Stubborn lingering bad feelings from infidelity.

LegacyUser

Ok people, I don’t really know where to start. I’m not used to asking advice from strangers, so please go easy on me. Here’s the story –

I met my bloke several years ago, nearly six, and for the first eighteen months or so he treated me like ****e. It was probably closer to two years if I’m honest with myself, and with youse. When I say he treated me like ****e I’m talking purely emotionally. He never never hit me or hurt me in any other way, the man never even raised his voice to me – he just didn’t love me, and his actions made that painfully clear.

He cheated on me four separate times with three separate women during those first two years. He wreaked my head and tore my guts out. He left me in bits emotionally. I was so mad about him that when I finally found out about all this (all in one go, he came clean one night with a few too many on him about two and a half years into the relationship and told me about the whole lot) though I told him to get the fook out of my home and ignored his calls for weeks and weeks, eventually I relented. After a prolonged period with lots of tears and rows, eventually things became much better, we got much closer.

Now, four years on, all his talk is about babies and weddings. I know that these days I am the central point to his world and it’s been like this for several years, but I can’t help wondering where were babies and weddings when he was screwing rings around himself in the earlier years of our relationship? Where were babies and weddings when he was treating me like ****e and it would have meant so much to me to hear him say those things? The truth is, at that time, babies and weddings and love for me were the furthest fookin things from his mind (and it still hurts to acknowledge that)

I just don’t know… Most times we are very very happy, but I have never fully gotten over having been so disrespected and just dragged through the mud. I never cheated on him and it wasn’t for lack of opportunity. Sometimes I wish I had taken some of those blokes up on their offers, not because I had the slightest desire to sleep with them, but because I feel like such a pleb for always having been faithful to him while he was carrying on like a dirtbird behind my back. I guess it’s the typical desire for revenge – I’d like for him to know what it felt like.

I know there’s not much benefit to living in the past, but it is so hard to move beyond these sorts of resentments. I think he took a lot of my innocence away with his actions. I had just kind of assumed that when people get romantically involved to the degree that they spend four or five nights together every week they’re going to be faithful. I don’t think that anymore.

I’d be interested to hear from anyone who’s moved on from infidelity or anyone who’s experienced it and reckons moving on is not possible. I’d be interested in hearing from anyone who’s been through a similar situation regardless what their opinions are.

I just wonder are these feelings ever going to go away? Sometimes I feel like an eejit for thinking this way because I’ve got what I wanted at the start, i.e. a proper relationship with this particular man, but I can’t make the feeling disappear that I’ve paid too high a price for it and the currency was my own self respect.

Can a relationship work in the long term when there’s been a time lag of two years between both parties falling in love??? (because I believe that that seriously was the case here)

Opinions???

Thanks in advance.

LegacyUser

Did you ever ask him?

I mean, did you ever tell him what you are telling us now?
You aren't really in a position to have a good relationship if these feelings are still hanging over you.
You are entitled to feel the way you do if both of you have not addressed the issue.

I mean, why did he treat you so bad at that time?

The only person who is going to give you the answer is him.

As for continuing the relationship to the point of marriage and babies, its really up to you to decide whether he has really changed. And if this sort of situation will ever reoccour.
You need to use your own judgement.

I would put it to you that if you dont talk to him you are never going to find out. And that the relationship hasnt a chance if you dont address these issues with him first and then make your decision on the basis of that and his current behavior.

estar

when i read what you wrote

i ask two things

1. why did you put up with the two and a half years - ok, you didnt know
he had cheated, but you werent happy

2. why dont you sit down and explain how you feel at the moment. say that
this is how his actions have made you feel.

IRISH RAIL

when I found out my ex cheated on me nearly a year ago the trust was gone some people are good at building it back up others arent. Im still hurting from it and altough Im seeing a fantastic new girl now I cant help sometimes wonder if all girls are the same. Now I know there not but I find it very hard to get over it it will always play on my mind so you have to ask yourself can you deal with the past or not cause if you cant then its curtains for a relationship.

How Strange

OP, when I read your post the tone of anger and resentment was palpable.

