The Road Gets Rockier
This is part twenty 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.
Well….
I thought I was done with this type of post. I hoped that my last few posts, optimistic in tone and outlook, would end up forming a sort of end, at least to the first, hardest part of our journey of recovering from the trauma of my wife’s affair and building a better relationship. But last week I was dealt the biggest wallop since the morning — almost six months ago now — that I found out she had still been talking to the other guy.
Last Tuesday, during a relatively routine check-in discussion, my wife dropped something on me that she had not spelled out before. She said that for about a year before her affair began, she had been planning to leave me as soon as our daughter graduated from high school, which occurred last month. She basically had the end of May 2022 circled on her imaginary calendar. That’s when she would make her “escape” from what had become for her, though not for me, an unhappy marriage.
She said she had been counting down the remaining months in her head, usually after an argument, or an exchange with me where she felt unseen, unheard, unimportant. She said she was surprised that I never heard her mutter under her breath, “Just _____ more months to go….” But I never did.
So first of all, this was surprising news to me. I had no idea her negative feelings went anywhere near this far. She never indicated anything to me about feeling this strongly, about wanting out of our marriage for so long. She didn’t tell me then, and she hadn’t told me in any of the many post-mortem discussions we’d had about our old, pre-affair relationship.
But secondly, it explained a lot. It put the affair in a pre-existing “exit strategy” context. It explained her apparent lack of guilt during the affair, and even her relative carelessness about covering things up. What would it matter if I found out? It would only move her schedule up a few months. It explained what “the plan” that she mentioned to him in an email truly was. She was leaving me anyway, and he came along at just the right time to provide a place for her to land after she left. There had been a plan, even though she had long denied that.
Still, I didn’t have a strong reaction to this news at first. Things had been going so well between us recently, and I guess I didn’t want to bump us out of the comfortable place our relationship was finally starting to settle into.
On Wednesday morning I went for a walk, which started out fine. I even saw a little rabbit soon after I set out, and sent my wife a picture of it. But quickly, my thoughts turned angry and sad.
This was an example of exactly what I had been worrying about — that there were still things she hadn’t told me, hadn’t spelled out clearly, or was even actively hiding from me. Dozens, if not hundreds, of times over the past six months, we had emphasized the importance of honesty over anything else. Not some honesty, not mostly honesty, but one hundred percent honesty, all the time, even when it hurts one or both of us.
We had talked at length about our relationship leading up to the affair. Why was I first hearing now, almost six months down the road to recovery, that her feelings ran this deep, that her plans went this far?
When I got back from my walk, I started another conversation with my wife. I asked her why she hadn’t told me this earlier. “Because I didn’t see a point, and I didn’t want to hurt you more,” she replied.
I said, “But that’s what I’ve told you I’ve been afraid of all along — that you were still keeping things from me for that very reason. One hundred percent honesty means you don’t get to decide what to tell me and what to keep to yourself. You just tell me the truth.”
She agreed and apologized for not telling me earlier. I accepted her apology on this count, but I told her that this now amplified my concern that there was more that she had kept from me.
I started, once again, to press her on that. What hadn’t she told me? What had she sugarcoated and danced around? What was she still lying to me about?
Of course, foremost in my mind was her claim that they never had actual intercourse. As hard as I’d tried to, I had never fully believed it. The story of how they tried three times, but he never got an erection still seemed like bullshit, and the reasons why she might still be lying about that made total sense to me. I could imagine how she could see herself as fully committed to me, fully invested in our marriage, fully transparent… except for about this one thing.
I started to press her on that again. As before, she quickly got upset. She said, “I’ve told you everything. If it’s still an issue for you, you need to talk to your therapist about that.” Putting it back on me to deal with on my own, again.
I pressed harder, to no avail. She wasn’t budging.
I realized how tired I was of this. When would this ever end? Unless she would admit it or I could somehow find out the truth on my own, it seemed the best I could hope for was wondering about this, at least occasionally, for the rest of my life.
I told her I knew a way to find out for sure and end all of this, but I didn’t want to do it: we could call or text him and ask for his version of what happened in a non-leading way. My wife went into a sort of strange mode of half-encouraging me to do that, telling me she was more than happy to do it since it would prove she was telling the truth once and for all, and half-discouraging me, telling me that maybe we should wait and talk to our marriage counselor first because she might tell me that it wasn’t a good idea.
This made me even more concerned, but she left it up to me, and she gave me her work phone (which they had used during the affair to communicate) to call or text him from. I still hadn’t made up my mind to go through with it, but I told her how I wanted the call to go if we did do it. I wouldn’t talk, she would. She would let him know I was there and listening. She would ask him to describe what had happened when they were together. She would tell him that I knew everything already, so just to tell the full truth. If he didn’t include it in his original description, she was to ask, “How many times did we have actual intercourse?” Not “Did we?” but “How many times?”
I agonized over it. I didn’t want to hear his voice. I didn’t want to open a line of communication between my wife and him again. I didn’t want to hear him describe what happened, even if it did match my wife’s account.
But, this seemed like what I needed. A full and final answer, an end to all my wondering, and an end to her deception, if any remained.
I made a last ditch effort with her: “Please, if I’m going to find out something different, then tell me now. It would be so much better to hear it from you, voluntarily, finally.”
She didn’t budge.
So I typed out a text as if it was from my wife, asking to talk. I was agonizing over whether to go through with it. I couldn’t bring myself to hit send. She said, “Give me the phone, I’ll do it.” She did. After a few minutes, he called back from another line.
She began: “So my husband is here with me, but he’s not going to say anything. We have been working things out, but we are hung up on some details of what happened between you and me. He already knows everything, so please tell him what happened the times we saw one-another.”
He said, “I’m not sure I remember everything. I’ve tried to shut a lot of it out. I’m trying to rebuild my life, too. But I’ll try. We saw one another three times: the night for dinner, the day we went out for lunch, and the day we went shopping.”
Wait, lunch? She had mentioned that meeting, but had told me they only met in a parking lot and talked for a few minutes. He elaborated, mentioning the specific restaurant they met and ate at. It was right here in the town where we live. Like I said, I don’t think she really cared much whether she got caught.
I mouthed to my wife: “Tell him to tell us what happened after dinner.” She did.
He replied, “After dinner we went back to my hotel room and… did inappropriate things. I’m sorry.”
I mouthed again: “What inappropriate things?” She asked him.
“We did sexual things, a couple of times that night and also the next morning.”
I whispered to my wife to ask the question we had talked about: “How many times did we have actual intercourse?” She acted like she couldn’t understand what I was saying, started to go grab a pen and paper so I could write it down. She was stalling. I said it more clearly. She asked the question.
His voice shook with nervousness as he answered, “I don’t know for sure. Like I said, some of it is foggy, but… I think three times. I’m sorry.”
My wife looked up at me, meeting my gaze directly, emotionless. Her expression simply said, “Well, there it is.”
And there it was.
After nearly six months of begging for the full truth, there it finally was.
