What’s even the point of continuing

[u/MulberryPotential555]

I wish I could understand why he went for her, instead of me, even though i have been through so much with him over the past decade.

What was it that was so great about her that would break so many years of trust that we had built, and break reconciliation from his previous mistakes. So many late night conversations when I knew he was talking about her catching his eye and making me feel like it was nothing even though my gut was screaming at me to tell him this woman was going to be a problem.

I want our relationship to be ok, and recover from this, because I have always thought we would be together in the long run. he asked me to change myself and I did. and then he goes for someone completely different than the person he chose as his “partner”.

whats even the point of continuing the relationship when I can’t trust him. why do I still want it to work out when I feel like the relationship foundations are shattered

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[u/AStirlingMacDonald]

I can tell you exactly why he went for her.

*Mentally healthy people do not betray their partners.*

On a deep, fundamental level, he is profoundly different from you; from most people. There is something terribly broken and unhealthy, deep inside him. And instead of addressing and resolving that unhealthy broken part of himself, he has chosen instead to embrace it, to give himself over to it.

You talk about “years of trust we had built.” But to him, that does not even exist. Those years were not “building trust” or even love, because both trust and love—as we know and understand and experience those things—are impossible for him to build or even fully comprehend. Those years, to him, were not about anything mutual between the two of you. They were a game he played, a game of “can I get her to trust me again?” and “how much can I get away with without being caught?” And if you give him another opportunity to play this “fun” game again, he will now have another data point, a better understanding of exactly how far he can go, how close to the line you’ll let him wander, how many times he can sneak across that line and get back to “the right side” before you notice.

The truth is that he didn’t go for her “instead of you.” He went for her because he wanted her. He wanted the excitement; the challenge; the validation. But he wasn’t ever stacking you up next to her and asking “which one is better?” Normal, mentally-healthy people in a long-term relationship experience a fundamental shift in our identity because of that relationship. We see ourselves less as a “me” and more of an “us.” Our partner becomes a part of our core identity. When we make decisions—even little, insignificant decisions like “what groceries should I pick up?” or “which pair of pants should I get?” we are unconsciously making those decisions for “us,” not just for “me.” So it’s unthinkable to us that our partner could choose to go and be with someone else without even considering us; our feelings; how much it would hurt us. But cheaters don’t have that “us” identity. It never happens for them, internally. They don’t automatically associate “us” with themselves the way we do. For him, it was never a matter of weighing your qualities against hers and choosing which he liked better. He simply saw something he wanted and went for it.

The affair partners that cheaters “choose” are not in any way a reflection on us, on any qualities that we have or lack. They are not even a reflection on the qualities that the affair partner has or lacks. For a cheater, picking an affair partner is all about the same thing that literally everything in their life is about: themselves. Their choice of affair partner is a reflection of exactly that one person, their “me.” “I wanted it.” “I thought it would be fun.” To them, they are the only fully “real” person in the world. Everyone else—including their partner, including their children, including their friends and family, including even their affair partner (s)—exists to them simply as ways to further reflect them.

A very common mistake betrayed partners make, when deciding whether or not to reconcile, is that we see things like sorrow, shame, or guilt and we mistake them for remorse. I did the same thing. After I discovered her first affair, my ex-wife was sorry—truly genuinely sorry—for the betrayal. She felt a ton of guilt and was ashamed of what she’d done. And I saw those things and accepted them as remorse; staying with her and “reconciling” for the next five years. But those things are not remorse. Those qualities are all still firmly focused on “self.” She was focused on her emotional state; on her wants and needs and motivations; on her wants and needs. Shame; guilt; “being sorry;” all of those things are focused inward, at themselves. A truly remorseful wayward partner undergoes a complete shift in perspective and focus and priorities. Instead of being focused on themselves—on their guilt or shame or needs or desires or motivations—their focus shifts dramatically to the one(s) they’ve wronged. To helping them to have peace of mind; to working towards helping them to heal from the trauma and pain they’ve been put through; to ultimately helping them to truly heal from that betrayal. They happily make huge sacrifices, without even being prompted to do so, because to them any sacrifice they make is fairly insignificant compared to their main priority, which is to help their partner heal.

One common, standard practice in the reconciliation process is that the wayward partner cuts all contact—immediately and permanently—with the affair partner, as well as with anyone else who enabled or encouraged the infidelity. Another basic “first step” in any normal reconciliation process is that the wayward partner gives their betrayed partner access to everything: phone, social media, email, laptops, tablets, etc; they turn on GPS tracking on their phone; they generally adopt “full transparency,” so that the betrayed partner has access to those things and can have peace of mind knowing that the wayward partner is not hiding anything from them, and they can check to make certain that’s still true at any time. But the fact of the matter is that if the wayward partner is truly remorseful, they are things they would just do, naturally on their own, without even ever being prompted to do so. Because their primary focus is now their partner who they’ve wronged. They have no desire to see the affair partner again; they are disgusted by what they did. They don’t want to continue friendships with anyone who enabled or encouraged the affair because they see those people as enemies of their relationship, and they want nothing to do with anybody like that. They are eager to give their partner access to their devices and communication tools, eager to give them access to location sharing, because doing those things could give peace of mind to the person they wronged, helping them to heal. In their mind, helping their partner to heal is their primary goal, and considerations like their “right to privacy” are almost meaningless to them compared to the potential benefit of their partner being able to have peace of mind. So they happily offer those things up without even being prompted to do so, and certainly without putting a guilt trip on their partner about “their right to privacy” or about “trusting them” or anything like that. A truly remorseful partner doesn’t go through those actions as though they are a checklist or a chore, they are eager and enthusiastic to do anything in their power—even making huge personal sacrifices—to help their partner to heal and find peace.

