I am back again, and sometimes I wonder how many of these topics and headings there are because it feels like we keep circling the same pain.
A few years ago I became more active on the forum, then life happened and I slowly drifted away again. The problem is that even though time passed, nothing really changed. We still feel stuck and I honestly do not know how to move forward anymore.
I feel like I have done everything the forum usually suggests, but we are still battling with the same core issues.
For example, I acknowledge now that I did not tell my husband everything on D-Day. Years later, after joining this forum and reading more, I realised I was wrong for withholding details. I eventually did a full timeline with as much detail as I could honestly remember.
The fights are not always about the affair details themselves anymore. Now it is more about the fact that I chose not to tell him everything from the beginning.
His view is that if I truly loved him, I would have come to him voluntarily and disclosed everything immediately. My perspective at the time was very different. In my mind, admitting that I had sex with another man already felt like the absolute worst thing imaginable. I genuinely thought withholding some details was better and would spare him more pain. It was not until much later, after reading here, that I understood why full disclosure mattered so much.
So now we are stuck in this place where the argument is not necessarily about the details anymore, but about the fact that I withheld them in the first place.
How do I respond to that in a way that helps instead of making things worse?
The second issue is probably the most difficult and confusing one for us. When I say that I made a mistake, my husband becomes angry and says it was not a mistake because a mistake happens once, while the affair involved repeated choices.
In my mind, when I say "mistake," I mean that the entire affair was the biggest mistake of my life. In his mind, calling it a mistake minimizes the fact that it involved repeated conscious decisions.
I understand now that it was a series of wrong choices, but we seem to get stuck in a battle over the words "mistake" versus "choice."
Has anyone else dealt with this? How do you explain the difference without sounding like you are avoiding accountability?
