Good Wednesday to all!

Many people find that the path to acceptance of their spouse’s marital affair is easier to take than the path of forgiveness. After being hurt so badly by an affair, forgiveness for many is not a possibility now–or ever. We believe acceptance can be a very effective means to move on with your life and take the final steps toward healing your relationship.

With this in mind…Are you ready, starting right now, to accept the past so you can move on to a brighter future? Why or why not?

Please be sure to respond to each other’s comments!

Have a great day!

Doug & Linda

See also  Discussion - Have You Ever Considered a Revenge Affair?

    15 replies to "Open Discussion: Are You Ready to Accept the Affair and Move On?"

    • Rushan

      I have at last decided to accept the affair, accept that it ended and have forgiven my husband and we are now trying to make our marriage the best there is. He is always there for me now, he is considerate, helpful, loving and kind to me. He is helping in the house. he isn’t going anywhere without me or else he tells me where he is going. He said he got such a fright when he saw what he nearly lost and that he doesn’t want to go through it again. The ow is in another town so I hope she will leave him alone and let him carry on with his life. I am praying that this will be the end of affairs and things and that we will be happy again. We had a nice week away from everything and had done a lot of talking and all things considered I think the affair is over and he wants to make a success of our marriage. Thank you for all your input, it helped me a lot.

    • NotBroken

      Ahh acceptance! I guess in these cases we have to accept it… because we can’t change what happened. It’s just hard to accept and then move on. Moving on is the hard part. Accepting that it happened is not a choice because we can’t change it. Now forgiveness that’s another thing entirely…

    • Jeffrey Murrah

      Doug,

      You said a mouthful when you wrote “the path to acceptance of their spouse’s marital affair is easier to take than the path of forgiveness”.

      Acceptance means having to tell yourself the truth about what happened. Acceptance means telling yourself the truth about how it happened to you. Acceptance means telling yourself the truth that the cheater did this to you. Acceptance means that you have to let go of the fantasies and illusions about your marriage and realize that something is wrong. Something is very wrong.

      One of the BIGGGG mistakes is forgiving too soon. Acceptance must come before forgiveness can be done.

      • NotBroken

        I have not forgiven my H, nor do I think I ever will. But why do you say that a big mistake is forgiving too soon?

        • Jeffrey Murrah

          I see two main problems with forgiving too early.

          1. When you forgive before you have a full understanding of what you are forgiving, it often leads to an incomplete sense of forgiveness. When we forgive it is important that we know what we are forgiving. For example, have you forgiven him for the affair? for the lying? for the betrayal? for the sneakiness? for his insensitivity? Incomplete forgiveness often leads to replays of the emotional hurts that needed forgiveness since they were incomplete.

          2. When you forgive, it takes off the emotional pressure from your spouse. They often need the pressure to make needed changes. When the pressure is let off, they can loose their motivation to change. Although some people do the right thing because it is the right thing, a majority of people need pain or pressure in order to make changes in their lives. Removing the pressure too early takes away the motivation.

    • ruth

      I have accepted that my h had a 2 yr affair. But I have not forgiven him for it yet. Time should take care of that. I dont trust him yet either and that will have to go hand in hand. Once I trust him again I thing forgiving him will follow.

    • cant sleep!!!!!

      These last few days on this blog have been very insightful. My wife is out of town on another business trip. So once again I have all the responsibility that would have come if she had left before.

      The kids need to be up and ready for school. Late for work everyday. Homework done. Baths for them both. Dinner and dishes. Pickup their mess. And it gets done. And I still make time for this site in my day.

      Mondays list of 8 things was offset by the tuesday “backing off”. Then comes acceptance. What a week. With less distraction of her, not talking about it, her wanting to forget it happened, it has been a productive work week.

      Here goes:
      Final farewell-
      Can’t say that I know in my gut (as I have put it here so many times) because she says she doesn’t know when she talked to him last. This, with the ongoing list of phone calls from blocked numbers to her cell, doesn’t give me a warm fuzzy feeling that she did end it.
      Get rid of reminders –
      This can go for me too. I still have all this info I have gathered and when I look at it I just want to throw it all back at her.
      Answer the questions – I get a lot of I don’t knows and a lot of vague answers. She won’t get there in my opinion.
      Repair the damage- she has shown that she wants to comfort me when I am upset. Only when I’m upset.
      Re adjust the barriers- well I know she will never have the windows part and without that, who knows whether the walls are there.
      Restoring trust – without all the others this won’t happen.
      Rewriting memories- this is gonna be a tough one because I don’t know if I will ever forget the specific days.
      Cleaning up- not a whole lot to do here. My family still accepts her and my choice to keep my family together. It wasn’t as big as some of the other stories here. Then again it may go deeper than most here. This is a guy from 19 years ago. I also found out more about the last 5+ years that she has kept from me. She left me long ago. She just never moved out.

      Now onto backing off. The affair Linda described is a lot like what my wife was doing. It describes a lot of the feelings I felt. I think it is that emptiness she feels that led to this. But she holds onto it like a safety blanket.
      I found out about her trip to see him, the day after our anniversary, sometime this june. About a month later she told me about another time she went. But she continues to use the “affair fog” BS and doesn’t know when it was.
      So one line in particular “sexual intercourse does not need to be a part of this relationship, but often it may end the relationship”, weighs heavy because I know it was 2 days before she confessed to me that she spent hours with him.
      Was the guilt of actual physical intimacy the straw that broke it. She confessed after drinking herself to oblivion. And she has continued to be in love with him while doing the right thing and staying with me.
      No matter what she says I will always know that it went too far. I accept that. I don’t think she ever will.

