SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

It has happened a number of times over the years. I was his first, even though I had a number of men before him. It particularly broke my heart because we had a unique love affair, travelling across the world to be with each other.

He always breaks down and admits it, eventually or immediately saying he's sorry. It has been like this on again off again for the past 10 years, even though we are not divorced nor do we sleep together, and our 3 kids live with me, and at the moment he sleeps in a different part of the house.

While it greatly saddens me, especially when he's said he won't do it again and does it eventually anyway (of course I don't believe him anymore), the thought of it, either past or rather recent infidelities, somehow erotically excites me.

In part I am sure that it is a kind of defense mechanism. It already happened, so my mind, etc., better just make the best of it. I assure you that I never wanted it to happen.

He has given me quite a bit of details about the sex he's had with these girls, partly because he volunteered the information, and partly because I asked, and that certainly helps to fuel my erotic excitement/curiosity about the sex he's had with them/

Sometimes I cry over the situation, sometimes it makes me horny, sometimes both at the same time. I'm not sure how many other men or women have felt this way, but I'm curious as to how many have. I'm also not sure how much detail I can share on this forum, but I'd really like to know how many other people have felt this way, especially the women. Thank you

Sometimes I simply can't get the picture of him making love to these women, even from years ago, out of my head. I know what all of them looked like. To think of him getting an erection over their nakedness, especially when I was his first, is so strangely erotic to me. He's told me the positions they made love in, what they looked like naked compared to me, that I was the only woman that could make him orgasm orally except for one, who he emphasized made him cum twice.

The pleasure they would give each other, the sounds they made, the fact it even happened at all, at the same time makes me extremely sad and very horny. It is a dilemma I guess I will just have to live with, but I still wonder if anyone else has ever felt that way.

It’s actually not that uncommon. We have he men here who have said this, but it’s been. While since I have seen anything on it. I know a woman who is semi close to me that also had this reaction to her husbands infidelity. I do not think you are alone.

And let’s face it, even though it’s not the same as infidelity as far as betrayal there are lots of people in the world who are living alternative lifestyles such as swinging for precisely that reason.

I personally think it’s just an extension of a phenomenon called hysterical bonding.

My concern is more that you have been betrayed so much and disrespected that it’s probably also battered you in deep ways. If you want to have an open marriage then it should be open for you too. However, those sorts of things require a lot of trust and I can imagine that may be irretrievably broken.

So, my question is do you think you want this marriage? And if so, he is going to have to be willing to do some serious work on himself. Have you thought about setting some requirements to move forward in the marriage?

Well, I know that some people have open marriages, etc., but I'm not even slightly interested in any of that. I'm also not interested in anyone other than him. I've just been through too much/too many relationships in my life to even contemplate being with anybody else. So, it's either him or nobody, and if it's nobody, that's fine. I will always love that person who I fell in love with 20 years ago and cherish memories of him and the time we spent together. Right now, he's not very loveable, but I threw my lot in with him, partly by moving across the world, and I certainly couldn't love anyone else. And even if I had hooked up with someone else, I would have probably screwed my life up even more and had much less time to spend with my own kids, who are all now teenagers, which is a little hard for me to wrap my head around, as time has gone by so quickly.

Yes, it has battered me deeply, that's true. My self esteem, confidence. For sure.

Do I want this marriage? If things could ever get back to normal, yes. Can they? It's up to him. I've gone way out of my way to do more than my part. In the summer he had ended a long running affair that he had with a girl and we were talking about what we might do with the rest of our and the kids' lives is the I, even going back to my home country, which is the US. We haven't been intimate in ages, but he was going out of his way to be cooperative and kind to me, then I recently discovered that he had started screwing around with not one, but two girls, one of whom is probably half his age. So, here we go again, and he's not even here half of the nights during a week.

Divorce where we live now is a very lengthy and expensive process, and he has a 100% chance of losing everything since he's cheated on me. We both figured that our money and time would be better spent on other things. He's always contributed to the support of the kids financially, although he hasn't been involved with them much personally, and hasn't helped me much financially, which I actually need pretty badly.

