(Re)Building the trust...

[Jane Bond]

Originally Posted by *Anya*

Trust has two meanings for me when we are talking monogamy. I fell in love wth my long-term ex and both of us agreed to monogamy. In retrospect, I think it was a more important value of mine, then hers. Then, out of the blue, my ex cheated. The sense of betrayal was so profound (no one had ever cheated on me-or that I had ever known about).

The first time she cheated was what you may be calling broken trust. Instead of breaking up, because I loved her and because I got a lot of tears and promises of "I'll never, ever do it again". I worked really hard on rebuilding that with her. I had a mantra of forgiveness in my brain 100 times a day.

Just as a tiny bit of trust was being rebuilt, she fucking did it again. Trust gone, never to be seen in regards to her again and it never will be again. We are now no more, 19 years of partnership and love down the drain.

Current partner made vow of faithfulness and I have total trust with her. Monogamy is just as an important value to her, as it is to me. If my trust were ever to shatter with her, there would be no rebuilding. The betrayal would be too deep.

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Anya, your summation was so easy to relate to my own situation.
I adored my wife, but her first cheating episode battered the trust, but not enough to make me want to leave her, because I loved her and chose to believe her promises that it was an isolated incident that would never occur again.
Still, that one betrayal and the lies she first told to deny it, continued to gnaw at my heart and abrade the trust.
Love may be the bricks of a relationship, but I have come to believe that loyalty and trust are the mortar that hold the bricks together.
Lies and betrayal from the first affair cast aspersions on her every word and deed after the affair was discovered. I hated feeling that way, but she seemed so much sneakier now.
I started suspecting her with each new muffled phone call, taken into the next room, text message she erased upon reading, and other behaviors that I never saw (or noticed) before.
Basically. I had cast myself in the role of Private Investigator, and I had lost my constant state of lust for her.
She resented my suspicion and started saying I was being paranoid. I bickered with her because it was hard not to throw her cheating back in her face as justification for my paranoia.

One day, I was cleaning our shared home office space, and I opened a bottom drawer in her desk to store some random papers of hers. I spied a little packet of baby blue envelopes, rubber banded together and addressed to her workplace address.
Hell yes I opened them, and discovered the whore she was cheating with was still in touch, and still very attached to my wife. When the letters mentioned how lovely recent trysts had been (like nooners at chic local hotels) I folded them up and replaced them in their envelopes.
I carried them upstairs to our bedroom and arranged them neatly under her pilllow. I was reading in bed that night when she came in and got in bed.
She heard the crisp paper envelopes rustling when she laid her head down, and immediately found the collection.
She looked at me with her best sheepish expression and I said, "This isn't baseball where you get three strikes. Get your shit out of the house tomorrow and have your lawyer call mine. And get out of my bed, sleep in the guest room or the couch, or go to your girlfriend's studio apartment and sleep on her futon. I don't care where you sleep as long as it's not with me."
I think once the trust is broken through infidelity, it's only a matter of time before we discover that cheaters lie and liars cheat and this wasn't the first whore and wouldn't be the last.
We vowed before God to be faithful and loyal to each other. She lied to God and me--I chose an insincere egomaniac who was more into the fancy wedding, the dress and the 2 karat rock than she was ever into me.