Firstly, this is my second post here, and I am unsure of the protocols, etc. So, if this is the wrong place or whatever, I apologise in advance. My nightmare has been going on for four months now, and while I feel no closer to any kind of resolution, I just need to get it out there I guess. Also, its a long story (I guess they all are), so I apologise if this is a wall of text.
It starts differently to most peoples. Towards the beginning of 2010, I was incredibly stupid. I formed an emotional relationship with a girl online. I didn't really even realise what was going on until the light was shined on it, and it all came out on Valentines of 2011. I have no excuse. I was a fool, and a horrible person. I paid for my stupidity. My wife was devastated. The people that knew her response even suggested that she went too far, but I could never think that. I hated myself. She tore up wedding photos, was violent and destructive. It was horrible. I ended it right away, spent hours talking and answering every question she had, opened up my email and cancelled my facebook page.
For the next 6 months, I paid for my mistake in a big way. For the year after that, I did everything that I could to turn myself around, to show her that I was a good guy who did a bad thing. Then, at the end of 2011, she got a job offer to move abroad. We didn't really discuss it, but I wanted to support her career, and she wanted to move forwards. She moved to the other side of the world, with the view that I would sort out our home and join her. At that point, things were OK. They were not perfect, and the past did still come up some times, but we were moving on together.
The year and a half that we were apart was difficult. I visited her just a few months after she moved, for Christmas 2011 and New Year 2012. I returned home alone at the beginning of January, 2012. After that, things changed. Because of the past, Valentines had always been a difficult time for us, but 2012 was worse than normal. She suddenly became distant. I put it down to the gap between us. She withdrew a lot, refusing to call or talk to me some times, saying that there was no point talking about her day as I wouldn't understand. Around April 2012, I checked her email (we had access to each others after the issues) to find that she had created a second Skype account and not told me. I confronted her. She said that she did it to provoke me. I asked if there were any others. She said no. A few days later I found a third. She changed her email password to lock me out of it.
She never called me. I mean never. In the 18 months that we were apart, she didn't call me once. We would arrange to be on Skype at the same time, and she would answer my call (most of the time) but she never reached out. She came over in August 2012 for a visit, which was filled with shopping and criticising how I lived without her.
At the beginning of this year, I finally got a job and made plans to join her. In the middle of March, only a few days before signing my new work contract, a good friend of mine took me aside, and asked if I knew that my wife was having an affair. I was devastated. I guess that I knew deep down, but had managed to convince myself that it couldn't be that.
I confronted her. She didn't deny it. She said that it had started on Valentines 2012 and so had been going on for just over a year. I had no idea what to do. I don't remember much about this time. I do remember saying that we needed time without contact, so we could both work out what we wanted. I expected her to contact me after a few days to say that she wanted our marriage. That didn't happen.
After almost a week, I contacted her. I said that I wanted to work on us still, that I wanted my new job, but that she would have to end things with him right away. She agreed, and did so.
The following weeks were hell. She gave me access to her Skype accounts, which I closed. I already had access to her Facebook and I got her eMail access again. Looking at her email turned up a chat log from her mobile. It covered the first four months of their relationship. It destroyed me. It showed that she met him the day before Valentines, and that their sexual relationship started very quickly. It showed that she told her family about him, and they either supported her or stayed quiet. It showed that she lied when she said that she was 'busy' or 'visiting a friend'. It contained messages that I had been crying out for from her for the entire 18 months, that she had refused me and sent to him. It contained comments about their intimate life. Worst, it contained conversations that they had about me, about how she had been trying to be distant to dissuade me from moving over there, about how he had been in the apartment that she had got for us (and had my name on the rental contract) when I called, and about how they had worked together against me. Apparently, I was the last to know about it. Not only had she told my friend (who had told her to tell me, and pulled me aside to let me know when it was clear that this wouldn't happen before I signed a new work contract) and her family, but most of her friends and old colleagues from work knew. It also showed that she had told him that she had intended to start divorce procedings with me on her recent visit, but hadn't gone through with it.
For weeks I was a mess, not knowing what to do. In the end, I decided that I had to go through with my move. If I didn't, this event and this person would be responsible for destroying my marriage and most likely my career in a single shot.
Its now four months later. We live together, but we are apart. We stay in the same apartment that they shared, but we sleep separately. We don't fight, I don't have the energy or desire for this. We barely have any contact, but things are not terrible. We talk and laugh. We are good flatmates. Nothing more.
He is causing problems. He has tried to call her two or three times a week for the last two months or more. He has created a new Facebook page and filled it with pictures of them together and messages of love. She says that she has only answered one call that he made, yesterday, to shout at him about the Facebook pictures.
I have no idea what the future holds for me. I bounce between wanting to just make my marriage work, to wanting to move out and start with someone new, to finding someone for a temporary release just like she did. I have had no support, no companionship, no contact on any level with anyone in 18 months. I am alone in a foreign country, leaving my home and family and old job behind. My father was diagnosed with cancer a month ago. Its contained and his prospects are good (otherwise I probably would have never moved away, despite my parents wishes) but its not easy to leave that behind.
I feel under pressure to make a decision. I cant look at her without thinking about how totally she has betrayed me right now. She has not shown any remorse or regret about what she did. Even she admits that she probably should regret it more than she does. She says that she doesn't find me attractive at all right now. Maybe that's a product of living apart for 18 months. Maybe that's a sign that there is nothing worth saving any more. She isn't proud of what she did. I can see this. She appears to have cut off all contact with him, aside from the recent event over the photos. She makes all the right moves, we watch movies together, eat and cook together, talk about our day together. But, there is a distance there that feels more than the physical gap we had from different countries. I cant move past what she has done, the fact that it took less than 2 months for our 11 year relationship to be worthless, that she built a new life with another guy, met his family, took trips with him, lived together, worked against me and told her family about him. I have a constant battle every day, between my need for some kind of human support, emotional and physical, and my feelings of distrust and betrayal and the pain. I feel like if I don't make some kind of a decision soon, people will assume that I have made one to stay with her (they may even have assumed that already). But, I have no-where else to go, and I know no-one else here. I just have no idea what I want right now. I cant see a time ever in the future that I will trust her again, knowing that we could be two months away from divorce at any time (even though she says that it wont happen again and she has lost the anger that she felt at my foolishness in the past). Part of me wants so much to start again with someone new. The other part knows that this is a romantic vision and that its not that easy (and I don't meet people easily in the first place) and that I shouldn't just give up on a marriage like this after fighting so hard for so long just to be in the same country.
She seems in no hurry to reconnect. She doesn't try to push any physical side, doesn't apologise and hasn't even really told me that she even wants this marriage.
I have no clue what to do, and so I try to get through one day at a time, focussing on my new job. I rationalise it by saying that either I will meet someone new first, or she will try to patch things up. I don't know which of those I hope will happen. I held our relationship together for years. I have told her that I wont do that any more, and if she doesn't work on it, it will die. But, I have no idea what I expect of her. Whatever she does, it cannot be enough to make up for what she did. So, how can I expect her realistically to make that effort?
[This message edited by Ixion at 12:06 PM, July 16th (Tuesday)]
