I’m male, 51 years old. My wife is 44. We’ve been married for 22 years, together for 23. We have four young adult children.
During the summer months of 2024, my wife came to me and said she "could no longer be in a relationship with me." When I asked what that meant, she said "I’m still here. But as long as you’re playing (that video game), we’re not in a relationship." I thought that was an unreasonable request, and I continued to play (that video game) and others.
Ya see, we’d been together for 23 years. I played many video games during that time. It was a way to escape. It was a way to avoid the day-to-day pressures of life, including being a father, having dead-end jobs, managing bills, repairing the house, getting older, etc.
For the record, I worked and I paid all the bills on time. I provided for the family. While my wife stayed with the kids, homeschooling (no we’re not religious) and taking care of the home for over 16 years. That means I paid 100% of the bills during this time.
In my 30’s I worked my way through school and eventually got both a bachelor’s and master’s degree. Then I worked my way through a career of having people 10-15 years younger than me as bosses, to eventually making six figures and being able to provide a better life for my family of six.
During this time my wife was fantastic! She was an amazing mom, homeschooling 4 kids that eventually finished in public high school with straight A’s. Our kids are very kind and smart people.
She was always supportive. During my mid-thirties I had a nervous breakdown (midlife crisis) and she was there for me 100%. I couldn’t eat or sleep for days and she would stay by my side (while still taking care of the kids) telling me it was ok, taking me to therapy sessions, and just generally letting me lean on her for dear life.
She barely spent any money. She asked for very little and she gave quite a lot. I was proud to be married to her. I felt lucky to have her in my life. I thought our marriage was solid.
{Morgan Freedman Voice} His marriage was not solid.
Throughout our marriage, I used two coping mechanisms to deal with stress. The first was rage. Any inconvenience, anything that made me feel like I didn’t have an immediate answer to a problem, anything that made me feel like I was being judged, I would rage. This means I would throw a little fit and stomp around and yell. I would basically act like a child. But mostly, this would happen behind closed doors, and only my wife and children would see this. It wasn’t 24 hours a day, in fact I might not do it at all for weeks or sometimes months at a time. It was random, but my wife and kids knew it could happen at any moment. They knew it could be set off by the smallest of things.
Thankfully, it did not result in physical violence of any kind. Only regret for my lack of control and maturity, as well as the impact it had on my wife and kids over the years.
The second coping mechanism was video games. I would play them as much as possible, but within reason, depending on what was going on in my life. For example, there were years where I was the sole financial supporter of a family of six, while also going to school full time, working full time, having a one-and-a-half-hour commute, and only making 20k a year! I didn’t play a lot of video games during this time, but I still tried!
22 years is a long time, and I can’t possibly do justice to the entire marriage without boring the readers of this post to tears (That’s right, this multi-page rant is the short version!). So let me just summarize the point I’m trying to make here. I knew our marriage wasn’t perfect, but I thought it was great despite any flaws my wife, or I might have had. (and for sure, there are events and actions that I made during the 22 years that were bad and where I failed to be a good husband. I do not want to lose sight of this.)
In 2022, we had recently moved into a new home, a HUGE milestone for us. We literally had 3 near adult children living in the same room. And it was a lifetime effort of ours to upsize our home into something that could support all our kids. A few months before we moved into the new home, my wife went back to work after being out of the work force for 16 plus years.
What I didn’t realize was that my wife was miserable. I didn’t realize this until she told me in mid-October of 2024. For the last couple of years I had noticed that she and I were growing more and more apart. And after the summer months conversation ("we’re not in a relationship") I started paying a lot more attention. I started to notice that things were really escalating in ways that they never had before.
That’s when I started to search for answers online using queries like "How to tell if your marriage is ending?" Almost immediately I realized that the internet was certain my marriage was ending. We weren’t communicating well, she was being overly critical, she no longer seemed to talk to me about the future. There were other signs, but those were the most prominent.
Shortly after that it came to my knowledge that the signs your marriage is over can often run parallel to the signs that your spouse is cheating on you! Oh crap, I thought. This is all starting to make more sense now.
