Love/In Love

I keep having affair dreams.

Until now they've been mostly reliving the actual events, and on occasion it has been my brain imagining WS having a second affair with the same woman.

Last night was different though. I dreamed that it was me that cheated-- that I had a lover that was passionate about me in every way, that thought I was everything, that begged me to leave my husband and be with him forever. And I dreamed about a d-day... about coming home to WS and laying next to him in our bed and talking to him, laughing with him, but feeling nothing for him. And then I told him about all the things in my head-- about not loving him, about finding someone else, about feeling attractive and alive again-- and that it was because of that someone else. I crushed him into the ground. I made sure he knew how little he meant to me and I felt soulless.

The one thing I can't wrap my brain around is the fact that WS says over and over how he never stopped loving me. He says he always loved me even if he did stop being "in love" with me for a time. Now he will say that he both loves me and is "in love" with me. How on earth do you fall in love with another woman when you still love your wife?

I guess to me love is this thing where you would never even consider the possibility of being involved with another person. The very fact that that thought goes through your head would make me question your true love for that person. Love to me is that commitment to sticking by each other even if times are hard or the other person isn't carrying their weight for awhile. That's the stuff that you argue about and work out and then go back to a normal relationship. Love is doing what is best for the other person, even when it sucks or your own needs aren't being met right now-- you do it because you love them, and you talk later about balance in the relationship and about the things that you need.

How can you love me and think it's okay to screw around with someone else? And it's not even about any of the physical stuff-- it's that he says he felt he couldn't depend on me to talk to or be close to-- that I couldn't meet his emotional needs. That's the part that just about kills me when I think about the affair. All he had to do was choose to connect with me rather than someone outside the relationship, and he couldn't even give me a chance to do that. He couldn't even tell me that he felt neglected and give me a chance to fix things. Isn't that what love is to some extent? It's about benefit of the doubt? Giving each other a chance?

And what is with this "I love you but I'm not in love with you" crap that every freaking cheater says? Every time WS uses that "I still loved you" spiel during a discussion or argument I want to strangle him and shout "Cliche! Cliche!" I want to show him somehow that cheater after cheater says the same thing. I cringe everytime he says it.

In case you haven't noticed, this is a bad day. A very bad day in recovery. There is no significance to today as far as being a certain date pertaining the affair. It's just a date where I wonder if it's all really worth it-- all the pain and bad dreams and crying for no real reason...

I guess the good thing is that when I woke up from the dream, I was crying and upset and the reason I woke up was because WS was the one to wake me. He held me and asked what happened, and I told him it was just a bad dream. He asked if I wanted to talk about it, even though it was 4 in the morning, and when I said no he let it go. For me that meant a lot, because he usually tries to bully me into talking about things I'm not ready to talk about. And this morning he asked again if I wanted to talk and my "no" was good enough for him.

Even though this is a crap day, I felt heard by him, and that's a tremendous step forward.