SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

I can't make others understand what I'm saying if they don't want to.

For my understanding and to be able to try and give advice, who was your AP and did he also have a partner/wife? How did you meet him? I can't seem to find it in any of your posts.

GottheMorbs

I get your point. Makes sense to me.

Everyone feels and experiences and heals differently. That’s the point of this site.

We can debate points and analogies etc. but I can say that the best revenge is living your best life.

My H tells me he worries about us as a couple. Me — I’m just living my best life.

GotTheMorbs,

Heard and understood. Thank you for that.

I am curious and would appreciate your thoughts if you will indulge me.

Do you think I am intellectually incapable of understanding you and your responses?

Or do you think I am emotionally in a state where I am not able to respond in a logical and intelligent way to your responses?

What do you think is going on with me? What do you think my problem is?

I broke my toe or foot last weekend at my friend's mountain house by accidentally kicking her couch late at night. I've spent the week with my foot elevated and throbbing and trying not to move and sleeping poorly. I'm not in the best head space. Ha ha.

The WS can do their best to off recompense. It's the BS that ultimately balances the scales.

I'm not talking revenge affair, but only the BS can know what it takes in their relationship to feel equal again.

KitchenDepth,

Sorry to hear about your injury.

This isn't to say anything about your intellectual capabilities or emotional state. It just felt like we were having two parallel conversations and struggling to bridge them. I think two intelligent people can interpret the same words through different frameworks and end up talking past each other.

I'm trying to respond differently in those situations than I have previously and use a couple mantras to help me recognize when it's time to step away. I also don't want to take LonelyGuilty's thread further off topic, so I think that's all I'll say here.

Speedy healing.

[This message edited by GotTheMorbs at 7:32 PM, Saturday, July 4th]

Thank you all for taking time to share your experience, views and thoughts.

A lot of different perspectives, from members who have reconciled for a while, members who divorced, and members who are more or less where I am now (in terms of time from DDay).

I am on my phone now, so I struggle to quote the parts that stood out more / resonated more.

Every angle is really insightful and I will need some time to absorb all of it. Thank you.

Lonely guilty

You can’t, nor you should aim to.
And I could spend a lot of words here but there’s a better way:

No answer is as elegant as it question

Ask yourself

What there’s to balance?

You already see it now.

It’s trauma, identity and reality destruction of a person who loved you.

It’s possible to "get even"?
Yes, if your partner’s goal is revenge, then he could work to make you fall in love so deeply that you will reach out to the happiness it always eluded you in your life, make you feel finally alive and at home, complete…

And then destroy you. Shatter everything you have, humiliate you and in the height of your suffering leave you for another woman while laughing at your traumatized face.

Build you up, while digging your grave.

That’s what would probably make a BS feel better about your betrayal. Revenge, payback, to throw you in the same dark place you and your affair partner threw them.

It will not heal you or your BS nor make either of you a better person.
At best it will make you feel it and understand what you did.
So probably you will feel even more miserable.

Then the books are balanced, once you lost any agency, hope, love.

Is it something worthy to aspire to?

I doubt, it is not worthy and this is coming from a guy who is pretty big on revenge.

If there’s any shred of love left, any good memory… just drop the revenge.

Don’t balance the books, it’s a mirage, a Fata Morgana, there’s only pain there.

You want to reconcile, balancing the books it can be done only by your BS if the goal is your annihilation.

Forget it both for this is what it looks like.

Live for today at your best and carry the wound as a memento of how you can fall. So both of you will never fall again, because you will be always ready to catch one another.

That’s the best you can do.

Balance the books is the furthest place from love there is.

Lonely guilty

At this point, I think it's best to listen to your husband and respond to his feelings. Other people can tell you how they feel. It might be helpful for you in seeing his point of view or not.

If your BH says it feels like a debt that can never be repaid, it's unhelpful and unempathetic to tell him that in 10+ yrs he will feel like he can write it off or that it's decayed.

There are plenty of BS here, particularly BH, that feel the unfairness or injustice acutely many years out.

GotTheMorbs,

I know you get upset at feeling misunderstood. What i'm trying to tell you is that there is a difference between understanding and agreeing. I can understand, comprehend, intellectually follow, or whatever adjective you want to use, a particular analogy. Still my feelings and experiences might lead me to say I don't agree with it. If your BH is similar, telling him that you've talked to many other BS further out, so you know what he will feel is likely quite unhelpful to him.

LG,

I tried to R for years and was on the lethal plain of flatness for most of it. As my tag indicates, my x became the man I always thought he was. Eventually I chose to divorce. It literally was no longer "fair" to both of us. I never made him try to balance any scale-that would be impossible.

