SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

I agree with Bigger. Being dumped, you have no choice but to ‘get on with life’. Being dumped, takes away the decision away from you on whether you stay to try and make it work or to leave.

In the early days after D-Day I pleaded, questioned, yelled at my WH - Why don’t you just leave?! It would make it so much easier for me. Not sure if it’s true but back then it honestly felt like it would’ve been easier.

You gave a lot of food for thought, @hikingout. I know you mean well and are giving your take on here with the utmost honesty. I will consider and go through your points.

[This message edited by WontBeFooledAgai at 9:24 PM, Thursday, February 27th]

WBFA-

I understand. I am not trying to hit you over the head with it but honestly it’s always the ws with the problem. However, having been through it yourself that type of abandonment, rejection, betrayal hits very personally. And it creates deep wounds. But I believe you are a good man with good morals and you did nothing to deserve any of it.

Were there issues in my marriage? Of course, you aren’t married for decades without those things but when I really opened my eyes, it was me who brought in or contributed to all the bigger ones. Do I have gripes about my husband? Very few actually. The biggest issues I have ever had was when I was actively cheating on him. I can assure you that was thousands times worse than anything I could point at about him even on my most delusional day.

[This message edited by hikingout at 9:31 PM, Thursday, February 27th]

In my experience the initial pain is pretty much the same whether being dumped or being cheated on. I believe recovery, as others have said, is easier and quicker after simply being dumped.

So, the difference between comparative painfulness is not something that would be easy to quantify, because its totally dependent upon the situation. Getting dumped or betrayed is situational and deeply personal.

There are tons of overlapping things between both experiences, but each individual situation has a different variable of offensiveness and each sufferer of the situation has an individual threshold of attachment/loss that might not translate to parallel experiences with the same circumstances.

A particularly cruel and sudden abandonment by a partner whom you believed to be your best/only friend and soulmate for most of your life, seemingly out of nowhere with no cheating would take years to recover from.

A spouse secretly looking at other people online for masturbation without contact would devastate some people and not move the needle enough to qualify as an affair to others. Preexisting trauma would definitely be a variable here. Everyone would dislike it, but the degree to which it becomes a show stopping trauma is personal.

I asked myself the same question, would it hurt less to have been dumped by my Ww and not been cheated on?

If you held a gun to my head and asked me to choose which I had to go through, youd probably have to shoot me because I cant choose either.

A particularly cruel and sudden abandonment by a partner whom you believed to be your best/only friend and soulmate for most of your life, seemingly out of nowhere with no cheating would take years to recover from.

It took me 3.5-4 years to call myself 'recovered', so I agree being betrayed or cruelly abandoned by a partner takes a long time to recover from, but for most of us, recovery is gradual.

That means most of us start feeling better, if only gradually. Some of us at least, experienced gradual but accelerating healing. Betrayal is traumatic, but we can heal.

(signed) sisoon, wearing his Pollyanna hat

[This message edited by SI Staff at 4:41 PM, Friday, February 28th]

(signed) sisoon, wearing his Pollyanna hat

At least I am not the only Pollyanna that frequents this forum. I have been called that most of my life

We have posters here who remain in misery irrespective of the path they decided to stumble down on... They are miserable despite being divorced – because they are monitoring their ex and what their lives look like now, or they are miserable because they insist that they are forced to remain in their marriage with little or no effort or will to reconcile.

The longer I have it and the more often I reflect on it, the better I like the quote I have in my tagline.

You start recovery the minute you decide you want to recover and do some work to recover.
In that sense being dumped might be "easier" if you are willing to accept it as final and work from there. But it’s a bit like the old question game kids have: Do you want to be stabbed seven times or shot in the foot seven times? Both suck big-time IMHO.

You start recovery the minute you decide you want to recover and do some work to recover.

I agree absolutely.

Thanks to all.

She stayed, so whatever her reasons were, I can at least hope, or imagine, that I was part of it. If she had left me, I wouldn’t even have that.

Who knows.

Who knows about any of this.

Talking helps, but there aren’t really any answers, are there.

There are a thousand books. If someone had figured this out, there’d just be the one book.

It is very difficult to stop thinking your partner or spouse’s opinion matters as much as it does.

But when you start to shift your thinking from "why am I letting a liar and cheater have that much impact on my self esteem!" to "I am good because…..", then you feel more healed and can grow.

I often challenge myself which was something I did before Dday. Since the affair I have become more financially independent and started two businesses.

I volunteer and have a good group of friends. All told I am blessed. And he’s lucky we were able to reconcile b/c we were a few days away from me filing for D. Not because I wanted to, but I had to.