I'm glad to know that I'm not the only person that's reacted to infidelity by being sexually excited by it. I'd actually love to talk to others that have had this same reaction. I have this enormous curiosity about what goes on in the bedroom with him and other women, even to the point of wishing I could be a fly on the wall or have a hidden camera to be able to see and hear every detail. The details are what excite me most. To be able to watch him undress and get hard over his mistress, oh goodness....I know what an extremely skilled lover he is. He's the only man that could ever make me vaginally orgasm or make me climax with his tongue, and to think about him doing that to other women excites me terribly. And if I could see and hear it.....OMG...

UTB,

I understand what you are saying. But take a moment to consider a few things.

Our bodies can often get signals confused. An extremely fearful or hurtful experience....the nervous system can mimick as excitement.

I have heard of women who have been r*ped having a climax...and they did not want that experience to happen.

The main consideration I have for you is....what do you believe? Do you think it is right to obtain pleasure from an act of covenant breaking and betrayal? Will it bring you peace and fulfillment? Or a never ending vacuum that only causes you to want more and more?

I would encourage you to ask God to guide your beliefs and desires.

Excuse me, Mr/Mrs/Ms/Miss WoodThrush2,

The first part of your post is on base, the second is completely off base.

Did I ever even imply that I thought that having these feelings/thoughts was right, or that it would bring me peace and fulfillment? I thought I made it pretty clear that they bothered me. They pop into my head involuntarily. I don't want to have them. If you had read all of my post you'd have got that. I was trying to express the anguish this has put me through and hopefully meet someone on here that had gone through the same thing and receive some empathy and understanding. Instead, I got someone trying to evangelize me and tell me that the thoughts I have are bad/wrong. As usual, I should have kept my mouth shut and minded my own business. But since I didn't have the brains to...

Let me clarify something to you, Mr/Mrs Protestant evangelist:

The 6th commandment of God says: "Thou shalt not commit adultery". Oh golly gee, I knew that already! And guess what? I didn't break that commandment, he did! Not only that, I've never broken it, always kept my promises and never cheated on anybody!

Not only that, the only thing I EVER wanted was to have a good, Christian family where we all loved and served God and each other, loved and forgave each other and had the humility to admit our faults. I wanted that way above money, material things, anything. I've prayed for a miracle for his conversion and to have a good, united family more than anything else. I set a good example for my kids by staying home with them instead of running around to get my rocks off like my husband and most of the parents of my kids' friends are doing. And I'm very lonely. I could use some everyday spousal companionship. I pray regularly with them, teach them about the Bible readings of the Sunday and what they mean, and they've always seen me PRACTICE WHAT I PREACH!!! If it wasn't for me they would have grown up to be godless heathens!

How did you know that I wasn't already asking God for guidance? You're a typical Protestant evangelist that assumes a lot of things about people they don't even know and then assume that their problems are always happening because they're not "saved". That's the reason that people don't want to join your stupid megachurches, be rashly judged about situations they know nothing about and give the pastors money so they can get rich. So put that in your pipe and smoke it!

You have suffered a sexual and emotional abuse which causes similar trauma as other sexual and emotional abuse.

The ambiguity of it all makes it difficult to process as your abuser sits right next to you most likely, as in your case you didn’t leave, and there’s no protection you can apply to unlike other abuses so you are abandoned to your own devices.

The scars this family of abuse leave are similar, yours is tricky for the victim for you are like in in other sexual abuses, completely dehumanized reduced as a tool for his validation high, so he can feel powerful. At the same time the threat is not coming from the outside world, where one usually can expect threats to come from, but from your inner world, the closest person to your true self in your life.

So you have nowhere to hide, no safe place to heal from your wounds, because your safest place is the place of your abuse.

Mind that it’s also deeply humiliating and likely destroying your own self worth until you can process that’s not you the cause of the abuse, it’s him and he is the villain.

