Highs and Lows

This is part thirteen 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.

It’s now about two months since that awful Monday in January, when I found out she had still been talking to him even after I learned of the affair.

Overall, things are steadily getting better. My wife and I are still connecting on levels we haven’t connected on in years — emotionally, conversationally, sexually. Those highs feel amazing, but I still have lows, too.

A song will come on — one I’ve listened to and enjoyed for years, but suddenly the lyrics hit me differently. They’ve taken on new meaning in the context of my wife having cheated on me, and now they trigger pain. This has happened several times, and I usually skip the songs in question if possible. And it makes me angry, because she’s taken that song away from me. It’s just another casualty of what she did — another little bit of collateral damage.

On the other hand, some songs have a new, powerful and positive meaning to me. A few weeks ago we rented a mountain cabin for a quick Valentine’s Day getaway. The first night there, we were listening to a romantic playlist when “You’re Still the One” by Shania Twain came on. It’s a song I’ve never paid that much attention to, but now I burst into tears as I listened to the lyrics and thought about how they now apply so poignantly to us. After all we’ve been through, she’s still the one I run to, the one that I belong to, and still the one I want for life. She looked me in the eyes as she sang along to it, to let me know she feels the same way.

The Valentine’s trip was amazing. Two nights in a secluded cabin in the woods, no other houses in sight. We went on hikes, we cooked together, we relaxed in the hot tub, we had great sex, we visited a nearby antique shop, we talked and laughed and enjoyed one another’s company completely. And we even danced together for the first time since… jeez, our wedding day? Maybe. It was a completely wonderful 48 hours, and I barely even thought about the affair.

Coming home from that trip, reminders popped back in. I had a difficult couple of days getting readjusted to reality. It felt like the usual roller coaster, but amplified. Two days of sheer bliss, followed by a couple of days of misery.

But we’re firmly engaged in the process of recovery now. Things are getting better. I think about most things less than I used to, and when I do they don’t carry the same sting as they did earlier. There are still low points. I do sometimes let my negative feelings come to the forefront — a necessary if painful part of the process, I believe — and we have had some big fights. When the storm calms down, I usually look at it as something that needed to happen. We still have painful stuff to work through. We’re getting there, but we’re not done — probably not even close.

My biggest hurdle recently has been trying to fully believe that she has told me everything about what happened. I don’t suspect her at all of continuing to communicate with him, and I don’t suspect her of lying to me about anything in the present. But has she told me all there is to know about the past?

Most prominently, I can’t get rid of doubts about whether they had actual sex. When I think about it logically, the “he couldn’t get it up” story just doesn’t feel likely. Possible, yes, but objectively unlikely. She insisted it was true, though, and my gut and heart both told me she was telling me the truth. I didn’t pick up on any of the “tells” that had previously set off alarm bells for me when she told me lies in the past.

Still, it gnawed at me more and more, and I confronted her with increasing intensity. I couldn’t stand the possibility that there was still a lie out there. Any untruth felt like a wall between us. If there was something she was still being dishonest with me about, I felt like the doubts kept me on one side of that wall, and her guilt over continuing to lie kept her on the other.

I became angrier and angrier over it, even though I had no real reason to suspect her story to be untrue other than that it seemed unlikely. Unlikely things happen all the time, I tried to tell myself. And yet, I just couldn’t let it go.

One night I got angrier than ever about it, and she got very angry in response. Her hostility pushed me over the edge from seeing it as only a possible lie, to seeing it as a near-definite lie. I wanted what I thought was the truth, and I almost told her to tell me what I needed to hear — that he had been able to perform, and that they had full-on sex — whether that was true or not. I had put myself in a position where that was almost the only way I could get past it, at least in the near future.

Late in the night, after hours of arguing, she relented. She told me that everything she had told me about so far was what had really happened. It hadn’t worked that night, it hadn’t worked in the shower the next morning, but she had left something out in-between. In the early morning hours, he had gotten it up, and they had been able to complete the act.

This story sounded more probable to me. I believed her, and I felt better and worse at the same time. I felt relief that there was finally nothing more to learn (like, for real this time), but also anger that she had still been lying to me for these past two months, when I had thought we were past that for most of that time.

Over the course of the next day, my anger increased. I had another “bad day.” I was barely able to eat, felt run down and sick, and my thoughts and feelings felt all mixed up.

My wife, too, seemed to be having a hard time with it. She also felt sick. She seemed more distant, too. Everything just felt really off all day.

I woke up the next morning, already furious. I came downstairs and began to write about the new pain and anger I was feeling. I now had to picture new physical acts between them, and that hurt much more than I expected it would. I had thought that most of the pain sprang from knowing she had tried, and that if he had been able to get hard, she would have been all over it. She had admitted as much, saying that frankly that night she was “in for a penny, in for a pound.”

But it turned out there was more pain than I anticipated in knowing he had been inside her. Something special that I thought had only between us these past 25 years was gone. And I had to imagine new details that felt like daggers when they crossed my mind. I also felt more and more betrayed by the continued lying when I had demanded one hundred percent honesty. Could I ever really trust her fully again?

She came downstairs that morning, and we started to talk. She stuck to her new story, and apologized for the new pain I was feeling. As we talked, though, I caught a fleeting expression on her face. I can’t describe it, but suddenly I knew for sure: she was still hiding something big.

I sat and watched her. I said her name quietly. “Are you being fully honest with me?”

She looked at me, her eyes filling up with tears. Finally, she whispered, “No.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“You have to promise not to yell,” she said, so I wouldn’t wake up our son who was asleep upstairs. I told her I’d stay calm.

“I made it up,” she said. “It didn’t happen, but I thought that’s what you needed to hear. I thought that was the only way you’d ever get past it.”

I sighed heavily. What the hell was I supposed to believe now!?

“Think about how I’ve acted over the last 36 hours,” she said. “I’ve been torn up because I was lying to you again, even though I thought it was what you needed.”

She explained exactly why she’d made it up. I could see the weight lifting off of her as she spoke. She was being honest with me now. I felt convinced of it on some fundamental level.

I felt a weight lifting off me, too. Somehow it seemed I had known the whole time that she had only said what she said in order to end my unrelenting suspicion. Her confession that she had made it up felt completely genuine, though. And it made sense. I saw clearly how I had put her in the position to feel like that was the only way forward.

I told her: “Looking at you and listening to you right now, I believe you. You will have to understand that I will continue to have doubts, though. You’ll have to be patient with me when those arise.”

She said she would, and we got started with our day.

Part fourteen.