To my husband,
I am not sure what I hope to accomplish by writing this letter to you…perhaps just trying to put my feelings on paper in such a way that you may understand me a little better…please bear with me…
I understand that you intensely dislike discussing the past. But I truly do appreciate and learn more about you when you allow me into your private world when you are willing to talk. That kind of sharing is what I truly believe a good marriage has. I understand that it brings you pain and revisits emotions that you would rather not feel , that you feel it is detrimental to our relationship and that it possibly ends up hurting me unnecessarily. I feel you believe it to be a weakness or character flaw in me that I still need to seek answers. Unfortunately, I do recognize a period of negativity after we discuss the past…I may get my answers by nagging but often you withdraw in anger and/or resentment. Not a good dynamic for our mutual healing. I am sorry for that.
Please try to understand that I do NOT ask questions to hurt you, wreak vengeance, punish you or to wallow in self-pity. I ask them in order to understand you, your feelings, what motivated you, to understand my role in the whole situation. You knew the WHOLE story of our marriage which included your unfulfilled needs, the other women and how they affected your feelings towards me during and even between the affairs, but for so long I did not…I was clueless, preferring to live in denial even though I should have responded more aggressively to the obvious red flags I recognized. (it's so hard for me to get over how complacent I was and forgive myself for that.) Over the last 2 years, you have expressed at various times that our relationship had deteriorated to the point where it was more conflict than not, there was no more fun and spontaneity, sex was practically non-existent; you felt encumbered, something elusive was missing, and you were convinced that I flat out did not love you. I am still rather confused as to whether this refers to the time before your first or second affair, or both. I assume both. But I fully understand how you could have felt this way considering how we interacted at the time.
I feel so much of my poor behavior towards you was due to not knowing the real reasons for your withdrawal from me , not understanding how you felt and what you needed from me. During the affairs I reacted to your coldness and absence in our lives in ways that I am not proud of and am sorry for but that I think can be understood (though not condoned)when considering the reality of what I faced. As for the time that led up to the first affair, all I can say is that I felt neglected, used, taken for granted, criticized and overwhelmed by child care. I had learned, to my dismay, that over the course of our marriage up to that time, that you hid many things from me, that you either grew to distrust me or had always been unwilling to share your innermost feelings with me…I didn't think it was so at the very beginning of our relationship. In any event, because I rarely heard praise or affirmations of love from you or was allowed to share in your feelings I grew to feel unloved to the point that I took out my frustrations and disappointments on you. To try to determine who started the downward spiral in our relationship is a fruitless task…we both contributed equally in my mind.
So, the other day, when you more fully explained exactly how our friendship with the OW morphed into an affair, I gained great insight into what motivated you. It's a missing piece of the puzzle that helps complete the picture of our marriage and helps me to better understand who you were…it's a tearing down the walls of secrecy you had built around yourself and your other relationships that had excluded me…and I see that as a good and necessary thing for both of us. I regret that after discovery (including the first affair), you felt the need to hide so much from me for whatever reason and were unwilling to cooperate in what I now know was necessary for us BOTH to heal by not revealing the whole truth, by not reading the professional advice I encouraged you to read for your own understanding or continue with counseling.
They say that there are three issues most people trying to heal from this situation find hardest. The knowledge of the sex shared outside of marriage, the knowledge that their partner formed an emotional bond (love) with the other person and the deceit necessary to accomplish both. Obviously, all have been hard for me to move beyond on my own.
While I desperately wanted to be allowed into your heart, you have expressed that it was easier for you to confide in another (my reactions often being negative): to share a level of emotional intimacy that I was excluded from. She knows all my faults or thinks she does and her opinion will never be corrected. I believe you grew to love her in place of me. I do not believe you loved two women at the same time, but that you replaced me in your heart with her for the time of the affair. I believe this because of how I remember being treated, the length of the relationship, the amount of time it took you to disengage fully from her and because you have been unwilling to talk about it. I realize for some reason it is difficult for you to express your love and feelings for me verbally which unfortunately is the only way I understand them. But it seems to me that you were able to express the same feelings to the other women quite freely. I know I have to accept this and move on with the hope that your love and its expression could fully return for me. It has been incredibly hard for me to do this as it opens me again to hurt, leaves me vulnerable when all my instincts scream to protect myself and requires trusting that you will not hurt me again. Thus the conflicts we have experienced since…
As to the sexual healing? I look back at the arch of my sexual growth and realize that I was fairly inexperienced for the most part, immature sexually, meaning pretty traditional and modest in how I expressed my sexuality when I first came to you, had unresolved guilt, and probably carried some deep-seated body image issues that probably affected it all. But I had always held as a treasured memory those sexual awakenings I experienced with you when we first fell in love. Ironically, I held then and still do, certain personal sexual fantasies that have never been realized for me but that you experienced with another woman…that hurts. My sexual expression was no doubt stunted during the bad years of conflict and that you were keenly disappointed in me sexually, feeling I was a prude and frigid. I then totally buried most of it during the affair years as I felt you were repulsed by me and the rejection was just too painful to me to attempt an effort. However, I feel I have had a remarkable reawakening since the beginning of our sexual and emotional reconciliation. I have experienced the best sex we have ever had since then but realize that you may have experienced your peak sexual experiences with someone else and it breaks my heart that I may never overcome that in your heart. Until you begin to tell me differently, I will always feel I was deficient in some way and that another woman holds that special place in your heart and memory. This too, I have to accept and move beyond.