Yeah, she has been talking about men at work. Yeah, she has been more secretive with her phone lately. Yeah, she’s working longer hours and coming home late all the time. Yeah, she’s always upset at me, often for no understandable reason. It was like I could put a check next to nearly every box on both lists.
During this time, she also made several crazy ass comments to me, that made me think "why the fuck did she say that?" The following comments were made over a four-month period (prior to D-Day) in 2024:
1. "I could have sex with someone from work in my car and you would never know it. But can you imagine how guilty I would feel?"
2. "I used to think that younger men wouldn’t be into me because I’m in my 40’s. But I was so wrong, I would have no problem getting a younger man if I wanted to."
3. "I never delete any of my messages. Everything I’ve ever texted to people is stored right on my phone."
4. In reference to a Netflix show about a female guard that fell in love with a male prison inmate and helped him escape, ultimately dying while on the run with him. "That woman is me."
These things were said in passing to either hurt me or I guess just tell on herself?
But I had no proof. And honestly, I just couldn’t believe it. She was always talking about how integrity was her biggest turn on. She had been cheated on by past boyfriends but said she had never cheated on anyone herself. She told me once that my greatest quality, what she loved the most about me, was my integrity. I just couldn’t believe that cheating was going to be the cause of all this. I thought it would be something else, that she just got sick of dealing with raging video game guy.
And to be clear, that was true. She was sick of it.
In mid-October I confronted her about her general interactions with me. I told her that when I searched for signs on the internet that your marriage is over, we were checking most of the boxes. There was yelling by both of us. She said she didn’t feel loved or cared for. She said I didn’t help enough around the house. She said I raged too much. She said I didn’t "see her has a person". She said she was "miserable for 22 years of marriage." She also said, "I have so much resentment for you."
I was mortally wounded by this. I did love her. I did care about her. I would always love and care about her. There’s never been a doubt in my mind about this since I met her 23 years ago, and when she asked me to marry her, I immediately said yes. I know I’m the same person she married; I didn’t change. And in that moment, I knew that was a problem.
I also mentioned to her that the signs your marriage is over is remarkably similar to the signs your spouse is cheating on you. Her reaction was surprising, as she instantly yelled in a the most forceful voice, "If you’re accusing me of cheating, we’re going to have a problem!"
Of course, I told her that I was not accusing her (I had no proof of anything, after all), and I was just commenting that it was worrisome. That our marriage was obviously in trouble, and I was here to try to figure out why and work to fix it.
The conversation ended by her confirming that she was "committed to the marriage and did not want a divorce". This would be one of the very few times in our 22-year marriage when the word divorce would even be mentioned, and the first time that divorce was a "serious" topic of conversation.
Oh yeah, my wife was going to a neighboring state at the end of the week for a funeral. She had not invited me to go, but because one of her many items on her list of grievances was that I didn’t attend family functions with her, I offered to go with her. That’s right, I was dropping video games and escapism because my wife was the most important thing to me.
She did not seem excited about me traveling with her. And it was unclear if she "just wanted to go by herself". Obviously, this was a HUGE red flag, and I told her that if she was committed to the marriage and this was something that I’d been failing to do, it should be a no brainer to allow me to attend with her, right? I said that you can’t be committed to the marriage and not allow me to go with you, but that it was her choice. She said I was giving her an "ultimatum". I was not. I told her "I’m giving you a prophecy. There’s a difference."
Days went by and I didn’t know if I was going to be her travel partner. Her plan was to immediately get off work and just go on a Friday afternoon. Which got me even more worried about who she might be traveling with if I wasn’t there. I also imagined that she could stay the night at someone else’s place on Friday night and then drive straight to the funeral the next morning and no one (not her friends or her husband) would know the better. I told her this. I told her that was my worry.