You say he treated you like sh1t for two years and you put up with it and then when he admitted the extent of his behaviour you kicked him out. Then you took him back.

Something happened in that period while you kicked him out and took him back. He pursued you and you gave him another chancewith a harsh warning. Something in you changed at that moment and therefore the dymanic of the relationship changed.

You are still so full of anger and resentment for the way he treated you or you allowed yourself to be treated four years ago. You have bottled this all up. The more he talks about marriage and babies the more angry you get. You are a ticking time bomb waiting to explode and it will probably be as he says I do infront of 200 of your family and friends.

OP, you need counselling if you are considering carrying on in the relationship. I really can't see how you can turn around to your bf at this stage and want to discuss his behaviour four years ago. You forgave him, you took him back and that implied that you wouldn't drag it up again at a later date to use against him.

I really think your issues are with your own humiliation at allowing yourself to be treated so bad for so long and for allowing yourself to put up with it despite the state you got yourself into. He had the power over you and now when you look back at the person you were then you hate it.

The choice now is yours. Get counselling to work through your anger - really its not all that different from the anger a child might feel towards a parent for how they were treated in the past. You can't turn around to them 20 years later and say x, y and z that you did to me when I was 15 really hurt me. These are your issues not your bf's.

You may decide to tell him that you are attending counselling and say why but you will only be transferring your feelings onto him if you say that you are attending because of how he treated you all those years ago. As I said, to me it seems this anger stems from how you allowed yourself to be treated.

You are stuck in an emotional time warp. You are throwing up all these things that should be dead and buried like was he thinking of babies and marriage when he was screwing other girls FOUR YEARS AGO (in caps for emphasis). Of course he wasn't. But you took him back, accepted his apologies and drew a line in the sand and agreed to start again. So why are you still going back to what happened during those two years?

You have to decide what it is you want - do you want to get married to him or break up with him? Your marriage won't last p*ssing time if you don't get some help and it certainly wouldn't be a healthy environment to bring a baby into.

Good luck, it seems you have a lot of work to do

Mr. Incognito

You took him back. You can't very well go and blame him for it now after saying that you'd forgive him. The time is past. If you can't get over it then end the relationship. Resentment is no foundation for marriage.

LegacyUser

vality wrote: »

Did you ever ask him?

I mean, did you ever tell him what you are telling us now?
You aren't really in a position to have a good relationship if these feelings are still hanging over you.
You are entitled to feel the way you do if both of you have not addressed the issue.

I mean, why did he treat you so bad at that time?

We've never really discussed the issue in depth. As I said, there were lots of tears and rows at the time when I first took him back, but we never really worked anything out properly, unsurprisingly; not much gets worked out through tears and rows. I got sick of fighting and crying and he got sick of listening to me, so we both made a pact of sorts to just not discuss it anymore, and there's no sense of resolution in that.

The thing is, at least 95% of the time these thoughts are the furthest thing from my mind. Four years have passed by since then. For the most part we have a great relationship. When we're not busy with work and whatever, we go EVERYWHERE together and laugh and joke every single day. The peculiar thing is that my relationship is so outwardly successful that some of my female friends actually tell me it's a point of envy for them, and for the most part it is inwardly successful too, but the odd time these thoughts come back into my mind and when they do I find myself really resenting him and feeling very disrespected and unloved.

The biggest point of disrespectful behaviour was this (and it wasn't even the cheating, you might be surprised to hear) It was the fact that after having a drunken snog and a grope on his female 'friends' sofa (he may as well have shagged her btw, same as he did the other two, it certainly makes no odds to me that he didn't go the whole hog) But anyway, after that night I found myself looking for work and he knew that there was a place available at the same workplace as this 'friend' he had spent the night rolling round her sofa with. So what does he do??? He sets me up to work with her. I'm working alongside this woman (sporadically thank God, not every day) but for months - and then he comes out with that lurid little detail!

