@Unhinged I admit that I might have been a little defensive when Evio said "It sounds like you feel this way..." BUT, like I said, I have had this conversation before on multiple different forums and it ALWAYS goes the same way. She may not initially have done so, but she and other users later doubled down on insisting they know I way I feel better than me, as I predicted they would.
I'll explain the difference, again, between feeling respect/love for your partner,
demonstrating respect/love for your partner in your behavior,
and whether or not you choose to accept your partner's behavior when they're supposed to make you feel loved/respected.
Sometimes we may love/respect someone and still behave selfishly, in ways that are unloving/disrespectful to them. When our feelings toward someone are incongruous with our behaviors, that is what causes us to feel guilt over them. I'll give you a hypothetical that isn't related to infidelity:
Let's say you're a 13 yo in school, and you have this math teacher you absolutely adore. You think he's brilliant, he really cares about his students, he's an amazing educator... You hold him in very high regard and you respect him. You want his day to go well, you want him to be happy teaching at this school, you want nothing but good things for him... Well, one day, you catch wind of other kids in your class planning to play a prank on this teacher. He's really afraid of snakes, so they want to put a rubber snake on his desk while his back is turned. They ask you to help distract them so they can place it there, and you do not want to. Again, you respect this teacher, and you don't want to scare him or ruin his day or for him to have bad experiences while teaching at this school. You say no. BUT. These kids are persistent. They tell you, "Come on! It's just a prank. It'll be funny. Don't be such a stick in the mud... If you don't help us pull this off, you'll be the least liked kid in school. Everyone will know you're a fun-sucker."
You still don't want to help pull the prank, but you're afraid of becoming a social outcast. So you sigh and raise your hand, and volunteer to complete a problem on the whiteboard in front of the class. You pretend to struggle, sweating nervously, and ask the teacher for an explanation. While he turns to help you, the other students put the rubber snake on his desk. When he turns around, he sees it, screams like a little girl, and runs out of the room, absolutely terrified. The whole class is laughing uproariously, and the other kids are high-fiving you and clapping you on the back, and that feels good in the moment... but you feel bad, at the same time. But when the teacher comes back, he's embarrassed and angry. For the rest of the week, he's not his usual self. He's less enthusiastic, and more wary, doesn't joke around with anybody or go out of his way to help students like he used to, and you can tell this is his least favorite class of the day. He feels disrespected.
You feel so guilty in participating in this prank. You wish you would have acted differently-- maybe you should have warned him, instead, or at least tried harder to dissuade the other students from pranking him. That's what a student who respects their teacher would do right...? Except, you do feel respect for him. You felt it for him prior to the prank, you feel it for him afterwards, you even felt it during... But you still behaved disrespectfully. Why? Because there was a competing motive at play then which won out: the desire to fit in and be well like by your peers, and the fear of ostracism.
Back to infidelity... I felt respect for my husband before, during, and now, after the affair. I love him, I admire him, I think he's too amazing for words. I want the best for him and for him to be happy in life. I want to treat him well. I felt all those things even as I was making the wrong choices that led to me having an affair, and felt them while I was having the affair, even though my behaviors were extremely disrespectful towards him, and he certainly feels disrespected by them . But there were those competing motives (in my case, unmet needs) which resulted in me behaving selfishly, and incongruously with the respect I felt (and still feel) for him.
{side note: the argument "You cannot simultaneously respect and disrespect someone" is an invalid one. This is a failure of the English language to demarcate between "respect" that is felt (and represented in the language as a verb) and "respect" that is demonstrated in behavior (which is also represented as a verb.) It is very much possible to simultaneously feel respect for someone, but behave disrespectfully towards them, and in effect, cause them to feel disrespect by you.}
I spoke with my H about this concept (because he saw immediately when he got home from work yesterday that I was NOT okay after this online interaction), and while he said it was a difficult concept to grasp, he still understood it. And I just feel like if he, the person I disrespected and hurt so badly, can grasp that... Why can't strangers on the internet grasp it? And I can't help but presume that it's because you don't want to grasp it, that you're not listening to the things I'm saying (and there is tons of evidence for that!), maybe because you presume yourselves to be "experts" on infidelity and wayward thoughts and feelings, and because I am a WS, that I must think and feel the same way... Therefore it seems perfectly reasonable to you to assume that you know how I feel better than I do, and that you're speaking the "hard truth" and I'm just not willing to hear it EVEN THOUGH I'm telling you, over and over, "No, that's not how I feel. This doesn't apply to me."
Like I said, it goes the same way every time. I say "I acted this way, but I felt this way," and someone else replies, "You obviously don't feel that way, or else you would have acted this way." And again, that's very triggering for me, because it is gaslighting to insist you know the way someone feels better than they do. You do not. The only thing you know is how you feel about your own partners, how you behave towards them, and how you would (and do) feel when your partners behave certain ways towards you.
What I was asking for was simply that you listen to what I say my own thoughts are, just believe me, instead of expecting me to perform the "mental gymnastics" and make all the excuses for my infidelity that other WS may have done. I AM NOT THEM. I AM NOT DOING THOSE THINGS.
I honestly cannot comprehend why I even bother, because I know exactly what the response to this will be. I have asked the moderators to delete this thread, as it's ruining my mental health to be treated this way. We'll see what happens, I guess.
