Chump Lady addresses the narrative from the cheater. Why won’t my betrayed spouse just get over it?
Until the person you trust with your life shatters your heart and your world, you haven’t a clue.
About the PTSD. The dealing with the health fallout. About losing yourself. About the traumatic, nightly nightmares. About the loss of your world as you know it. About the battle with self harm and suicidal ideation. Home. Job. Friends. Peace. Joy. Security. Safety.
Your ability to trust anyone ever again.
Gone.
The reality is, the cheater thinks they made a booboo.
And now everything is okay again.
Right?
“I had no idea my wife cared so much about our lousy marriage! It means nothing to me and I thought I could just fuck strange and brag to her about it and she’d go back to cooking for me, raising our kids, and washing my shit stained underwear. But she isn’t functioning correctly now! I don’t want to have to get another wife appliance, how do I fix this one?”
That’s not how it works, dude.
Your spouse is now affected by your choices, your actions, your sharing of STIs, forever.
Forever.
Yes. Forever.
We do so much work on ourselves. We heal a bit.
But the effects are permanent.
I was told last week by one of our mutual friends – who nonetheless does see Roger for who he is. Does understand that he is a cheater and a liar – that she is so impressed by what I am building. How far I have come. Her: you have a better life now, Paula. You’ve shaped your own destiny. You have surrounded yourself with empowering, supportive, interesting, fun, educated friends. The (name of small hometown) detritus. You’ve shed that. All those small town entitled bores, you don’t have to deal with them anymore! Yay! Roger’s friends are still in the same mindset. He still operates the same way he always did. You, on the other hand, have completely reinvented yourself, keeping the parts of you that are unique and admirable, and shedding all the crap that came with being “someone’s wife. Someone’s small town mother.”
Yeah. I think I mostly have.
But it doesn’t mean I am healed.
Or am “over it.”
Because you never really recover fully. You just learn to live around the pain and reconfigure your life to cope.
Tearing at the Fabric 
Jun 25, 2022 at 11:19 am
“You never really recover fully. You just learn to live around the pain and reconfigure your life to cope.” Yes. Truth.
Jun 25, 2022 at 11:25 am
I think that has been the hardest, most unexpected outcome of this entire fiasco for me, DLH. Healed is really just healing. A constant work in progress. There is no finish line. It keeps shifting.
Jun 25, 2022 at 2:48 pm
I’m beginning to think there is no finish line either. We are changed forever.
Jun 25, 2022 at 3:16 pm
Yes. Sorry to say, but I think I worked that out about two years after D-day 1. Nothing “goes back to normal.” You never forget. You never relax again.
It doesn’t mean life is over. But it does mean it is changed so very, very dramatically.
And permanently.
Change is not a bad thing. But forced change is very challenging x