You're thinking deep thoughts, wow. Which inspired deep thoughts of my own, not neccessarily the same as yours, so bear with me, I suppose.
I mean, I saw sadness in my husband's eyes for over a year before he ultimately strayed. There are no words that might truly convey the fear I endured during that time, fear for him, fear he was lost and confused and I simply could not save him from it. I would beg him to talk to someone, anyone, just get some help. But this was years before admitting to something as ugly as Post Traumatic Stress was really "done" by tough, capable soldiers. No, they "sucked it up" and then "drove on", so he would insist, insist, insist that he was okay, he was fine, he was all right. One time he actually looked at me, angrily, and said, "My only problem is you constantly asking me about my problems!"
But I knew he was hurting. I could see it, in his eyes. He was so completely lost. He wasn't sleeping and when he did manage to fall asleep he would wake up with nightmares. He would rage, throwing things across the room at the slightest provocation. He was critical and caustic alot of the time. He was distant, far apart from me even when we sat there together in the same room. I often felt I just couldn't reach him, as if I wasn't even there nor even noticed let alone appreciated. About a year ago, I got ahold of a movie we use to emphasize PTSD to soldiers coming home from the war and there's a scene that depicts a wife asking her soldier what it is she can do, her hands reaching out to him, and he doesn't even look at her, just yells out how he doesn't need anything and "leave me alone", and every time I show that movie to the Joes my eyes turn glassy with unshed tears, because I can remember being that wife.
My husband's affair was like a final, devastating blow to a year's worth of pain and upset. It almost broke me completely. I remember raging at him, on D-Day, how "damn unfair is it, I stood by you through all the crap, and this is how you treat me, this is how you respond, my god". I felt so utterly demoralized through my betrayal, so dang broken. It was beyond impossible for me to really, truly empathize with his pain in that immediate, yes. Because I had been hurting, too, for a long long time. I had struggled with the loneliness and the fear. The sadness in my husband's eyes hadn't been the only sadness our marriage suffered, anyway. I certainly wasn't happy while my husband was so sad. To be betrayed after all of that, after standing by and hurting for so long a time, I was just utterly broken-up inside. I almost totally withdrew from him, like wrapping my heart up into a load of gauze he couldn't cut his way through, beyond afraid of being hurt even a little bit more. I felt if even once more I was treated that badly, I would just shatter into a million pieces and be no more, so I acted much of the time like I was in some sort of wild self-protective mode. A constant "Red Alert", where one wrong move could result in a wild flailing of defensive strike back's so that we ended up on a terribly uncomfortable and fine fine line all of the time.
Logically and consciously I knew he was hurting, mind you. I always understood that. I even appreciated so much of his behavior was, itself, a sort of strike back against the pain he was feeling, so that I was just caught up in a kind of cross-fire or tornado of devastation. It wasn't he didn't care about me, nor even that he didn't want me. It's just he was that lost, that frustrated, so there was no base, no foundation, and we were caught up in a huge maelstrom of pain and upset. I logically understood all of that. I just couldn't change it, not when I was in that much pain. I was hurting too much, had nothing to cling to or count on. I depended, in fact, on nothing more tremendous than hope -- hope that things would settle into a balance or peace once again at some point down the road. But the road stretched out in front of me and the end was so distant I too often felt angry and frustrated more than caring and loving.
Ultimately, I accepted it. I accepted those were my feelings and feelings change. No matter how long it took, I wouldn't feel that way forever. I just had to be patient, I just had to keep moving, I just couldn't give up. Eventually, I wasn't so bitter, so angry, and I was better able to reach out to him again. I discovered real forgiveness, a huge process that required an immense number of days and weeks and months. But it did come. When it did was when I was better able to soothe that sadness in his eyes. Which itself became a long long process. He had to forgive himself and that took longer a time than my own forgiveness required, anyway.
About a year before he deployed to Iraq -- which sent me into a tailspin of fearful anxiety we would suffer a similar travail, mind you -- he traveled north for some NCO training. I drove up there to retrieve him after he graduated, and we ended up discussing that first deployment of his, the one that sent him spiraling into depression. I admitted how scared I was he would struggle like that again through another deployment. And he looked over at me, reached out to stroke my cheek, and said to me, "You were the best and strongest wife any soldier could ever hope for and you will never know how much I regret hurting you the way I did..it will never happen again, I promise." He swore he would seek help, would talk to anyone and everyone he could talk to, even if he felt he was perfectly fine, if only I wouldn't be afraid. And when he came home from Iraq, that's precisely what he did, went down to the behavioral health folks and said how he needed to talk, just talk, only to be perfectly sure he was okay and all right, because, he said, "my wife needs to know I care that much for her." His eyes aren't so sad anymore. He says it's because of me, because I remained his homebase, his security blanket; I was the one he could count on, I didn't give up on him. I myself don't really care about all of that, I'm just glad that when I look into his eyes, I see gladness and pleasing again.
"I won’t be wronged. I won’t be insulted. I won’t be laid a-hand on. I don’t do these things to other people, and I require the same from them." -- John Wayne, "The Shootist", 1976
Love 
