What Can I Do About My Husband’s Feelings For The Other Woman?
By: Katie Lersch: I often hear with women who are trying to break the spell that the “other woman” or mistress has over their husband. I recently heard from a wife who said, “three weeks ago, my husband admitted to having an affair with a woman from his gym. He said he was telling me about it because he wanted to save our marriage and he cancelled his gym membership and swore he would cut off all ties with her. He seemed very sincere. But he’s been sullen and withdrawn. After my asking him what was wrong with him for several days, he finally admitted that he has ‘deep feelings’ for this other woman and he’s confused and conflicted between his loyalty to and love for me and his feelings for her. She came by his office last week and he asked her to please leave him alone while he was sorting out his feelings. I am so hurt by this. I feel like I really don’t stand a chance because of his perceived feelings for her. He hasn’t even known her for very long, but now supposedly she’s his soul mate. What can I do about this? How can I make him see that these feelings probably aren’t even real? He doesn’t even know who this woman really is. I had a friend of mine do a background check on her and she has a bankruptcy and some foreclosures, neither of which my husband knows anything about it. How can I make him see her for who she really is?”
These are all tough questions. Because although you are often quite sure that these “feelings” are born out of lies and deception, they can feel quite real to husbands, at least at the time. And often, when you try to expose the other woman as the fraud that she is, this makes you look like the desperate bad guy which can only reinforce those phantom feelings. In the following article, I’ll discuss what I think is the best strategy to use in this situation.
Know That It’s Not Likely That You Are Going To Be Able To Change Your Husband’s Feelings For The Other Woman By Force: Many wives in this situation feel that they need to “out” the other woman or make the husband see her for who she truly is. The hope is that once he sees that everything about her is false, he will realize that his feelings are also false. Unfortunately, this often is not the way that it works. Your husband knows that you are deeply invested in changing his feelings for the other woman. So, he’s likely to doubt what you are telling him, even if it deep down rings true.
And sometimes, even if he eventually finds out the truth, he may still discount it because he might think that the circumstances surrounding his feelings have nothing to do with the feelings themselves. It’s very common for people who are in the middle of infidelity to become very good at justifying their actions and their emotions. Sure, they may know that what they are doing is wrong, but they’re able to put those doubts on the back burner. The same holds true when anything might get in the way of their feelings. They want their feelings to be strong enough to justify their actions, so it only makes sense that they are going to discount or downplay anything that is going to question those feelings. After all, once they admit the feelings aren’t there anymore, then they have to also admit that they caused all of this pain and turmoil for nothing at all.
Time, Patience, And Integrity Will Often Lessen These False Feelings Better Than Anything Else: Beware that when you try to “force” or “make” your husband change his feelings for this other person, he’s likely to see you as the manipulative one. You want for the opposite to be true. You want for him to eventually see her as the bad guy and you as the good guy. So as strange as it may feel, often the best thing that you can do is to take the high road and bide your time. Conduct yourself with respect and dignity and know that he will eventually see things more clearly.
The impact of the husband’s discovery of this woman’s past was going to be so much greater if the husband found these things out for himself. And, time has a way of making the truth come out. When things are shiny, new, and forbidden, the feelings are so much more intense. But once things are out in the open and become routine, the feelings begin to lose a little of their power. Often, the best thing that you can do is to understand this and to just wait until the inevitable happens.
Once she’s no longer a forbidden person that he can only see during stolen clandestine moments, she starts to look more like an average, ordinary, middle aged woman. Once this happens, the feelings can turn average and ordinary as well. I know it’s tough to wait for this to happen. And at the same time, it’s very tempting to try to turn his head back to you. Nothing says you can’t continue to work on your marriage and on reestablishing your bond. But my best advice is to focus on reestablishing his feelings for you and having confidence that his true and “real” feelings for her will reveal themselves over time.
Don’t give her more power over you by continuing to focus on their relationship. Once you move on and turn your attention toward yourself and your husband, the rest will often eventually sort itself out. I know that it can be hard to keep the faith when you’re trying to move past an affair. I remember feeling pretty hopeless when I was in this situation. But once I placed the focus on myself rather than on my doubts, things changed dramatically for me and my marriage recovered. If it helps, you can read more of that story on my blog at http://surviving-the-affair.com/
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