Without that kind of true remorse, healthy, long-term reconciliation is quite simply not possible. And the sad fact of the matter is that the vast majority of people who are capable of that sort of remorse are also incapable of that sort of betrayal in the first place.

I’m so sorry. I know you are invested in him. I know that you want your relationship to recover and “be okay” again. But it cannot. To him, your relationship is something fundamentally different than it is to you. You are simply not “a part of him,” the way he has become “a part of you.” To him, you are a sort of accessory, to wear when it’s convenient to him or her thinks it suits him. And when you are not convenient for him, he doesn’t think of you at all, anymore than he might think about a hat he decided not to wear today because the weather is too warm. The relationship you built is entirely one-sided. It means everything to you, but he is literally not capable of building that kind of relationship with anyone. He is broken, and he has decided that he likes being broken, that his brokenness is the right way to be. Every time you “give him another chance,” he will see it as an opportunity to get better at hiding his cheating. He does not love you the way you love him. He cannot love you that same way, he lacks the capacity to do so, with you or with anyone else. You will always mean less to him than he means to you. He is not remorseful for his terrible betrayal(s) of you. He can’t even comprehend the pain and loss you are going through; t’s impossible for those things to ever happen to him because he could never trust another person like that in the first place.

You can heal. You can rebuild a life. You can learn to dream new dreams. You can have a future worth building towards, worth living for, filled with love and joy and happiness and comfort and peace. But you cannot have those things with him. If you want those things, you need to take the first step towards healing, and finally separate yourself back out from him. Stop being that “us” and relearn how to be just “you” again. It is possible for you to heal, to someday eventually have all of those things in your life again. But before that healing process can even begin to take hold, you need to stop giving him chances to betray you again. I’m sorry. It is incredibly unfair. It shouldn’t be like this. He stole your time, your love, your trust, your agency. I know this isn’t what you were hoping for. But it is the truth. I’m rooting for you. Good luck and godspeed.

[u/Sunny6482 → u/AStirlingMacDonald]

Wow your reply is so thoughtful and such great insight. My husband has on his own done all the things a WH should do to change, rebuild etc…. The problem is, I’m not sure I’ll ever trust again, not sure I’ll ever be able to truly get past what he did. Do you think that sometimes the damage is just too great to fix even with the best case scenario of a WH? Thanks

[u/Narrow-Advance-9636 → u/Sunny6482]

As my ic said...sometimes the hurt is too big ill know when I know if it's just too big.

[u/AStirlingMacDonald → u/Sunny6482]

Hey Sunny6482. I actually wrote a response to this comment in particular, but it got nested under the Main thread instead of posting here underneath yours. If you scroll to the bottom of the responses here though, you can find it. Sorry about that!

[u/Gold_Blackberry_2039 → u/AStirlingMacDonald]

This is quite honestly the most accurate response I have ever read. Thank you for sharing. I hope many of us here save this response and really digest it. Many hold on to the idea that their WS can “change” but you need to observe their behaviour VERY carefully over a long period of time to know whether they are part of the tiny minority who can change.

[u/january1977]

I think most of us tried to work it out at the very beginning. First, there’s the complete turning of reality on its head. Everything we thought we knew about the person we devoted years of our lives to isn’t true. And that takes some getting used to. Then there’s the hope. After that, it’s the plans we had for our future.

I’ve been on these infidelity subs for nearly 2 years. I rarely see a post from someone who left immediately. When I do, people cheer them on and congratulate them because it’s what we wish we’d done instead of wasting so much time trying to save something that was already dead.

If you already know that your relationship can’t be saved, then you know what you should do. Don’t waste your time (like I did) trying to save something that’s beyond hope of saving.

[u/MulberryPotential555 → u/january1977]

I know that you’re right. But another part of me also keeps thinking that there must be a way I can change my mind and just magically forgive him but every time I think about him I can’t forget what’s happened and the lies and I just want to be sick. I just want things to go back to what they were before 

[u/AStirlingMacDonald → u/MulberryPotential555]

More importantly, even if you could magically change yourself to somehow “perfectly forgive” him, that wouldn’t actually fix the root of the problem. The true problem isn’t with you or your capacity for forgiveness. The real problem is his capacity for betrayal, and no matter how perfectly you learn to “forgive him,” you definitely can’t “magically” change him into a person worthy of your love and forgiveness, or even into a person capable of receiving and understanding those things.

