With exceptions, humans are generally social animals. People need people for their lives to hold meaning. A person myself, I need people for my life to have meaning.
For the better part of 3 decades, I had "only" family and the woman who became both my wife and the very center of my family. And that…. was enough for me. Sure, I wanted other friends. At least another friend. But family was enough.
Then I met "my AP." Her friendship opened my eyes to what I had been missing, with no friend in my life. I saw colors I had never seen before—not because my wife was in the slightest lacking, but because—as vital and critical as is a spousal relationship—the spousal relationship isn’t supposed to be a person’s whole world.
Now without my friend, my experience is of a life decolorized. I don’t think that’s because my wife is lacking, and I don’t think that’s a sign of unhealth for me. On the contrary, I think it is a sign that I was changed for the better—for the healthier—through contact with my friend—and that my existence now is a shadow of what it was when my wife and friend were both in my life. I am no worse off than I was before I met my friend, but my experience of this state of being is entirely different. What was normal to me is now muted. There is no turning back for me.
As for my seeing things only through my own eyes, that was a criticism leveled at me by my friend only in her last letter to me—when she saw that I was apologizing but apparently not empathizing enough with my wife.
I have taken that criticism to heart. Once, I insisted on remaining in contact with "my AP." I have not attempted contact with her in months. I am trying to pay my dues. I am listening to audiobooks and reading books on the struggle of BSs in coping with affairs. I am being faithful. I am trying to cultivate greater empathy for my wife’s perspective and to accord her pain weight even though I don’t find her perspective to be reasonable. But I cannot be without "my AP" forever unless and until I try once more to contact her… to plead my case (if she will let me) that I have done the homework she gave me—that I have healed my marriage and regrown my integrity and am a new man, eager to rebuild a safer version of what my friend and I once had—and am still rebuffed.
Absolutely, there could be a flaw in my reasoning! I am far from infallible. That’s precisely why I have engaged here—to have my reasoning challenged.
If you see my reasoning as flawed, please tell me how?
My thinking has evolved at least a handful of times in just the days since my first post here. What hasn’t changed is my commitment to a return to my friend in properly-ordered friendship while any infinitesimally small chance to reestablish that remains.
I will close with this thought, for now:
I have gathered that the position others see when they see through my wife’s eyes is that my friend cannot—under any circumstances—ever return to my life. But that view isn’t rational or justifiable, and without excellent cause, I cannot honor that view, given its cost to me. I guess my love of my wife is just simply not enough.
Is that everyone’s point? My love for my spouse should be so great that I shouldn’t care whether her needs are reasonable or just, how much meeting her needs fully would cost me, or how much I could protect for myself while according her everything that she justifiably ought to require? That any want she expresses and labels as "a need," I should simply move heaven and earth to achieve?
A problem with answering those questions in the affirmative is that a need I have is for my friend to be in my life. So, if what’s good for the gander is good for the goose, then my wife has just as much of an obligation to grant me my friend as I have to relinquish her.
[This message edited by Unconventional at 6:23 PM, Monday, September 28th]