In the end, the infidelity was a deal breaker. I’ve moved on, but as of this very second, I think he was likely the love of my life.

Good luck with your R, I hope the two of you are successful.

This is a normal "stage" line of questioning.

There is no way to do what is being asked, you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.

What happens overall is both people will heal to a greater degree. The bs will typically have to confront the cognitive dissonance they feel in trying to stay. It is normal both people tend ro be outcome oriented.

But let’s say I was driving from the east coast to Alaska, I don’t know what the outcome will be, how I will feel, whether I will decide it’s too much and turn around. It’s better to focus on what is immediately in front of you because you can’t view what Alaska is going to be like. You can only deal in the now of the journey and try and to embrace the views as you go.

In the end, the first year really ends up being a lot of recovery. That healing is needed before you can get to reconciliation, which in itself takes a lot of time. Eventually I believe what happens is the debt is partially covered by a better relationship- with yourselves and each other-and the outcome question often comes from that—-the bs may not decide they can go to that step, and those who do have a firm belief somewhere in there that it’s worth staying for what has been built.

The other portion is covered by the bs providing grace. Until the individual healing happens and the relationship has improved through reconciliation it’s unimaginable to be able to give the grace.

But if you truly as the ws remove the barriers you have for love and connection and lead the way to a better marriage through consistency, reliability, and demonstrating love that is all you can do to try and earn the redemption and grace. A bs who decides to stay, decides you are worth staying for will eventually come to the conclusion there is no balancing the past, but can find it in themselves to engage the present and future with the person you have worked to become. That’s the grace.

There is nothing a WS or BS can do to rapidly even the scales.

True forgiveness arrives as a whisper, and this is not when the weight is balanced. This is when the scale is removed.

SL

This is when the scale is removed.

This.
You can’t make a wrong feel right, because it’s wrong. (you can only convince yourself through narration, but it is a lie).

Not even 2 wrongs will make it right. It’s just payback. From a place of resentment.

You can only start over on a new scale, where the wrong has no place.

If you want it to be from a place of love.

I wonder if it could be informative to ask your DH to dig into the analogy a bit. Money is fungible, so you can use profit from one enterprise to pay off loss in another. Presumably he feels differently about this, so ask him: exactly what is it that's being measured in these books that are to be balanced?

Like others here, I don't think there's a way to pay off the debt, but I don't think "fairness" is a realistic goal in life anyway. For instance, as a man I get to be physically stronger than my wife without "deserving" it.

Life is not a Zero Sum Game.

The best thing you can do is go about the business of living your best life. With or without someone else is the question you are asking. But only a healed you can answer that.

I don’t believe in the possibility that balance will ever be achieved.

There is no scar removal cream, no plastic surgery, no therapy, no apology, no sweet behavior that could possibly remove the mark on my soul where I was stabbed repeatedly by infidelity.

Healing will take a very long time, and no further lies. Not one lie more, or the door will close.

I guess that’s my "balance"?

There isn't a way to balance, but there are things the WS can do to lighten the burden. That's not a balance exactly, but it is important to acknowledge that there is work to be done.

@LG

Most trauma therapists don't talk about "balancing the scales" or restoring justice. They talk about integration. Because the past doesn't stop being true. The real question is whether, at some point, it becomes part of your life story instead of continuing to define your entire experience in the present.

I don't know what your husband means when he says something like that, or what's really underneath those words. Does he mean, "I want you to hurt the way I hurt"? Or does he mean, "I want there to be a world again where my trust, my love, and everything I invested actually mattered." That's a different kind of restoration, more like a moral or emotional restoration.

Overall, I think there are four different levels here.

The first is revenge.

Revenge is about making the other person suffer because they made you suffer. The underlying idea is, "You should feel what I felt." Having an affair as a BS out of that motivation would be a classic example. Revenge isn't trying to repair the relationship. It's trying to even the emotional score.

The second level is what I'd call making amends.

This isn't about canceling out the pain because, realistically, you can't. It's about taking responsibility. Being completely transparent. Being consistently honest. Having patience with your partner's triggers. Sitting with your own shame instead of avoiding it. Those are all ways of making amends. They don't erase the past, but they say, "I take responsibility for the consequences of what I did."

The third level is practical or financial measures. Things like signing a postnuptial or updating your wills. I wouldn't call that revenge, and I wouldn't really call it making amends either. I'd call it compensation or risk management. Those kinds of steps are meant to distribute the consequences of a betrayal more fairly, for example, if the marriage eventually ends in divorce or if one spouse dies unexpectedly. That's a form of justice in the external sense, not necessarily justice on the inside.