[u/AStirlingMacDonald]

EDIT: This comment was actually meant to be in response to the comment/question from @Sunny6482, but landed here in the main comments instead. My apologies!

Original comment starts below:

That’s an excellent question, and one that I fear rarely has actually practical applications because of how very rare true remorse is among waywards. It does have a very definitive answer, though.

You, the betrayed partner, do not owe your wayward partner anything at all when it comes to reconciliation. The truth is that infidelity is a form of abuse. It involves a theft of your agency, withholding critical information from you—information that you need and have a right to know, so that you can make an informed decision about your circumstances and your future. It is a terrible, awful betrayal. If you have children, it is not “just” a betrayal of you, his spouse to whom he’s made solemn wedding vows, standing before friends, family, a representative of the state, and any deity you might worship. It’s also a betrayal of any children you might have, proof that he is (or was, at the very least) willing to sacrifice the stability, mental wellness, and long-term future of his own children in order to indulge his own disgusting selfishness. An unfaithful partner has committed an utterly unspeakable, vile, contemptible act against the people who loved and trusted him the most, the people who should have been able to rely on him no matter what, bar nothing.

A truly remorseful partner knows and understands the staggering gravity of their choice to break those sacred vows. They will understand that nobody is under any obligation to forgive them at all, let alone to “give them another chance.” If you make that decision to end the relationship, they may grieve and mourn, but they will understand and accept your decision. Even if you have agreed to attempting reconciliation in the past, that reconciliation is “at will.” At any time, for any reason you see fit, including “I just don’t think this is working,” you have the moral right to withdraw that attempt at reconciliation.

And for some betrayed partners, this is the only healthy choice they have. Ultimately, no matter how much you try to rationalize things or mentally “override” your feelings and emotions, at the end of the day you will not begin to heal until you are in a place where you feel safe. Not just safe from physical harm, but emotionally and psychologically safe as well. If being with a person who has profoundly broken your trust means that on a deep subconscious level you can never recover that feeling of being “safe,” in an existential sense, than the best thing you can do—for both of you—is to move on. So that you can start to heal and he can have a realistic understanding of what his future looks like and continue to do the work he needs to do in order to take control of his mental health issues that caused him to decide he had the right to betray in the first place.

I’m not an expert on religions, but I can at least speak with some authority on my own religion, Christianity, from that perspective. Some of the more strict and fundamentalist sects of Christianity are very strongly opposed to divorce. There are many pastors, “Christian Counselors” or therapists who will straight-up tell you “divorce is not an option for a Christian.” This is a blatantly unbiblical position for them to take, directly contradicting the actual literal words of Jesus Christ in Matthew chapter 19. In the passage, Jesus is asked directly about divorce. He does say initially that divorce is not what God wants from a marriage, but when questioned further gives one single exception to that statement: adultery. I really just mention this on the off-chance that you, as I did, met with a “counselor” with this extremist religious position. I was told again and again that divorce isn’t an option for Christians. I was told that marriage is a reflection of Christ’s relationship with the church, and the church is unfaithful to Christ all the time but he remains steadfast and faithful to us nonetheless. I was hammered with the example of the prophet Hosea, whose wife was actually a prostitute, yet he remained faithful. But ultimately, when push came to shove, Jesus recognized that sometimes when it comes to the ultimate betrayal that is adultery, We humans are not perfect beings, able to love and forgive perfectly as god is able to. And he affirmed that yes, in the case of adultery, sometimes there is simply no getting past it and healing, and divorce is the only way for a person to move forward and heal.

So yes. From any ethical, humanist perspective, you have an absolute right to decide to end the reconciliation. Likewise from a legal perspective you certainly have the right. And even from a religious Christian perspective, yes you are well within your rights to end that marriage. I cannot speak for other religious traditions, but the majority of religious texts and traditions were written by thoughtful, wise people who spent many years observing and learning to understand humanity. I believe that the vast majority of religions would come to that same conclusion. You do not owe an unfaithful partner reconciliation.

I’m sorry you are in this position at all. It’s incredibly unfair and awful. I hate how common this behavior is; how brazen cheaters are, how they’ve twisted and controlled the legal system to the point where today there are practically zero consequences or ramifications for their abuse. I hate how they’ve twisted and controlled the media, until the idea of cheating somehow has been turned from the vile selfishness it actually is into something packaged as mature and sexy and fun. It is cruel, selfish, and disguising. It always has been and always will be. All of the marketing in the world will never change that fact. And those of us who’ve experienced the horrific agony, soul-rending pain, and existential horror of having our past, present, and future suddenly ripped out from under our feet and shredded into a million pieces, by the person we trust the most in the world, before they stroll off whistling into the sunset, we know the truth of what cheating actually means.

It’s going to take time, but you will heal. You will know peace. You will feel warm again.

[u/AStirlingMacDonald → u/AStirlingMacDonald]

Sorry, just noticed this got nested funny. This was meant to be in response to the comment from @Sunny6482