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"Years and years ago, after I first discovered that Peter had been unfaithful, we made the decision (or should I say, I made the decision and he nodded enthusiastically with his fingers crossed behind his back) to try to work it out. After all, we were about to become parents, we had sixteen years of history together (nine of it married) and I felt like we owed it to our daughter to try. I had told only a few close friends, and they all wondered the same thing: How can you ever trust him again? And the answer is, after a betrayal like that, you really don&amp;#039;t. If he does all the right things, if his actions support his words, some of the trust comes back but you&amp;#039;ll never have the blind faith in your spouse that you had once. Never. I&amp;#039;m sure my friends thought I spent the following years waiting for the other shoe to drop, but I realized early on in the process that I couldn&amp;#039;t live like that. So I learned to trust who I really needed to trust all along: me. I knew that if he tried to do this again, I&amp;#039;d figure it out. I was a lot smarter than he realized, and he was a lot more careless than he thought. I knew that if he didn&amp;#039;t show me the respect he was promising me, I would leave. I wasn&amp;#039;t staying for the sake of staying. I was staying because I thought we could change some of the things that were causing issues between us. I trusted myself to stay true to what and who I wanted to be, and I held to that. And of course, he went right back to who he used to be and found another girlfriend and I figured it out and that was that. And now as we finalize all this divorce mediation, I&amp;#039;m planning for every single possible scenario that I can think of and I know it irks Peter in the extreme, but the truth is I don&amp;#039;t - can&amp;#039;t - trust him. I don&amp;#039;t think he&amp;#039;ll ever try to fight me for custody. I don&amp;#039;t think he&amp;#039;ll back out on paying his share for college expenses for Anna. I don&amp;#039;t think he&amp;#039;ll turn his back on my son if he needs assistance later in life. I honestly can&amp;#039;t imagine Peter doing any of that. But I also have a long, long list of things I never thought he&amp;#039;d do that he did. I can&amp;#039;t trust him. But I can trust me to know how to deal with him if it all goes south.  How long did it take you to learn not to put your trust in your ex? Was it as freeing for you as it was for me to realize how useless that was? [Follow Ellie on Facebook and Twitter] "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.womansday.com/relationships/dating-marriage/a48622/knowing-who-to-trust/>