I can honestly say I didn’t trust the AP for the things mentioned. I wouldn’t use trust at all in the equation.
I think one of the reasons fantasy gets used to the affair is often the whole thing is a way for the ws to convince themselves they are more desirable or interesting than they are.
The AP is the audience to that. If they play their role well it will fool you into believing you are the one with the upper hand in the situation.
I was the one too clever for everyone. I didn’t need to trust him, I went into the situation kind of cocky. He was willing to let me think whatever I wanted.
I also think calling an affair "love" a bastardization of the word. Love is wanting the best for the other person, wanting them to be happy. You can’t do that while helping someone destroy thier lives and loved ones.
Affairs are attachments, toxic attachments. The feelings one has in them is usually based on avoidant and delusional thinking.
I had the affair, it was real. So I would never sit and argue that I had temporary insanity or didn’t make outright decisions. What I will say those decisions and thoughts were based on was projections, and escapism, this the shorthand of fantasy. Delusional thinking.
A) I was never going to get caught.
B) I deserved something to make me happy.
C) My marriage is over because my husband has never loved me.
Reality is
A) You can’t bury an affair and live a life that feels good.
B) The affair didn’t make me happy, in fact it brought misery for years in its wake. And for what? Nothing. The farce of it all is almost the hardest to swallow - only trumped by the devastation I watched my husband battle.
C. My marriage was fine and fixable until I chose to have an affair. And it was me not able to receive love or believe someone loved me for me.
I would say that for a ws, they don’t really love anyone at the time of their affair. And I don’t think it’s trust in the AP, I think it’s more desperation to believe something in order to escape reality.
That all being said, I don’t discount that none of that really helps or means anything in the end to a BS.
What means something in the end would have been not doing it. The only thing left is to try and make amends, and ensure the person you become will not repeat this in the future. I think the often fought about point of contention is how long it should take for someone to be completely unreliable to becoming reliable. This is not something that happens overnight. You don’t become a cheater and snap out of it. Cheating is often the symptom of complex interpersonal issues that takes a great deal of time to resolve.
That’s why you see these requirements being passed around - they are bare minimum stuff. Like NC, and transparency, timelines, etc. I think those things are so bare minimum that compliance is a reasonable ask for the shorter term of recovery.
The deeper stuff, changing core things about who you are, that does take longer and is much harder to define progress because that is so individually mapped. But that is part of reconciliation, which we often say is 2-5 years. And that’s partially because the healing both people have to do takes that long.
[This message edited by hikingout at 6:26 AM, Friday, January 26th]