5 years after H EA/PA we're stil married (I wish I could tell you how) - 05/16/07 05:49 PM
Well as the subject line indicates we are still married 5 years after my husband’s physical and emotional affair.
A very short and edited review:
My husband and I had bee drifting apart after he mother came to live with us for 18 months. Her presence and persona was so toxic and destructive that it tore us apart and five years after she left we still couldn’t put the pieces back together again. I was angry and waiting for him to do what he had promised to do, get us into marriage counseling.
Around December 2001 I had begun to feel that I had to do work on myself and then us to bring us back together again. I wrote him a long email and told him what I was going to do and accomplish to bring me to a certain point. I had completed everything in the letter by the end of March 2002. But he had forgotten, he had forgotten much and instead of turning into our marriage, as I was preparing to do, he turned to someone else, April 1, 2002.
I remember that date because it was the first day of my diet, it was also the day I noticed a change in him. I wrote about it here in a post I think I titled, “The Changing of the Underwear” – I knew that day that he had started an affair, why else does a man change the type of underwear he is wearing to one that he always complained before was too tight – this underwear made his package look bigger too.
I confronted him, he denied it. This went on for 6 weeks. I was having great success in my diet, getting myself together and putting more toward this marriage than I had during the years before, he was banging a woman at work. She was someone I knew and we and other co-workers actually had had dinner at her home with her husband 3 months prior.
Well on May 16, 2002 several things happened. I was extremely happy, I had lost enough weight to put on my first “achievement” outfit. I was excited and wanted to show him. The night before he hadn’t been home, his company did system upgrades around mid night every 3-5 months. Living so far from work, they paid for a hotel room for him. Sometimes we’d make it a night out (on the company dime – they comped dinner too) – I hadn’t gone to this one.
I had also landed a job that would put what I did on a whole knew level. I needed to do the graphics for it but had to wait for my husband to come home, because while I had asked him to put the software on my computer, he hadn’t done it. So after he was home, after I had made dinner, etc. I went up to his computer to create the graphics.
He had left many windows open, working on computer code for their systems. I began closing each one of them until I came upon the hotmail window. It was an account I didn’t recognize, but the subject lines of the email left little doubt it was the OW.
I opened a few to read, I can still recall what I read. How she felt when he put his arm around her in the “control room” at work, how if they were going to meet at the hotel next time he needed to tell her the day before (I looked at that date and knew they had been together the night before), how she was going to register for a 5K and she wanted him there to cheer her on.
These are memories that just don’t go away. She used a pseudonym like my husband did, but I knew who it was. I completed one graphic and sent it out, and then I left. I drove to the gas station about 5 miles away and called home. I told him that I knew he was having an affair with XXX and that he had one hour to pack and get out. But during the interim I was thinking, you see 5 years ago today was also my daughter’s prom. She deserved wonderful memories, so I stowed my feelings and went home, and didn’t have him leave.
We went to MC, OW left the company (he sent a NC letter to her 2 months after she stopped contacting him) and were doing fine for 2 years until a childhood best friend of mine committed suicide. We had promised to always be there for one another, but I hadn’t told him what had happened to me, and he likewise hadn’t told me what was going on with him. I failed him, I was devastated. It took me 3 months to get to a place where I could go on. I then decided that since it was summer and I had been through so much with the A and the suicide that I’d take 2 months to just do nothing and rest.
I was fully going to be “back on it” in August after one son went to visit my parents 2,000 miles away and H left with another son to visit his family an ocean away. My daughter had already moved out, so it was just me and our youngest. So I started back on cleaning the house, enrolled in college to finish my degree and trying to get everything else done on his list of needs (my list was supposed to come later after his list was completed).
Well while he was away with his family he decided that all the old problems he had with us when he began his A had not been addressed so he was going to leave me. He told me when he got back, and I was devastated – I begged him not to leave, I asked for a time table, I knew that if he walked out that door, we were over.
This though became one of the most stressful times of my life. Yes dealing with his A was bad, stressful, I had one post here where I lost it and began breaking plates in the kitchen and cut my foot, and I had spent many days and nights driving just screaming and crying in my car) and that was really bad – this was just a different kind of bad.
I never reached those bench marks, in many ways I gave up. I was stressed that often I would begin the day in the school bathroom crying and trying to get myself together. In the end he finally gave up on the benchmarks, but the damage was done. Our wedding ring, that I had faithfully worn all through our struggle with his A, I took off, I can’t say it means anything to me now.
Because of the stress I sank into a deep depression, but hid it so well until he found me sitting on the edge of our bed crying and not being able to stop. I told him that my biggest mistake in life was not dieing three days after I was born. My brother had three years before, and we both had Hyaline Membrane Disease. I fought to live, and last year I felt that had been my greatest mistake.
