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Hello SI, hoping for some guidance

I am WS. At the beginning of my relationship with BS I was unfaithful over the course of a few months with sex workers. I disclosed this 2 years later out of guilt and we separated.

Since then we've been in different countries. BS dated someone else initially, I didn't. After about 12 months we had sporadic attempts at R - by phone and text etc. And eventually met a few times.

This didn't work out fully,as I now understand because BS didn't see enough change. I can see she was right about that.

Anyway, I accepted this and began dating others. After about three months of that, we had a more significant conversation about R.

This is where it gets tough. I laid out some things that I needed from her, which in hindsight and after reading a lot here, seems crazy. But my concerns are around her anger and disrespect [again this seems crazy but I will say these issues predate DDay and are observable in her behavior with others].

We had already done much of the timeline of things back around Dday. She asked me not to pursue others during R. I ceased contact with the one individual I was pursuing at the time.

We had some very good conversations and then some backsliding to old patterns over the next 5 weeks. I became disillusioned that the contempt and disrespect is still strong [again my impatience seems crazy here]. I voiced this to BS but she [rightly] would get angry, which of course I added to my scorecard.

About a week ago I mentally checked out and shamefully restarted conversation with the person I was pursuing prior. I maintained conversation with both until finally ending things with BS a couple of days ago. As of now I have date with this OW upcoming

In this last week I have been an absolute mess. I suddenly see the immense stupidity of how I've behaved, the incredible hurt this would likely cause BS were she to know.

And I am deeply scared. Scared of what R would look like, how long it would take. How it could have been a lot easier without this latest mistake. Whether we would be fighting for something that's unhealthy anyway

I'm also shocked by how I let myself do this again. By how easily my own needs ran over those of BS. And realise i haven't dealt with the underlying issues properly. I wouldn't say we have rugswept but living apart since Dday while maintaining semi-togrther behaviors has probably obscured some of the work needed.

I suppose one of my questions is when do you make a choice that this is too much of a mess? That you're just bad for the person you love. How do you ever balance real concerns about other parts of the relationship while facing the scale of the immense damage you've caused?

It may all be moot as we haven't spoke in a couple of days and she may have gone NC for which I wouldn't blame her

I should say she is an incredible woman whom i love very dearly. I do worry that we are not right or good for each other. Certainly i have been very bad for her

Very lost

Edit: I should add, on re-reading it. I'm still not doing a great job focusing on HER pain here. I'm an idiot

[This message edited by Squeakywheel at 7:23 AM, Thursday, October 1st]

Brother, there is no stop sign so I imagine you want to hear some feedback from betrayed partners.

I am tight with time so I will expand on this later.

But I feel you. Yes you are calling yourself an idiot, and there’s a point in that, but not the point as in "you are" in an absolute sense, rather is "you allowed yourself to become one" through behavior.

And that behavior is usually coming from pain caused by unresolved issues that you ran away instead of confronting, trying to find comfort in escapism and fantasy rather than facing your inner demons and fix what was broken.

How are you standing right now on self love and self acceptance?

That is a very important part if you want, as it seems, to pick up your pieces and become whole again.

You can’t fix your bs trauma, not even help her until you heal yourself.

And look, I see something here, very important:
You started to acknowledge the problem and identify the patterns that brought you here.

That is a start, but is a very big step.

If you resent what you allowed yourself to become and reject it as bad, you have a high chance to kill the cheater version of yourself for good and to become the man you always deserved to be.

Respectful of yourself, confident and self loving, capable of bringing the same values to your partner.

No more pain and abuse, but stability and strength.

You are going to make it if you feel this will inside.

Catch you later for nuance

Thank you Storm for your words. I also read your story about the garden, and landmines, and found this very powerful and helpful.

Looking forward to any other messages you have to share

On self love and acceptance I'm not doing so good right now. I think this is one of the things I realised recently that while I long ago resolved never to do "those things" again, I didn't get to the bottom of why they happened... im thinking low self esteem and inability to love myself is a big part of that

You have a lot of tells.

Hey Pippin, would you clarify what you mean. I guess I'm reading "tells" as I'm not fully owning up to my actions?

I do not know how to answer the question you are posing, but I would like you to consider a few things in changing your perspective:

I think what you need to do is make a commitment to yourself.

If you pursue other women, then you are going to bring the same issues into every relationship you ever have. It will take varying length of time. The issues you have blocks having a true connection with someone because as you aptly pointed out you only concern yourself with how you feel and you make permanent decisions of temporary feelings.

My suggestion is to focus on getting therapy, reading some books and practicing being a man who can create and sustain a real connection. I believe one of our tasks here on earth is to remove the barriers you have to love and be loved fully. This starts with our relationship with ourselves.

What if you thought about not just failing your wife but failing yourself? The thing you are looking for is connection and belonging but you do everything you can to sabotage that.

True change is selfish.

The kind of selfish you are (and that I was) is because you are trying to fill a void in yourself with validation from other people. You must work to learn to be a man who gives validation to himself.

The kind of selfish you need to be for a time is to figure out where your patterns came from (which therapy will do) and work to change those patterns. Committing to a better relationship with yourself will make the external world easier for you to navigate. You won’t want to cheat in relationships because you will understand you are cheating yourself from deep and lasting love. You will learn to value your integrity and begin a pattern of feeling like you do add up and are a quality person.

It’s really hard to get things back on the road until you do the work to your engine. My suggestion is no new people for at least a year. As far as your marriage I think that your goal would be to own up to who you have been, and give your wife any answers or support that you can with no expectations.

You are focused on what should be the outcome of the relationships, you need to be digging into the outcome of who you want to become, what you truly value in life and make a stronger commitment to those values as a way towards loving yourself and honoring your journey.

As one of my favorite ws contributors would say "Proceed with valor". That posters name is evolving soul, and that’s what we all are here. Focus on that.

I would say that true change is self centered, more than selfish.

Selfish I understand as taking as much you can in an exploitative manner.

Self centered is instead focused. You are doing for you and for you only. But you aren’t taking, exploiting, you are "finding".

Finding the center tha make yourself stable, because it finds your inner self, not the ego facade (who exploits, takes, selfish, but not self centered).

Truth is, any person is already ideal for you care unique and can’t be anything better than your true self.

Pretending to be something else never works, because you are you, and you will in time fail spectacularly at pretending, even when it seems someone’s buying the performance.

That’s when you learn to love yourself, and when you have that, you don’t give two fracks about outside validation, for you are already full, no longer empty.

And that’s stable, lovable by you, and by who can "see" you.

That’s what a safe person is

[This message edited by BackfromtheStorm at 5:24 PM, Thursday, October 1st]