It's Been Five Years...

September is here, which makes it five years since  my husband ended his affair…

While things may not always be roses and sunshine, in many ways, they are so much better, even better than they were before his affair. We’ve both worked on ourselves and have grown so much…I guess that’s the lemonade I made when life handed me a huge pile of lemons…

Of course I still think about the affair sometimes, but now it’s as something in the past, sometimes we even joke about it. For example, his ex other woman is kind of , well, a nut bar, and I was teasing him the other day about how he dodged a bullet by not staying with her…

Being able to kid each other about it is a sure sign we’ve really moved on…

Someone once asked me if I forgave him for the affair…I have. Forgiving is not the same as forgetting. I forgave him, but don’t forget and that makes me value what we have so much more. I know how fragile relationships can become, so it’s very important to “tend and water” them carefully.
Some have told me I need to forgive his ex other woman in order to “heal”…that is something I have never really understood at all. Some people feel a need to do so, and that’s fine for them. If it works, don’t knock it. For me, it is irrelevant. I’m not raging at her, I’m not even a little bit angry…the truth is that I don’t care enough to forgive her. She is irrelevant to my life.

It feels really great to say that. She was an other woman who couldn’t handle his rejection, and she lashed out at me and my children. She did so much to try and make us miserable, but through it all, I never gave her the satisfaction of knowing she got to me.

She is a serial other woman, and is likely with another married man now, which is sad. Of course, she has convinced herself that somehow she is better than any man’s wife, but really, all she is is an easy “roll in he hay”…I pity her for that, as no woman should feel the need to reduce herself to that low point in her life. She could do so much better, but she doesn’t want to. Makes me think of a pig in muck…content, maybe because she doesn’t know any better.

Ah well, as long as my husband and I are happy, in the long run, it doesn’t matter 

Looking for Your Input

Up until now,  I've been talking about my life, experiences and opinions, but I'd like to hear from you.

Here's some questions for you:

online poll by Opinion Stage

online poll by Opinion Stage




 

online poll by Opinion Stage

Your answers will be anonymous, but I will share the results.Feel free to include any thing you'd like to share about your answers in the "comments' section for this post.

 

 

Affair Boosters?

During the affair, did your spouse have a small group of friends who thought that everything they were doing was just fine?

Did he or she make new ones, and stop spending time with those people who would not be supportive of their affair relationship?

Mine sure did.

During the time he was cheating, he began to distance himself from his friends and even his family who he knew would not support the affair. It’s understandable. After all, knowing how they felt, how could he look them in the face while he was cheating on his wife?

He made new friends, and one thing that really struck me at the time was that these people really were jerks! I couldn’t understand what he saw in them. They cheated on their wives regularly, and bragged abut it to one another. I think that, in them, he saw two people who he thought would understand him and not look down on him. He felt guilty enough himself without having it rubbed in his face by those he felt were “judging” him.

These two would give him advice on how to keep the affair a secret from me,  how to spend time with her without me being suspicious, and even on how to make me feel guilty for asking questions ( this is called “gas lighting’” which will be the topic of another post)…

The more they encouraged him, the less he saw that what he was doing was wrong.

With friends like that, who needs enemies?