Her Side: The Discovery

This is part twenty-seven 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.

After their night in a hotel, my wife and her affair partner talked and texted constantly, but found it difficult to meet in person. One Saturday, they managed to sneak off and meet for lunch. Then a week or so later, they met up for a full day of Christmas shopping together. That’s when I found out what was going on, and she found out how I really felt about her.

My husband confronted me and was very upset and very angry. Much more upset than I had ever expected him to be. I knew he would be angry but as I’ve said before, I thought he would be relieved that he was free. Free of the wife he seemed to dislike and free to maybe find a wife who wouldn’t embarrass him and that he actually liked.

To my surprise, not only was my husband mad, he was extremely upset. He kept asking how I could do what I did, what I wanted, how could I hurt him that way. Over and over, he asked the same questions. I didn’t have answers for him. At least, not ones that he could understand. After years of feeling like I was being treated, not as a spouse, but as another of the annoying teens who needed discipline and guidance and caused him embarrassment around his friends, family and the general public, I had found someone who thought I had hung the moon. I never set out to hurt my husband, but to make myself happy. And I thought I had found that with someone else.

When he asked what I wanted, I didn’t have an immediate answer. If I said I wanted to stay, was I giving up happiness and recognition of what I have to offer and returning to the stagnant, repetitive life that we had been living for the past several years? Was I giving up happiness and recognition to be insulted and treated like a child? Or was this an opportunity to find happiness and recognition with the man I had married 23 years before?

Side note: my husband asked repeatedly how I could do that to our kids. I honestly (and maybe selfishly) didn’t think of them. At the time, they were 18 and 20 and were young adults living their own lives, for the most part. I thought they would be a little upset about their parents divorcing but I didn’t think it would have the tragic impact on them that my husband thought it would have. Was I wrong? Maybe. I still don’t know.

I’m not going to lie — the first hours and days after my husband found out are somewhat of a blur. He gave me an ultimatum that I had to choose, right then on that first morning, what I wanted. Stay and end things with the other person or pack my things and leave immediately. While I wasn’t completely sure that staying was what I wanted, I knew I didn’t want to pack and leave. So I chose to stay.

We talked for a long time that day about what led up to what I did, and what we might be able to do to save the marriage. I don’t remember any specific details but I know that I agreed to end things with the other person, start marriage counseling, and work on fixing things. And I was comfortable with that up to a point. But I was also scared. Really, really scared. What if I did all of this and then days, weeks or months in, my husband decided he couldn’t do what it took to save our marriage after all? Would I have ended things with the other person and have my marriage end too?

So, while I told my husband that I had cut off the other person, I was still communicating with him via an email account I created specifically for that purpose. Yes, while I was telling my husband that I was all in and was doing everything necessary to save our marriage, I was lying because I was still keeping the other person strung along behind my husband’s back.

My physical health was continuing to suffer because of all the lies. My stomach was upset constantly, I had never-ending heartburn and a tension headache that just wouldn’t leave. But still, I was scared of cutting off the other person completely. My husband was doing and saying all of the right things but I wasn’t sure that it was enough. I wasn’t sure that he completely understood how unhappy I had been in our marriage. I wasn’t sure that he understood how unseen and unheard I felt, how much I felt like I was an embarrassment and merely an annoyance that he liked to have sex with. Honestly, that’s all I thought he felt for me — I was just a warm body for him. I wasn’t sure that he would be able to make the changes necessary in himself for me to be happy. And I wasn’t sure I would be able to make the changes necessary in myself for me to be happy with him.

And that sounds unfair. I know that not all of the changes needed to be made by him. Not by a long shot. I needed to make even more, bigger, more profound changes within myself. I needed to learn to be happy with what we had, not want bigger, better tangible things. I needed to learn to talk to my husband about things that were bothering me and I needed to learn how to do that without getting too emotional , dramatic, yelling, using absolutes … all of the things that I had always done. But he also needed to learn how to listen and how to hear me. He needed to know that even if he didn’t agree with what I was saying, that those were my true feelings and it wasn’t up to him to decide if my feelings were valid or not. This is a lot to say that we both needed to learn how to communicate. But before we could do that, I had to make the final decision to cut off the other person.

All along, through the ‘recovery’ process we were trying to follow, my husband had been writing. He said it was cathartic for him and he asked me if I would read what he was writing. I kept refusing. I was still lying to him and stringing the other person along and I didn’t want to read about the pain that I had caused him and would continue to cause him as long as I continued to lie. So, I continued to email with the other person and continued to keep him on my line as a safety net, back up, whatever you want to call it. I was just scared to cut him loose.

Finally, one day my husband and I had a long, long, very emotional talk. That conversation included him telling me how critically important absolute honesty was. And I said I understood what was at stake if I wasn’t honest — that we were over. All along, I was still continuing to lie to him. At the end of that conversation, he asked me to read what he had been writing. Finally, for some reason, that day I agreed to read it. And it was literally life-changing. In that writing, he so vividly expressed his pain and the love that he felt for me and how utterly devastated he would have been if things had ended differently that morning when he first found out. If instead of staying, I had heeded his words, packed my shit and left.

His words hit me hard. I cried as I read them and I cried as I opened up my laptop and deleted that email account that I was using to communicate with the other person. I was able to do this in private as my husband had left to run an errand while I was reading, so I didn’t have to worry about being discovered. He came back and we talked again, and I told him how deeply his words had hit me. And this time, I meant it. Should I have told him then that I had still been communicating with the other person but that I had cut it off for good that day? In hindsight, probably. BUT I WAS STILL SO SCARED. I was scared that, at that point, complete and total honestly would be too much and my husband wouldn’t be able to take another hit like that. So, I didn’t tell him.

