1. I love the other guy. No, he is not a drug to me, no, am not addicted to him. I know people have different definitions of ‘being in love’ and ‘love’; to me, loving someone is best expressed as deeply caring about them, about their welfare and their wellbeing. It is not about how the other person makes me feel – to me, that is more what ‘being in love’ is. So, I love the other guy. He has been added to the very small list of family and close friends who I love. But, I am no longer fighting this. I may always feel this way. This I accept.
2. I have a new layer of sadness that is added to my life because there is now someone who I love but can not be with, can not care for and can not be there for. To me, love is as much about doing as it is feeling. Which is to say, I may feel love for someone, but that emotion manifests itself through my actions. So, I am sad. Not all the time, but it is always there nonetheless.  But, I am no longer fighting this. I may always feel this way. This I accept.
3. My husband and I have found our way back to each other in ways that are surprising and delightful. Our relationship is not just back to where it was when it was at its best – it has grown and become richer and deeper than it has ever been. This is a source of great joy and contentment to me. I had hoped that getting closer to him would somehow erase points 1 and 2 above. However, I have come to realise that this is not the case. How I feel about one man is, sadly, completely separate to how I feel about the other. So alongside my happiness at the state of my relationship with my husband the sadness and love for the other guy are there too.  But, I am no longer fighting this fact. I may always feel this way. This I accept.
4. Ironically, there is no way that my husband and I would have reached this place in our relationship had I not become involved with the other guy. Of course I am ashamed that I let my guard down and allowed myself to become involved with another guy. However, alongside that shame there is also pride. I am proud of myself for pulling back from the other guy as soon as I realised I had fallen in love with him. I am proud of myself for having had the courage to go and tell my husband about the other guy. This is what triggered the necessary shift in him from his stubborn complacency about our relationship, and what kickstarted the changes that took place between us. I have been struggling with this interaction of shame and pride, but no longer. It is ok to feel both things at the same time. This I accept.
5. The other guy and I work in the same place and it is inevitable that we will see each other sometimes. It makes me sad to see him, as it reminds me afresh of how I feel about him. But it is ok. I no longer either hope to see him or hope to avoid him. We are still talking a little via email, and this is still helping me to be ok with these occasional meetings. So, I will carry on doing that until I feel that need pass. He is away for three weeks soon and then I am away for two, so I expect to slow this down after that break. But, I am no longer beating myself up about talking to him now and again. I am doing what I need to do to heal in a way that is working for me.  

This has been at times a hellish year. It has changed me. I am now a sadder person. My sense of myself as a moral and honest person has been damaged. But, this experience has changed me in positive ways too. I am significantly stronger now – or rather, I have a much greater appreciation of the strength that was already within me. I have discovered that I have far greater resources of courage, willpower, determination and strength than I ever imagined possible. I also have a new and deep level of pride in myself. It would have been so much easier to carry on with the other guy and fall into a fully-fledged affair. I am so proud of myself for taking the harder path and walking away before we got to that.

Writing here has helped me enormously as I go through this, at times excrutiating, process. It has helped me to disentangle and examine my thoughts and feelings and it has been very helpful to be able to look back on how I felt and realise how far I have come. But I am not finding it so helpful at the moment – if anything, it makes me think about the other guy more than I want or need to. So I will probably only come back and update if and when things happen about which I feel the need to write.

For now, I have reached a place that feels good. There is still pain and sadness, but accepting and not fighting these feelings is allowing me to carry on with my life – I am now just accompanied in my life by these new emotions. I am no longer trying to ‘get over’ the other guy. Before now, I have only loved two men, and my experience of love is that, once it arrives, it is there for good. If that turns out to be the case with the other guy too, it is fine. I do not have to fight to banish him from my heart. I am not and I will not act on those feelings, and that is what matters more than the feelings themselves. I can just accept them and move on, and that is what I am choosing to do.

Last week my husband’s uncle died, so we spent yesterday at the funeral. My husband had written and read a very beautiful eulogy for his uncle.

In two week’s time the other guy’s baby is due.

These are the things of which real lives are made. These are the important, significant moments in our lives.

The other guy and I are still catching up once a week, as we have been doing for a few weeks now. I am finding these chats very helpful in distancing myself, getting a more real perspective on, and healing from our relationship. Why? Because they bring home to me the difference between a lighthearted email and holding my husband’s hand as together we cry at the funeral of a loved family member.

There is something about no contact that I found almost built up the other guy in my head – as if he was a force that I had absolutely no power to resist. Chatting to him intermittently is helping me to ‘downsize’ him in my mind. I feel a little odd about saying this as I know that the conventional wisdom is that no contact is the only way to go. I can only say that for me, right now, low contact is working more effectively as a way to heal.

Hmm – clearly I still have some way to go in getting over him. I need to remember this and not get too complacent.

I think there are number of things that are causing this. I had a long chat with a good friend yesterday about the other guy, and I think that maybe talking about him too much is not too good for me, even though talking about him a bit sometimes can be really helpful. I think that I need to be careful about getting that balance right. I am also tired at the moment as a consequence of working longer than normal hours and rarely getting quite enough sleep.

But I think that there may also be something else going on.

As I gradually recover from the heartbreak of the last few months, I think I may be left with an energy deficit similar to that which often affects people after an illness. The events and feelings of this year have been so intense that I think I have seriously depleted my energy as a result. And I think it may be possible that I am noticing that depletion more now, after the worst of the pain is over – I no longer need to use all my energy and strength merely to get through each day.

I don’t think I’m going to read anything more into my anxiety and sadness than this. I will treat this tiredness as a sign to be a little more gentle and kind to myself at the moment, and allow myself to recharge my energy as best I can.

