Her Side: The Distance Between Us
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.
First, a quick update. About nine months have passed since my last post, and my wife’s affair is now over one-and-a-half years in our rearview mirror. I’m happy to report my wife and I are continuing on our road to recovery. The vast majority of the difficulty is now far behind us, and our relationship continues to get better and better.
This past spring, we celebrated our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary with a big, expensive vacation. We felt we had earned it. We had a terrific time together, not just because of the beautiful and exotic environment, but also because our bond is stronger now than it has ever been before.
On our first night there, we sat down to dinner at a restaurant near our hotel. We were starving, exhausted from the travel, and we had both been awake for thirty-something hours straight. After we ordered drinks, my wife looked at me from across the table and said, “We did it.”
The words could have meant simply that we had arrived after the long trip, but her eyes told me that she meant much more than that.
“We did it.”
Twenty-five years of marriage. The last year or so of which had been the most challenging of them all, by far. But, we did it. We made it through. We had each done hard work on ourselves and on our relationship. We were still together, and we both knew that we would stay that way. We did it.
Some residue of the affair still remains, of course. It hurts sometimes. It angers me sometimes. These feelings are all far less intense than they were, and they continue to abate. I still occasionally have what we’ve come to call “dips,” which can last a few minutes or a few days, where I just get a little bit down over what happened, and feel insecure about what it says about me that my wife slept with, and for a time felt as if she was falling in love with, another man. When those dips happen, and she asks me how she can help me (as she always does), I’ve often circled back around to the still-unfulfilled promise that she would write something about the affair and our rebuilding process from her perspective.
All along, she’s been very reluctant to do it. But she feels like she owes it to me, so she tells me she will, then she tries — writes a little bit, tells me she’ll finish it the next day … then that next day comes and goes, then the next one, and pretty soon the promise is forgotten again.
I totally understand her reluctance, and I’ve tried not to get frustrated or angry at her over it. I’m asking her to do something she really doesn’t want to do. Plus, our relationship is in a great place right now. Should we really go back and dig around in the painful past yet again?
And even I am not sure how much of my asking for it is because I actually want or need to read her words, and how much is because it just feels like a hanging thread; it’s something I asked for that remains undone, and I want it all to be as “done” as it can be.
Finally, after yet another start and stop on it a few weeks ago, I asked her to just let me read what she had written so far, and she agreed. It turns out she had written a good bit, explaining her negative feelings building up in the years prior to her affair, then how she felt during the affair, up until the point where she decided to end it for good and go all in on saving our marriage.
What she had finished felt like enough. It illuminated some of the corners of the hows and whys that had still been dim for me. I feel like I can tie off that hanging thread now, and continue moving forward. I told her — and I meant it — that I didn’t need her to continue writing.
But I do want to keep my promise to readers here, and share what she wrote, so here is the first part:
In late 2021 through early 2022, I had an affair. I purposefully planned to meet my former high school boyfriend at a hotel in our capital city and, while I wasn’t certain that a full-blown affair would take place, I was definitely open to the idea. And, if I’m being honest with myself, I think I was probably hoping it would. I had been married to my husband who, by all accounts, was a wonderful husband and father, for 23 years. Yet I was unhappy. I loved my husband but I didn’t really like him anymore. How can you truly like someone that you can’t be yourself with?
Growing up, I envisioned myself being a stay-at-home mom, doing all kinds of fun things with my kids, while my husband provided for us. Then, I married a creative person. While there are some jobs in the creative field that are high paying, his is not one of them. I, on the other hand, work for a large, international company with almost limitless opportunity for advancement. But I wasn’t happy. Many, many times while our kids were young, my husband and I would have arguments over the fact that he was living my dream. I wanted to be the one home with the kids but, instead, I left home every morning before they even woke, drove sixty miles to my office, worked a full day, then drove home through some of the worst traffic congestion in the country. At best, I would get to spend a couple of hours with our kids before it was time to tuck them into bed. And I resented that. But every time I tried to talk to my husband about it, he would tell me I was being selfish, and I needed to grow up because what I wanted couldn’t happen.
One time, during an argument over this topic, he blurted out that I was a terrible person, a horrible mother and an unpleasant person to be around. I can’t tell you how many times I cried myself to sleep over the years with those words ringing in my head. Of course, he recanted them immediately after saying them, but the damage was done — especially to this person who never had high self-esteem to begin with.
My husband was the person who volunteered at the kids’ schools and was known in the office of their elementary school. When, on the rare occasion I would need to check one of them out early, the office staff had no idea who I was and needed to see my ID. That may not seem like much, but every time, it was like a punch to the gut — he was living the life I had always envisioned for myself. But any time I tried to express my feelings to my otherwise great husband, he would once again tell me that I was being selfish and immature and that I needed to grow up and get over myself. Over the years, I gradually stopped expressing my feelings to him because I knew what the outcome would be.
As I continued to progress in my company, I eventually landed a role that allowed me to work from home. In some ways, that was life-changing. I no longer spent three hours or more a day in the car driving to and from the office and I now had flexibility in my schedule to do what I had always wanted — be involved in our kids’ lives. And I jumped in full-force, sometimes spending 20 hours a week or more at the high school while also working 45–55 hour weeks at my day job. It was grueling but I loved it!
The problem was that, in some ways, it seemed too late. Our kids had spent their entire childhoods going straight to Dad when they needed something and just couldn’t get into the habit of coming to me. When I attempted to discipline them, I was often ignored or they replied that they “were going to tell Dad what I was trying to do.” And oftentimes, Dad didn’t back me up — he would tell me in front of them that I was being overbearing and too hard on them. Again, after a time, I stopped trying to discuss the situations and just kept everything contained.
During this time, I was often miserable while working. My husband was very supportive of me about work problems, but the fact remained that I still had a job I hated while he enjoyed what he was doing. I understand that most people don’t love their job but honestly, I hated mine. I would get stomachaches and heartburn when I headed into my home office and those remained throughout the day. Oftentimes, if my boss was particularly nasty, those physical symptoms continued into the night, often keeping me awake. I understand that this wasn’t my husband’s fault but, again, I hated that I was having to do it because his job couldn’t provide the income and benefits that we needed. Selfish? Yeah. But I couldn’t change the way I felt.
As we continued to grow more and more apart, my old high school boyfriend started contacting me via social media.
