Sliding Divorce
This is part nineteen 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 haven’t seen the Gwyneth Paltrow movie “Sliding Doors,” but I think I get the gist of it: our decisions are forks in the road of reality, and while we live in the reality created by the choices we’ve made, perhaps other realities exist in which things turned out differently.
I’ve been thinking a lot about that idea recently. A few weeks ago, we attended my daughter’s high school graduation. My wife and I sat in the stands, surrounded by family and a few friends. We held hands and experienced together the pride and sense of accomplishment that comes with watching our youngest child get her diploma, before she heads off to college in the fall. It was the end of an era, but the beginning of something new between my wife and me: the next phase in our relationship, where it will again be just the two of us together most of the time. It was a wonderful, momentous night.
But as we sat there, I thought of the other possible version of that night.
I’m in the stands, alone or maybe with some of my family. Somewhere else in the stands sits my wife, actually my ex-wife in this scenario. She’s with members of her large extended family. They would have initially been shocked by what she had done to me, but they would have forgiven her by now, even if they would never approve of her decisions and behavior. Would our friends be sitting with me, or with her? Depends on how they had taken the news of what she had done, I guess.
And of course, he’s sitting there with her. He’s the victor in this reality. He went after my wife, and she chose him, or at least she chose the “shiny things” his wealth could offer her. The affair had progressed too far, past the point of there being any trust left for us to rebuild upon, or maybe past the point of her even wanting to try. Her companionship was the prize, and, through some twist of fate, he had won it, not me.
I can imagine how that night would have felt, in this other world. I still would have been proud of my daughter and smiled and hugged her after the ceremony. But overall, the night would have been emotionally crushing.
We avoided that alternate reality by the skin of our teeth.
I just happened to stand in the kitchen on that Wednesday evening last December, after my wife had been out shopping all day with the other guy, and wonder when she’d be home with the pizza she was picking up on her way back from “the office.” The mundane event of checking the Find My iPhone app activated the suspicious thoughts that led to my discovery of her affair early the next morning. Prior to that, I had absolutely no reason at all to even consider the possibility that she had been carrying on an affair for a few weeks.
If I hadn’t checked the location of her phone, who knows what could have happened? Maybe my discovery would only have been delayed by a few days. Or maybe it would have been weeks, months even, before I found out.
Maybe it would have been too late.
The other inflection point that brought our current reality into existence was on a Sunday afternoon in January. My wife and I had been talking for hours, after I had found out she’d still been lying to me about some important things. I asked her to read what I had written so far –– parts one through six of what I have since published here. Reading that woke her up. That afternoon, she broke things off and deleted the secret Gmail account she’d been using to talk to him.
If she hadn’t done that, mere hours before I happened upon incontrovertible evidence that she had still been talking to him, I just don’t see how we could have gone forward together. I think we would very likely be divorced now.
We just barely slipped through that “sliding door” right as it closed.
These moments like my daughter’s graduation, where I catch glimpses of the other possible outcomes of my wife’s affair, make me feel a mix of powerful emotions. It hurts to think how close my wife’s selfish and deceitful behavior brought us to these alternate realities. That pain can still make me angry at her, and it raises questions in my mind.
What was she thinking and feeling? To what degree did she see these alternate futures? Were they vague visions of a more comfortable life, one in which she could quit her job if she wanted, one in which she could travel more, and drive the big SUV she doesn’t need at all, but just wants, one in which she thought she would feel more “seen” and appreciated? Or was her vision clearer and more complete? Had she pictured this other version of my daughter’s graduation, where she was sitting with him, instead of the man who with her conceived, cared for, raised and loved this daughter? Was she really okay with that?
These are questions I don’t know if I can ever know the answers to. We’ve talked about them. She downplays how much she considered these things. She says she was swept up in the excitement of the affair. She says she wasn’t thinking much at all. That sounds believable.
But on the other hand, after I first found out about the affair, she assured him in an email that “my plan is still the same,” which indicates she was thinking about a different future, at least to some degree. So… I don’t know.
It’s one of those things that will matter less and less with time. That other version of my wife — who was so different from the young woman I met over 25 years ago, and maybe even more different from the loving, supportive woman who now sleeps beside me — will fade into a distant memory. Thoughts of that alternate reality will fade, too, as the branch we chose together takes us further and further from the branch we narrowly avoided.
But, there are other alternate realities, too.
For one, there’s the reality in which my wife had no affair; the opportunity was never presented to her, or she turned it down when it was. In that reality, our marriage might still be plodding along like it was before. Fine. Okay. Pretty good sometimes. Just a typically stale relationship halfway through its 26th year. Where does that path ultimately lead?
Does that possible reality make me grateful that my wife was unfaithful? Of course I can’t go that far, but I recognize that we needed something to shake us out of the doldrums we were in. Something had to happen to make us appreciate one another again. I wish it hadn’t been an affair, but it was.
Of all the possible realities that could exist for us after her infidelity, I know that the one we’re in, the one where we’re rebuilding a new and vibrant relationship based on love, trust, mutual respect and admiration, our common interests and values, and our time-tested bond… that’s the best of all possible realities for my wife and me right now.
Sometimes I can’t believe how lucky I am to be living it.
