Rock Bottom?
This is part three 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 I point out to my wife the strangeness of her behavior the night before, she calmly asks, “What’s the matter with you?”
I ask her again to tell me what’s going on. She pretends she has no idea what I’m talking about.
I ask her if she can show me any emails or messages that support her story about the day before — how she supposedly had to go into the office to put away some old documents before they closed down her floor for consolidation.
She says she can’t. She claims it had all been communicated in meetings, no emails or messages.
I press her again about her location being turned off on her phone. She lies and “admits” to me that she had gone to look for a Christmas present for me and didn’t want me to know where she was.
I ask her about a night a couple of weeks ago, when she had claimed she needed to go downtown for a dinner with coworkers. She wanted to get a hotel room. I had told her then that a hotel room seemed unnecessary. She insisted she didn’t want to make the 45-minute drive home late at night. I had let this go when she told me her company would pay for the room, and I didn’t think much more of it.
She starts listing coworkers she says were there at dinner. I stop her. I tell her, “I know some of what you’re saying isn’t true. I suspect none of it is true. Do you want to try one more time?”
She gently says my name. She’s trying to soothe me, hoping this is all based on a weird vibe that she will be able to explain away. “Where is all of this coming from?” she asks.
I take a deep breath and tell her that I checked her Snapchat this morning. “Now,” I ask her, my voice cracking, “do you want to try again?”
She looks at me for a long time, then softly whispers, “I’m sorry.”
And even though I knew already, finally hearing confirmation from her feels like a ton of bricks falling on my chest.
My heart begins to pound again, so hard I’m afraid I might have a heart attack. I tell her I need a moment to calm myself.
After a few minutes, I begin to react. I’m angry and incredibly hurt, but I remain calm.
“You do this to me at Christmas?” “I’m sorry.”
“With him? A random stranger would have been so much better.” “I’m sorry.”
“What were you thinking?” “I don’t know. I’m sorry.”
“How could you do this, considering everything I do for you and this family?” “You’re right. I’m sorry.”
I ask for details of what happened. She initially continues to lie and downplay things, claiming at one point that she just happened to run into him the night she went downtown for the work dinner. But that doesn’t last for long. I beg her for complete honesty. I tell her wherever we go from here, whether it’s divorce or reconciliation, there’s no longer any point in lying. She says she agrees, and she starts telling me answers I can believe. (Another spoiler alert: it will turn out that many of these answers were not honest, either, but we’ll get to that later.)
She says he had contacted her shortly before we left for a cruise we had taken in early November — our first trip together without kids in a few years. After we got back, they continued talking, casually, and he asked about meeting in person. She insists the work dinner was real, and that they had planned to meet afterwards for drinks. It’s unclear how detailed their plans were, but it’s obvious that he wanted to initiate an affair that night, and that she was at least open to the possibility going into that evening.
After drinks, they went to her hotel room and “made out.” He slept in the same bed with her, but she insists they didn’t have sex. “He has not been inside my body since I was twenty years old,” she says. They got up the next morning, she completed some work tasks in the hotel room, then she left and came home to me.
Over the next two weeks, they talked frequently over Snapchat. She says they didn’t make any plans beyond meeting again to go shopping together. She had made up the story about having to go downtown for work the day before so that she could meet up with him in a neighboring town and spend the day together. She says all they did was shop and have lunch. She insists they were in public the whole time.
With all of that on the table, I get into the big question: Where do we go from here?
“Do you love him?” “I’ve loved him since I was fourteen.”
“Do you love me?” “Yes, but I don’t know whether I’m still in love with you.”
“What do you want to happen now?” “I don’t know.”
“Were you going to end up leaving me?” “I don’t know.”
I let these answers sink in. They hurt, a lot.
Finally, I say, “Well, now that I know, it’s time for you to make a choice. Me or him?”
“I can’t do that,” she says.
“Then I need you to leave until you can.”
“I’m not leaving my own house.”
This is when I lose it. I scream “Yes, you fucking are!” The dogs jump up and start barking at me. I usher them out the back door and give myself some time to regain composure.
“Please remember our son is still upstairs,” she says.
I’m quiet again. I explain to her that until I know what she has chosen to do going forward, I can’t look at her. I can’t look at my wife of over twenty-three years, knowing she’s wrestling with a decision between me and another man. If that’s going to be the situation, then I need her to leave.
She’s quiet for a while. When she starts talking again, she says she doesn’t want divorce, and she doesn’t want to end it with him. It’s clear to me that she hadn’t expected to get caught and have to decide so soon. But she seems to get that she can’t have it both ways anymore. So we talked more about our possible paths forward, but this part is hard for me to remember. These moments are the rock bottom of this conversation — not knowing whether this was going to be the most difficult hurdle in our relationship, or the end of it.
I think she sees that pain. I think she realizes how deeply hurt I am, and I think it surprises her a little. I think she had tricked herself into thinking I wouldn’t even care that much if she had an affair.
I tell her that if she cuts things off with him completely, right now, then I am willing to start working to repair our marriage immediately.
My wife gets up and goes to get her phone. She opens Snapchat and types a message to him. She shows it to me. It’s just four words:
“It’s over between us.”
She hits send, then unfriends him in the app. She shows me as she does it. She opens Facebook and unfriends him. She deletes his contact info. She tells me I’m free to look at her devices at any time. She texts me the passcodes to all of her devices, including those she uses for work, so I can check up on her any time I want.
A part of me doesn’t like this. I don’t want to be the jealous husband who’s tracking her every move, even though I now have every reason to do just that. I just don’t want to be that person. But I have to admit, it may be necessary for a while, to rebuild trust. I resolve to use this investigative power over her judiciously. I want to get past this part quickly and start trusting her again as soon as I begin to feel comfortable with it.
She does and says all of these things voluntarily, seemingly without resignation or reluctance. I think I sense relief in her.