I am sorry if this letter makes you feel pain, resentful, or angry…it is not meant to. But I need to express myself and stand up for myself and I feel the only way I can do that is by perfect honesty. This is not an attempt to cause unhappiness but to communicate my most vulnerable feelings to you …feelings I don't think you understand right now and that I need to express to move on. If I have misunderstood your feelings or memories as expressed in this letter, I need you to correct my assumptions, come what may. I realize you may feel that certain feelings and experiences are your private business, but hope you understand from my point of view, that when they impact my self-identity, our relationship and the meaning of its history, they are my business too.
Every day, I pray for strength and courage to personally overcome this in order to allow our past to become just another chapter in our lives, without the pain that accompanies it now for both of us. I hope you can understand that it has been the hardest challenge I have ever had to face: to take responsibility for the past I had control over, accept the past I was given no choice in creating and also understand the pain you felt and obviously still do. I truly appreciate the efforts you have made to reconcile up to this point and despite everything else, I am grateful you are a part of my life. To first forgive ourselves, and then each other and for me, even the other women in our story, is absolutely necessary for a release of the pain and blame and doubt. I know we have to succeed in full forgiveness in order to become better people and enjoy peace and contentment once again in our lives. I only ask that you help me achieve this by your patience, honesty and willingness to examine your own feelings fully and express them to me.
I pledge and commit to you to continually seek a level of honesty, love and emotional bonding to you, my chosen one, for better or worse, that we never really had before… even in our best years.
I am not sure what I hope to accomplish by writing this letter to you…perhaps just trying to put my feelings on paper in such a way that you may understand me a little better…please bear with me…
I understand that you intensely dislike discussing the past. But I truly do appreciate and learn more about you when you allow me into your private world when you are willing to talk. That kind of sharing is what I truly believe a good marriage has. I understand that it brings you pain and revisits emotions that you would rather not feel , that you feel it is detrimental to our relationship and that it possibly ends up hurting me unnecessarily. I feel you believe it to be a weakness or character flaw in me that I still need to seek answers. Unfortunately, I do recognize a period of negativity after we discuss the past…I may get my answers by nagging but often you withdraw in anger and/or resentment. Not a good dynamic for our mutual healing. I am sorry for that.
Please try to understand that I do NOT ask questions to hurt you, wreak vengeance, punish you or to wallow in self-pity. I ask them in order to understand you, your feelings, what motivated you, to understand my role in the whole situation. You knew the WHOLE story of our marriage which included your unfulfilled needs, the other women and how they affected your feelings towards me during and even between the affairs, but for so long I did not…I was clueless, preferring to live in denial even though I should have responded more aggressively to the obvious red flags I recognized. (it's so hard for me to get over how complacent I was and forgive myself for that.) Over the last 2 years, you have expressed at various times that our relationship had deteriorated to the point where it was more conflict than not, there was no more fun and spontaneity, sex was practically non-existent; you felt encumbered, something elusive was missing, and you were convinced that I flat out did not love you. I am still rather confused as to whether this refers to the time before your first or second affair, or both. I assume both. But I fully understand how you could have felt this way considering how we interacted at the time.
I feel so much of my poor behavior towards you was due to not knowing the real reasons for your withdrawal from me , not understanding how you felt and what you needed from me. During the affairs I reacted to your coldness and absence in our lives in ways that I am not proud of and am sorry for but that I think can be understood (though not condoned)when considering the reality of what I faced. As for the time that led up to the first affair, all I can say is that I felt neglected, used, taken for granted, criticized and overwhelmed by child care. I had learned, to my dismay, that over the course of our marriage up to that time, that you hid many things from me, that you either grew to distrust me or had always been unwilling to share your innermost feelings with me…I didn't think it was so at the very beginning of our relationship. In any event, because I rarely heard praise or affirmations of love from you or was allowed to share in your feelings I grew to feel unloved to the point that I took out my frustrations and disappointments on you. To try to determine who started the downward spiral in our relationship is a fruitless task…we both contributed equally in my mind.