When humans get hit so hard by traumatic experiences we can respond in different ways.

The healthy ones are usually about protecting yourself from the abuser, either leaving or confronting and setting boundaries. But our nervous system shatters with this kind of intimate abuse, so it can also respond in weird unhealthy ways.

Sometimes people become abusers themselves (cheaters) and sometimes they have sort of Stockholm syndrome like reactions like yours, becoming submissive and craving the abuser, which will inflict more abuse since he’s broken in self worth and craves validation. This is probably the worst case scenario for the victim.

That is dysfunctional and toxic you probably figured it out already, but is not that’s something is wrong with you, it’s that something was broken in you by your abuser, and your survival instinct short circuited trying to re establish your safety by submitting your sexual and emotional abuser.

Which right now, is a piece of shit, mind you. I don’t excuse this wimp in the slightest, he deserves the five folded fingers timestamp right in his teeth to try the thrill taste of swallowing 32 shards of enamel layered dentine.

He chose to become an asshole at your own cost, because he is broken and this was easier to soothe his own low self worth and insecurities than facing his unresolved issues.

You pay the price.

It’s the attachment wound that causes you to lose yourself, and this reaction is sad but not unheard of.
The positive news is that you can heal from it, reclaim your agency, your self respect. And magically you will see him losing this manipulative magnetism that oppresses you right now, and very likely you will see him as a worm, repulsive rolling in the mud and dirt with his siblings.

Nothing exciting, more,likely you would either feel pity or you would feel disgust. Likely both.

Question is sister, what do you want in your life? Do you really want to live in infidelity or you want to reclaim your broken attachment? Your peace and center?

You have suffered one of the worst abuse a human being can experience in life, it temporarily change you because you are broken, but you can reclaim yourself once more and demand the respect you deserve.

Don’t let the pain stay unheard repressed inside, I feel like that’s eating you, there is no shame even if it feels like, the shame is all on him.

You need to not feel alone and have your emotions be heard.
You have been heard, and you are not alone.

I appreciate your input. However, I do not crave him nor am I submissive. I love him, or more accurately I love the person he was when we met and got married. At that time he had a lot of good character and moral traits that he doesn't have much of anymore. I always hope and pray that he will come to his senses. I have always stood up for myself and for what is right and have never put myself in a position of being any more vulnerable than I have to be, except that I've continued to live with my kids and refuse to just get up and run off with somebody else because I'm lonely and leave the kids here with no parental guidance, as many of my kids' friends have been left with.

I am not a masochist. I haven't had sex with him in 4 1/2 years and don't have any desire to get in bed with him until he stops this kind of behavior for a long time. I thought in the last few months that had happened, only to be let down again.

I love him, but that doesn't mean that I have put myself in any position to be vulnerable any more than is absolutely necessary. My vulnerability is on the inside of me because I choose (or can't avoid) loving someone that I gave up literally everything to come across the world to have a family with. We have 20 years of memories of what was for a long time a beautiful and unique love story, and whenever I think of him I also think of that, not just his infidelities or mistreatment, which hurts me immensely.

Jesus taught us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. I do that. I can sleep at night without hate and animosity in my heart, which doesn't mean that I'm not totally disappointed in him and his behavior and morals, or that I'm going to throw myself at him the first time I see him. I've never done that. When he came back a few months ago, he said that we could start watching movies, take walks together. That sounded great to me. I'd love to just take a walk, hold hands and talk about our memories of the last 20 years, or watch a particular historical movie together, as we used to translate the scripts for those kinds of movies, as recently as 6 years ago. Getting in bed with him is the last thing on my mind at this point.

And you ask me what I want in life. If you had read my last post you would know already. I feel like instead of being really listened to and responded to about my specific situation, I'm bombarded with a lot of psychological theories and hypothetical situations, most of which don't even have anything directly to do with me. Maybe I'm too simple for this complicated world, but that's the way I am. And maybe I'm completely wasting my time on here, which I probably am. It wouldn't be the first time.