      I do accept it for what it is. I can’t change her heart and I don’t want to. She WILL never give me again what she gave him. We WILL never be that new or renewed love that she had when they met, when we met or when she found him again. I WILL never be the same man I once was.
      I WILL be better.

    • michael cant sleep!!!!

      About forgiving:

      Forgiving too soon rings all to true here. I can’t forgive for what she wont even aknowledge she did. It was 7 months to the day that I found out about her using our friend phone to call him. So have I backed off too much and is it too late to work on what happened. Why bring up the past now. Things look brighter today. But that deep down feeling that I cant trust her ever and cant forgive her. I mean if I was on the oposite side of this why would i want to stay with someone who didn’t trust me?
      I did forgive too soon. And I Learned my lesson for it.
      I said I forgave her early on on this site only to be slapped in the face again and again with more and deeper things.
      If she doesn’t accept it for what it was and work through it she will never learn from it, as I have seen close up with my best friend, It WILL happen again.

    • Donna

      Hmm… Acceptance, YES! I am ready to accept the affair, as was stated above by NotBroken, really in the end we have no choice but to accept. For some that may be a hard place to get to, although I think once you do, it is a good feeling. I understand that there was a lacking of something in my marriage, I accept that. I accept that my husband felt this more than I did and a I accept that the actions of what my husband did is not my fault either. I accept it is more about the person he was at the time and still is (the affair, although at this minnie is not physical. It has been, the contact is still there!)

      As for forgiveness, that is going to be a long time coming. As I said, teh contact is still there and I can’t forgive when he is still being not 100% honest with me. I will wait and let the affair ride itself out. To some that may seem silly, I see it happening, I see the changes in my husband already.

      I am TRYING to still accept that my husband is in love with the OW though. To me, that one is the killer. I guess I do accept that he loves her and not me, although I REALLY struggle with it terribly. I struggle with the fact that my husband has found someone more compatible for him and someone who makes him happier than he was even on our wedding day. I do accept, it sucks though and hurts.

      I accept that my husband made a MASSIVE mistake and that he is so very human with flaws just as I have. I will not judge him as I am sure we are all likely able to do the one thing that we probably never thought possible. I guess when placed under the right circumstances at the right time, we never know what could happen. I think withthat, we always need to be aware of our surroundings and circumstances and NEVER become complacent in anything we do. Especially with our marriages… Just my thoughts, what are thoughts on this?

      I guess I wonder though.. when he gets tothe otehr side of this, will he ever really be happy with me, or will part of him always feel only 80% happiness with me as I am not compatible to him in his mind. So many wonderings still, so not worth worrying about I guess.

    • beth

      My husband dumped the OW the very day I confronted him about it…although I had known about them for some time prior, I had to collect evidence…and has had only minimal contact since (because they work together, no choice). Even so, while I have accepted that it happened, I am no where near forgiveness and may never be. This wasn’t his first…and I know now, will likely not be his last, although he swears it is. He has fed me that line before.
      He is treating me differently…better…than ever before in our relationship. But I know what he is capable of…will always be capable of…and that is an enormous roadblock for me. All of his complaints about our relationships were the same issues I had with it…lack of attention, lack of affection, too busy…but I chose not to do this to him even though he NEEDS to feel this pain (I have never done anything like this to him…and won’t…it’s not who I am and I won’t let him make me less because he is devoid of basic concepts of faithfulness and loyalty.)
      I have tried to explain to him that what we had before is dead…it will never be again. And what we have left is tainted, no matter how we try to pretend it isn’t. It’s dirty. And to be honest…and I know this is an enormous problem…if I had my life to live again, I would have dumped him when he cheated early in our relationship. I would certainy NEVER have married him and had two kids. I don’t know what I could have been thinking, assuming that he could ever be true to me when kids and jobs and bills pressed down on us when he couldn’t be true to me when we were living a carefree college existence.
      I read somewhere that one thing you should do is reset all dates…renew your vows so you have a new anniversary, etc. But I don’t think I could ever do that because if I had it to do again, I wouldn’t marry him…I’d move on to greener and hopefully healthier pastures. While I am not sure he is toxic to those around him…he is your typical “good guy”…I believe he is quite toxic to me and we have been living a toxic relationship our whole lives together. I just didn’t realize it…until now.
      We are bond together by a lifetime of memories, many of which are not positive ones to me (more than cheating, too much to go into here)…and that is why I am staying, at least for now. But resetting all this back to zero? Trusting someone who has consistently demonstrated he will take advantage of my trust and my nature? Placing myself in that position of emotional vulerability again? I just don’t see a time I will be able to do this with this man. So should I just cut my losses and move on? Not sure…

    • mightbeatranny

      if you had the affair, what would your husband do? if you had wild porn star sex in fancy hotels w/ a hot guy who had his mouth and hands on every one of your body parts, and you had been sexting him and lying to your husband about where you were to make time for your hottie lover, what would he do? would he say “oh well, we all make mistakes?” or would he be so repulsed by the very sight of you that he couldn’t even look at you. would he suck up his self respect and take your lying ass back? or would he know that he deserved better and move on? just sayin…

    • Angela

      I cannot accept it until I feel like I have the whole story in truth.

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