The next morning, he woke me at around 2:30 in the morning by screaming. It was a deep, painful scream and I thought he had somehow injured himself in his sleep. But no, I was the one who had injured him in our sleep. He had woken up in the middle of the night convinced that I was still lying to him and he got my phone, computer, iPad, etc., and searched. Of course he found the email account I had deleted, he reactivated that and read the emails that I had been exchanging with the other person, and he found that I had been doing that all along — since just a couple days after he originally found out about my affair. He was understandably crushed and livid. He told me that there was not another chance for me and that I was to get out immediately. When I pointed out that I didn’t have a car and couldn’t leave, he told me to take one of the kids’ bikes or to walk. I refused. I was completely terrified in a way that I hadn’t yet been along the route I had put us on but I knew that I couldn’t leave. After reading the words he had written, I knew the route I wanted was the one that we had begun together almost 24 years before.

That was literally the worst day of my life — and I can’t even begin to imagine how hard it was for my husband. We fought, argued, talked, round and round, for hours. I finally left our room so I could make sure our daughter made it off to school safely and then I went back into our room to continue the fight of my life. At one point, I remember actually sitting on my husband so he couldn’t physically try to remove me from our room. I gave it my all and was scared that it wouldn’t be enough. I repeatedly told my husband how much I loved him and how much I realized he loved me after reading what he wrote. I told him that I chose him and that I was fighting for him and for us. After hours upon hours of talking, crying, arguing, he told me that he didn’t want me to leave right away but that he needed time to process what I had once again done to him. I told him that I would give him that space but that I chose him and that I was fighting for him.

I gave him the space that he needed but I was doing everything possible to convince him of my love for him and my desire for us. Again, I don’t remember many of the specific details but I know that it was really hard — for both of us but definitely more so for him. How could he trust me again after I had betrayed his trust twice? I lived in constant fear that, at any moment, he could change his mind and decide that he couldn’t do it and would kick me out. Despite that, I tried in every way to show him that I was fully committed to rebuilding our relationship.

I am not a demonstrative person. Most would describe me as completely unemotional. I love but am not comfortable saying the words and giving the physical demonstrations of that love. To adults, I guess I should add. I have no issue displaying affection to children and animals. But through our marriage counseling, I realized that my husband needed the verbal and physical affirmations of my love. Like I needed him to acknowledge my feelings were valid (even if he didn’t agree with them), he needed the reassurance of my love. It was hard to do that but I started making a concerted effort for him. And for us.

I had to force myself to do it because it doesn’t come naturally to me. That led to other disagreements because my husband didn’t think I should have to force myself to express the love that I claimed to feel. I’m still trying to make him understand that it’s not an effort for me because I don’t feel those emotions but because I’m still not comfortable expressing them. I think I’m (and we’re) making progress there.

After giving him the space he had asked for, my husband finally reached the decision that he wanted to continue to try to fight for us. I was so relieved but also still scared. Would he decide that it was just too hard? I decided it didn’t matter. I was going to fight for us and, if necessary, I would try to fight hard enough for both of us. I had glimpsed my future without him and I didn’t want it. I wanted the future with him, however that turned out. Did (and do) I hope that it’s a good future full of excitement and passion and adventure? Sure, but that’s not reality. Reality is day-to-day life and doing things for one another and showing appreciation and love. Reality is comfort and safety and the knowledge that the person you’re with loves you enough to willingly put themselves through the pain of fighting for and saving your marriage because they want to be with YOU.

I don’t think my affair was an intentional cry for attention but that’s what it ended up being. I was unhappy and looking for other options. At the time, those other options just included a dream of divorcing my husband and being free of having to hide my true self. When my affair partner presented me with other, exciting options that included constant words of how wonderful I was and almost limitless ‘things’, that option looked good. But after spending some time with him, and faced with the real possibility of losing my husband, I realized that the life I wanted was with my husband.

That’s where she left off. I’m sure if I asked her to keep writing, she would have a lot to say about her journey from here. Though she had made her decision, and was fighting hard for it, she wasn’t fully on board with the whole one hundred percent honesty thing at this point. Almost, but not quite, because she was still afraid.

So if she kept writing, she’d probably explain her perspective on that and how it changed later. I’m sure she’d talk about my grief, anger, sadness and recovery process from her perspective, and maybe I’d understand better how she dealt with that and stayed on board, trying to navigate through this storm. And I’d like to read about how it feels to her recently, as we’ve emerged on the other side of this.

But, it feels like it’s time to let go of needing that. I honestly don’t even want her to write anymore. She wrote more than enough.

Right or wrong, I let her hesitancy to write become another small roadblock for us. Like I said, it felt like a hanging thread. I’m honestly very grateful that she put aside her reluctance and wrote this much, and that her writing was so open and honest — “warts and all” for both of us.

“No need to be grateful,” she would say. “I owed it to you.”

And she would write more if I asked her to, because that’s the type of person she truly is. But I feel like it’s time for us to go.

It’s been cathartic and therapeutic for me to write about this experience, and it’s been a privilege to have people read and respond positively to our story. But now I need to stop writing about my wife’s affair and its aftermath in order to put it behind us as much as possible. We’ve done very difficult work together. Now it’s time to reap the rewards together.

We’ve gone through these last couple of years — the most difficult of our married lives, and we’ve built something new and so, so much better. Now my wife and I are ready to push down on the pedal and let our old, broken relationship disappear over the horizon in our rearview mirror.

We still have so much wonderful road ahead of us.