I never thought I would find myself here.
Infidelity, even as a hypothetical, was always just anathema to me. I couldn’t finish books that involved adultery, I even changed the radio station whenever those songs came on - you probably know the ones I’m talking about.
I looked at communities like this with overwhelming pity, but also a prideful sense of gratitude and security in the knowledge that I had fallen in love with an incredible partner, and I would never need to write a post next to yours.
And now you’re reading it.
It’s going to be tremendously long - I know that already, and I’m sorry in advance for it. This is probably one of those "grab the whole bottle of wine and settle in" kind of posts, and I understand if it's too much. I’ve put this off for almost two months now; it was just too difficult to write out every time I tried before, and now all I really have to show for it is two more months of struggling and doubt and reflection to add to the story. But I’m grateful to have a community like this here to share it with, and to see all of the posters and commenters here still moving forward, each of you living reminders that it’s possible to survive this.
We weren’t married. We don’t have kids, and my relationship wasn’t nearly as long as so many of the others I see here. I feel almost guilty for letting myself get swallowed up by the grief and betrayal when so many of you seem to have lost even more, knowing that my pain must be just a fraction of what those with children and long-term marriages have endured. But it’s still more than enough.
My WS (27f) and I (29m) were together for three years. Neither of us expected to find a long-term relationship when we met each other, or were even particularly looking for one, but immediately after our first date that mentality vanished. The first two years were as close to perfect as I have ever experienced in a relationship. We went almost a year before our first fight, and ended up celebrating it as a milestone as soon as we realized it was finally happening. We moved in together very quickly, and it was a seamless transition. She was - I thought - everything I never even knew I was looking for. I’ve always been a bit commitment-averse, but I could already genuinely see myself spending the rest of my life with no one else.
After two years, around the summer of 2019, something began to shift. At first, it wasn’t all that noticeable: She wasn’t as affectionate, she didn’t do much of anything for our 2nd anniversary, she just didn’t seem quite as enthusiastic about our future. But we remained very much in love, and happy. A few months later though, that fall, I began to notice her growing distant. I could tell she was struggling with something, but any questions about it were dismissed or turned aside. Intimacy dwindled away as she began to brush off my touches because she was “busy” or “tired” or “feeling gross” after work, until sex was almost nonexistent. She was preoccupied with something, some concern or fear or doubt, but as much as I would ask about it, she just wasn’t comfortable discussing it with me yet. I gave her space.
She began to seek advice from other people then - coworkers, friends, people who didn’t really have the full picture of our relationship, and only heard her concerns presented in a vacuum. So, naturally, they focused on those concerns, and magnified them. They tried to be supportive by not dismissing her fears, but in turn only made them seem all the more valid and terrifying to her, when in truth they weren’t much worse than what every other couple goes through occasionally. That’s not to make light of her worries, because they were absolutely legitimate and worth discussing, but they were also very solvable - especially if we had just confronted them together, as they arose, one at a time.
Toward the end of 2019, she pulled further away. She walled herself off emotionally as she fell into her doubts. I was growing desperate. I pleaded with her to tell me what was going on, why she was shutting me out, why she didn’t seem to want me to even touch her anymore. What I had done wrong? What was so horrible about me that I had to atone for, to fix somehow? Why did she seem to resent me and detest me for no reason that I could understand? She still couldn’t discuss any of it with me, in part because of her own unresolved demons from her experience with a horrendously abusive (ironically unfaithful) ex-husband, and her fear of abandonment - that revealing any doubts to me about our future would somehow lessen her value in my eyes, and I would throw her away as he did.
So before I could abandon her (a pathological fear she still struggles with after that relationship), she distanced herself from me instead. But that left a void - her codependency hadn’t vanished, but when she pulled away from me in this attempt to protect herself from being hurt, she also deprived herself of the person who made her feel valued and appreciated.
Around this time, she did a rotation with a different unit at her workplace. She performed exceptionally well. Work became her focus, because she had begun seeking validation there that she thought she could no longer get from me. After that rotation, she added everyone from that unit as a friend on facebook, including a surgeon in his 50s. They exchanged some pleasantries, mostly work-related, and she viewed him as a valuable professional contact. Around November they started talking a bit more frequently on facebook. I wasn’t aware at the time, but he was already flirting with her there - pushing personal boundaries, then pulling back and apologizing for it before she could call him out, or even realize he’d crossed a line. But of course from then on, the line had moved slightly, and he could push it a bit farther the next time.
She didn’t discourage his flirting. She craved the attention, it made her feel valued and appreciated in a way that I no longer could after she had distanced herself from me emotionally. And yet it was something she needed, as a codependent person with a deep-seated terror of being abandoned or viewed as worthless.
