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Do betraying spouses ALL trickle truth and minimize and refuse to admit the truth (such as being in love with the long term AP), to protect themselves?

Makes me feel insane. Story changes every few days. Like, love, friends only, EA but not attraction, no sexual tension/desire etc, in love, it was mutual," how would I know what she felt" blah blah blah.
Use common sense! If someone had a "thing" for me at work, I would figure it out pretty quick especially if they gave me tons of attention for almost TWO YEARS.
Can't make p his minds or more likely, just refuses to admit the truth.
Thanks for letting me let off steam.

I’m sorry you are struggling with the post affair drama but we welcome you to SI.

You will find some great info in the Healing Library here at Surviving Infidelity (SI).

There is a book by Linda MacDonald called How to Help Your Spouse Heal from Your Affair. Highly recommended for the cheater.

In trying to get answers and understand the "why" of the affair - this is where betrayed spouses or partners have the most difficulty in dealing with the situation.

The cheaters often continue to lie. Whether by habit or out of fear that betrayed will kick them out or whatever the reason is, they lie by omission or just outright lie by hiding the truth.

In my opinion, that is one of the reasons many marriages or relationships don’t survive an affair. It’s not the cheating but the behavior by the cheater after discovery (Dday) of the affair that often leads to a D or end of the relationship.

Unfortunately you cannot make someone be 100% truthful. But you can try to explain the continued damage being done by the lying. If the person cares they may change and start to realize that continued lying is not going to work.

If they don’t care and continue to lie, then reconciliation will be that much harder to achieve because the trust may be compromised or permanently damaged.

[This message edited by The1stWife at 9:00 PM, Saturday, August 9th]

Trickle truths are probably lies. Cheaters inherently struggle to tell the truth or the whole truth. It’s their mechanism of self preservation.

18 years ago it came out that my WS (other half as were not married), had had a (singular) ONS. The manner in which she did it was more shocking than I can bring myself to type what happened (I will at some point when I feel confident and composed enough). But in the belief it was a one off, drunken mistake I tried to work through the devastation, but the one condition was that she told me everything. In the meantime my mind raked over events of previous years when her implausible excuses for coming home late or not at all gave rise to suspicion. So she admitted to two more (three in total) ONS’s in the preceding 5 years.

But the details of all 3 were so vague that it nagged away at me for years, and whenever I probed she’d get defensive and conveniently couldn’t remember. Then over time the little details that she did reveal became inconsistent. E.g the first one she told me, in the aftermath, that she had brought him back to our (old) house. In recent years that changed to he came round, made his own way there and left after a few hours (I believe, with some evidence, that he stayed overnight while I was away).

That doubt though drives me absolutely mental, and finding the truth becomes an obsession that’s now gone on 18 years. That obsession has ruined my life. The conclusion I’ve come to after 28 years together, 18 years and 2 kids since D Day, is that I’ll never know. Not knowing the truth has the same effect knowing you’ve been lied to. And so I can’t live in our relationship in a ‘lie’. My kids aren’t old enough for me to leave right now, but I must prepare an exit strategy for when the time comes.

Some WSes do come clean quickly. That is, they give what is essentially an outline and then fill it in as quickly as the BS wants and tell no lies of commission or omission.

I will say that there were things my W honestly forgot for months, but she volunteered the info as soon as he remembered. For example, we took an annual Thanksgiving trip to see my mom, and W took some greeting cards to send ow in 2010. In 2011, she found one in her suitcase, and she told me and asked what to do about it. Since the 2010 trip was traumatic, since she hadn't touched the suitcase since for any other trip, and since she volunteered the info, I treated it as a mistake, not TT.

About 13 or 14 months out, I got what I thought might be deal killer TT. W was shocked. She said the info was on her timeline, and it was. No TT. The info just hit me differently in early 2012 than it had in 2010.

Many fewer SIers say they got the truth immediately than say they got TT. I think the consensus - and it may be unanimous - is that TT is lying by omission at best.

*****

WGOI, I think most of us would get 'WSO' or 'WSo' for 'Wayward Significant Other'. You are not required to use that TLA, but it would save you key strokes, and I like to save keystrokes.

I also like "WP" (Wayward Partner) for those who aren't married.

JadedLady, I got trickle truthed for 10 months. And the final round, he did 3 disclosures over the span of 11 days. Each time, he would "that's everything." The third time, I burst out laughing when he said it. There was one more lie I busted him on about 15 months after dday, though it wasn't about his affairs. It made me angry anyway.

To add complexity, he started digging into his why's about a year after dday, and over the next 6-9 months, as he went further with therapy, his narrative kept evolving. Now to be fair, it can take a while to understand oneself, but what bothered me was that I would latch on to an explanation of why he had the affair, and then 2 months later, he would come to me with a very different explanation. It wasn't lying, but his changing narratives kept demolishing any fragile trust that I'd rebuilt.

I agree with The1stWife - how they behave after dday has a huge impact on whether the relationship survives the infidelity.

Luckily that wasn't a problem I had to deal with for the most part.

There was a little bit of it, but it was very short lived.

However I did have to deal with continued contact with AP off and on for 6 weeks. As well as stubborn resistance to anything I said I needed her to do for nearly ten months. Actually that attitude still rears its ugly head periodically.

Also DARVO, and blaming me for everything. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