Hello Everyone. My wife and I have been married for 6 years. We have a 3 year-old daughter whom we both love dearly.
A few days ago, I discovered that she was having an affair with a fellow graduate student at school. A little background:
About a month ago, my wife came to me suggesting that we go into couples counseling. This was not a completely surprising suggestion since we had been having some ongoing clashes that we were having some trouble getting past, but if you had asked me at the time, I would have said that our marriage was mostly functional and happy, but beleaguered by a handful of ongoing conflicts and problems: in other words, a normal marriage. However, it came out in the course of the conversation that she was having serious doubts about our marriage and our future together. I won’t give many details about the problems she raised, but let’s just say that it’s a familiar story of a husband cruising through marriage while his wife repeatedly feels that her emotional needs are not being met. Many of the problems she brought up were legitimate (while some were exaggerated or distorted), and when I began to see just how badly I had managed to hurt her by my actions, I was devastated, and of course with all of this language about the marriage not working out, I was terrified. After a few angry and heated conversations, I came to her on my hands and knees promising to change. I knew deep down that our problems could not possibly be all my fault, but I also knew that I wouldn’t get anywhere by finger pointing. I had already begun to push her further away when I lashed out at her during our initial conversations, and I couldn’t risk pushing her away any more. I had to focus on my problems and my faults and focus on giving up my own need for vindication in order to love her. Basic marriage 101 things that I learned too late.
So we had begun to go to counseling, and it became apparent that she was not so much interested in working out our problems in counseling to improve our marriage as she was in negotiating the end of the relationship. So I was desperately trying to be given the chance to change and show that I could change, but in many respects it seemed like she had already given upon me, too emotionally wounded and drained to even give it time to play out. She has been pushing for a separation, which I believe is simply a stepping-stone to divorce for her.
This whole time, I had been laboring under the assumption that, with some exceptions that I hoped would come out in therapy, my wife was primarily the wronged party. I was saddled with horrible feelings of guilt and inadequacy, and was terrified of the possibility that I might not be even given the chance to make things right when I knew in my heart and mind that our problems were not insurmountable.
That is when I learned about the affair. As is often the case, I learned about it through perhaps morally questionable means, snooping around in her e-mail account. It was a breach of trust, but when I confronted her about it, she was less upset about it than I thought she would be. She seemed more upset that she hadn’t managed to be more discreet (in other words, she seem like she was sorry that she got caught). She came clean. She told me what, I think, was everything: how she had met the guy at a party five months ago, hit it off and several months later reconnected. The scumbag took her back to his apartment and kissed her. She liked it, and the continued seeing each other. He knew that she was married, and that she had a kid and was okay with that. Hearing all of this, I somehow managed to remain calm, though every second of the revelation was like having a hot knife twisted in my gut. It was made worse by the fact that I heard little or no remorse in her voice. Her confession was almost starry-eyed. Later, she told me, she discovered that, in a crazy coincidence, a friend of hers in her book club had also begun seeing the same man. Needless to say, both of them were shocked and hurt. My wife’s confrontation with the guy revealed what, according to her, was a “miscommunication about exclusivity.” Apparently the scoundrel figured that since he was already seeing a married woman, the normal rules of exclusivity probably didn’t apply. And astoundingly, my wife seemed to accept that, and they agreed to have an “exclusive” relationship from that point out. My wife’s friend, however, was not so understanding, and had the thought that you are probably all having right now, which was to question how she could keep on seeing someone who had cheated on her! The language was, of course, intensely ironic, and I kept on wondering how it was in all of this that no one brought up that the real problem was the fact that she was cheating on her husband! They all seemed to accept my wife’s infidelity, which mad me suspect that I had been painted in their eyes as a real monster, a terrible husband somehow not deserving of fidelity. It felt like I was living in some terrible alternate universe, where not only had my wife turned against me, but everyone she knew had as well.
Having learned some of this through reading her e-mails, I had been able to steel myself somewhat for this conversation. I knew that the wrong response would be to immediately try to use this information as ammunition against her, in order to turn the entire situation around and make her the villain. Even if I was justified in that, I knew that it wouldn’t help, and she’d probably feel like there was no way to come back from this and quit on the spot. I wanted to shout at her, revile her, curse her for her betrayal. Nearly every part of me wanted to walk out on her right then and there, but a small part of me clung to the possibility that even this could possibly be overcome, and I focused in on it. For my daughter, if no one else, I thought to myself. So instead of cursing her, I told her that I loved her, and that even this did not change my resolve to save our marriage. She did seem surprised at this. She asked how I could love her after she cheated on me. Perhaps if we were in a movie, I would have heard those words and thought that my devotion had warmed her heart, but I don’t believe that was the case. She said that she thought that I was crazy for loving her, and I think she meant it just like that. She reaffirmed to me that she did not love me, and wanted a separation.
