I can say — that the way my wife fell down her slippery slope bothered me quite a bit the first few years, but I’m no longer haunted by it.
I think the work she did on herself, and the IC and MC helped illuminate her previous fault lines or areas of her coping skills that needed work.
I think boundaries are a comparatively new concept in human relationships, at least more clearly defined than before. I think some of us always had them, and a lot of us needed to figure them out and some folks just don’t really ever have boundaries at all.
In other words, I now understand as much as I can about a choice I never made. And it is a choice I could have made a few times in life, I just chose not to hurt anyone by being unfaithful.
That’s the thing, every step my wife took toward infidelity was a step she was sure wouldn’t lead where it was going. At first she just liked the extra attention. AP and his wife were the first people we met when we moved to this new town. Our watched each other’s kids, we BBQ’d together, my wife and AP were in the same group carpool to work, etc. The family ‘friends’ were about five years older than us, he was the ‘big brother’ giving advice and all that….crap.
Weirdly, two of her co-workers started to hit on her at the same time. The single guy, my wife thought, was being creepy, and yet, she thought she special getting the attention of a married man was somehow ‘better’.
It’s the first sign something is broken. What kind of shape is your self-esteem in when hurting two families is suddenly worth the ‘risk’?
Flash forward to the current day, and I would say my wife could explain and show better boundaries than ever before, because she feels far better about herself (although, she still hasn’t forgiven herself) than she used to. And both of us understand love and M far better than we used to as well.
