The Moment That Saved Everything
This is part ten 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.
So, now it’s one week after finding out that she had still been talking to him. I have a new, miraculous “moment that saved everything.” Before it had been that I had looked to see where she was with the pizza, thus ending (or so I thought) the affair before it went past the point of no return.
Now it is that I had insisted that she read what I had written so far, on that Sunday afternoon, and that she had agreed.
She says it made her see things in a whole new light. It made her see my feelings — my hurt, my love and my optimism — as fully real. For the first time she really believed that I was giving my all, and that I did want it to work literally more than anything in the world.
Shortly after my wife read it, I went to pick up an artificial Christmas tree from a neighbor who didn’t want it anymore. While I was gone, my wife deleted her secret email account and started looking at how to wipe her history, to erase all traces of what she had been doing. The records fully back this up. It’s one of the few things I can verify with absolute certainty to be true.
It was this decision by her, made just hours before I found out she had still been talking to him, that truly saved our marriage from the extreme peril she herself had put it in. Without that one ember, all would have been lost.
This past week has been very difficult. My mood swings have been even more dramatic than before, from the lows of feeling betrayed once again by this version of my wife that I feel I don’t know at all, to the highs of being so grateful to have hope again, so happy to feel like I really have my true wife back now. Sometimes these swings happen so quickly it’s sickening, and the highs often seem to trigger the lows.
But, the difficulty of this past week is nothing compared to how it would feel having to tell the kids about what she did, talking to a divorce attorney, watching my wife move her things out and to her parents’ house, likely before moving to a rental home or something, somewhere near him until his divorce is final. I can imagine the anguish of dealing with those things, and I’m so glad I’m not.
Which maybe makes it sound like we’re doing this for the wrong reasons — that we’re clinging to something that’s gone just because the alternative is too painful. I can only say I do not feel that way at all.
I didn’t make my decision to continue to fight for our marriage out of fear of the alternative. I made it out of hope for what we can still have. My wife and I had something special, for a long time. Our marriage has never been one of burning passion, but we’ve always loved one another, we generally got along really well, we enjoyed being together. But we do have a lot of growing room to become closer, to know each other more intimately, to experience more things together, to truly understand and cherish one another. After 25 years, that growing room is actually a very exciting thing to still have.
I have to assume that many readers of this will think, “You’re giving her a third chance?! Man, what a pushover.” In response to that, I can only emphasize that these things my wife did to me over the past couple of months are not at all in line with the character of the person I have spent 25 years with. When I met her, she was quiet, sweet, loving, cheerful, incredibly smart and capable. Over the time I’ve known her, she’s pushed her career forward through hard work and dedication. She’s been a steady and supportive companion to me. She’s given birth to and helped raise our three children into young adults who seem well-adjusted and on the verge of happy, successful lives on their own. In short, she’s a wonderful woman who made a terribly selfish choice that then snowballed into several weeks of truly awful behavior.
By giving my all in this effort to save our marriage, I am not at all letting her off the hook. Ours was not a bad marriage. She was not a bad wife, and I was not a bad husband. There was no single, simple “reason” for what she did. After two and a half decades together, had things grown stale in some ways? Yes, and honestly, I had been making more efforts to fix that than she had. She did not talk to me about feeling unfulfilled in any way. There were no clear warning signs that I could have heeded but chose to ignore. I did not deserve what she did — at all. It’s easy to reflect on these facts and feel even more betrayed.
If there’s a “why” to her affair, it’s rooted in deeper, more complex things than any of that. She has always had issues with poor self esteem. And she had always pictured her life as a mom as very different from what it turned out to be. She resented that I got to be the work-from-home parent for much of their childhood, and I don’t think she ever fully worked through those feelings. I think she felt hurt by that circumstance, and therefore, in some kind of twisted way, that made her feel okay about hurting me.
These things also contributed to a distance between us — a distance that didn’t feel significant to me at the time, but looking back, I see it clearly. We were getting along, we were generally happy, everything was fine. Still, we weren’t fully together.
But when I look at my wife now, I see something in her that I haven’t seen in a long time. She seems more present. She looks at me with different eyes, and talks to me with a connection I haven’t felt in years.
We are continuing with counseling, meeting with our therapist once a week for now. My wife is also going to get some one-on-one therapy, to help her work out all the why’s and how’s within herself. We’re talking, working through things. It can be upsetting, but I think we both usually come out of the other end of our conversations having made progress.
So we move forward from here, the low point of our marriage, with a lot of hope, and growing room, and excitement, and patience, and, above all, love.
To some it may seem crazy, but my hope remains intact. I’m still so optimistic about our future, and now my wife is, too.