SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Spot on Pogre.

My experience mirrors yours. 💯%.

When I'd had enough, I really had enough and I pulled the trigger hard. That's when everything changed and she stopped her nonsense almost overnight. Once she knew I wasn't going to be waiting in the wings while she fucked around, took her time making up her mind, and toyed with my emotions and sense of security, my reality... things took a drastic change. I took back my pride and agency and took control of the situation. No half measures and no more patient understanding. It became my way or the highway and it snapped her out of that fog so quick it made her head spin.

This right here, same thing for me. She didn't take me serious until I was serious. I was done and headed to the lawyer.

DobleTraicion

If you cannot accept it, you cannot face it. If you cannot face it, you passively refuse to deal with it.

Dnial can look like doing nothing but sometimes it is your mind trying to survive what your heart cannot fully hold yet and relate to the delayed acceptance part because when betrayal is old but the evidence is new as the mind does strange things with time part of you knows it happened years ago and another part is standing in the wreckage today.

the accumulated pain always comes crashing in.

Yes exactly this as the pain does not disappear because it was delayed or because life carried on around it - it waits in the details, the old memories, the things you explained away and the version of life you thought was real. For me acceptance has not meant being okay with it - it has meant stopping the argument with reality and finally saying this happened as it mattered and I do not have to minimise it just because I survived it...

The part that stands out to me: for six weeks you were rebuilding a house you didn't know had already been sold. That timing is its own kind of injury, and it's why "I never got a fair chance to respond" lands so hard - you didn't. That's a real loss, and it's okay to grieve it separately from the marriage question.

One reframe that helped me: right now you're doing 100% of the repair work inside a marriage she may or may not choose. That's not sustainable, and it quietly removes her consequences for staying undecided. Wanting her isn't the same as waiting indefinitely. You can hold the door open AND set a structure: her choosing the marriage has to show up in *her* actions - initiating the hard conversations, offering transparency without being asked, doing the work between therapy sessions. Ambivalence that never converts into effort is an answer, just a slow one.

And keep the order straight: the affair trauma gets addressed before the pre-affair marriage problems. Not because your part doesn't matter - you clearly own it - but if you fix "what made her unhappy" first, the story becomes "the affair happened because of me." That's not the truth, and it's a story that never lets you heal.

Two weeks is nothing. You don't have to decide anything yet - only how much longer you can be the only one investing.

Hi BengalsFan:
Awful the situation that you have. It's so traumatic to have to deal with this. But, it is what it is. Your WW is not all in with your marriage, she has betrayed you, your children, her best friend. With disrespect, cheating, and lies. And for what prize - an AP WH who has betrayed his own with same.
Being the perfect spouse, crying, begging, pleading, therapy, head games, etc., is most likely NOT going to get her toes back to the line. When you realize that there is nothing you can say or do - then what?

Save yourself.

Yes, it hurts. It should. I realized that my WH didn't even care about me. How could he possibly with his choices and behaviors? He left our marriage and never really and fully came back to it while the years went by. It still shocks me. How could he, why would he? Eventhough I tried so hard to hold it altogether. My regret is that I wasted years of my life while he deceived me everyday. It is evil to deceive your own like this.
My advice is to be brave and really look at it. What is it really? If you have nothing to work with here, then move on. You can always go back if things should change. You said that you love her. I loved him, he didn't love me back. I remember thinking that if I still need to love my WH after D, then I can still love him when he is no longer in my life and somewhere else. Ridiculous, but this helped me move forward - without him - after 50 years.
That's right. My marriage didn't survive, but I have. And, actually it is nice that he is somewhere else.

"My regret is that I wasted years of my life while he deceived me everyday. It is evil to deceive your own like this."

Many of us on SI have survived this with partners who were not all in on the marriage.

Every person’s experience is different. But my experience is that I now believe people when they tell me or show me who they are.

In retrospect it was an hard-earned and painful lesson learned. All attempts I made to get wexh to change his cheating ways were futile and dare I say devalued me even further in his eyes. I believe there is something fundamentally different between a faithful spouse and an active unrepentant wayward.

Of course we can and should all learn to be better partners: A partner who brings real (not contrived) issues to their partner’s attention and who works to resolve them for both partners. My situation was extreme, but I do believe that it is not possible to negotiate a win-win with a partner unless they are negotiating in good faith.