Re: Was this adultery? pd408: I wish I had read this topic first when I initially joined here! I've been on both sides of this fence myself. During my marriage, I felt like my ex didn't care about my feelings and basically viewed me as a maid and babysitter. Everything was always about HIM. I got too close to someone at work. Not a full-blown affair, but emotionally too close. I admitted it to him after several weeks of denial. I had come to the point that I knew I was wrong, that I still loved my husband, and wanted to save our marriage. He, of course, freaked out and we started talking about divorce then (this was in 2000.) We never actually separated, but there was more distance between us than if one of us had been on the moon. But later, we realized that we had a responsibility to our son and to each other, so we reconciled and things were fine. We even talked about having another baby. I was happier than I had been in a long time. Then, January of 2002, I got accepted at the Police Academy and spent 12 weeks dealing with that. It was more than he could bear that I just didn't have the time or energy to cater to his every whim. He even accused me of having an affair with one of my instructors, which I was NOT, because he was so jealous of the fact that I had something else going on in my life! During that time, he became very close to a woman he worked with occasionally who was also going through a divorce. They cried on each other's shoulders and blah, blah, blah. I thought he had forgiven me for what I did, and God knows I apologized enough for it and tried to make everything better. But I guess since he found that there was someone oh-so-wonderful just waiting for him "over there", it was time for him to leave. I understand his hurt over what I did. But why bother to lie and say he still loved me and wanted it to work when he really didn't? He was just waiting for something better to come along, so he didn't have to be alone because that's something that he just cannot do.
While I know what I did wrong really hurt my marriage, I feel it didn't break it. He just refused to get counseling to help it heal. I truly believed that it could be saved if we BOTH worked on it, not just me. I think he was afraid he would find out that maybe he WAS partly to blame for our problems and that just wouldn't do. Then, when the opportunity came along to jump ship, he took it. I know I am to blame for a lot of what went wrong, but his arrogance about the whole thing and the lies he has told me have been the major problem for me.