And then there's a fourth level.

I'd call it restoring your dignity ("I want my self-respect back"). That might mean setting boundaries, insisting on transparency, or simply saying, "I'm not willing to be treated like this anymore." Not because it erases what happened, but because it allows someone to reclaim their own dignity.

Different BS will probably prioritize different things.

For me personally, the goal is what I mentioned at the beginning: I have to heal and integrate this experience into my life story, no matter where my life goes from here. Otherwise, I'll carry everything it triggered and everything it destroyed into every close relationship I have in the future. That's nothing my WH could do for me.

7m46s put it very clearly.

Balancing the books only means revenge.

It doesn’t mean erasing your evil, it means paying it back in equal measure with another evil.

It’s a natural emotion we possibly have all thought about at some point in time.

But 2 wrongs don’t make a right.

If imagine myself revenge cheating on my wife I can see clearly what the "fantasy" (the stupid, not to be missed, old ego) believed:

She gets betrayed and suddenly understands "what I did to you was horrible! I finally understand how painful it is. I am suffering twice, because you showed me how much it hurts and because it was me who started this by doing this horror to you. I understand now, I deserved it and I will never allow this to ruin our love ever again!"

Sounds pretty idiotic and immature? That’s because it is.

How it would likely look like in reality:

- I betray my wife with one or more women. Behind her back, lying, hiding until she eventually finds out. All the time pretending to love her and sucking validation from her.

- she is destroyed and yes, she might finally "understand ". But becoming a cheater doesn’t make me any better than her, it actually validates her dysfunctional ego with "you see? It can happen to everyone "

- it burns the relationship to ashes levelling any healing process to zero.

- infidelity is still disgusting no matter who does it for what reasons

- the books are balanced, two people were broken in their deepest and were cast into trauma.

In addition to the crap above: I betray myself, I do something the very idea of which makes me want to vomit. I lose respect for myself as I betrayed my values and my morals. Just to have a petty revenge on her.

See any positive things there?

And I say this, while the deal with my wayward wife is "we are just two stranger living together, roommates. We may date but until trust is restored we can’t be anything more. Our marriage is open. You opened it. You are free to choose to have sex and romance with who you want. Same goes for me."

I am not even closed to possible new relationships, and if she chooses to sleep with other men again, it’s her business, I don’t care. Just not under the same roof.

I still wouldn’t have any sexual connection with another woman until I first tell her that is what I decided and then leave her definitively. This is where we are different, she can lie and have sex behind my back. I can’t imagine looking myself in the mirror after allowing that to happen.

The books will never be balanced because I must betray myself first in order to do it.

There’s no love that could ever come from that. Not here, not in the future. It’s only pain and corruption of your self.

You don’t want this sister. Neither your husband should.

Understand the emotion, absorb it and then let it go where it belongs—> in the trash

[This message edited by BackfromtheStorm at 9:56 AM, Tuesday, July 14th]

Maybe I'm just jaded and cynical but there is absolutely nothing a WS can do to "balance" the books. The WS has permanently robbed the BS of something and there is just no way to fix that. You can become a better spouse, a better person, and that will make the relationship better but will not ever fill the hole that was created by the discovery of infidelity

Maybe I'm just overly sensitive and giving what my wife did too much weight but discovering what she was more than willing, able, and excited to do with a man who did nothing for her, never provided for her, never took care of her when she was sick, never wore his body out providing for her, destroyed a part of me and 27 months later I never see it being fixed

The discovery destroyed my confidence, destroyed what I thought was a great relationship, destroyed the image I had of my wife. And it got even worse when I confronted her because she could see I was a babbling stuttering train wreck and she just coldly sat there with her arms folded, zero empathy in her words

When her using anger didn't work she switched to darvo, accused me of having secrets, and after an hour-long conversation the closest I got to an apology was her saying well I'm sorry this upsets you. To her it was just harmless flirting and she said I was giving it too much weight and she was just purely dismissive

How can my wife fix what she broke inside me? Absolutely nothing. The balance can never be restored. All I could do is falsely let her believe that our relationship is healed and that everything is great while carrying on with another woman and when my wife discovers it and is crushed then I guess you could say the books are balanced :/

No, this is not something I would ever entertain because all it would do is cause more pain and I'm not the type of man who could scheme something like this

All you can do is be the best spouse you can and maybe one day your spouse will be able to let their guard down and give you their implicit trust again