On the next Friday afternoon (just hours before she was supposed to leave work for the trip out of state) I got a text from my wife saying she decided that I could go with her to the funeral. I was excited, my marriage may not be ending! I booked the hotel for her and started to get ready. I had one mission, show my wife I will be there for her, I will not rage, I will not make things difficult for her, I will show her love through action.
It was a five-hour drive, and almost immediately I realized how disconnected we were. I mean I already knew it because I was present for all 22 years of the marriage. But the last two years were in free fall. Still, I found the drive and the time with my wife to be fun. I liked spending time with her.
But as I drove, she texted. And my fears started to creep up on me throughout the drive. I kept wanting to ask who she was talking to, but she was already telling me it was her girlfriend’s that we would be meeting up with at the funeral. Again, I had no proof, only my gut saying "DANGER! WILL ROBBINSON!".
As we got closer to the hotel, I just kept thinking "this is the point where if she’s in any kind of a relationship with someone she’s going to text him the moment we reach the hotel to tell him she made it there ok." As we checked in at the front desk, I couldn’t stop eyeing her. I kept trying to see if she would just randomly text someone. And she did. I saw it. And I was very worried and sad.
In my mind, I thought that there was someone that was going to go with her, or that she had plans with, and she had to back out. And they’ve been talking to each other in texts this whole five-hour drive and even though she’s physically with me, she’s emotionally with him.
But moments later in the hotel room I didn’t care because we had the best sex we’d had in years. I was surprised that she even wanted to have sex with me. But it was good, really good. And I thought, "Our marriage is going to be just fine!"
Throughout the funeral and all the different gatherings and meeting up with friends, I was amazed at how affectionate she was towards me. I hadn’t felt this connected to her in years, and I kicked myself for not paying more attention to her needs to be seen with her husband.
At one point, one of her girlfriend’s husbands was pissed off, and I learned through my wife that he asked his wife why my wife was being so affectionate, and why we looked so in love? He was upset that his wife wasn’t doing the same. Little did he (or I) know, it was all an act. My wife was "people pleasing" as she calls it, only to keep me happy through the event. I would learn on the car ride home that she was still miserable, and this was exactly what she’d been doing for 22 years. Just people pleasing her husband. Soothing him, taking care of his needs while sacrificing her own.
Now at this point, I think it’s fair to say that there will be a split in the reaction of what this means to our marriage. Some people will say, "This is clearly ‘walk away wife syndrome’, where the guy thinks everything is great and the women thinks she’s been carrying all the weight and just gets sick of it." While other people, like me, might say, "WTF?! How am I supposed to know that I’m doing a bad job as a husband if you’re not telling me and instead, you’re letting me lean on you and carrying my water for me?!"
I’m sure there will be more opinions on this. But to date I feel that yes, I was a bad husband (despite the poor communication from my wife) and it wasn’t like she never communicated anything, she did! She told me on several occasions that she "hated that video game", she even called it my mistress. She also had a few examples of where I absolutely failed as a husband, including one where she had her own nervous breakdown and unlike her, I did not give her the same level of support that she had shown me. (there’s a longer story to be told here about our communication styles influenced by past trauma, and the lack of emotional intelligence of my wife, BUT generally I take full blame for this episode).
So, the trip out of state ends, and I think we’re in good shape. But she says no she’s totally miserable and "you can’t fix 22 years of marriage overnight". Ok, sure. I get that. But we’re not dead, we’re "ok" and we’re both "committed to the marriage and we don’t want a divorce." She still agrees with this statement.
I forgot to mention that around this time (prior to the out of state trip) I started to notice that she was getting text messages later and later at night. Sometimes at 3 or 4 in the morning. I also noticed that she would immediately wake up in the morning and take her phone to the bathroom while she showered. She never did anything like this before this time.
I had also noticed that she was taking more time to get ready in the mornings as she appeared to me to be focusing much more on her appearance on workdays. She had also started to exercise more frequently. And on many occasions appeared to leave for work earlier and earlier, while coming home later and later (never past 8PM, but sometimes close to that, which significantly later than her normal 5:30-5:40 PM arrival time).
