Oh, THIS Is Rock Bottom
This is part nine 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.
The following fifteen hours or so were among the worst of my life.
My wife and I talked, fought, cried, talked some more, screamed, cried some more. Not just tears rolling down my face — I literally howled in agony. How could she have done this to me? As I write this, it’s now four days after that horrible Monday, and I’m not much closer to an answer. I suspect I’ll be wrestling with it for a long time. I don’t think even she understands how she was able to make things feel so real with me, like we were really rebuilding something special, and still be telling him that they would be together one day.
“My plan is still the same.”
While I don’t think she really had a true plan when she typed that, she at least wanted him to think that she did. She used those words to keep him on the line, to give herself an “escape hatch,” as she would put it, in case things didn’t work out between us. Of course, I had no escape hatch, and she knew that. “My plan is still the same.” That phrase will haunt me for a while.
There were other revelations during that day, too. They had seen one another one additional time that she hadn’t admitted to before, meeting up in a shopping center parking lot to talk for about 15 minutes.
She still insisted they had not had intercourse, but she finally admitted it was not for any lack of trying. That night in the hotel downtown, he had had a lot to drink, and things didn’t work. So they did everything but have “actual sex.”
That next morning when he knocked on the bathroom door? She hadn’t told him no. Though she claimed he was still unable to get an erection, he had gotten in the shower with her and they had made another run at it. The one thing she had told me to prove there were no more lies had been a lie.
I’ve found that one of the cruelest things about an affair is that one partner knows the full truth, and the other partner has to decide what to believe. The sexual acts have been revealed to me slowly over weeks. Each time she told me about how far things went, it was a lie. Starting with “we only made out,” and becoming slightly more truthful (but still a lie) all along the way. There’s no way for me to know whether we’ve finally arrived at the truth. I want to believe he was never inside her. I hope it’s true. But would it shock me to learn it wasn’t? Honestly, not at all.
Learning these new sexual details were like new stab wounds, but nothing compared to the indescribably cruel injury she had inflicted by continuing to talk to him, to tell him she missed and loved him, all while I was giving my all in the effort to build our relationship and marriage back better than ever.
Over those three and a half weeks, I was telling her how much I truly loved her, more intensely than ever, and assuring her we were going to work this out… then she was talking to him that same day, assuring him that they would one day be together.
I was giving her expensive and thoughtful stocking stuffers on Christmas Day… and I know from her browser history that she was emailing him back and forth all day.
We were having sex that felt genuinely connected and passionate… and for all I know, she was probably emailing him from the bathroom right after.
Did the fact that I was doing all of this for her in a way drive her back to him? After all, maybe she felt like she had sort of gotten away with it. I was very hurt by what she had done, and she must have seen that, but what other repercussions had she suffered? I had quickly told her that I forgave her, and told her I was already regaining trust again soon after that. At the time, she told me she felt intense guilt and shame over the affair she claimed was over, and that that was punishment enough. But obviously that wasn’t true.
After his LinkedIn message on December 20, four days after I learned of the affair, she had replied that afternoon on her new secret gmail account. She replied to him while I was at the movies with the kids, when I had what I thought had been an unwarranted freak out. Now, I have to wonder if I had picked up on something from her that day, something subtle that triggered my insecurities. From that point until Sunday, January 9, they had emailed and/or talked every day. But there was one important detail about that Sunday, which I’ll get to in a minute.
Over the course of those weeks, she probably uttered more untrue sentences to me than true ones. And when I did get suspicious, such as when I thought maybe she had called him from the car, or when I thought maybe she was messaging him from her watch, she made me feel bad for even having those suspicions. She cried and lectured me about how I eventually needed to trust her. All while knowing what she was doing. It was absolutely despicable behavior to engage in, especially in a marriage that’s in peril, with one person working so hard to make it work.
Despicable. There’s no way around that.
For most of that Monday that I found out, I simply didn’t see a way forward. How could we rebuild a marriage with zero trust? It seemed inevitable: I was going to be a nearly fifty-year-old divorced man. My top goal in life, to have one fruitful, loving, happy, lifelong marriage (compared to my mother’s five marriages and my father’s three), was in shambles. I broke down completely at the idea of divorce. Deep, sorrowful sobs poured out of me. I had not cried like that since my dad died thirty years ago. Maybe not even then.
My wife said she didn’t want divorce, but if it was what I wanted, she promised to make it as painless as possible for me. She would let me have the house and the dogs, she would keep me and the kids on her health insurance, she would pay me alimony to make sure I could afford to maintain the family’s status quo as much as possible. She said she wouldn’t even hire her own lawyer, if she could avoid it. Her promises made divorce seem even more like the only viable option. If it was going to happen, now was the time for me to pull the trigger and have it all be on my terms.
At around 3:30 that afternoon, my daughter was about to get home from school. We had been talking constantly since 2:45 a.m. or so. It was finally time to make a decision. Was my wife going to leave, or were we going to try yet again to save our marriage? I climbed into bed to rest and think.
I began to weigh the pros and cons of the two options in front of me. It quickly became apparent that the problem was not so simple. There were no pros to telling her to leave and getting a divorce. That column was all cons. For me, all of the pros were in “stay and fight for it” column. The problem came from the fact that the “stay and fight for it” option seemed impossible. It seemed as realistic as a “fly to the moon and start a new family there” option.
How on earth could we rebuild from what seemed like nothing? She had destroyed my trust, burned my hope and optimism to the ground. Everything was in ashes. How do you rebuild from ashes?
Then I saw an ember.
Glowing in those metaphorical ashes, there was one bright point of hope. Remember how I said when I first went to her secret email account, it was deleted? She had deleted it Sunday afternoon. That’s when she also Googled how to erase her browsing history. She had done those things when she had finally — after all the deception and doubt and duplicity — decided to end it with him and stay with me. She had done those things the previous afternoon, after our long discussion about the dinner and LinkedIn lies.
And after, at my request, she read the first six chapters of what you’ve been reading.