A “Mini Rock Bottom”
This is part twenty-one of my story of recovering from my wife’s affair and rebuilding our marriage. If you haven’t already, please start at the beginning with part one.
My suspicions had been exactly right all along. Over the weeks and months following the affair, her description of events between them in that hotel room had evolved from “just making out,” to “just touching one another with hands,” to “just oral stuff,” but full-on sex had always been vehemently denied.
But he had just revealed the truth. They had “gone all the way” more than once during their time in that room.
She finally whispered, “Is there anything else you want me to ask him?”
“No,” I replied. “This is over. In more ways than one.”
I got up and left the room as she ended the phone call. I was absolutely livid. Probably about as angry as I’ve felt since the beginning of this whole thing. After a few minutes of trying to compose myself, I went back to her and let her have it.
I didn’t yell or scream. Two of our kids were also in the house, upstairs. But I got in her face and… I don’t remember what I said. I know I was super-pissed and amazingly eloquent. I sometimes am when I get really angry. The words pour out of me in complete, structured paragraphs, and I can almost just listen to them rather than think about what I’m saying, as if I’m simply reciting stunningly well-crafted lines written by an Oscar-winning screenwriter.
She stared at me, blank-faced, as I ranted. My words were at times truthful and sincere, and at other times only meant to hurt her, to make her feel as bad as possible about what she had done to me. I know I called her a “horrible person.” And I know I don’t really mean that.
But at the time I did mean one thing: our marriage was over. It wasn’t a choice, it simply had to be. She had finally betrayed my trust one too many times. She began to cry. She told me why she had lied: exactly the reason I always suspected. She had been scared from the beginning that I wouldn’t be able to accept and get over that part of it — that they had actually fucked, not just messed around. As we moved forward and our relationship improved in so many ways, she wanted more and more to be with me forever, and that only intensified her fear of losing me if the truth came out.
With every day the lie continued, it became harder for her to envision ever telling me the truth. Because then she’d have to admit not only how far things went with him during the affair, but also that she had been repeatedly untruthful after her promise of no more lies.
Now that this lie had been revealed and the damage done, she didn’t want our marriage to be over. She wanted to keep rebuilding with me. She had been holding back an important piece of that building — total honesty — and she had wanted desperately to somehow complete the building of our relationship with only 90% of the honesty piece. Now, she was clearly devastated to realize that by trying to do that, she had probably destroyed everything we’d been working on.
My wife fought hard for yet another chance. She begged me for it. I told her I couldn’t see how I could trust her again. I pointed out to her that the lie about actual sex hadn’t been the only thing revealed on the phone call. There was also the weird, seemingly irrational lie about just meeting in a parking lot, when the truth was they had lunch in a restaurant. I asked her, “What are the odds that during a five-minute phone call, he would accidentally reveal the only other thing you were still lying to me about? There has to be more, so what is there?”
She didn’t hesitate to tell me more. She began to correct the record on other events. She had always insisted that the day they met to spend the day together shopping, nothing happened beyond hitting a couple of stores, lunch, driving around aimlessly, and a kiss before she got out of his car. She revealed to me now that they had also stopped in a secluded area of a grocery store parking lot. There, he had brought her to orgasm manually while she massaged him through his jeans.
And lastly, another truth that she had directly lied to me about. I had asked multiple times if they ever engaged in phone/FaceTime sex. She had always vociferously denied that. That was not something she would ever do, she claimed — she had never even done that with me. But, it turns out she did with him. One night after he sent her steamy Snapchat messages during her bath, she snuck downstairs while I was asleep, and masturbated while on the phone with him, as he did the same.
Obviously, these last two things were similar lies to the bigger one about not ever having full-on sex. She didn’t want to hurt me more with details, so she lied, then became afraid to reveal the lie. She couldn’t really explain why she had lied about lunch. I suggested she simply didn’t want me to know how reckless she had been, meeting him in a popular restaurant in our own town, at lunchtime on a Saturday. She said that made sense.
Oddly, these new details themselves didn’t hurt all that much. It was more about the fact that she had still been lying about several things: her significantly diminished feelings for me before the affair, and multiple sexual acts with him during it.
Overall, she had been downplaying her feelings and how far gone she had been. In truth, she hadn’t been torn between me and him, as she had claimed. She had in fact been both totally withdrawn from me and totally invested in him.
This conversation after the phone call with him wound down pretty quickly. I soon realized I was repeating myself. There just wasn’t that much to say. She knew she had messed up — badly. Like the previous times she had messed up, she wanted another chance, if I could find a way to give her that. She said she understood if I couldn’t, but that she would be devastated, and she would regret her actions for the rest of her life. I didn’t know whether I would be able to get past the trust issues this brought back up, but I wasn’t ready to tell her to pack her bags yet, either. There was really nothing more to say at this moment.
I went to my desk in my office, and between answering work messages, typed this email to her, unsure whether I’d actually send it or not. (This gets a little more explicit than I usually get, but my goal here has always been to present unvarnished truths, so I’m leaving this as I wrote it that day.)
This is what I’m confronted with….
You had your chances. I gave you dozens of chances to tell me the truth. Why, after I finally forced you into a corner, and I still had to hear it come out of his mouth instead of yours, do you get to ask for “one more chance?”
I feel like I don’t know who you are. The person I thought you were wouldn’t have withstood everything I tried in order to get you to tell me what I suspected was the truth. I appealed to every part of your better nature. You didn’t budge. And on top of that, the person I thought you were would have seen the misery I was in when these doubts and suspicions bubbled up, and felt pity on me, wanted to take that pain away from me, not add to it by putting all the weight of it on me. That’s one of the things I told myself to try to force myself to believe the lie: “Surely this person — the one she’s been since January 10 — would not do that to me.”
Now I’m being asked to move forward thinking, “OK, surely THIS person — the one she’s been since June 22 — wouldn’t do that to me again.”
Can I respect myself if I stay with you? If I were watching all of this as a spectator, I would probably say, “Well, that dude has no self-respect, staying with her after the lies she’s told and the pain she’s caused, repeatedly.”
Shockingly, the smallest part of the pain now is that you fucked him, multiple times. He came inside you. He fucked you in the shower the next morning. On top of what I already knew: you sucked his dick, he licked your pussy. There’s almost nothing left that has just been between us. You crossed every line, the first night you were with him. Jesus. I have barely even begun to think about that, because right now it hurts less than everything else.
You decided you were done with me more than 18 months ago. You should have seen me then for who I really am, after over 20 years of marriage. You know me. You know how I confront problems. You know that I’ve always been willing to work on things about myself, once I see that they’re things I need to work on. You didn’t give me that chance by telling me how you felt, maybe because you didn’t even want me to fix anything. You just wanted out. If I decide I can’t do this, remember you’re only getting what you wanted then.
God, this hurts. I want comfort so bad. But the only one who can comfort me is the one who has put me through all of this.
Shortly after I finished typing that, she came into my office, and I did let her read it. When she was finished, she quietly said, “That’s all fair.”
I honestly didn’t know what to do.
