I guess I’ll start at the beginning.
I’ve been married to my wife for 6 years. I have been in the military for 11 years, with multiple deployments. We’ve had a very stressful life together, but I feel that we had a very loving and caring relationship. During our marriage, I have been blessed with 3 girls who are the light of my life. Unfortunately our second child passed away from SIDS at the age of 2 months. That was almost a deal breaker for my (and her) sanity. My wife went through very serious depression and anxiety, alcoholism and substance abuse, as well as cutting episodes. She has been hospitalized for suicidal ideations 3 times. My wife was sexually abused and neglected as a child, and as a result she has been diagnosed with borderline-personality disorder as an adult. During the darkest days of her life, I have literally saved her life more times than I care to remember. I was there for her emotionally and physically as much as I could. Fast forward a year or so and she made a 180 degree turn-around. An intensive treatment of therapy, medication and electro-convulsive treatment and she seemed to be a whole new woman.
Now the affair. About a month ago, I came home from work early one night. I work the night shift, and the boss let me go home for some reason. I came back to the house, and noticed my wife was sleeping. Oh well. I went downstairs and got on the computer. I noticed her email was pulled up, and there was the sent-message window open. Curiosity got the best of me, so I clicked on it. I found out she sent an email love letter (that she wrote me a few years back), to a married navy neighbor. I confronted her about it, and she just said that it was no big deal; he just wanted some tips on how to write love letters to his wife. Of course, that didn’t satisfy my questions. I decided to leave it alone for a little while. She fell back to sleep while I kept tossing and turning. Because I couldn’t sleep, I went back down stairs and found her phone. I picked it up and started searching everywhere for any evidence of infidelity. It was scrubbed clean, no texts calls or mobile conversations. I then looked on the "words with friends" page and found out several games she had played with this navy guy. It all looked innocent, until I pulled up the conversation section.
There it was. A very sexually explicit text conversation she had with him. I cannot write this all down, for fear of my own sanity at the moment. Let’s just say that she was telling him about her wanting me to be sexually humiliated by HIM, amongst other of his sexual acts with her. In that conversation I found out that they indeed have a physical sexual affair, not just a flirtatious conversation. Words cannot describe the level of disgust, betrayal and sickness I felt. It felt like I swallowed broken glass. My entire world was torn apart. The love of my life, the one person whom I felt so emotionally connected to betrayed me and degraded me. She fantasized about me being degraded in such a way as to treat me less than human.
My wife, the one girl in this life that I felt 100% connected to, treated me like nothing more than a paycheck and babysitter. I saved her life time and time again; I had so much emotional investment in her that this ripped my guts out. I thought I knew her, her upbringing and her mental health issues made me work overtime in our entire marriage... just to let me know that I was the only one for her. She constantly told me over the course of our relationship that she would never leave me. That she couldn’t leave the only good person in her life. And now she acted like she never meant any of that.
I couldn’t sleep for 3 days. I didn’t eat a single thing in about 5. I got drunk almost every night to cope with the pain. I punched doors and the refrigerator, constantly. I was shaky. My entire world was torn apart and shit on by my best friend, my companion, my wife. None of it made sense! I knew beyond a shadow of doubt that this girl was made for me by God. I 100% believed that I knew her better than anyone else in her life. She would never cheat on me, she was the most loyal loving person I have ever me, and it was absurd to think it could even THINK about doing this. It wasn’t possible, not on an emotional, spiritual and mental level. At all.
What do you do when your entire belief system crumbles? Reality was a joke now. Up was down, black was white, right was left. Nothing made sense anymore.
I lost all trust. I lost all faith in the righteousness of others. I sometimes feel like humanity is doomed from the start. If someone as perfect as my wife gives in so freely to whims, what’s the point of having virtues anymore? Am I the last sane man on earth? Why should I try to be a good man anymore? I have always strived to be the best father, husband, friend and lover I could possibly be, and look where it got me. Constantly shit on by others. Constantly taken advantage of. Now betrayed by the ones they hold so dear. They say nice guys finish last, but now I doubt they even finish at all.
Nice guys get fucked in the end. There is no point.
Fuck, that hurt.
Since I confronted her about everything, she broke down and reluctantly admitted to everything. When I say reluctantly, I mean to say that I had to use “verbal judo” to find the truth. As a trained military police interrogator, I knew how to get her to answer questions I had in such a way that made it extremely difficult to think of a “lie on the fly”. It was brutal, having to learn every sexual position, every fantasy, everything. In the average of three months that she was seeing him, she said she only had sex with him once. I find that very hard to believe, because of the nature of his and her conversations, and the fact that my wife has the tendency to mitigate any sort of damage she inflicted… even if it means lying again.
Probably the most confusing thing I had to deal with in all of this was a certain text I found of her’s. A few days after the confrontation, I found another text conversation she had with him. She was “attempting” to call it off with him, to explain that I knew. She stated that I backhanded her across the face when I found out, and she was scared of my anger. I find this very concerning, because I have never hit her in anger before in our entire life together, even during this cheating scandal. Why would she try to say to her lover that I had hit her? Was she purposely trying to get him to physically assault me, to come to her aid or something? Why would she fabricate such an evil lie? My father raised me very well. As a Lutheran minister, he taught me all of my virtues… that I should never hit a woman, no matter what the reasoning. Now here I am, being accused of this nonsense?! Later, I asked her why she would come up with such a lie. The only answer I received from her was “I don’t know…, I’m just a messed up person”. Not only is such an accusation fucked up, it is also dangerous. If the wrong people heard about her BS story, I could lose custody of my children, get hauled off to jail for battery or worse. She was unfaithful, and I was almost the one to lose everything.