In 22 years of marriage, I have never checked her phone. I have never snooped on her. But this was enough for me to want to. I would often sit and stew thinking about what might be happening. But I had no proof! I had nothing to confront her with. And that’s when I decided to start checking phone records to see who the fuck was texting my wife at 4 am every night?
What I found was that one number had texted her over 1500 times in the last month. It was an unlisted number, but it was from the area of her work.
And let’s talk about what she does at work for a moment. After many years of being a homemaker, she didn’t have a lot of options to find a job. A job, btw, that we needed her to work so that we could afford a new home. I took care of the down payment, and the many other bills, she took care of the monthly mortgage payment. I wish it didn’t have to be that way, but owning a home for six people to live in is expensive. In my wildest dreams I will someday make enough so that she no longer has to work anywhere if she doesn’t want to.
But currently, her job is to watch drug addicts (both male and female) provide urine samples. And yes, that means that she’s literally looking at dicks and vagina’s all day long. That’s her job! It’s related to behavioral health, and she actually does much much more than that, and is a fantastic employee.
Unfortunately, felons in recovery are not often fantastic and will use this opportunity to flirt or sometimes even outright assault my wife. Which was the case during 2024 when some dipshit literally groped her.
Also, she was physically abused as a child by multiple people and has severe trauma from these past experiences. This is something that I have great empathy for but have not always historically been able to express this well to my wife. I’m not a mental health professional, and I don’t have a lot of tools to effectively deal with these types of situations. I wish I could do a better job, and in recent years, I recently had some firsthand experience with this kind of trauma when I was solicited in an airport restroom by some asshole that asked, "can I suck your dick?" while watching me take a shit through a crack in the restroom stall. It’s haunting, and I feel that much worse about everything my wife has been through over the years than I would have if I didn’t experience something like this for myself.
When she was groped at her job, she told me about it that day and explained that she would escalate it to her management. This happened and the guy was sent back to jail for violating his parole.
This was probably the worst thing that’s ever happened to her in this job, but it’s far from the only thing, and we’ve had many conversations about her looking for new jobs. She’s really a brilliant employee and would be amazing at anything she was given an opportunity for.
But I digress, the phone records.
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. This person was texting her, and she was texting them back all day and night. It was endless. Just to give you a comparison, she had thousands of texts for her work and for friends and family, but this single person represented 33% of all the texts she had that month, and her husband represented like 3%. Her best girlfriends represented like 5%.
I was so sad. But I still had no proof! Who the fuck was this?
It was one week after we’d travelled out of state together on a Friday. She had agreed to go to dinner with me that night, and I was really happy about that because I thought at least she’ll still go out with me.
I really struggled with how or even if I should bring up the text messages. I mean what was I going to say exactly? If she wanted to just say "it was some girl from work that had issues" or any other made-up story, I wouldn’t have a way to combat that. I would be effectively wasting my one shot while giving away that I was checking up on her.
My plan was just to hold onto the information until I had more ways to verify what was going on. It was so painful when she got home because I knew in near real time that she was still communicating via text with this number right up until she came home.
She sensed something was wrong immediately when she saw me that night and asked what was going on. I had no poker face, so I lied by mumbling something about work being difficult. She bought it, or at least it allowed us to get out the door and into the car.
So, we’re driving, and I just can’t stop thinking about all these texts. It’s really shaken me because this is the first time I’ve ever REALLY felt like my wife was having an affair. She asks me again what was wrong, and I think I just spurted out, "Who are you texting with right now?" And she says, "just some client from work". And I ask, "Is it [some guy she always talks about]?" And she says no, it’s not him. It’s some other guy that I’ve never really heard of, and according to my wife he just needs help with something for recovery, and she’s his case manager so she’s just helping him work through the logistics. (late on a Friday Night)
I confirm with her what number it is he’s using, and I have it memorized because it’s taking up pages and pages of the phone bill, so I know it’s the same one. That’s when I ask her why he’s texting her 1500 times in the last month and why he’s doing it at 3 and 4 AM?