The drunken snog and a grope I could get over much easier if I didn't know that he disrespected me enough to deliberately set me up to work with her. That is just so humiliating and it's not something I would have EVER done to him. I felt like I didn't even know him after he told me about that, so I gave him the boot and I jacked in my job within minutes. When I think back to that time, it really does stick in the throat to have been treated like that. I didn't really want to get into all the nitty gritty, but maybe this'll give people a clearer idea of why I'm finding this so difficult to let go of.

dudara

When you took him back, you should have discussed everything. It's the only way to start to rebuild trust.

The fact that you are all comfy and happy together now is just masking the facts that there are still trust issues in the relationship for you. It's not too late to talk to him, but he's going to find it hard as he's probably moved on in his head, but you have not.

How Strange

OP, I reitterate what I said originally - these are YOUR feelings of humiliation, disgust, anger.

Unfortunately you backed out of the big talk when you got back together and its too late to go dragging it all back up again. You took him back on the agreed terms and conditions at that time. The fact that you have now changed your mind and have unresolved feelings regarding his behaviour is neither here nor there.

Why did you decide to post this issue on PI? From what I've seen when someone posts something serious here they have been mulling it over for a long time in their own heads and something acts as a catalyst to make them need an external opinion. So what was your reason?

From what I can see you are an emotional time bomb.

You need counselling to work through these emotions.

If you can't work through them then you can't reasonably expect to build a future with this guy.

You are saying he did this, he did that but what I hear is 'I was treated badly, I was messed around, I was humiliated, I was coerced into not talking the whole thing through when we got back together'.

Maybe your anger etc comes from the fact that you've always been the passive one in the relationship; you've always backed down to him.

I don't know, I'm surmising that from your post but I do know that this is your issue not his. Honestly, if I did something awful, repented and was forgiven and then had the whole thing thrown back at me 4 years later because I wasn't actually forgiven I wouldn't be at all happy about it.

One last thing; I noticed that after reading your reply a second time your language is very hostile and defensive. What is strange about it is that you speak like someone who experienced all this quite recently and not like someone who went through this four years ago.

That's why I think you need counselling because even if you break up you will still have these feelings. They aren't going to go away and all that rage and anger directed inwards is not good. It will come out in other ways.

LegacyUser

dudara wrote: »

When you took him back, you should have discussed everything. It's the only way to start to rebuild trust.

The fact that you are all comfy and happy together now is just masking the facts that there are still trust issues in the relationship for you. It's not too late to talk to him, but he's going to find it hard as he's probably moved on in his head, but you have not.

Well, when I took him back I definitely should have discussed everything with him, instead of putting a lid on it, so to speak. That has caused more problems than it has contained, for sure.

As far as trust goes, the thing is, I know for a fact that sort of behaviour would be out of the question for him now, so we do have trust to the degree and extent that we recognise we are in a monogamous relationship and both know that wouldn't happen again, but it's not it's happening again that worries me, it's that it happened at all.

I've considered counselling in the recent past, but then I thought; what's the point in going to counselling for feelings which only occupy my mind the tiniest proportion of the time? It'd be different if they were majorly intrusive and obviously affecting my relationship in a negative way, i.e. leading to rows etc. I would just like them gone entirely out of my mind because they don't feel good and I'd like to move on.

And no, How Strange, I am a long way from "an emotional time bomb", "a ticking time bomb" or any other type of bomb you care to envision. I had thought you were making some interesting points in your first post but kind of tuned out after - "You are a ticking time bomb waiting to explode and it will probably be as he says I do infront of 200 of your family and friends". LOL! All I can say is you should be writing scripts for those cheesy American day time soaps; you certainly have flamboyant enough an imagination!

Could you lock this thread now please dudara? I think I've got as much out of it as I'm going to. Thanks.

How Strange

why people post here and then get offended with responses is beyond me!

maybe I'm off the mark but we only have your own posts to go by.

bury your head and it should be ok for another while but we'll probably hear from you again.

if you needed annonymous feedback on the state of your relationship once then you will be back.

it's a recurring theme here. Post an issue/problem, don't like what I hear, go away, come back again.

you say you considered counselling but disregarded it because its a problem that occupies so little of your mind - I wouldn't have thought that judging by the feelings coming across in your posts.

but sure, Desperate Housewives is back tomorrow night - that should occupy my furtive imagination for a few months.:D