I understood and you missed the point of that explanation.

I ask you nothing, those are questions you need to ask yourself truly and with naked honest.

For you, not for me, not for him, or anyone else in the entire existence.

You are misplacing empathy for nagging, that’s a reactive response and is at a deeper level than your conscious rationalization of it all.

As the fawning response that twists you is outside of your control.
Explaining that is not a theory, is the fruit of direct experience with this kind of abuse from people who lived in similar cognitive dissonance as you are experiencing today.

The way you reacted feels like you didn’t read it with will to understand, your reaction above is adversarial.

So what exactly are you looking for?
Do you want to find yourself again and retrieve your peace or you want to be where you are now?

It almost appears you might be limerent of the simulacrum of your partner and looking for External validation from your last response.

If that’s the case you can’t be helped, because you don’t want to be helped.

And mind you, the extent of the help you can receive is feedback from people who have been in the same dark places you find yourself right now. Got out of those paying a high price for a crime they never committed.

The learned experience to show you empathy from a place of "been there, I know how it feel" is a valuable tool you can use to heal your wounds, but only if you like to.

This angry response above means you just shit on it.
I don’t like it, but it is your choice to see who is genuinely offering you a hand, and if you decide to spit on it, your call.

It’s as well my choice to choose who deserves my attention.
So it’s fine.

You never offered me any "help" and I didn't ask for any. I was looking for people who had the same experiences that I could relate to. So far those people are nowhere to be seen. You don't seem to be able to talk to real people about their real circumstances, only referring to them indirectly with some overly intellectual psychobabble. Before that somebody tried to convert me to Christianity. I wrote a long post about that, also completely ignored. I should have been smart enough to know that I was wasting my time coming on here. I'm sure smart enough now. I'm sorry I ever came here in the first place. The only person that gave me any kind of rational answer was hikingout, which I appreciate. I'm sorry I bothered to come on here in the first place. I should have been smart enough to know it would be a big waste of time. I've learned my lesson. Good bye and good riddance.

@ utb nobody is judging you or trying to shame you. I agree that what you’re experiencing might be a form of coping mechanism. Please see a trauma therapist , and understand that people giving you advice and perspectives doesn’t mean that they’re calling you out or that you need to follow it. However , consider your own healing. I think you may have been accepting this reality for so long that it’s hard to consider a life outside of it. You want somebody to tell you that it’s ok and normal. It is a justified reaction to what you’ve been through. You are heard. However, you are not going to live your most healthy and happy life continuing in this situation the exactly same way, and that’s just the reality. Sometimes it hurts to hear.
I hope you find healing.

Very, very interesting string of responses. Would love to dialogue more but seems you have left the building.

My comment really was only intended to encourage you to focus more on what your core beliefs are...as opposed to what you feel or whatever stray thought enters your mind.

That said, I do take issue with your assertion to me.....

I thought I made it pretty clear that they bothered me. They pop into my head involuntarily. I don't want to have them

On the contrary...if you could just reread the last paragraph of your original post, it seems you rather are chewing on these thoughts and entertaining a longing for more ....

The details are what excite me most. To be able to watch him undress and get hard over his mistress, oh goodness....I know what an extremely skilled lover he is. He's the only man that could ever make me vaginally orgasm or make me climax with his tongue, and to think about him doing that to other women excites me terribly. And if I could see and hear it.....OMG...

Anyway, I wish you well.

[This message edited by WoodThrush2 at 1:06 PM, Tuesday, October 6th]

I'm sorry I bothered to come on here in the first place. I should have been smart enough to know it would be a big waste of time. I've learned my lesson. Good bye and good riddance.

I absolutely agree.

You are looking for fetish validation, this place is a place for healing.

Your fetish might be trauma induced, but you seem to choose to indulge in it.
Also a choice, but this place is useless for you.

Better luck on porn sites.