She’s on the defensive now and she eventually says, "do you want to look at my phone?" And I say, yes, I do, and I pull the car over into a parking lot. Before she hands me the phone, I see her delete the messages for the number in question. And I’m like wtf, did you just delete those? And she denies it.
I’ve never known my wife to lie to me, ever. Not even about small things. But I know what I saw, I know I saw her swipe and delete all the messages for one number.
She hands me the phone and as I look for the number I can’t find it anywhere. Meanwhile she’s mumbling about "if I deleted something I didn’t mean to". I look to see if the messages can be recovered, and BINGO, there they are. She apparently had no idea that you could recover deleted messages. And now I’m feeling like I will finally get to the truth of whatever is going on, and so I say almost triumphantly, "Here they are, AND RECOVER" as I make a flourish with my hand and press down on the recover button.
My wife yells out "NO!" and jumps across the car in an attempt to rip the phone out of my hands. I couldn’t believe it. I felt like I was in some kind of twilight zone episode. Who the fuck is the person in the car with me right now?
I kept the phone away from her, even though she was like a wildcat trying to claw her way through my body to the phone. She started to plead with me "Please don’t read the messages!"
I asked why? I asked what was on them? I said, "You just told me I could read them! You handed me the phone to read them!"
She started to grasp at straws and explained that "there’s very private information about my clients on there, it would be a violation of HIPPA!"
That’s about the time I realized that the phone had locked up and I was not going to be able to open it again without her giving me the password.
I didn’t put up any more of a fight because I already knew the answer to my questions had been confirmed, I gave her the phone back and said "You’re going to delete them. Please don’t do that. Let’s talk."
She asked, "What if I don’t?" I said, "I’ll divorce you."
She didn’t care. She said she’d get out and walk home. It was pitch black and we lived 40 miles away.
It’s hard to remember and write about this time because it’s so painful.
I loved her deeply. And in that moment, I felt as if I didn’t even know her. I felt like everything, all 23 years of it, was potentially a lie. Who the fuck did I marry?
We drove around together and talked for the next 8 hours. We never got dinner. We just drove. I figured as long as she was in the car with me and she wasn’t texting anyone, she was still my wife. I would’ve driven until we ran out of gas, then I would’ve gotten out and pushed.
There was a lot of crying, mostly by me. I was devastated as she began to explain bits and pieces of the truth. No, she wouldn’t let me look at the texts, but she would tell me the following:
1. "She didn’t care about him. Wasn’t interested in him."
2. "He’s really dumb."
3. "I think he’s a sexual predator."
4. "I’m not in love with him."
5. "I would never allow this person near my kids."
6. "It was not physical."
7. She "did not fantasize about this guy or pleasure herself thinking about this guy."
8. It was "the same guy that groped her and went to jail for it."
9. "I wasn’t hiding my phone from you in the shower, I just didn’t want to miss any of his texts." This one really hurt because like, who says that? I didn’t care so much about getting caught, I just didn’t want to miss the riveting conversation from this low life douchebag that can’t talk in complete sentences.
I don’t remember her saying she was sorry. I don’t remember her being super remorseful. I don’t remember her making me feel the least bit safe during these moments.
I do remember her saying that she was worried she’d lose her job. I do remember her reluctantly blocking his number. I do remember her saying that she thought that she just wanted his validation and so she played along with his advances.
It was insane.
I don’t know when, but we started to have sex that night and probably every night after that for many days. I’ve heard this is called Hysterical Bonding? We did a lot of that. In fact, I found myself ridiculously turned on by all of this.
Which brings me to another issue (as if this onion isn’t complex enough). I have ED. It’s physical (and probably also mental at this point because why not?), and it’s a problem.
The day after D-Day, I finally got my wife to read aloud "the most problematic text messages" so I could understand what was going on. She wasn’t happy about it, but she did it. It was sexting, it was really fucked up because the dude she was sexting with seemed like he had a 3rd grade education, and I just couldn’t understand why this guy was in my wife’s DM’s? I mean the guy couldn’t complete a single sentence, nor could he spell the most basic words correctly. It was sometimes difficult to even understand what he was saying. And there’s my wife responding with fully coherently "I want you to bend me over the table" type shit. WTF world am I living in?
