My husband had an affair. Actually, make that several affairs.
D Day occurred as I was lying in a hospital bed by text message.
I was just starting to drift off into a hazy, Dilaudid induced sleep when a text came through on my phone from my husband. The text was not only sexual in nature, but pretty vulgar. Not at all the kind of text we would send to each other. Is this a joke, was my first thought. As I pushed the haze aside, (dammit he ruined a perfectly good Dilaudid buzz), it became clear that the text message was not meant for me. And so began our, at times reluctant and other times joyful, trudge to save our marriage.
I always have had mixed feelings about monogamy in relationships. I think I believe for some couples extramarital dalliances can work as long as both parties are participating in outside affairs and they are strictly for sex. There can be absolutely no emotional involvements at all. But I do know this could not work for me and I always assumed that if my partner was unfaithful, I would leave, no questions asked. So when I began to wade through the ten million emotions I was experiencing, why was it that confusion was the strongest emotion I was feeling? Should I leave him or should I stay and try to forgive him? Don’t strong, empowered women leave? They don’t put up with this kind of disrespect and humiliation. And forgiveness? I don’t think that’s possible. How will the movie reel of how I imagine his encounters stop playing in my head? But I loved my husband and he would verify this as well, we really did have a happy, fulfilling marriage. Up until that moment, we had the marriage that people envied. Boy were the haters gonna love this juicy bit of gossip.
Without getting too much into his psychology and reasons behind why he was unfaithful, I will say that he immediately confessed and immediately said he had a problem. Not a “yeah, yeah, they all say they have an addiction just to save their necks,” but something deeply disturbing to him. In fact weeks before D day he asked me what our mental health coverage was on our health insurance plan. He assured me from the start that he loved me and wanted to do whatever was necessary to save the marriage. He was definitely contrite and ashamed. On his own he made an appointment to see a therapist and he asked me to go to marriage counseling. I agreed, but I also decided that I didn’t have to make any decisions any time soon about leaving the marriage. I can just be still and take each day as it comes. I was way too emotional to think clearly about the logistics of leaving anyway and I felt pretty much in control of my homicidal urges toward him.
So we began our counseling sessions together. Our therapist explained that in order for our relationship to survive, he would have to be willing to offer full disclosure. Anything I wanted to know, he should be willing to answer truthfully. She did advise me to ask myself if the information I was asking would be helpful or harmful before I asked. I am very impulsive and when I want to know something, I need to know it and in hindsight there are some things I wish I didn’t know. Let’s just say there is a certain position we can no longer do with each other because I know too much. I also asked for names, which I do not regret. But maybe I do regret the public and nasty things I posted on the women’s Facebook page. I hate them, but I only hold them slightly to blame; he gets the rest of the blame. And he accepted that. He was completely, one hundred percent accountable for his actions. He always maintained that the affairs were because something was wrong with him, not me or us. The affairs were strictly sexual and there was no emotions or “dating” involved. Some of them were just flirtatious texts or IM messages that sometimes led to sex and sometimes didn’t. As angry and as hurt as I was, I did feel some relief that I wasn’t walking blindly through life thinking that I had a great marriage when my husband was miserable. I was also relieved that there was no way that I could have known as his trysts occurred only while I was working. There’s nothing worse than feeling like a chump.
Over the next several months, I was all over the place. One moment I was angry and disgusted by him. I would say the cruelest things I could think of to him, just so he could feel the hurt that I felt. Another moment I felt an overwhelming love for him, more than I ever felt for him before. Then the next, I was filled with a grief I would compare to the sadness of death, that would send me to bed to sleep all day. I also felt embarrassed and ashamed as if I committed the crime. Strangely, our sex life became pretty amazing. We always were pretty good in that department together. But now, we were at it every day, a couple times a day and it was super intense. I have since found out that this is not unusual when recovering from an affair. It’s called hysterical bonding. When trying to heal the extremely damaging effects of infidelity, one will often be “hysterically driven” to seek a tangible experience that will reclaim the bond between people, for example, husband and wife. His affairs occupied my mind all of my waking hours. All of my internet searches were about affairs;how to recover, why people have them, statistics, will they always cheat, etc. Frankly, I was getting sick of thinking about it, but I just couldn’t stop. And it was exhausting. I was so tired I would fall asleep at my desk during work. I lost twenty-five pounds and my husband was not allowed to leave the house except for work or if I was with him. I can’t believe he complied, but again, he was willing to do whatever it took to keep me in the relationship. I think if I would have told him to cut his nuts off and throw them in the Chesapeake, he would have. I broke down and cried uncontrollably in my gynecologist’s office when I went for STD testing. I couldn’t live like this any longer, I was unraveling and I was unhappy.
Then one day I was reading an internet article (there are five trillion blogs and message boards on infidelity, geesh!) from a man whose wife had a twelve year affair with a friend of his. She, like my husband, was full of shame and remorse. Something he said stuck in my brain and clicked with me. He said that almost immediately he turned to his wife and he told her he forgave her. Isn’t that part of loving someone? Of course one could say, if you love someone you wouldn’t cheat on them or cause them hurt. But if I’m honest, I can’t say that I haven’t intentionally been hurtful to my husband in our relationship and I haven’t lied to him. He’s always forgiven me and continued to love me. I’m very good at holding people to impossible standards and saying, “I would never…” or “If it were me, I would…” But at that moment, I realized that I loved a flawed man, but a flawed man that is always trying to be better. That’s all I can ask for and that is enough for me. So I told him that I forgave him. I don’t forgive the action, but I do forgive him for making the mistakes he made. He was grateful and continues to honor this act of forgiveness by working on his issues. Trust took a while, but we are in a good place with it. He continues to actively demonstrate reasons to keep my trust which is very important to our recovery. I don’t think about “if it happens again.” Although he insisted that I was not the cause of him straying, I still have responsibilities in the relationship. We both have always trusted each other that we would do our share of the heavy lifting when it came to providing the kind of life that we would like to have. We both show up for work every day, we stay fit and keep our house nice. But we were always moving quickly onto what’s next, never sitting still with each other. So today, we work hard to just stay very present in our relationship, which leaves little room for the fears of the future.
