It’s easy to feel wildly insecure when your partner cheats on you, but what would you do if you found out that the love of your life called their affair partner their soulmate, yet never said the same thing to you?
This woman’s husband cheated on her with her younger sister, and his affair spanned approximately 35 days in total. She says her sister swooped in and sank her talons into her husband after she revealed their marital struggles to her. Her husband spoke to her sister every single day, so there was a lot of chit-chat between these two.
“….That’s like an insanely small number of days to have had all of the moments and talks they had. To have completely replaced his partner of over 10 years at the time,” she explained.
“On some days, when I look at it like that, it helps me to remember how insane the whole thing was. How fake. How delusional. How immature. It’s all so stupid. They were probably saying I love you in the first couple of weeks.”
“Everything was so fast and driven by attention and validation, and it was just…insanity. On the other hand. I’m sitting here thinking the other half the time, and I’m like, ‘God. How were there conversations going that in that amount of time [where] he gave her everything? They literally had conversations about being soulmates.'”
She can’t help but conclude that her husband and her sister had an overwhelming amount of things in common to be that deeply intertwined in such a short period of time.
She worries about how her husband had such an amazing connection with her sister, leading him to call her his soulmate. She’s been with her husband for 13 years in total, and he’s never called her that once.
They have expressed how they feel meant to be and like one another’s home, but that’s very different than soulmate status, and she can’t get over how quickly her husband labeled her sister his true love.
It’s been two years following the affair, and she has questioned her husband about it, only to have him say her sister was the one who brought up the whole soulmate thing.
He has claimed that he wasn’t genuinely feeling that emotion, and in the heat of the moment, he was aware of how fake the interaction was.
Her husband says that thinking back on it now, it just proves how silly the affair was. Her husband has acknowledged that it was childish, delusional, and that he was pursuing a fixation.
Her husband has revealed that he would have left her for her sister if he had meant what he said. But her husband kept on talking to her sister after the affair ended, leaving her to believe her sister walked away from her husband, and not the other way around.
“But to me, I just look at it and think, ‘…He must have been feeling really…good to say that to her when he’s never even said it to me…,’ and it kind of breaks my heart,” she continued.
“Thinking about him looking at her the way he looks at me. Basically, telling her that she’s perfect for him. While I was at home and broken. How do you get over this?”
“If your [wayward partner] also did this, how do you handle it? He tries so hard to tell me now that I am perfection. That I am perfect for him. But it just feels…I don’t know. How do I believe that when he did that?”
I think it makes sense for her to feel so haunted by a single word because it carries a ton of weight, and I get that she’s questioning her husband’s love for her.
Affairs are fueled by fantasy. Her husband’s compliments were designed just as much to boost his own ego as they were to flatter her sister.
A brief, two-month relationship built on dramatic declarations is too immature to survive the real world anyway. Ultimately, intensity should never be mistaken for reality, and infidelity is a self-serving echo chamber where both parties must constantly make each other feel good to keep the illusion alive (no one is bringing up flaws in that stage).
To me, a real soulmate is defined by love that endures and can overcome genuine hardship. And whether she and her husband have that soulmate bond or not hinges on being able to heal and move past the affair.
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
