Hope12345, I'm really sorry you are having to deal with all of this; in my mind there are not too many more difficult things to overcome in a relationship than an infidelity. In my case, my Husband had just one affair since we've been married, but that one was a true love affair (he'd felt, after meeting her right before our 11th Anniversary, that he'd finally found his "soul mate" and that his marriage to me was a mistake) that lasted for 2.5 years. He gave her up after I kicked him out of the house, and he moved in with her and stayed there for about 3 months.
We never got legally separated, we had 2 little kids at the time and deep down when I kicked him out I really did want to reconcile eventually but let him think that I was ready to move on and have our marriage over. What helped me deal with our issues and the affair itself was the book
Codependent No More by Melody Beattie. It is probably what saved our marriage--that and the feelings that I had that once he could see his indiscretion rationally then he would realize the mistake he made and come back to our marriage.
That
is exactly what happened, and I needed to weigh my own pros and cons: Did I love him enough to take him back? Did I want to have a life with him that kept our family together? Could my feelings of being betrayed be overcome by my love for my Husband and my desire to have a good marriage, not just one where I would hold a grudge against him to use to browbeat him into always being the "best" he could be forevermore? Did my desire to move on to happiness and a freely loving relationship with him overcome my pain and need to feel continually aggrieved against him? Did my desire for a calm, peaceful and fun marriage outweigh my need to feel like the superior partner, fidelity-wise, on a continual basis?
The answers to those questions eventually became an unqualified "Yes!" (after a few years of muddling through the morass of my own hurt feelings and desire to be "right" and morally superior to my Husband), and eventually I moved past the initial begrudging forgiving stage to a wholeheartedly loving and peaceful forgiving place in my own heart and head. I started with the book I mentioned above, to learn about my own co-dependence on my Husband, and my own contributions to the circumstances that led to the affair.
I started with an open mind and open heart, to try to understand where his head and heart were at when all of that was going on. And then I worked on my own heart and head to get to the place of a type of non-grudging forgiveness that freed my love for him again, and gave him the space to move past his own guilt and shame, so that he could love me unfettered again. I found that as long as I held his affair against him, as a club to use when I wasn't happy with him going forward, his sadness and inability to overcome his own remorse affected the quality of our relationship. I didn't want to be that sour person who couldn't allow him to flourish with the ability to move past his indiscretions to get to a place of feeling proud of himself and his love for me again.
Today we have been married for 40 years (as of just a few months ago), my Husband loves to think of that accomplishment as a positive, wonderful thing in his life, and I like to think that we've made our way out of the morass that had threatened to consume both of us. We are better together, as a couple, than we would ever be, apart... .And I appreciate the value of that enough to move past the negative feelings I could have harbored and nurtured to my own soul's detriment... .
I would like to give you hope, Hope12345. It takes a lot of work on your own part as the "forgiver", besides the work your wife has to do. It really does take two to make this work, but it
can be done