

It sounds as if you're in a similar place. You know it's over, even when you're not angry, even when you're remembering the good stuff about him. That's a good place to be in, in many ways. (ETA - well, if you start from the admittedly crappy position you're in, I mean.)

In answer to the hypothetical, do I think that trust can ever be rebuilt? Yes, I think it can, in some cases. I know couples who've done it. But it's not easy, and not quick, and it requires the right set of circumstances. These... don't sound like that.

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Thanks all. This is all really good advice from a lot of different perspectives.  The biggest thing I'm trying to remind myself of is that none of this has a quick easy answer, as much as I might want one, so against every bone in my body, I need to embrace the process (I HATE process) and see where it goes.

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I've been in a similar situation few years ago. Long story short, my wife had a sexting affair (that's what she claims it was at least) with our neighbour. She dissmided it as "nothing serious whatsoever", but it wasn't nothing for me. But I admit I never even seriously considered ending our marriage, partly because of the kids, partly because I was hoping rebuilding of trust is possible if we both try hard enough. In my case it wasn't possible, not entirely. We do live together, but ever since I often ask myself if she's being honest with me. We both still love each other, that's at least clear for me. But trust is a different matter. There's no doubt our relationship worsened since it happened, but as it wasn't excellent even before that, I can't be sure it wouldn't worsen without it as well. But we still try to make it better. Sorry, I know it's not helpful, just wanted to spit it out and the opportunity arrived.

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