My wife had an affair this spring with her step-brother while she was in Mexico. The affair was revealed as soon as she got back to the U.S. on July 1st. Needless to say, it was a very painful time for me. I was an emotional wreck. Immediately, I began a crash course in infidelity. Ultimately, I ended up reading about the MB concepts.
My wife was a real mess, too, as she tried half-heartedly to end the relationship. For reasons unclear to me, we didn't simply end our marriage. If one person brought it up, the other person resisted the idea. We weren't fighting. Just a lot of emotional pain. We continued living together. We continued doing family activities with the kids. We both tried hard to be nice to the other person.
(Incidentally, a phrase which she has used almost from the get-go, is "We're going to be okay." She used it within a couple days of returning to the U.S. During the summer and in her most recent letters she has used it.)
During the summer, my wife decided to join the Navy. I was obviously in a Giver frame of mind and agreed. Pretty dumb, but she's at boot camp right now. We said we'd decide after boot camp if we were going to reconcile. She viewed boot camp as a means to help her break no contact with her step brother.
Shortly after she left for boot camp, I met with Dr. Jennifer Harley and discussed our marriage. She told me that we'd definitely complicated our chances to successfully reconcile because the nature of her work would make MB principles more difficult to implement successfully. I asked her flat out, should this marriage be saved? Absolutely, she said. Still, the situation seemed pretty hopeless.
I've been doing a lot of research about what happened. First, I started with the infidelity angle. I came across some information on this site which described what my wife had done as Romantic Infidelity. In this type of infidelity, it happens at a moment of great stress in the person's life at an important turning point. My wife was under a lot of stress with three young children and she received a lot of emotional abuse from her maternal side of the family. She ended up getting in touch with her father whom she had never met. Also, with Romantic Infidelity the OM is someone highly inappropriate. Her step-brother whom she'd never met definitely fits this definition. Also, he is quite the loser who my wife was going to save. Lastly, part of Romantic Infidelity is that the more stable the spouse is and the better the marriage, the more likely the infidelity is to occur. Honestly, I think it is fair to say I'm a good husband in most ways. Obviously, I wasn't meeting my wife's emotional needs (or more precisely she wasn't letting me meet them).
Alright, on to the incest angle. In the course of researching this, I learned that when there is sibling incest and it is consensual, it happens typically because the child was abandoned by both parents. That definitely fits my wife. Her father, who was married to another woman when he impregnated her mother, abandoned her before her first birthday. Her own mother abandoned her in Mexico when she was about three years old. For the next four or five years until she was reunited with her mother, she lived with an assortment of aunts and was molested by various men. When she was reunited with her mother, she had taken a common-law husband. He began to molest my wife soon after her mother became pregnant. It goes without saying, both of her parents are incredibly stupid and immature and selfish people. Amazingly, her father is now a minister pretty high in the hierarchy of what seems to me to be the Seventh Day Adventist Church.
You'd think with this history of abuse my wife would be a wreck. To the contrary, she exuded great maturity far beyond her years. Everyone who meets her comments on this. There is a significant age difference between us. I met her when she was 17. I was 36 at the time. Once I found out her age, I figured she'd act her age in short order and that would be that. For everyone who has me pegged as some pedophile, I was not aggressive about sex. My agenda was conversation. I was astonished that despite her age, she was more mature than any other woman I'd met. (Little did I know what the future held.) We fell in love.
I always figured given her history she'd have a date with therapy. I just never imagined it would be like this. When we decided to get married, we sought pre-maritial counseling. The Catholic Church really wanted to check us out before signing off on the deal. Once we started having kids, my wife had a great deal of difficulty in trusting anyone but herself to care for our kids. In hindsight, this lead to us being unable to meet each other's emotional needs. At the time, I just assumed this was the early part of having children. Incidentally, my wife was an exceptional mother. Very loving. My own mom said she was a better mom than she ever was.
Anyways, in the course of my research about our situation, I read up on divorce. I now also realize that my wife is the child of a divorce, so to speak. In the course of reading "The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce", I kept seeing my wife's behavior explained. I also took away from the book that if my wife and I can save our marriage, we really ought to. The impact on our children will be devastating in the long run.
Meantime, I've been using the past five weeks while my wife is in boot camp to run a plan A, of sorts. Basically, it is a letter-writing campaign of the most old-fashioned kind. I'd write her every night. Send her cards and photos. I'd always be telling her how much the children miss her and how much I miss her. I'd also tell her in every way I could think of how I still loved her, despite everything. As you'd expect, boot camp has been very tough. (She has to do 15 push-ups for every piece of mail she receives) However, she is doing well. She got promoted last week. She is passing her various tests.
So what is the point of this post? My wife has had a long time to think about her future. Our future. The future of our children and our family. Boot camp has also given her the opportunity to sort out what the ****** happened to her in Mexico. (It really seemed as if she'd gone completely nuts.) I could see as time wore on, the tone of her letters to me was changing. Recently, she told me she loved me. She hasn't done that in almost six months. She's now talking in very detailed ways about what we have to do to reconcile and save our marriage. This is good news.
But, now that this moment has arrived, I'm not exactly clear on what I'm supposed to do now. I don't want to blow it. My daughter and I will be seeing her in four weeks at her graduation. I'd like some advice on how to handle this situation in the smartest possible way according to MB principles. Frankly, I think I ought to schedule an appointment with Dr. Jennifer Harley to discuss this. But, if anyone would like to offer some productive advice, I'm all ears.
