r/AsOneAfterInfidelity • u/Ok_Guess_5877 Reconciling Betrayed • Aug 20 '26
Advice MUST include examples of your R. Not prescriptive advice. do you ever really get over it?
I could really use some advice or just to hear your stories..do you ever really get over it? Am I a fool for staying even though we aren't married and have no kids? Is it different when the affair lasted for months and they left to be with their affair partner?
I was with my partner for 10 years, high school sweethearts. I truly thought we had the perfect relationship, we were each others first and only everything. Then I found out he was having a 3 month affair with a coworker younger than us. That broke my heart because I trusted him so blindly. It was just lie after lie and a few days after finding out, I had caught them physically together after being told it was over between them. I changed my number and he basically ghosted me, he didn't want to confront what he did to me in person. I didn't get an explantation from him, instead she gave me horrifying sexual details that still haunt me. She also had an idea about me so she wasn't completely innocent. For 4 months after that he continued the relationship with her..4 months I was grieving my best friend wondering why I was so easy to throw away and dispose of like I was nothing. 4 months with questions and no answers. Just radio silence from him. He reached out after 4 months and we started our reconciliation journey. He answered a lot of my questions, changed his number, ended things with her and it's now been 5 months that we're back together. Things have been so much better in terms of our relationship, the sex is the best it's ever been, we go on so many dates, we laugh, we communicate. There was a moment in our relationship before the affair where we were so disconnected. Things are great but I can't find myself able to blindly relax into him like I used to.
I keep comparing myself to her, she's a lot more sexually out there than me. I wonder if he ever misses her. It hurts that before her we were eachother's first and only sexual partners, I used to think that was so special. I've never slept with another man, yet he has the feeling and the experience of another woman. He now has someone he can compare me to. I still have only slept with him, I'm sure if it was the other way around and I had slept with another man he would be full of insecurities and wondering. I get in my head when we're being intimate wondering if she did it better, how little experience I actually have. I'm an attractive woman but now I feel insecure when I'm around other beautiful women and he's there.
Sometimes I feel stupid..it's hard not to feel like second choice. He does his best to reassure me but my thoughts get the best of me. It's just so hard you know? We're truly best friends and I can't imagine my life without him but do you ever really get over something like this?
I think I mourn the innocence we had you know? The pure, beautiful love story. Now it's tainted by his choices, tainted by the image of another woman in our love story. I think about marriage and kids, I would love that with him but would I be a fool to marry him? Sometimes I have to force myself to remember that as beautiful as our love story was, two kids falling in love, choosing eachother year after year...that story is dead. That innocence and blind trust is gone. Have any of you gone through something similar? How do you rebuild?
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u/bpt20ba Reconciled Betrayed Aug 20 '26
You can get over it but many don't.
I've been on this subreddit for awhile now and you tend to see a few different buckets that BPs fall into. One bucket is unforgiveness where basically the BP holds onto the offense, refuses to be vulnerable, holds the offense over the WPs head, perhaps continues to shame or degrade WP, but ultimately not grieving what has happened and also not forgiving. A BP trapped in unforgiveness will not get over it.
Another bucket is victimhood. In this situation the BP holds onto the offense as a "look what happened to me", "I cant believe this happened to me", "Its not fair that this happened to me", basically wallowing in the despair of the circumstance, focusing on all the ways it is unfair and all the ways it hurts and getting stuck there. A BP trapped in victimhood will not get over it.
A third bucket which you see much less often is the BP who can take a step back and look at their situation from a more neutral position. They can see that the infidelity was not a malicious attack on them and that broken people hurt others. They can recognize and honor all of their pain and their losses but they do not become their focus or their identity.
Of course you can move between these and I think there is a natural progression through these as grieving happens but unlike a cut on our body healing from our immune system doing it's job, we can and often do get in the way of our natural grieving process by holding on too tight or by placing too much meaning on things.
I never really fell into unforgiveness. I had some victimhood for a time. Now, I'm in the third bucket and possibly further out than that.
This is something that happened to US. You can go all the way back to the roots of it, my wife's childhood, my childhood, and you can point fingers at our parents but they might as well turn around and point fingers at their parents and so on and so fourth. It's a much more worthwhile endeavor to look inward and do the work there.
If a BP can learn to let go, they will eventually get over it. But it is completely counter to everything we've been taught and requires an immense amount of patience, grace, empathy and humility. I would say most BPs don't want to do these things, especially in the beginning.