SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

So, recently one of our married friends entered into divorce talks (one of the WF I had revealed the A to BS, the first to possibly collapse). She is weighing the logistical difficulties of divorce against the ongoing anguish in her marriage. Much of which she is responsible for and some of which (more standard issue marriage stuff) is her husband's slacking and refusal to do IC or MC.

Well I talked with my wife about this, and I mentioned how hard divorce is on the high earner. In this case WF makes about 5x what he BH does. I said something along the lines of "if it wasn't so bad to the high earner we would probably be divorced". She started crying. Saying she thought it was because our love endured. I said, "I never stopped loving you but you had pulled out my heart and stomped on it at the time. I wasn't in a good place and you were making terrible decisions." She said she knew and but still thought it's a little cold that I accounted for the financial and logistical impact of divorce in making my decision. As though wuv should have been enough...

Anyway, I stuck to what I said since it is the truth. But it did seem to strike a cut and remind my wife how close we were to divorce.

Anyone else dig into their decision making as a BS around this topic several years out from DDay and R? Find yourself accused of being to pragmatic about your marriage? Even though it's the very pragmatism that kept the marriage together?

Well my (f)SAWH has never DARED to reply to the things I have told him about my decision process, but I guess might be related to the fact that we are still IHS awaiting him to go to WORK on his mental issues. Which he does not want to address.

In short: I'd disregard such disappointment on her part, what girlish fantasy is she still living in....

Its good for your wife to absorb how close you were to divorce. I think a lot of wayward spouses never fully absorb the position they put us in on DDay or understand all the painful emotional and practical calculations we had to make about our relationship and our lives. But I can also see how it would feel hurtful to her to hear that you stayed with her only because you didn’t want to lose money/standard of living. And she may fear that that is still the case.

As a side note, I think you’re one-sided in your perception of divorce being financially harder on the higher earning spouse. It’s no picnic to be the lower earner and be betrayed, either, and there’s a slew of pragmatic considerations that come along with that as well.

BH and I are certainly far from "several years out from DDay," but one of the pretty horrible rationalizations that I made during my A was that even IF he found out, he would probably stay with me for our daughter's sake, as he had for so long in his previous marriage. I thought maybe eventually he'd come around to forgiving me and we would have love between us again someday (I had also convinced myself he didn't love me during the affair, so this kind of seemed like I wouldn't be losing much. Again-- horrible rationalizations for consequences I had no idea about at the time. Totally wayward thinking.) We put a pretty "strict" (that's probably not the right word but I'm having trouble coming up with another one) pre-nup in place when we got married because I earn about 10k a year to his 350k+, and it limits alimony to like a lump sum of 10k or something. (It's been a long time since I read it. But I always thought the idea of paying someone to not be your spouse anymore was bizarre, and I know I have the ability to make money and support myself if I need to. And he'd never let any child of his struggle financially.)

I was really confused on DDay when he confronted me, and after I admitted to the A, he asked me "What do you want to do?" Because at that point I fully expected him to be making a decision about whether he still wanted to be with me, rather than the other way around. So I started with, "Well, I think it would be best for [insert child's name] if we stayed together..." and he was like, "No. What do you want?" And I was like, "Well I want to be with you, of course," as if there wasn't any reason for him to be asking. I never once thought about ending the marriage, but obviously in hindsight that's not how someone who wants to be married behaves... The massive amount of pain in his eyes and the fact that he was still afraid of the relationship ending combined to make that moment 1000x more awful, as I knew that he still did love me, and I loved him, and yet somehow I still went and did that to him... I won't ever forget it.

So yeah, I was all pragmatism by that point. I think a lot of WS just want to be loved and/or made to feel good/valued/esteemed/etc., whether that's by their BS or their AP. So maybe your W rationalized at that point in time that if you were both choosing to stay, you had to be doing it because you loved each other; otherwise her decision to stay-- to exit a "relationship" with an AP who made her feel loved/good/valued/whatever for a relationship where she isn't loved at that point in time and in which she would be in the doghouse for several years, to understate it-- would have been much harder to make. I'm sure looking back and seeing the reality isn't easy for her to do, but it is the reality, and she'll need to come to terms with it.

[This message edited by GotTheMorbs at 3:04 AM, Saturday, May 30th]

Clearly, I am not fully relating to your current situation. But it still strikes a chord. For me to make the decision to divorce, things had to get SOOOOOO bad emotionally that I was willing to give up
- half the time with my kids
- half of the wealth I’ve earned
- half of the people I’ve considered family
- significant alimony
- my home

And eventually it did, in fact, get that bad. But it had to get really bad for a long time. And fuck yeah, I had some kind of loose qualitative assessment going on.

What’s wuv got to do with it?