He began to talk to her about our relationship, subtly discouraging her from staying with me and feeding her doubts. The conversation moved to texting. I later learned that they met up for lunch together around this time, shortly before Christmas. We went on a cruise to the Bahamas to swim with dolphins (her dream) - she texted him from the beach there, lying next to me. She had started hiding her phone screen from me, exiting out of whatever she was doing when I came into the room. She later claimed that she had been researching the concerns she was struggling with and hadn’t wanted me to know - really she was talking with him.
She canceled plans with me routinely so she could “be alone” or go “take a bath” only to vanish for an hour or three. She would bring her phone with her each time.
Finally, on Christmas Eve, I pushed her hard enough that she opened up to me about her concerns. We started working through them together immediately and, no surprise, we found answers. They weren’t perfect right away, but over the next few months we made them perfect. Still, she continued to message him. She left our Christmas dinner with my family to go to the bathroom with her phone for half an hour the very next day.
That night, I was using her computer to look up articles about couples dealing with some of the concerns she had, and his name and address were in her search history (she told me that she had wanted to send him a Christmas card because his sister had died recently and he was lonely over the holidays).
When I saw that, the behavior I had seen over the past few weeks fell into place. I violated her privacy and read their facebook messages. There weren’t many there (she had already deleted most of her flirting with him, I eventually learned), but it was clear what he intended. I confronted her about the messages and told her exactly what he was doing - that he was playing off of her emotions, preparing to manipulate her vulnerability and take advantage of it. That she couldn’t see how inappropriately he was behaving, how little respect he actually had for me or for our relationship, because she was caught up in the feeling of a new emotional connection with someone who pretended to care about her feelings and make her feel special.
He would continue pushing the boundaries, moving the line further and further. He would listen to her concerns, always encouraging her and telling her she was right to feel that way, comforting her, giving her the validation she was so desperate for, building up an emotional tie between them that he could take advantage of later if she let him. I told her everything he would do if she stayed in contact with him.
She agreed. She said she would maintain better boundaries, but asked to keep him as a friend because he was such a valuable professional connection. I told her in order for me to be even remotely comfortable with that I would need to see the texts between them. She had already deleted them.
At that point, it was clear she needed to cut contact with him. I had never asked that of her before, but this was not someone I was comfortable having in our lives. She refused. Told me I was being controlling. But eventually she gave in and said she would cut contact.
I found new messages between them shortly after that, in early January. I left the house to stay at a hotel a few hours away, telling her then - in detail - how much his continued presence in our lives hurt me. That I shouldn’t even have to ask her to cut ties, because if she cared about me as she claimed to, she would see that I was in pain because of her behavior with him and decide to break contact herself. She argued once again. He was an important professional connection. I needed to trust her and move on. Besides, he’s “old” and “unattractive” anyway, so I had nothing to worry about. After a few hours of back and forth, I told her I was done - if keeping him in her life was more important than preventing me from feeling betrayed, she could have that life. That finally opened her eyes (I thought) and she deleted her number in front of me.
I didn’t notice that she hadn’t blocked it.
From then on, we started working on our relationship and the doubts she’d had. It was tough, and at times during the next four months it genuinely felt like she was fully invested, while at others she seemed to have given up. Sometimes she would shift from one mood to the other in the span of an hour. I fought with everything I had to pull us back together, and most of the time it felt like I had to convince her to fight with me instead of having a true partner. I knew she was scared, worried that she would re-invest herself in the relationship only to have it be that much more painful if it failed, but I begged her to try. Those months, from January to April of this year, were intensely difficult.
But finally, in May, it was like someone just flipped a switch in her. She woke up one morning, came to me, and said that she had no idea what she was doing until then - that it was clear to her that I was the most important thing in her life. And if that’s clear, then what were all these little problems holding her back for? Her mentality was night-and-day compared to the few months prior, and our relationship felt almost overnight as if it had returned to how we were at the beginning.
In the middle of June, we went on a road trip for her birthday. She’s originally from Germany, and was feeling a bit homesick as she always does around holidays. So I took her to a German town a few hours away to remind her of home, a place with a street lined with Christmas lights (her favorite time of year) even in summer. We toured through vineyards a few hours farther then, the closest thing I could find to the vineyards where she grew up. We hiked to the beach, so I could give her a taste of all her favorite places in one trip for her birthday, almost like we were celebrating it again for the first time. During those drives, we had a lot of time to talk about our struggles, and how we made it through.
But then she said something that stuck in my head: “I don’t even recognize who I was back then.”
In May, she had asked me if I had ever been with someone else while we were struggling and she had stopped being intimate with me. I hadn’t, but it had never even occurred to me to ask her the same thing. When I heard her say that she hadn’t been herself, I remembered that question…
We had been drinking to celebrate, the night before her birthday. And I finally built up the courage to ask her.
She hesitated, but then said she hadn’t done anything. I instantly felt a huge weight lift off of my shoulders that I hadn’t even known I was carrying. And then…
“There was a kiss.”