So I spent last year getting well, and finally got off antiDs last fall.
Another great casualty was caring for this marriage. Oh I care for my husband, just not our marriage. Seems strange to have fought so hard for it, even putting myself in a very bad place to keep it from ending, and to now care so little, if at all, about it. Which conversely seems to be the best thing I could have done.
We actually have had interactions which I have longed for, great political and literary debates, goofing off and enjoying each other, etc. We at times, been able to unload to each other saying anything to the other person – and the other just know that it’s not about them, it’s a catharsis that the “unloader” needs. I sure that some of that came out of my hospitalization for and unknown illness (Feb 2007) – I just kept throwing high fevers for no reason and had abdominal pain that before they gave me morphine, the ER staff had to keep scrapping me off the ceiling.
It was perplexing, every test came out fine. Before they admitted me they had to do a pelvic exam. As you would expect they took me to a private room, and then the ER doctors said that the last test was a pelvic exam for STD’s. He said this was a sensitive issue between married couples because if I was being straight with him and had no other partners than my husband, then if it is positive it would mean that he wasn’t being faithful.
How I wish to God I could have said “No, not my husband!” But I could not, that ship had sailed five years ago. I just indicated that I understood and thought “well [email]h@##[/email], if it’s positive how am I going to deal with this.” I guess my lack of denial indicated to the doctor that I had been down that road, he asked and we talked a bit.
The test results were negative.
We still struggle, we have our good days and our bad weeks. I still have triggers. I will always have triggers (no song about cheating can be played around me, unless it’s Carrie Underwood’s Before He Cheats, and then you’d better not complain about my singing or touch the dial), but even with all our warts, maybe we are a strong couple.
I don’t know - only time will tell – we have work to do
Coming here every day during the first 2 years was my life line. I could not have gotten through it without being about to vent here, without the friends I made here, without crying here through everything.
When a came here during those 2 years I would read about these wonderful “God we’re so in love, it’s never been better” 1, 2, 5 years after an affair. I have read where marriages of my friends didn’t survive the affair.
I have seen all this played out in my “real” life too between family and friends. Some divorced, others stayed – I don’t know if there is a formula.
I wish I could give some uplifting words, it’s not me, any more. It is what it is and I don’t spend too much time crying about what I wish it were.
But you can still be married, have a decent marriage and love each other after an affair – that much my FWH and I have proven.
way2
(I'm not chaning my sig line but I turn 45 this year)
A very short and edited review:
My husband and I had bee drifting apart after he mother came to live with us for 18 months. Her presence and persona was so toxic and destructive that it tore us apart and five years after she left we still couldn’t put the pieces back together again. I was angry and waiting for him to do what he had promised to do, get us into marriage counseling.
Around December 2001 I had begun to feel that I had to do work on myself and then us to bring us back together again. I wrote him a long email and told him what I was going to do and accomplish to bring me to a certain point. I had completed everything in the letter by the end of March 2002. But he had forgotten, he had forgotten much and instead of turning into our marriage, as I was preparing to do, he turned to someone else, April 1, 2002.
I remember that date because it was the first day of my diet, it was also the day I noticed a change in him. I wrote about it here in a post I think I titled, “The Changing of the Underwear” – I knew that day that he had started an affair, why else does a man change the type of underwear he is wearing to one that he always complained before was too tight – this underwear made his package look bigger too.
I confronted him, he denied it. This went on for 6 weeks. I was having great success in my diet, getting myself together and putting more toward this marriage than I had during the years before, he was banging a woman at work. She was someone I knew and we and other co-workers actually had had dinner at her home with her husband 3 months prior.
Well on May 16, 2002 several things happened. I was extremely happy, I had lost enough weight to put on my first “achievement” outfit. I was excited and wanted to show him. The night before he hadn’t been home, his company did system upgrades around mid night every 3-5 months. Living so far from work, they paid for a hotel room for him. Sometimes we’d make it a night out (on the company dime – they comped dinner too) – I hadn’t gone to this one.
I had also landed a job that would put what I did on a whole knew level. I needed to do the graphics for it but had to wait for my husband to come home, because while I had asked him to put the software on my computer, he hadn’t done it. So after he was home, after I had made dinner, etc. I went up to his computer to create the graphics.
He had left many windows open, working on computer code for their systems. I began closing each one of them until I came upon the hotmail window. It was an account I didn’t recognize, but the subject lines of the email left little doubt it was the OW.
I opened a few to read, I can still recall what I read. How she felt when he put his arm around her in the “control room” at work, how if they were going to meet at the hotel next time he needed to tell her the day before (I looked at that date and knew they had been together the night before), how she was going to register for a 5K and she wanted him there to cheer her on.