The following night I would finally convince her to allow me to have complete access to the phone and all the text messages. I read all 1500 texts from this guy and there were multiple sexting conversations, really dumb shit, but unmistakably cheating.
And there was a conversation where this guy is trying to get her to use a messaging app that will automatically delete the messages so she can’t be caught. There was also some conversation about him deleting messages on his phone. However there was no evidence of photos being shared or anything related to actual physical activity.
But the thing that bothered me the most though was that he was indeed the person that she was texting to during our car ride when we travelled out of state, and to me it showed more than a sexting relationship. It showed that they were not just talking dirty to one another, they were in some kind of emotional weird as thing.
For example, when we got to the hotel, she went out of her way to tell him she "made it to the hotel" and when we were driving back over the state line days later she told him she was back in his state and that she was travelling with her daughter (which was a complete lie, she was only with me).
This really hurt me. I think I’d almost rather she was getting gang banged than in an emotional relationship with someone else. I mean just divorce me already! And then you can go do whatever you want, for fucks sake.
The following week (and the rest of my life) was a rollercoaster of emotions. I had learned that my wife felt like "one of the reasons I needed validation was because of your ED." I’ll just leave this here for a moment to sink in.
So there’s this younger felon that is in substance abuse recovery, that previously groped my wife, and went to jail for it, and when he got out of jail, he immediately started messaging her all kinds of BS and although she initially ignored it (as the text messages show) she didn’t send him back to jail, she instead eventually joined in because he was persistently validating her and because of my ED. Awesome.
Now at this point you might be saying to yourself any number of things. For example:
1. Just divorce her. Once a cheater, always a cheater.
2. Is sexting really that big of a deal? (this is what her friends tell her, and then they say she should just divorce me because of the last 22 years).
I don’t know what the right answer is. I know if I were reading this about someone else, I would say divorce her dumb ass, let her go get STD’s with felon drug users, she’s still cheating, you don’t know the whole story, you’re wasting your time, you deserve better!
To this I will say:
1. I had myself checked for STD’s. I was clean. I plan to go back every 6 months (maybe forever) just to be on the safe side. I have never cheated on anyone in my life. I’ve only been with my wife for the last 23 years. If I ever do get an STD it will be the end of our marriage. I told my wife that I got checked for STD’s and I was clean. She was very upset by this and told me I was "trapping her" for some reason. I still don’t really understand her issue with it, I never asked or demanded that she get checked for STD’s.
2. Is sexting that big of a deal? No, actually it’s not that big of a deal to me. Yes it hurts, I don’t like it, but honestly if she wanted to sext with other men and just let me be a part of it, be included in it, I would be ok with that. It might be fun to see her get off on that. (if she could get off on that) But the lying is incredibly damaging because now I question everything she says or does. Now I question if it was just sexting or if she was getting plowed by this guy on her lunch break. For 23 years I’ve very rarely been jealous of anyone or any situation with her. I just never felt like I needed to worry about her like that because she wasn’t a weak vulnerable person. I was wrong. And what it shows me is that we’re all actually vulnerable to this if enough stress is put on us. What I’ve learned from this is that I can’t take for granted my belief that some people are "strong" and others are "weak". We all have our breaking points, including me, and in the future, I will be extra cautious not to get too close to the fire. That’s always been my strategy when approached by women, just take myself out of the danger zone (and it’s always worked). I wish my wife would’ve done that.
3. For anyone still following along, there’s one more complexity to this story that is ongoing. My wife was/is still this dipshit’s case manager. That means the sexting violates company policy and any ethical standards in her field of work. This is problematic for many reasons, it’s unprofessional, it’s potentially doing harm to the client under her care (even though he initiated it), and it’s certainly enough to get her fired. In addition, it leaves her open to blackmail or revenge. When I asked her about this, she said "He’s a criminal, he knows how to keep a secret." And lastly, there’s the whole question of why on God’s green earth would a company put their employe back into a situation where a felon drug user that previously groped her and went to jail for it, ended up back in her care?!