Two weeks of daily trickle-truth, one suicide attempt and one extended stay at a mental facility later (edit for clarification: my suicide attempt and my stay, not hers), I ended up with the story I have now. Whether it’s actually the full truth, I’ll never know. All of the messages between them have been deleted - unrecoverable. Her GPS data is wiped, and the OM is (unsurprisingly) not very forthcoming. I have no way to confirm anything.
But here it is:
Around when I went to the hotel in January, she had decided to take a drive to clear her head. During that drive, she claims he texted her (I’m certain that’s a lie, and she reached out to him first). She called him asking to talk about everything, our struggles together. He asked her to meet him at a bar by his house. Alone. At night. She agreed. She claims she only ever intended to talk.
He was everything I warned her he would be. And at the end of that night he walked her to her car, and she kissed him.
She felt guilty afterwards. Stopped contact for a while. Eventually they got back in touch, and she told him she had to clear the air about what they did, tell him it wasn’t ok. He invited her to his house to talk. She went. As much as she still claims she didn’t want it to happen, the truth is you don’t go to a guy’s house like that not knowing what happens next. She sat in his kitchen and said what she had to say. He said he understood, and he kissed her. She resisted. He pulled back, talked more, kissed her again. She resisted. Eventually she decided to leave, and he walked her to the door. And this time she stopped resisting.
The affair lasted (as you’ve probably already realized) until May, when she suddenly “came out of the fog” as they say. She broke things off, but couldn’t bring herself to tell me until June.
She claims that, while she knew each time she went to his house that they would probably end up having sex, she never actually wanted the sexual/romantic aspect of their relationship and never enjoyed it apart from the feeling of being desired. She viewed it as almost the “price” or “tax” she had to pay to maintain that emotional connection - the only thing she felt she could rely on to fill her codependent need to be valued and appreciated. I don’t say that as any form of excuse or justification, but only as context to her thought process at the time, twisted and selfish as it was.
Since d-day, she’s done a lot of things very wrong. Trickle-truth is a horrendous experience. I can’t emphasize enough how terrible it was to think I knew the truth, then discover some new fact - her phone records, a GPS log on her phone, a text, another confession - that showed there was more. She didn’t suddenly become any less codependent, and spent much of those first couple weeks turning to friends and family to get pity for herself, reaching out, flailing almost desperately for anyone who would talk to her. When I asked for no contact, she complained about how hard it is on her. She saw friends and family attack me: “If he loved you, he would…” or “he’s only in the mental facility to make you feel guilty.” And while she didn’t jump onto that bandwagon, she didn’t actively defend me either. She stayed working at the same job where she met her AP, and while she did break things off and cut contact with him at the end of April, she called him one last time after the first round of trickle-truth to tell him I knew about it (to get closure once and for all, she says). But she called him from a friend’s phone - she told me about it the next day, but clearly she did it at that moment so that she could hide it if she wanted to.
She’s also done an incredible amount of things right. She confessed the affair to me when she didn’t have to. She told my family, her family, her friends, her coworkers - she hasn't hidden from the truth at all. She’s burning through books on infidelity, healing, codependency, vulnerability, at record pace. She’s owning responsibility rather than putting any blame on me. She immediately began IC, and is asking for MC whenever she has the opportunity. Her stepfather, a serial cheater himself but still someone closer to her than her real father, told her everything you might expect he would: It was my fault as much as hers, I’m paranoid, I’m trying to use this to control her, etc. She didn’t respond to him initially. But when I pointed out how terrible those things were, she cut contact with him completely - he was family, and she has cut him out entirely to defend me. She’s begun to snap back at the people who imply that I share blame for her cheating, or that I don’t love her because I’m not immediately jumping into reconciliation. She’s also gradually stopped relying on the people around her for validation, eventually distancing herself from many of the people she considered friends who gave her such poor advice in the first place, only holding onto the friendships that actually make her confront the painful truths. She’s deleted all social media. She’s offered me full transparency - a keylogger on her phone, GPS tracking, the works. She starts a new job next week. Many of these things I had to tell her to do, or point her in the right direction, but once she realizes what the right thing to do is, she sticks with it. She’s determined to change, to become a successful rebuilder/healer, even if she can’t always figure out the right path towards it on her own yet.
I feel like she’s doing as well as I could realistically expect someone to do, when the task ahead of her basically involves confronting everything about her past, her upbringing, and her emotional vulnerabilities and changing the core of who she is.
I feel like, if anyone could be deserving of reconciliation, it would be her.
But right now I just can’t forgive. I can’t move past all of the memories she was willing to throw away, and all the years ahead of us full of new memories that still weren’t worth enough to her to stop her from going to his house that night, or all the nights after. And I’m struggling to remember what it feels like to be happy or have something worth living for.
I apologize for the length of this post. If you made it this far, thanks for reading, and for being here.
(edit/update: I've moved in with family and started IC. She and I have gone no-contact at my request.)
[This message edited by SurvivingIndiana at 7:56 AM, August 19th (Wednesday)]
