u/Jumpy-Birthday461

I have gone to weekly therapy since the night my ex-husband left me for his affair partner almost 19 months ago. The other woman ensured that I was not allowed to meet my beloved step son, or MIL. I miss them all even though MIL and ex-husband completely replaced me within days. On her last call MIL’s voice was breaking saying that she has to chose her grandson over me and that I wasn’t “blood family”

I have struggled the past 19 months to heal from this. I have an excellent job, an excellent apartment, a wonderful emotional support animal, a wonderful therapist & PCP who have held my hand through this. I have been told that for many people after a major betrayal or abandonment for an affair partner, the first year is pure survival and disbelief.

The second year feels better than the first in terms of much lesser raw pain … I’m also putting myself through college now. I hope to become a physician one day and this is the first hope I’ve experienced since the night he left. I wake up each morning at 3am and put in 4 hours of pure hard work until I go to my job. I return around 5pm and put in another hour of studying. Just several months ago, I was not capable of this. Now I’ve been doing it consistently for over a month . I know I will make it .

Some days though, I hurt like no time passed. Yesterday was my beloved ex-husband’s birthday and I got a migraine. I grieved and couldn’t go to work because of how much I missed him. Other days I’m so much more accepting, almost bewildered that over a year and a half have passed. I marvel at my peace, my independence and my ability to work hard. I still do remember him, strange as it sounds. I still do love him, I still do grieve for him, I still wish things were different, I am trying to create a new identity by putting myself through college. I still wish that the homewrecker had never happened to us.

Many therapists and friends who experienced infidelity have mentioned that it is only around the 3–5 year mark when the grief of infidelity completely lifts. Maybe true love will find me. But today, I’m at the 1.5 year ish mark and I am single. Mistrustful. Grieving. Cherishing my own little independent life in my own little apartment. In the same breath missing my silly goose husband. Wanting to kiss his forehead. Wanting to hug him again. Reminding myself that he is with the affair partner that he chose over our marriage.

Honestly, if any betrayed spouses are wondering how long it takes to heal. I can tell you that my heart is still heavy and I am completely unable to trust the words of any man in my life at the 1.5 yr mark. Hopefully I will heal but as of right now, healing hasn’t come . Love hasn’t visited again. My heart feels heavy at what he did - and how he did it . If only he had respectfully divorced me instead of monkey branching to the other woman and discarding me overnight. Yeah 1.5 years later and still it hurts .

Karma arrived in one little installment for my wayward ex husband just a year later.
He cheated and chose the other woman in October 2024. I moved out and filed for divorce immediately.
Today, 1.5 years later, I found out that the house we used to live in together - the house we rented from his mother - was sold.
And of all people, it was sold to the one cousin whom he hates.
That house was never just a house to them. I understood that almost immediately when I moved in. It was sacred to my ex and his mother.
That house held his whole childhood. His mother and father built it together from the ground up.
They moved in as a young family and raised two little boys there. Then when my ex was 10 and his brother was 8, their father was killed in a car accident. So that house held both the happiest years of their family and the worst loss of their lives. It held their dad. It held his memory. The basement was still full of his tools, untouched, left almost exactly as they had been the day he died. My ex had told me many times that he never wanted that house sold. He wanted to live in it. He wanted his son to live in it after him. He wanted that physical connection to his father and his childhood to remain intact.
The plan had always been that I would eventually buy it from her so it could stay in the family, so we could live there as long as we wanted, and one day leave it to his little son, whom I loved deeply and still love deeply. His mother is retired, and for years I paid the taxes and other bills tied to that house. So when he blew up our marriage for another woman, and I was no longer there paying those expenses, they clearly could not keep up with the taxes, solar, heat, and everything else. The house they were emotionally attached to, the house they wanted to keep forever, became unaffordable. And they lost it within a year.
To a cousin who my ex despises thoroughly.
It tells me that everyone lost something because of his affair. Not just me. His mother lost every last memory of her beloved husband, including his little work area & tools that nobody had touched in 26 years. His little son lost grandpas house that I absolutely would have gifted to him.
The saddest part is that I never would have let my ex husband lose that home for anything. I knew how much that would break his heart - and I would have sacrificed whatever I had to allow him to keep the house. So I feel sad for him today.
Maybe that sounds irrational. The first installment of karma has arrived. Karma truly is a bitch.