These are memories that just don’t go away. She used a pseudonym like my husband did, but I knew who it was. I completed one graphic and sent it out, and then I left. I drove to the gas station about 5 miles away and called home. I told him that I knew he was having an affair with XXX and that he had one hour to pack and get out. But during the interim I was thinking, you see 5 years ago today was also my daughter’s prom. She deserved wonderful memories, so I stowed my feelings and went home, and didn’t have him leave.
We went to MC, OW left the company (he sent a NC letter to her 2 months after she stopped contacting him) and were doing fine for 2 years until a childhood best friend of mine committed suicide. We had promised to always be there for one another, but I hadn’t told him what had happened to me, and he likewise hadn’t told me what was going on with him. I failed him, I was devastated. It took me 3 months to get to a place where I could go on. I then decided that since it was summer and I had been through so much with the A and the suicide that I’d take 2 months to just do nothing and rest.
I was fully going to be “back on it” in August after one son went to visit my parents 2,000 miles away and H left with another son to visit his family an ocean away. My daughter had already moved out, so it was just me and our youngest. So I started back on cleaning the house, enrolled in college to finish my degree and trying to get everything else done on his list of needs (my list was supposed to come later after his list was completed).
Well while he was away with his family he decided that all the old problems he had with us when he began his A had not been addressed so he was going to leave me. He told me when he got back, and I was devastated – I begged him not to leave, I asked for a time table, I knew that if he walked out that door, we were over.
This though became one of the most stressful times of my life. Yes dealing with his A was bad, stressful, I had one post here where I lost it and began breaking plates in the kitchen and cut my foot, and I had spent many days and nights driving just screaming and crying in my car) and that was really bad – this was just a different kind of bad.
I never reached those bench marks, in many ways I gave up. I was stressed that often I would begin the day in the school bathroom crying and trying to get myself together. In the end he finally gave up on the benchmarks, but the damage was done. Our wedding ring, that I had faithfully worn all through our struggle with his A, I took off, I can’t say it means anything to me now.
Because of the stress I sank into a deep depression, but hid it so well until he found me sitting on the edge of our bed crying and not being able to stop. I told him that my biggest mistake in life was not dieing three days after I was born. My brother had three years before, and we both had Hyaline Membrane Disease. I fought to live, and last year I felt that had been my greatest mistake.
So I spent last year getting well, and finally got off antiDs last fall.
Another great casualty was caring for this marriage. Oh I care for my husband, just not our marriage. Seems strange to have fought so hard for it, even putting myself in a very bad place to keep it from ending, and to now care so little, if at all, about it. Which conversely seems to be the best thing I could have done.
We actually have had interactions which I have longed for, great political and literary debates, goofing off and enjoying each other, etc. We at times, been able to unload to each other saying anything to the other person – and the other just know that it’s not about them, it’s a catharsis that the “unloader” needs. I sure that some of that came out of my hospitalization for and unknown illness (Feb 2007) – I just kept throwing high fevers for no reason and had abdominal pain that before they gave me morphine, the ER staff had to keep scrapping me off the ceiling.
It was perplexing, every test came out fine. Before they admitted me they had to do a pelvic exam. As you would expect they took me to a private room, and then the ER doctors said that the last test was a pelvic exam for STD’s. He said this was a sensitive issue between married couples because if I was being straight with him and had no other partners than my husband, then if it is positive it would mean that he wasn’t being faithful.
How I wish to God I could have said “No, not my husband!” But I could not, that ship had sailed five years ago. I just indicated that I understood and thought “well [email]h@##[/email], if it’s positive how am I going to deal with this.” I guess my lack of denial indicated to the doctor that I had been down that road, he asked and we talked a bit.
The test results were negative.
We still struggle, we have our good days and our bad weeks. I still have triggers. I will always have triggers (no song about cheating can be played around me, unless it’s Carrie Underwood’s Before He Cheats, and then you’d better not complain about my singing or touch the dial), but even with all our warts, maybe we are a strong couple.
I don’t know - only time will tell – we have work to do
Coming here every day during the first 2 years was my life line. I could not have gotten through it without being about to vent here, without the friends I made here, without crying here through everything.
When a came here during those 2 years I would read about these wonderful “God we’re so in love, it’s never been better” 1, 2, 5 years after an affair. I have read where marriages of my friends didn’t survive the affair.
I have seen all this played out in my “real” life too between family and friends. Some divorced, others stayed – I don’t know if there is a formula.
I wish I could give some uplifting words, it’s not me, any more. It is what it is and I don’t spend too much time crying about what I wish it were.
But you can still be married, have a decent marriage and love each other after an affair – that much my FWH and I have proven.
way2
(I'm not chaning my sig line but I turn 45 this year)