Hope this helps you. You need to change the inner voice that you listen to.

I'm going to almost entirely sidestep the question as posed.

Cheating and leaving rarely come from the same thought process or decision making premise (I'm not claiming exit affairs don't exist, but they are the edge case rather than the norm). The societal impression, for whatever reason, is that cheating is an alternative to leaving an unsatisfactory relationship.

In most cases, the cheater is picking both. They find a new shiny person that brings them joy. They want to keep their spouse and the new person. They aren't choosing between steak and ice cream. They are picking both. Even if you are a great steak, you aren't ice cream.

There was nothing about you that made her cheat. There were certainly deficiencies. We are all deficient. But that isn't generally what is motivating cheaters, especially if your impression was that the pre-affair relationship was good.

As to why they stay after. Most cheaters do not and never intended to leave. Some "mentally" say they are going to leave to get over their internal conflict over cheating, but that's generally more lying that just muddies the water. Every (non-existent/non-serial) cheater thinks their situation is the unique case where they just happen to love two people and they need to keep AP a secret from their BS so that no one gets hurt.

I have probably already over-explained my premise here.

The answer is that your partner leaving is a clear and straightforward communication to you that they aren't happy and want to leave. That sucks less than being lied to and stabbed in the back by someone you trusted.

[This message edited by This0is0Fine at 3:31 PM, Wednesday, March 5th]

hikingout post #23:

WBFA-

I understand. I am not trying to hit you over the head with it but honestly it’s always the ws with the problem. However, having been through it yourself that type of abandonment, rejection, betrayal hits very personally. And it creates deep wounds. But I believe you are a good man with good morals and you did nothing to deserve any of it.

Thank you, @hikingout. Even though our opinions clash on here sometimes, you are a good wise person with a kind heart, and I for one am glad you post here.

RE what I said: I know I go off on these rants and sometimes they do go off the rails. But, that doesn't mean that there isn't a lot of truth in what I write and even in my rants. I agree with you 100% that someone cheating is due to a lack of integrity, on the person cheating. Sometimes **the motivation as to why** someone cheats however, is because they feel more attraction and connection with the AP (not in your case I am understanding) than they do with their spouse. And oftentimes the WS wants to recover with BS because they realize R is the best 'logical' decision for themselves (the WS that is). And finally, attempts at R often fail but in the process really can entrap the BS in sunken costs, additional D-Days, even in (finding out or sometimes even not!) the affair was still really going on. I really do feel that SI as a forum does not address this enough, even taking my emotions out of this.

[This message edited by WontBeFooledAgai at 6:18 PM, Wednesday, March 5th]

And oftentimes the WS wants to recover with BS because they realize R is the best 'logical' decision for themselves (the WS that is).

1) The BS, too, should be choosing R only because the BS thinks it's a better option for them, when they consider everything they want to consider.

2) Both BS and WS are responsible for their own recovery. The WS is the only person who can recognize and resolve the WS's issues. The same is true for BSes. Staying together can help and/or hinder recovery. It's up to the partners to decide if being together helps enough to continue together or hinders enough to split.

*****

...[A]ttempts at R often fail but in the process really can entrap the BS in sunken costs, additional D-Days, even in (finding out or sometimes even not!) the affair was still really going on. I really do feel that SI as a forum does not address this enough, even taking my emotions out of this.

Again, we're responsible for ourselves, and each of us knows our own sitch better than anyone on the 'net knows it.

What more can SI do to address false R than it already does?

Not so BTW, it can also be said that anger, grief, fear, shame and/or broken self-esteem lead many BSes to jump to D more quickly than they want to jump. (Now THAT really is something that I don't see discussed on SI.) It's not for nothing that it's common for people to say, 'Act in haste. Repent at leisure.'

[This message edited by SI Staff at 8:34 PM, Wednesday, March 5th]

And finally, attempts at R often fail but in the process really can entrap the BS in sunken costs, additional D-Days, even in (finding out or sometimes even not!) the affair was still really going on. I really do feel that SI as a forum does not address this enough, even taking my emotions out of this.

My R failed because of False R there was just no coming back from it. It also helped that my xWS was NPD for me to finally pull the plug. I do not think R should be encouraged in situations like my own. Life for me has been so much better since the D. No more triggers, thinking of the A's, it's like I got a clean slate. Whereas when I was struggling in R the albatross of the affairs were always around my neck. There was no escaping it. I felt like I was going to feel that way for the rest of my life until I D'd I was pleasantly surprised it all went away.