You cannot even begin to get over it and move on with a true reconciliation until the A is over and your H owns his crap.
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I think that just answered it for me. I think because I attempted R before and he didn't respond, and because he's been hurting me for a long time now, that I shut down and don't want to see him for anything other than insert name du jour.IMHO you can't reconcile with somebody you can't stand. There has to be something there! I understand where you are coming from but if I couldn't stand my H I wouldn't have even considered R. I offered him R because I saw how truly sorry and devastated he was and because I still loved him. I truly believed we had a marriage worth fighting for. It hasn't been easy, but its what we both want.
It's difficult for you to comprehend R from a place of love and Forgivness when WH is still hurting you.
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Thank you. This is well said.I just want to comment on what you said in your first post, "the man can't make up his mind."
This view of what he's doing is the "layperson's" attitude about cheating. By layperson, I mean, the average person who hasn't been betrayed, or if they have been betrayed, they have not learned much about infidelity in general beyond their own situation. That is NORMAL, by the way! I spent about 3 years in that state of affairs myself (pun intended).
The man CAN make up his mind--but he doesn't want to. MOST cheaters don't want to choose--they want it all! That is why affairs are so god-awful.
Cheaters enjoy the security of marriage. If they didn't, they'd just divorce you before you could blink an eye and you wouldn't know what hit you. No--he gains something by staying married, and it sounds like at this rate he will continue in this situation indefinitely until he's forced to pick one. That is why cheating is known as "cake eating" (have cake & eat it too). Choosing is the furthest thing from his mind.
My husband said a few cruel things while he was into his emotional affair. He is tremendously sorry for them now. He also picked fights. Your WH is demonstrating a distancing mechanism that allows him to mentally justify what he's doing--he couldn't be cruel to a good person, so you must be "bad."
The only way I was able to work past these hurtful statements was for my H to show penitence and remorse. PLUS, loving kindness to repair the hurt. But someone in an affair just isn't capable of thinking this way. It's psychological compartmenalization--in a mentally healthy person, true comprehension of their selfishness and cruelty would make them break down mentally--how is it possible to be empathetic and selfish at the same time?