My husband of 10 years had an affair.

He’s in individual therapy. We’re in couples therapy. He has taken full responsibility for cheating. He’s said it was completely wrong, cowardly, morally reprehensible. He says he sees how devastating it’s been. He says if he had the emotional awareness and reasoning ability he has now, he would have just separated instead of cheating.

And that sentence is like a destroys me and I feel abandoned.

What I hear is: “If I had been healthier, I would have left you.”

He keeps saying the affair is 100% on him. But he also says it was a response to being emotionally lonely in a marriage that had already become bad for both of us. Not to justify to understand.

Years ago, I had a late-term miscarriage. It destroyed me. I developed postpartum anxiety and rage. I was volatile and I said cruel things sometimes. I was grieving and hormonal and honestly not stable. He tried to support me. I won’t take that away from him. But he took everything I said personally. Every emotional outburst became about how I was hurting him. I didn’t feel given grace for the fact that my body and brain were wrecked. I felt like I had to manage his feelings and that’s when I built resentment I never really processed. I never forgave him for not holding me better during the hardest time of my life. I needed his grace and softness even if it was hard for him.

Then he lost his job. Then his mom died.

I wanted to show up for him but I couldn’t get past the internal wall of, “Where was this compassion when I needed it?” I was colder than I should have been. I can admit that now.

But he cheated.

Our therapist has given us individual exercises on how to make each other feel safe again and. He has a lot of specific rebuilding exercises like transparency, reassurance, check-ins, empathy work.

But the big rule for the next three months is this:

No one gets to hold the moral high ground.

No “you did this.”

We both just “own our parts” in how the marriage deteriorated.

The therapist says blame only makes people talk over each other and that accountability right now needs to come from within. She said verbatim; “you both seem stuck in your own point of views”

And I hate her rules they feels wrong. It feels like him “owning” the affair isn’t enough if I don’t get to hold him accountable for it in real time.

He says he owes it to me to make it right because he cheated on me. That hurts too. I don’t want to be chosen because he owes me. I tell him this, he tells me he’s sorry but he’s working on shifting the mindset of “owing” me to actually wanting to do everything because he “wants” to. And when he says that in a healthier state he would have just left, it makes me feel like I was a placeholder and it makes me feel even more abandoned and alone.

I’ve been confiding in my sister. She gave me tough love and said the therapist is actually giving us excellent advice. She said if I’m choosing reconciliation, I need to let go of the desire to hold him accountable if he’s already given the structure to do so himself by our therapist. And if I can’t live with this structure, then I need to make a decision.

I HATE this. I want the moral high ground. It feels like proof it was not all on me.

He crossed the line. I feel confused, heartbroken, defensive, and honestly more resentful since starting therapy.