

One about a sad pregnant lady married to a sad angry man.

(502 Posts)
izchaz Wed 24-Jul-13 14:51:49

Before I start, please don't read this and say "divorce him, he's a shit head", much as that might be outstanding advice it's not an option I want to engage with. What I'm after is help in turning the negatives in my relationship into positives. How do I let go of the grief and hurt, and how do I persuade my husband to stop beating himself up over the protracted affair he had with my best friend (no longer)? I try every day to push the positives in our relationship: we're a good team, we can laugh and have fun together, we have an incredible group of friends that we share, we are going to be parents to a much wanted baby, and when we are both behaving we have glimpses of what used to be - it's easy to be together and we can both see how much the other loves us. However whenever times get tough - work stress, the whisper of tightening belts, having to multitask or balance multiple issues at once then the whole house of cards crumbles and one of us reverts to recriminations and aiming to wound the other. He is under a huge amount of pressure with work, an impending family bereavement, the worry of my earnings disappearing when I go off on maternity etc etc, and I try so hard to keep him afloat. On the days when I fail, as yesterday he rails and I cannot help but bite back. Last night we fought from 9 at night until 3am, and only stopped because our lodger came home. Once he has started he will follow me from room to room, verbally attacking and prickling me until I re-engage the fight. I am desperate to stop the cycle as I am conscious that our marriage is tiny and frail (married 11 months, his affair was on/off for the first 7, and when confronted twice he lied about it) and I do not feel it can stand up to such punishment without becoming a very twisted paradigm of what we wanted when we got engaged.
Please, help me to figure out how to break the cycle of bad behaviour we have both sunk into, I am miserable with him now, and would be miserable without him, but we had something so good and so precious not so long ago, and I want to find a way back to that.

Inertia Sat 03-Aug-13 07:45:58

Nobody thinks you should forgive your friend - you don't have to forgive either of them. Your husband should certainly be working a damn sight harder to earn forgiveness though. You both seem to think that the forgiveness has to be there to try to repair the marriage - it's actually allowed to say that you can't forgive at the moment, you're not willing to excuse or move on, even if you want to repair the marriage.

Leaving aside the fact that most of us see your husband as a conniving lying cheat who took advantage of what he saw as a vulnerable woman , whereas you see a lovely man whose sprained ankle and kind heart caused his penis to helplessly fall into a wicked witch (repeatedly, for several months ) - I think you're wise to think about planning for a potential alternative future. Your husband has proved that you cannot trust or rely on him.

I also think that , for your own wellbeing, you might need to try to rally round support for yourself once the baby arrives. Your adrenaline-fuelled, high risk H couldn't cope without sport and needed an affair to deal with the trauma - god knows what he'll do to cope once he has an exhausted, sore wife and a crying newborn in the house . ( Remember not to put temptation his way by introducing him to any women.)

GoodtoBetter Mon 05-Aug-13 16:47:31

How are you OP?

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