So, the other day, when you more fully explained exactly how our friendship with the OW morphed into an affair, I gained great insight into what motivated you. It's a missing piece of the puzzle that helps complete the picture of our marriage and helps me to better understand who you were…it's a tearing down the walls of secrecy you had built around yourself and your other relationships that had excluded me…and I see that as a good and necessary thing for both of us. I regret that after discovery (including the first affair), you felt the need to hide so much from me for whatever reason and were unwilling to cooperate in what I now know was necessary for us BOTH to heal by not revealing the whole truth, by not reading the professional advice I encouraged you to read for your own understanding or continue with counseling.
They say that there are three issues most people trying to heal from this situation find hardest. The knowledge of the sex shared outside of marriage, the knowledge that their partner formed an emotional bond (love) with the other person and the deceit necessary to accomplish both. Obviously, all have been hard for me to move beyond on my own.
While I desperately wanted to be allowed into your heart, you have expressed that it was easier for you to confide in another (my reactions often being negative): to share a level of emotional intimacy that I was excluded from. She knows all my faults or thinks she does and her opinion will never be corrected. I believe you grew to love her in place of me. I do not believe you loved two women at the same time, but that you replaced me in your heart with her for the time of the affair. I believe this because of how I remember being treated, the length of the relationship, the amount of time it took you to disengage fully from her and because you have been unwilling to talk about it. I realize for some reason it is difficult for you to express your love and feelings for me verbally which unfortunately is the only way I understand them. But it seems to me that you were able to express the same feelings to the other women quite freely. I know I have to accept this and move on with the hope that your love and its expression could fully return for me. It has been incredibly hard for me to do this as it opens me again to hurt, leaves me vulnerable when all my instincts scream to protect myself and requires trusting that you will not hurt me again. Thus the conflicts we have experienced since…
As to the sexual healing? I look back at the arch of my sexual growth and realize that I was fairly inexperienced for the most part, immature sexually, meaning pretty traditional and modest in how I expressed my sexuality when I first came to you, had unresolved guilt, and probably carried some deep-seated body image issues that probably affected it all. But I had always held as a treasured memory those sexual awakenings I experienced with you when we first fell in love. Ironically, I held then and still do, certain personal sexual fantasies that have never been realized for me but that you experienced with another woman…that hurts. My sexual expression was no doubt stunted during the bad years of conflict and that you were keenly disappointed in me sexually, feeling I was a prude and frigid. I then totally buried most of it during the affair years as I felt you were repulsed by me and the rejection was just too painful to me to attempt an effort. However, I feel I have had a remarkable reawakening since the beginning of our sexual and emotional reconciliation. I have experienced the best sex we have ever had since then but realize that you may have experienced your peak sexual experiences with someone else and it breaks my heart that I may never overcome that in your heart. Until you begin to tell me differently, I will always feel I was deficient in some way and that another woman holds that special place in your heart and memory. This too, I have to accept and move beyond.
I am sorry if this letter makes you feel pain, resentful, or angry…it is not meant to. But I need to express myself and stand up for myself and I feel the only way I can do that is by perfect honesty. This is not an attempt to cause unhappiness but to communicate my most vulnerable feelings to you …feelings I don't think you understand right now and that I need to express to move on. If I have misunderstood your feelings or memories as expressed in this letter, I need you to correct my assumptions, come what may. I realize you may feel that certain feelings and experiences are your private business, but hope you understand from my point of view, that when they impact my self-identity, our relationship and the meaning of its history, they are my business too.
Every day, I pray for strength and courage to personally overcome this in order to allow our past to become just another chapter in our lives, without the pain that accompanies it now for both of us. I hope you can understand that it has been the hardest challenge I have ever had to face: to take responsibility for the past I had control over, accept the past I was given no choice in creating and also understand the pain you felt and obviously still do. I truly appreciate the efforts you have made to reconcile up to this point and despite everything else, I am grateful you are a part of my life. To first forgive ourselves, and then each other and for me, even the other women in our story, is absolutely necessary for a release of the pain and blame and doubt. I know we have to succeed in full forgiveness in order to become better people and enjoy peace and contentment once again in our lives. I only ask that you help me achieve this by your patience, honesty and willingness to examine your own feelings fully and express them to me.
I pledge and commit to you to continually seek a level of honesty, love and emotional bonding to you, my chosen one, for better or worse, that we never really had before… even in our best years.
Put the internet to work for you.
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