These are all very valid questions to ask, especially if you’re a third-party reader. But it’s not about another person. It’s about me. I love her. She’s the mother of my children. She’s the only person that ever understood me. I’ve never wanted to be with anyone but her since I met her. I was happy in the marriage, I just thought we had some minor issues that we needed to work through, and I didn’t realize how disconnected we actually were.
Of course, it’s now been a few months later, and things are NOT good. We’re both in marriage counseling, and individual therapy. But it’s going very slow.
She shows up, she’s engaged with the process. She’s trying. But when the marriage counselor said she was going to assign us "homework" to spend 2 hours together without cell phones, my wife was not excited about that. I was excited and immediately after the therapy session, asked my wife where we should go for our homework. My wife responded, "I don’t know if I can spend two hours with you. What are we even going to talk about? You’re annoying."
Since then, I’ve come to realize that my wife "doesn’t feel safe" with me, doesn’t think that I love her or care for her, doesn’t think we have much in common with each other. Doesn’t think we’re sexually compatible. And generally, only thinks that we’re both attracted to each other physically and intellectually, but that’s about it. Still, she maintains that she’s committed to the marriage and wants to work it out.
She’s remorseful. Just yesterday she told me she feels like a horrible piece of shit all day for what she’s done. She says she’s sorry she hurt me. She still swears that it was not physical, that it only went on for a couple of weeks. But she’s still at that job, and still literally looks at this guy’s dick twice a week.
And I’m oh so triggered by everything. In the early weeks, I was an absolute mess. Luckily for me I had already scheduled some time off work for the holidays, or else I don’t know what I would’ve done. But every time her phone makes noise, every time she’s away from me, every time she gets defensive with me, I feel the pain of the betrayal.
And sexually I’m a trash fire now. I think I understand why though. I think my mind is using my body to relieve the stress of the pain I feel when I think about her with this man. And the way it works is that I can’t really get off like a normal person because I don’t feel safe. But when I feel the pain of the betrayal, my body gets me really turned on and I basically orgasm my way out of the pain. What this means is that I get off thinking about my wife cheating on me, but I’m still sad afterwards, I just have a way of pushing out the feeling of being overwhelmed by it. It’s like my mind knows that I just can’t take the shock, so it gives me a way to relieve the pressure instead of going into a comma or balling up on the floor crying.
And crying is something I’ve done a lot of over the last few months. Although it rarely happens now, in the early days after finding out I would wake up in the middle of the night and be unable to get back to sleep, I would eventually just break down crying. During the days I would have to hide in my room so the kids wouldn’t see or hear me in tears. It was often uncontrollable and would just happen out of nowhere. Sometimes at night I would cry trying not to wake up my wife so she could sleep for work. One time I woke her up, and there she was looking right at me, never saying anything, never reaching out to comfort me or figure out what was wrong. Just watching me cry uncontrollably. She would later tell me that she didn’t think that I wanted her to do anything, and I just wanted to be left alone.
This is one of many examples of our miscommunications. Our inability to give each other what we need in the moment or over time. All I wanted was for her to hold me and tell me it was going to be ok.
And get this! My wife is "disgusted" by my fantasies about her being with other men and doesn’t want to participate in that. Again, WTF?! It’s like I’m trapped in this world where I have ED which causes my wife to become vulnerable to cheating, but then if I try to use that as a method to overcome my ED, she’s grossed out! You can’t make this kind of personal hell up.
I even told my wife that I might be flexible to an open marriage (not involving me seeing other women) but would have to really talk through the ground rules. She’s not the least bit interested. She wants a traditional marriage where the sex is vanilla but romantic, and where she doesn’t have to tell me what she wants (just all the things she doesn’t want), and where apparently, I don’t have ED.
