Recovering from a partner’s affair is one of the hardest things a person can do, and many opt not to. She had been doing the work, genuinely making progress, and starting to feel like solid ground was finally under her feet again. Then she discovered her husband’s emails.
This woman’s husband was in the middle of an affair a year ago, and once she found out, she would badger him with questions about it, and it became a pattern for her.
Retroactive jealousy is something she’s encountered in the past, and the affair exacerbated her attachment and abandonment issues.
She and her husband went to couples counseling, and she got a personal therapist as well. Both professionals reassured her that her husband was suffering from an affair fog, which happens when a cheater gets irrationally excited about the new person they’re seeing and doesn’t realize the damage they’re doing to their spouse. Hearing this truly helped her heal.
“I’d express to him what I had learnt and expressed to him how he must’ve been in [an] affair fog when he was cheating on me – he’d agree, and we moved on with that understanding,” she explained.
“I don’t think he really wished to explore the ‘affair fog’ because I knew it was sensitive for me to presume how he felt, when he really values his autonomy. Overall, we’ve made good progress, and he went [no contact] with the other woman.”
“Yesterday, though, I was clearing out the desk and found his laptop. I had an impulse to check it. Inside his email draft, I found several emails written to me but never sent.”
She believes the unsent emails were a way for her husband to deal with his emotions, and she couldn’t help but read what he put in there.
She was curious to uncover his raw, unfiltered feelings, but what she saw ended up breaking her. The emails came across like things her husband wished he could say to her, but was unable to.
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The latest email her husband penned to her was from literally a week ago, so he is very much still in love with his affair partner, according to that.
Here’s more or less what it said:
…Stop calling it “affair fog.” We aren’t gonna heal until you actually admit that I’m capable of emotional depth and that I really loved her. I know it was wrong, I know it hurt you. But I felt things. And if you think you can make it smaller by calling it fog, that’s just a lie you’re telling yourself.
But it wasn’t meaningless. I felt real feelings. Yes, I know that it terrifies you. Until you admit I had genuine feelings for someone else too, and that I have the right to process them, grieve, and move on from them, like I would from any breakup, we aren’t ready to reconcile. If you can’t see it, if you can’t face it without calling it fog or some fantasy, so you feel better, it’s not honest. I want you to see my emotions as fully human, not some cheap high that can be dismissed.
Healing isn’t reducing my love to a lie that’s easier for your brain. That’s your coping, and that’s why we can’t move forward yet. And don’t act like the whirlwind with them was something alien. The obsession with each other and the romance is how we started, too. I can be in love wildly, painfully, impossibly, even when it’s wrong. And if you can’t face that, there is no reconciliation.
She’s not sure how to move forward after finding those emails, and it’s ruined the sense of peace she managed to find after the affair.
She threw up this morning because she was so upset about what she read, and it’s left her broken-hearted all over again.
What scares me the most for her is that her husband referred to his affair as true love, and in that case, I don’t think that reconciliation is possible.
It sounds like her husband should be with that other woman then, and I’m shocked he didn’t pick that for himself. The email reads like he’s throwing himself a pity party without taking accountability.
The bottom line is he’s still not being honest with her, so I don’t see how she can find a way to trust him anymore.
What advice do you have for her?
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By Bre Avery Zacharski
Hi, I'm Bre, Chip Chick's CEO! I have a degree in Textile/Surface Design from The Fashion Institute of Technology, and... More about Bre Avery Zacharski
