I have a somewhat specific question for the people here who consider themselves securely attached.
Were you securely attached before the affair, and have you actually had what you would consider a successful reconciliation?
I would argue I fit the bill. I was very secure before the affair and have a "secure" attachment type. That said, there is maybe some element of "dismissive-avoidant" to myself personally. Any of these sorts of grouping exercises ultimately misses that we are all individuals showing a spectrum or mix of behaviors from the categories.
I ask because I keep noticing that a lot of the reconciliation resources seem to assume that the reconciling betrayed is insecure attach.
I am looking at specific challenges to reconciling from the perspective of a secure attach individual.
I was secure before my wife's affair. I had high self-esteem, trusted myself, trusted her, was comfortable with independence, and never had much fear around abandonment. I have also practiced mindfulness for more than 20 years.
Same, and I still have high self esteem and we have restored trust (functionally). But trust 2.0 is not trust 1.0, implicit edition.
I don't fear abandonment at all. Mindfulness is a funny topic for me. At least previously, I didn't find it necessary because I don't tend to ruminate about the past or worry about the future. So I only recently needed to learn those tools to avoid rumination and worry brought on by the A. I rarely find myself using mindfulness tools and am close to my baseline.
The affair did not leave me believing that I am inadequate or that I cannot survive without my wife.
If anything, that creates a different problem.
I know I can leave.
I know I will be okay if I leave.
I do not need the marriage to prove my worth, and I do not need my wife to regulate me.
I used to be very proud of my marriage. Now I'm proud of being a good husband. Pride in the marriage was misplaced because you aren't responsible for your wife's behavior. So to some degree I have "permanently lost" pride in my marriage. But is that really a loss?
We will probably return to the idea of permanent losses in my reply.
My wife is actually doing exceptionally well in reconciliation, particularly over the last month. She is doing serious work on herself, we are in structured therapy, and she is finally beginning to understand some of the deeper fearful-avoidant, shame, fawning, and escape dynamics that contributed to the affair.
So this is not a situation where I am contemplating leaving because she refuses to do the work.
That's good, I didn't get that for the first year.
The problem is that I am 19 months out, the relationship is objectively stable and connected, and I still feel unsettled.
I think the PLOF is the PLOF and it's gonna PLOF. Feel free to read up on the "plain of lethal flatness". This is likely what you are experiencing. You are no longer constantly working on the A or something, and finally you get somewhere stable and you aren't working at the A but you aren't back to normal yet. That's very typical.
My trust has barely returned.
Trust is built through a series of actions. If you take my "bayesian" approach it takes 3 times as long to build up trust after a single betrayal. So you would need a large number of years to restore trust. What's sort of worse is the length of time you had trust prior to the betrayal makes it that much harder to ever achieve that level of trust again. I could link the thread but it's not really that important.
All I'm saying is it takes years for trust to be even close to functionally equivalent. Even then, the type of trust is no longer implicit, another permanent loss.
I am not unhappy, but I am not particularly happy either.
The next step for me after that was "happy and married but not happily married". I can say after a few years I have returned to happily married.
My life sometimes feels like an ill-fitting suit. I can live in it. There is plenty that is good about my life. I still love my wife. But there is a persistent awareness that I would not have chosen this life if I had been given informed consent.
My nervous system frequently tells me to leave.
My heart and my brain tell me to stay.
My nervous system hasn't told me to leave in a long time. My heart kept me in when my head wasn't even in it. I'm now "fully aligned" in staying. It's something I want and choose to be in every day. My daily experience in my marriage is not that it's something I continue to tolerate and work through for a happier future. But it definitely *was* at some point working towards a goal. And getting through the PLOF is like it's own sort of work toward the goal where the work is just going through it.
What I am trying to understand is what this looks like specifically for people who started from secure attachment after years of remaining.
Did you eventually feel that staying was something you freely wanted, rather than something you had rationally decided was the best option?
It took about 3 ish years to feel like it's what I "freely wanted" not what I was choosing as the least shitty option. It took another year or two to completely remove the "ill-fitting suit".
Did the loss of agency and epistemic safety eventually become integrated into your life, or did you simply learn to live around it?
We all live with epistemic uncertainty. Sometimes we don't register it correctly or explicitly. We sort of lose that opportunity following betrayal. So I learn to live with adequate uncertainty, not have complete implicit trust. This is likely a more durable mechanism anyway. I also grant *myself* epistemic uncertainty. If I at some point, change my mind. That I've made a terrible mistake, then I'm free to change my mind and leave. My previous frame of mind attached far more duty to marriage. Now I know I want it, because I'm free to leave if I don't.
Most importantly, did you ever get back to being genuinely happy in the marriage?
Yes, and like I said before, the progression was something like, Dday -> doing my best at R but not being ready to lose the M (1 year) -> asking for a divorce because I couldn't keep it up -> my wife actually working at R with me as a team (1 year)-> PLOF (1/2 year?) -> happy and married (2 years) -> happily married.
And from that level of progress it appears linear, but the reality is the progress is "non-linear". So on any given day in any given phase, I might be wildly optimistic, or totally depressed and upset at myself with my series of decisions leading me to this point in my life. But the trend is there.
I am particularly interested in hearing from people several years out who would describe themselves as securely attached before discovery and who believe their reconciliation was actually successful.
Not "we are still married."
I welcome you to read through my update threads. I am happily married.
https://my.survivinginfidelity.com/topics/666420/six-years-/
And if I did my housekeeping right, each thread should link back to the previous year.
I mean you genuinely like the life you ended up with and would still choose it today.
Does anyone here fit that description?
Yes, I genuinely like the life I ended up with and choose it every day. If you sent me back to DDay, I would like to think I would have made better decisions faster to get to where I am now with less pain. However, I don't think those shortcuts exist. I think I've done the best I can for the circumstances I've been presented.