I wanted to tell her how she was not only wrong, but stupid for having an affair, because, after all, what kind of person fools around with another man’s wife aside from a dirty rotten scoundrel? But whenever I hinted at my opinion of her lover, she rebuffed me, saying that I had no right to judge his character without knowing him. What a strange situation to be in, but I had to acknowledge, painful though it was, that at the moment, she had a stronger emotional connection to him than she did to me, and that this reaction, though terrible and misguided, was natural. I told her what I was sure she already knew, that I didn’t want her to see him anymore. She told me she couldn’t give any guarantees.
The next morning, my wife called me and told me that she had broken off the affair. She revealed that she had told him that they needed to cut off their romantic relationship so that she could “Focus on getting out of her marriage.” I have no idea what this means, whether she is planning on getting back together with him after we separate, or what. It’s certainly not the reason I wanted to hear for her ending the affair! She seems more determined than ever to get out.
I haven’t forgiven her, and I don’t trust her, and I don’t even respect her anymore. I do love her, but loving her feels more like a torturous exertion of willpower than a warm feeling of affection, and I do it because of the fool’s hope that our love for one another can come back and be rebuilt, that trust can be restored over time, and we can somehow get over this horrible, horrible betrayal. Frankly, I don’t even know how I am holding on to this hope, because I feel like I’m emotionally at the end of my rope. I feel like a walking dead man, a corpse with no blood running through his veins who is somehow still walking, still going on. I am trying desperately to save my family, to save for our daughter a future in a loving household. I fear that I still won’t be given the chance. I’m not sure how much longer I can go on like this.
I am still not sure if my wife feels sorry for her affair. It sounded to me like she felt that it was largely justified due to the way I had treated her. And while I do have to accept responsibility for my failings as a husband, I refuse to accept responsibility for her adultery.
The emotional toll has been severe. I have never felt a pain this intense, this terrible, in my life before. Daily functioning takes a huge amount of energy that I don’t have. I want to just curl up in a ball and grieve, but every day I still have to get up and put on a happy face for my daughter and play with her and continue to raise her. I feel trapped and just want to scream. And the worst part is that I know that this is only the beginning. If somehow, my wife is convinced to try to work it out (and she seems impossible to convince), we have a long and torturous road ahead of us. If she refuses to get off of the path to separation and divorce, then it is going to be even worse. It feels like every time I feel like I couldn’t possibly be hurting more than I already am, something comes along that hurts even more.
She has already started looking at apartments for moving out. I have basically until July first before she’s gone. She says that she wants us to agree to a separation with joint custody, which gives me a little bit of leverage since she’ll probably want to avoid making it a legal battle, which means she will need to compromise with me, but apart from that, I am completely powerless. I feel like I have no choice but to try to make this work because the consequences of giving up are too terrible for me to contemplate, especially for our daughter, but at this point pessimism and despair are beginning to sink in. For the past month I have been trying, as much as my wife will let me (which isn’t much) to live out the kind of behavior that I should have been exhibiting for years, but between my wife’s continual emotional coldness to these efforts and the discovery of the affair, I am finding myself with less energy and drive for this every day. I’m not sure what to do. I am fairly certain that if I give up without continuing to try until the bitter end, I will have to live with regrets for the rest of my life, forever wondering whether it could have been better, whether we could have had our “happily ever after,” whether our daughter could have grown up in a complete and loving family. I feel like I know what I have to do, but I don’t know how, and I don’t know if I can, and perhaps most crushingly, I don’t know if it will make a difference.
I argued to her that we had every reason to at least try, and no reason not to. If we gave it a few months and it didn’t change her mind, then we’d just be back where we started, but if things did get better, then we could have years of happiness ahead of us, and we would be able to say that we delivered to our daughter a childhood in a whole and happy family. The benefits of trying outweigh the drawbacks spectacularly. She says that the downside is having to live with me for any further amount of time, which is apparently torture enough that she’s not willing to do it. I understand this to a certain extent because I understand probably even better than she does at this point what it’s like to be emotionally strung out and at the end of your rope with someone who has hurt you, but I still argued that this was a small price to pay for the good that could come.
Ultimately this did not move her, but she said that she would consider a month-long trial period leading up to her moving out, and that she’d take the weekend to think about it. I’m not hopeful that she’ll decide to do it, and if she does, my fear is that she’ll simply check it off of her list and leave me anyway, having the salve of being able to say she tried, when in reality both of us know that a month isn’t nearly enough. And what’s more, I fear that after putting myself on the line for another month, it will hurt even more when it still fails in the end. Still, it’s all I have.
And so after being betrayed, somehow I’m still the one with his face in the dirt begging to be given a second chance. How did this happen? What do I do?
