Lies and Forgiveness
This is part four 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.
I wrote this next chapter about a week after finding out about the affair. Even though later developments would render much of what I wrote inaccurate and make me feel gullible and even more betrayed, I’m leaving this as I wrote it at the time.
Forgiveness was never in question after that. I forgave her the moment she sent that last Snapchat message in front of me. She said she had made her choice to work to make our marriage better, to make it last. I believed her, and I forgave her.
Now, as they say, to forgive is not to forget. It still hurt and will continue to hurt sometimes for a long while, I suspect. I would tell her as I cried the next night that the emotional anguish was worse than anything I’d experienced since my father committed suicide thirty years ago, and that’s true. And the process of working through that pain has so far been very similar to a grieving process.
One similarity is that it gets a little better every day, and my wife has been helping me with that immensely. Since that Thursday morning when I confronted her, she has been supportive, understanding, truthful (with one minor exception when I truly believe she was only trying to spare my feelings), loving, and seemingly fully engaged and committed to rebuilding our relationship. She has been nothing short of wonderful.
In the moments when I can see the guilt and regret are hurting her, I remind her that this — the way she’s behaving now — is the person I’ve always known, and who she truly is. She made a mistake. It was a doozy, but still just a mistake.
My wife has been amazing since I found out. Frankly, I’m proud of how I’ve responded, too. I’m seriously so impressed with how both of us have dealt with this. We’ve listened to one another more intently than I think either of us has in decades, trying to truly understand what the other one is telling us. We’ve supported one-another, been patient with one-another, and expressed genuine love for one-another. We’ve both put in a lot of effort to be the best versions of ourselves we can be, in order to make this relationship work, not only like it has before, but way better than ever.
It has not been easy, and we have occasionally failed one-another. A few days after I discovered the affair, I took two of my kids to a movie. It was the first time my wife and I had been apart since I had found out. Even though she would only be home by herself for a few hours, my imagination began to get the better of me, and I admit I had a little freak out.
I excused myself from the movie, FaceTimed her from the theater lobby and made her show me around the house to prove she was alone. I’m ashamed I behaved that way when my wife was trying so hard to help me. Still, I guess the occasional freakout is understandable in the aftermath of something like this.
It would come up again several days later, when I became concerned that she might be secretly messaging him on her Apple Watch, based on… nothing, really. Just my imagination again. After that incident, I asked my wife to try to understand that I had just had the rug pulled out from under me. And now here I am trying to once again stand confidently on the same rug. It’s going to be difficult at times. She seemed to get that.
She’s had her failings, too. I went to her at one point and asked a simple question that had popped into my head: did her employer really pay for her hotel room that night? Yes, she assured me that they had, but that the reimbursement hadn’t yet gone through, so she couldn’t prove it to me yet. I knew she was lying immediately, just by her expressions and mannerisms. She quickly confessed that her affair partner had in fact paid for the room, and became upset with herself for having attempted to lie to me again.
But, I do believe she lied to me to try to avoid causing me more pain. The day before, she had truthfully revealed some details I hadn’t known originally. First, she told me that the sexual aspect had been more than what she had led me to believe. While I still believe her when she says they didn’t have intercourse, to call what happened physically between them “making out” had been a stretch beyond the common definition of the term. And second, she had not only messaged him frequently but also talked to him on the phone almost every day. She would take her work phone with her on her daily 5-mile walks, and they would talk the whole time.
She hadn’t directly lied about either of these things, but they were important details she had omitted until a few days later. Together, they made that day the worst since the first day. I had no appetite, I couldn’t concentrate on anything, I felt depressed. It was this evening that I had my movie theater freak out. So I believe her when she says that when I asked about who paid for the hotel room the next day, she just didn’t want to hurt me again with another revelation, no matter how minor.
Even though we are both trying so hard to be perfect, we need to remember we’re not. We will both let the other one down from time to time. It’s part of being human and in a relationship. It’s important to be understanding and forgiving for the little things, too.