I just want to let you know how wonderful having you here for me recently has been. Your solid, non-judgemental support has meant more to me than you can possibly know. Even though we don’t always get to talk as often as we’d like, when we do you always make me feel better about myself and about this situation.

I admire you greatly for your thoughtful, reflective approach to your own life and situation. You have taught me so much in terms of figuring out what has been going on with me this year, and without that clarity I think I would probably have sunk far further into the mire than I actually did. If it hadn’t been for you forcing me to confront my feelings for the other guy, I think we would probably have carried on for much longer, and I can only imagine how much worse the consequences could have been.

I will always be here for you, and I will always be your very true friend, Ax.

Yesterday, for the first time, I realised that the day had passed with me having no hope at all about this. I didn’t care whether I saw him or whether I didn’t. And today, so far, I feel the same.

This is a huge relief. I think that letting go of hope in relation to the other guy has been one of my biggest challenges. Not just hope about bumping into him at work, but hope on a bigger scale – hope about the prospect for any sort of future togetherness for us. We have no future and so hoping for one is futile. But hope is a bugger to kill off! So realising that it has gone in this regard, at least for now, is worth marking as a small victory.

And, what is more, my husband got home this morning after a 4-day business trip, and I notice that my thoughts are full how great it was to see him before I left, and of looking forward to seeing him later. I am glad that he doesn’t know how much healing I have had to do over the other guy. But I am also incredibly grateful to him, as having him here for me has been massively instrumental in that healing.

My husband and I were talking about our relationship and how it has changed – transformed, even – in the last few months. He said that, although he never thought he would say it, that he thinks more good has come out of me getting involved with the other guy than bad.

I started to cry. I said that I feel I have damaged my sense of self through the way I behaved, by breaking my personal code. He said that he didn’t think I had broken a code really – after all, all we did was kiss, it wasn’t like we had had sex. And that, to him, is what would constitute an affair.

But, to me, I have broken my code. And in that moment I realised something about my code. My code is actually not an adult, rational, ‘I will not be unfaithful to my husband because that would hurt him and be a bad thing to do’. Rather, my code is coming from the position of the scared child whose parents caused said child havoc and devastation through their repeated infidelities. My code is utterly fear-based and childlike. It is rather like the story of the little Dutch boy who stuck his finger in the dam. It says that it is down to me to stop any leaks at all, or everything will come crashing down around me.

I am wondering now whether I might have been focusing some of the bad things I have been feeling in the wrong direction. What I mean by that is that maybe some of these painful feelings are less about the other guy (I miss him! I’m sad to lose him!) and are actually more to do with the grief and sadness I felt as a child about the loss of my family and security.

One of the things my husband and I have been talking about as we concentrate on renewing our relationship is the possibility of shedding some of the baggage of our past relationship. What this means is that when we were much younger we made certain assumptions about each other and behaved accordingly. For example, ‘he doesn’t like talking about x so I’ll avoid it’. We have both recognised that we have a rather outdated view of each other based on these old assumptions and we are trying now to react to each other much more based on what we actually say now, in the moment. Shedding the baggage.

If it is the case that my utterly fear-based, all-or-nothing code is in fact another example of outdated baggage, that makes me feel like a very large weight is being lifted from me. Which is not to say that I do not take responsibility for my actions, or that I now think that infidelity is ok. But, if I look at the events of this year from a more considered, adult perspective, I think I can feel a lot kinder and more forgiving towards myself. Which, incidentally, is also exactly my husband’s perspective.

I do miss the other guy. I did fall in love with him, and that means that I do hurt now. But that does not mean that I am a dreadful person or that I or my marriage are irreparably damaged as a result.

The other guy is just a guy. He is a really nice guy, but so are lots of guys. My husband, on the other hand, is not ‘just’ a guy. He is the person who sees deep into my soul and loves me more the more of it I reveal to him. I am truly blessed to have him.

Remembering that one of the reasons for starting this blog was as a way of recording and reminding myself of the progress I am making, I have just gone back and looked over all my old posts. This was a good thing for me to have done, as I was actually surprised at the intensity of the emotions I was feeling a month or so ago. I wrote about feeling bowled over by pain, and about how it hurt so much that I didn’t know what to do with myself. That is so different to today and yesterday, when what I feel is more of a dull, aching sadness. I would still prefer not to feel like this at all, but a dull ache is definitely better than intolerable pain…

I also realise how much easier I am finding it being at work. I had actually forgotten how excrutiating I found the uncertainty about whether I would see the other guy. Now I work on the assumption that I probably won’t, and this is fine with me. And if I do? Well, I’ll deal with that if and when it happens. Again, much better than before. In fact, definite progress.

I have made choices recently of which I am proud. I have chosen my lovely husband. I have chosen myself. I have chosen not to go down a path that would hurt me and others and that would go completely against my personal code of behaviour. I am not going to cheat on my husband and I am not going to have an affair with the other guy.

These choices all make me feel proud, strong and good about myself. So it really pisses me off that I still get so sad about them at times.

The other guy and I had a bit of a chat on Monday – how was your weekend and what are you up to at work kind of stuff. But chatting with him even in this very limited way does bring me down a little. I do not feel anything like the intensity that I did a couple of months ago. I am just reminded of some of the things that I like so much about him when we talk. I think that this low-contact route we are trying out may not be the easiest path I could choose. But I will give it a chance and stick with it for a little while longer. I know that I would be sad anyway, whether I spoke to him now and again or not. There may well be a job coming up in his department that would sort of be earmarked for me. Jobs in my field are like gold dust. I could not afford, and would not want to, turn it down if it does come up. So I really, really want to try and have an easy, friendly relationship with him if it turns out that we will be seeing more of each other at work. I would hate an opportunity like that to be tainted because of this.