What if....

iVillage Member
Registered: 07-21-2009
What if....
2
Mon, 10-18-2010 - 9:01am

For awhile after D-Day I was plagued with the glorified ‘what if’ thoughts. My XAP is a good person who like me, made a bad decision and had an A. I am not angry with him, so sometimes when I am tempted to put our relationship back on that pedestal, it helps me to envision what the reality of life together would have been like, had we chosen to leave our spouses to be together instead of stay and work on our M.

Here goes:

He had six boys. Yes, that’s right. Six. And I have two kids. So we would have been a family of 10. Hello? I’m envisioning the amount of laundry that would be. Plus his boys were in sports all year long. That’s a lot of chauffering (Is that even a word?) And seriously, cooking for that many every day? Not to mention the emotional trauma it would have been to our kids. How would we have taught them integrity and marital value and strength with starting our own relationship as an A? Each others kids would have thought the other was the enemy. No one in our lives would have supported our decision to be together. We both would have been under extreme pressure to return to our families. Because of an integrity clause, He may have had to leave his partnership, so we would have had no money to buy Hamburger Helper for 10. Our own relationship would have been strained beyond belief, by external pressure as well as the realization that we had lived in a fog for 7 years and that the other person was more flawed than we realized. (Heartache without makeup is not pretty, I have a temper that he didn‘t really ever have to see, his BS is very health oriented, What would have he thought the first time I ate a whole bag of hershey kisses during PMS?) Then we would just become bitter towards each other, or worse, become so needy and clingy to one another that we would live in a constant state of insecurity. I personally would probably not have gone to IC, so would not have addressed the issues that got me into the A in the first place, so therefore may have cheated on him at some point anyway. Ugh. It would have been awful.

iVillage Member
Registered: 05-06-2010
Mon, 10-18-2010 - 5:32pm

Thank you, Thank you for this!!

iVillage Member
Registered: 09-28-2010
Mon, 10-18-2010 - 9:57pm

Such a good exercise - to imagine the REAL likely outcome!

Honestly, I shutter to think what our real life would have ended up looking like. It would have been awful!

Like AWFUL!

Thank you for the dose of reality. I hope others use it to blow that fog away for good.

((HUGS))

Tu.