This is on my profile in "Your story" but here it is again.
My wife had poor mental health years before I met her. It was not either of our first marriages (my first ended with getting cheated on) and we entered knowing it would be tough, but we were devout Christians who believed God joined us together to grow together. She worked on her mental health here and there but she is highly sensitive and reactive in ways that have been painful for us since the beginning, especially with my own anxious attachment, and in the several months things came to a head. At the beginning of the summer she (according to her) voluntarily entered into a dissociative state from me for her emotional protection and couldn't find a way back to me.
Because of our difficult past relationships and hope in this marriage, we always struggled with enmeshment, but in July she reacted to the emotional volatility associated with our enmeshment in the polar opposite way. She could hardly stand to be in the same room as me and could barely even text necessary things. We lived in separate ends of the house (the guest room for her). She acted like a caged animal if we got near each other. I'm sure I had been insensitive to her emotional fragility at times and was often not able to make her feel heard, and it annoyed her how clingy I could be, but she reframed the entire marriage as unsafe oppression even though there is no real world reason for it. She refused to work on it anymore and said her only hope was that we could stay away from each other long enough that both of us can get healed and maybe someday meet as two whole individuals and try again.
For 6 weeks I lived in a lonely hell while she began medicating with things like 4-5 hours in the gym in the middle of the night. Then I found out that she started going to Atlanta (1.5 hours away) late on Monday nights and staying out to the wee hours to swing dance and hang out afterwards with the gang there - violating my trust because it had long been a misgiving I with my abandonment and infidelity trauma for her to dance with other men, especially the very (for her) thrilling and physical-contact-heavy type of dance that was. She left the kids asleep in their beds under my care all these nights. I found out later that she had started making male (and a couple female) friends on Tandem, a language transfer app, and started chatting with a lot also. She was very isolated from people in our close knit church community while she was in this dissociative state and her extrovert self started craving attention.
She started wearing clothes that were a lot more revealing of her figure in this time also than she had ever felt comfortable doing for moral reasons, and started primping a lot more. I was quickly losing the woman I knew and I feared she was seeking the male gaze.
Then I found out I was getting laid off from my 20 year career in a month. No sympathy or anything from her, which made that news harder for me.
After this period of six weeks or so, I knew she was about to go out of state on a trip to stay with friends (a priest and his wife) for a few weeks for space. I was hoping it would give her some peace and direction to resolve some difficulties in our marriage. Just before she left she told me in a fury that she was divorcing me. The fury and fear was because someone she knew scared her into thinking I was tracking her location (I wasn't, though God knows it was all I could do not to). I had finally the day before looked at our phone records and saw she'd been chatting with a guy from church who had assured me he was staying out of the situation. She told him and a few other friends that I was controlling and emotionally abusive. She left immediately, a day earlier than planned, and I kind of thought I wouldn't hear from her until the paperwork showed up.
After she got there she calmed down and apologized for initiating the divorce talk that way, although she said she had been planning to do that ever since she found out I was getting laid off (ouch). I told her of my desire to reconcile and I didn't hear a response.
Turns out, a couple weeks later while she was still visiting friends out of state, she got on Tinder and began a series of 3 one-night stands and fooled around with three other dates. I'm telling you, this is absolutely a change that's unfathomable by anyone who knows her; her life has been characterized by hangups about sex and modesty and things, and she usually held the most conservative line on all that stuff. She's a germophobe too, and the idea of swapping fluids with all these strangers...
At any rate, she got back into town and started it again. By this point I knew she at least had a Tinder account (she accidentally charged our bank for it) but I hoped against hope for better. After a week living with that interfering church friend's family (who kicked her out because she spent the night with a Tinder date, but I didn't know this), she and her two small kids (to whom I've been a devoted father for 3 years) ended up needing a place to stay, and I did let her back in the house until she get her feet underneath her. I'm sure I was hoping to buy some time and maybe eventually change her mind.
Two weeks later I hear voices in the guest bedroom. She had invited a "friend" to watch a TV show and he jumped out of the bathroom window. We talked all night long and the Tinder stuff came out. She later revealed (under my questioning) that she actually had sex with two men here in our house since she'd been back, one of them when I was home and asleep in my bedroom. Talk about feeling violated. The second of those was a very bad encounter and she decided to stop the one-night-stands, so the guy I caught there was actually a guy she didn't have that interest in (yet). The tally is 6 full sexual encounters and 3 others (who knows what that means).
She was ashamed and apologized to me because she knew how it hurt me and said she was not rationally processing anything in that time, utterly vulnerable to her brokenness and trying to fill what she believes is a social void with (mostly) meaningless sex.
So now I'm stuck with a massive case of betrayal trauma (or so says the Internet). One of the worst parts about it is that she still denies that it is infidelity because she told me she was going to divorce me. She still hasn't filed for practical reasons. But beyond that, just the betrayal of her abandoning the marriage, unilaterally moving on to all these destructive and meaningless relationships without my knowledge is a knife in my heart.
At any rate, we're sharing this house and trying to be friendly and light, though not really engaging much. I'm not sure how I'm able to do that other than the fact that if I'm not here I fear she'll resume her destructive nighttime escapades, catastrophic both to her and her small children. I would still reconcile with her but she is just as intent as ever to end our marriage. She's broken and trying to make improvements but I fear she's not yet at the bottom. She hasn't faced her shame yet, and couldn't handle it--she's still saying she doesn't "regret" the behavior but coolly states that those encounters were mistakes and bad choices that she is glad she learned from. Full of denial.
This has all really messed with my head. I can't look at romance or women the same; the ones I'm most attracted to, the seemingly wholesome and trustworthy ones, won't want my 47 year old self with two divorces, and even if they did, I could never be sure---I would fear they'd only be available because they've done the same things she did to me, and can't be trusted to be faithful to me no matter what, or actually ever have truly loved me.
Thanks for reading.
[This message edited by WorthLessThanCounterfeit at 1:11 AM, Tuesday, December 2nd]