I watched a standup comic recently where he paused in the middle of a joke and asked, "What the fuck do women actually want?" I don’t know dude. I don’t think they know. I think they make it up as they go. But to be fair, I’m sure men are like that too. People, ugh.
At this current moment, my wife and I are both feeling like this is hopeless. She’s remorseful, she knows I didn’t deserve this, she understands that she has a lot of individual work to do for herself (including a lot of unresolved issues from childhood). She’s done a lot of work to show she cares and she’s trying.
Her work to date includes:
1. Blocking all numbers associated with her AP.
2. Limiting exposure to the AP at her work.
3. Coming home on time every day. Overcommitting where she’s at.
4. Talking to me on the phone when she’s driving home.
5. Never taking her phone with her into the shower.
6. Allowing me to see her phone when I ask. (which is never)
7. Giving me her phone password.
8. Spending hours with me each weekend, answering any questions I have about the affair.
9. Trying to find a new job.
I still don’t have a good answer as to "why" this happened. I don’t know why this guy got her attention. And I don’t even think she knows why, exactly. She says that he was simply "very persistent, and she felt validated by his attention." But that she’s not even attracted to him physically.
It really messes with my mind too. Because he’s fat, I’m in-shape. He’s short, I’m tall. He’s a felon, I’ve barely had a traffic ticket. He has no job, I have a good respectable job. He can barely put words together in a coherent thought, and I worked my way through college to support and better our family. He has no wife or kids, maybe $10 to his name, isn’t allowed to drive himself anywhere. I’m the polar opposite of this guy in every way I’d want to be. Even after reviewing the texts, I can’t see what this guy was giving my wife other than exactly what she said "she felt validated by his attention."
In other words, I "think" she’s telling me everything. She was miserable in our marriage, and while I was happy, she wasn’t. She was tired of that dynamic and shutting down emotionally. This guy came along at the right time, was persistent, and as life got harder with me, she used him to escape. Probably liked the feeling of being able to get him all wound up and toy with him. In addition to triggering her past trauma, she may have enjoyed the brief moments of control while the rest of her life was spiraling into oblivion. Or is this just the rationalization of a shell-shocked husband that is only a few brief months past D-Day? I believe it’s possible I may have stopped what would have turned into a physical affair if left undetected.
I believe if I asked her to quit the job today and just walk out, she would. We would likely lose our house though if she did that.
But she’s tapped out. I mean she’s just really on empty (in life). And so, I’ve been carrying her water for the last two months, emotionally. It’s not fair, I know that. But I just keep thinking about the time before when I wasn’t there for her like I wanted to be, and I just keep hoping that at some point it will dawn on her that I’ve always loved her and cared about her. I just didn’t have the maturity and the ability to be a better husband at that time. I didn’t have the life experience to recognize that I wasn’t married to someone that was emotionally strong. I was married to someone that was really good at using her "people pleasing" coping mechanism to ward off and prevent all the triggers from her past trauma.
I understand that I messed up as a husband and a father, I have some anger issues to work on, and I need to keep working to show my wife that I’ll be there for her when she needs me. We’ve had a lot of bad days since then. But I keep telling my wife, "I will never stop fighting for you, until you tell me it’s time to give up." And she keeps saying she needs patience, that she’s doing everything she can to "claw her way back to me". I feel like she’s in the Abyss, and I’m holding on to her hand trying to pull her out without falling in myself.
The internet will collectively tell me I’m a fool. I’ll only get hurt again. I’m a cuck. I’m doing the "pick me dance".
I say I’m aware of the risks, and I’m going to give her a chance to show me who she really is. Because I already know who I am, the same guy she asked to marry her (but with more experience, more maturity, and more determination to be a better husband and father). Lastly, the kids know we're in MC but not about the affair. I told my wife they shouldn't know because then they will have to carry that baggage around with them.
Thanks for reading. I know this was horribly long. Thanks in advance for any advice or emotional support. I’m in a very bad place, but I haven’t given up hope.