There is nothing wrong with stepping back and sorting before acting. I actually respect the fact that you recognize that you are not ready to talk to your husband either yet. Acting on impulse tends to bring on more grief and regrets.

You will get a variety of responses. But each response you get is based on someone elses experience and how they themselves feel about what you are faced with. No one knows you or your husband and some may not have children either.

Recently I watched a movie based on a true story about a woman who got into a car accident with her husband and sustained a brain injury. As a result it caused her to forget many recent parts of her life, including meeting her husband, marrying him and her life with him. She felt very lost and moved home for a while and while she was living at home she learned that her father had cheated on her mother with her best friend. She felt horrified that her mother did not tell her about that. And she asked her mother why she stayed married to her father. Her mother responded with how at first she was going to leave the father even though the father ended the affair. The mother said that as she was thinking about leaving she looked at her home and all the pictures of her family and realized how important her family was to her. She thought about her husband and decided to stay and forgive him, she said that she decided not to destroy her relationship for the one thing he did wrong but to stay for all the things her husband did right. Everyone has their own "deal breaker" when it comes to relationships. It's very upsetting to learn a husband had an affair and now that I think about it, this happened when the girl was in her late teens maybe 20 so it's that mid life crisis thing.

When I heard this mother's response as to why she stayed it made me realize that sometimes people really do mess up, and yet how many things did that person do right? Well, IMHO, that's something YOU have to decide as after all you had a very long relationship with your husband. Thirty-three years is a very long time with someone. I am not going to tell you to make an impulsive decision based on how I might feel, or what my deal breaker is. While some do end their relationships, others work past it and stay together. Perhaps, what they make their decision on is not just that one wrong thing, but many of the right things they shared together. Well, where you are at right now is not in that place yet where you can see that perhaps, but, I think it's partly there. I think the hard part is facing something you never expected to face and it's very common to feel what you are feeling and even not know what to do about it. Oh, I could feed your negative emotions and anger, but that's only going to feed the part that may act on impulse vrs being smart and wise despite the emotional challenge you are experiencing.

We go through things together in a marriage/long term relationship, but we also go through things separately as well. You experience things many women experience and your husband experiences things many men go through too. Well, the woman married to that bus driver I talked about in your other thread I think, never imagined what it really was like to be her husband having to drive that same route day in and day out. She had her own day in and day out routine. Well, people can be together in a routine and yet also be apart in ways they don't realize. A couple can actually drift apart not realizing it and get lonely. They are together, but not really together.

So your husband strayed from you, but did you do that too? No, I don't mean by interacting with a different person and developing a realtionship that may be filling something abscent. I mean more of contributing to creating whatever grew to be abscent in the first place. That tends to be felt when something like this happens and the wife says, you know come to think about it I have not been all that happy myself. You can act on anger and shock, but it's also a time to sit and think about your own happiness when it comes to your relationship. Truth is, people sometimes do grow apart, are not that happy but don't really pay attention the way they should.