Some days, I truly wonder if I’m losing my mind. If I manage to sleep, which is no sure thing, I might actually awake and have a brief, fleeting moment where I forget. I forget for a nanosecond what Handsome did. In that moment my life is like it was pre-DDay, and it feels safe and comforting. Then reality flashes in and I wonder if I had a bad dream. A split second later I realize it’s all too real and the feeling of profound loss washes over me and consumes me in an instant.
Two months ago, I was a certifiable wreck. I have no idea how I made it through a two week family vacation or Christmas. Sadly, the good times with my mom and kids among those days are such a blur they are lost to me…one more casualty of Handsome’s infidelity.
I’d love to write here that I’m getting better. Some days I feel as if I am. Not every day has been 100% awful. The affair is clearly over. Handsome started individual counseling, is working hard at it and has dialed back his drinking significantly. He is doing a good job controlling his angry outbursts. He tries in his own somewhat clumsy way to talk to me about what happened. We start marriage counseling next week. He tells me multiple times a day that he loves me. (I mostly believe he thinks he loves me, but I am very uncertain whether he is actually in love with me. How could he be if he did this awful thing?) We have had days where we laughed, had fun, had great sex (hysterical bonding!), and/ or talked about our future as if it was a certainty.
And yet on other days there is no light in the world and the very sight of him, or the sound of his voice, is both repulsive and hurtful to me. I spend days with tears dripping out of my eyes at work (it’s not exactly crying… tears just flow forth for hours on end… WTF?), and the waves of grief that wash over me seem never ending. I think of the deliberate deception (the burner phone), the duration of his involvement with the Whore (years), how he made believe he was being a good husband and a good dad, and generally how he flitted around our home acting like nothing was going on when he was actively destroying our marriage and our family. It sickens me.
I’m tired of the emotional seesaw. I want to get off. I didn’t get on willingly or of my own volition. I was dragged onto it by the narcissism and selfishness of the person I love (loved?) most in the world. That realization alone is devastating. While I have good days and bad, every single day I’m aware of what Handsome did. It is in my head permanently. The mantra running through my mind is “He did this to me. To us.” It was intentional, disrespectful, disgusting, and dishonest. Two months in, I’m still not certain how to come to terms with that.
I hope he is doing everything he can to help you through this. I read all your posts and see such similarities.
Just know that as long as your are both working to rebuild your marriage and he is working to rebuild your trust (which will never fully come again) then it does get easier.
I do have one question for you that I get asked the most. Why did he do it? Feel free to tell me to go jump in a lake if you don’t want to answer.
We are working on the “why” and trying to figure out how we got to a place where the affair happened. He says it’s because he was a selfish, narcissistic asshole, which is certainly true but not the root of the issue. Handsome has been in individual counseling for a month. (At 55, for the first time ever talking to someone about his innermost feelings.) I have my own theories though on what led him to seek attention elsewhere. I cannot explain how he picked this wretched person to seek that attention from or why he wasn’t repulsed by her (which would be his normal reaction).
Handsome comes from a very patriarchal family. His dad is king. His mom had a good professional job at a time when many women didn’t, but his dad still dictated everything. I earn about 3x as much as Handsome. His job pays for utilities and provides our health insurance (and he pays for his car and credit cards) and I pay for absolutely everything else. While I think he likes the trappings of our lifestyle, I know the shifted power dynamic gets to him. (I say “power” but I don’t control his finances or anything…. it’s more the lack of control he has over me or mine.) I think perhaps he wanted to feel more needed.
I also think the dynamics of our intimate life played a role. Several years ago he developed E.D. issues. I never mocked or cried in front of him or did anything other than try to reassure him I loved him and it would be okay. But a cycle started. We’d try to have sex, it wouldn’t work, and so rather than trying and failing he just quit trying. In retrospect, I thought I was handling that okay by stepping back and giving him some space to work through that frustration. I didn’t think I should try to force the issue (he already had a Viagra prescription that barely helped). Whereas I saw “helpful, supportive space” I think he saw “rejection” and “she must not care.”
To me, there are still a bunch of steps between “she must not care” and “seems like a good idea to have an affair”. I’m haunted by how many fairly simple conversations we could have had that might have made a big difference in where we are today. If he had ever asked “Are you still in love with me” I would have moved heaven and Earth to assure him I was. I was certain he loved me, but I didn’t realize that might not be enough.
It took a long time for me to even figure out the why and sometimes I still wonder what I was really thinking. I feel like I was someone else completely when I look back.
I take responsibility for all the damage I did, but it was like I had a complete separate identity that just took over for a short time.
Finding the right marriage counselor was what really helped us. We saw a number of them but once we got our current one she made the biggest difference. Don’t be afraid to change if it isn’t a good fit for either of you.
I hope you find the answers you need to help you heal. Also if you have any questions feel free to reach out.
Dude the Ed is a symptom of the affair not the cause. He was ragging it to porn so much he didnt get it up from normal women, plus there’s some shame in there. Because he’s a turd. But… if he wants to change he should try celibacy from masturbating and porn and even sex and it will help.
It’s still so soon for you 😞. The first year is crazy. It’s almost like a fog. Hang tight on this horrible ride.
I’m so sorry you are going through this.
“He tells me multiple times a day that he loves me.” These words are important to hear, but my counsellor stressed to me the importance of believable behaviours. Words are meaningless if the behaviour is not there to back it up. It sounds like you are beginning to see some of that with the counselling, changing drinking patterns, etc. And then we watch and see if it sticks and becomes a new lifestyle. In my case, my husband was/is a sex addict so I needed to see the consistent involvement with his support group, accountability partners, etc. I watched his heart and attitudes transform. Now his words are believable too.
That is so very true, Cynthia. Handsome’s behavior has to change and “stick.” Only time will tell.
I do believe that Handsome loves me, but I wonder all the time whether he is truly “in love” with me… a very different thing in my book. Of course, he insists he is, but he’s an addict and addicts lie. I know this, so I am extra wary.
I am glad that you have seen your husband’s words and deeds come into alignment. It gives me hope.
Xo
I understand what you mean about differentiating between loving you and being in love with you. I had similar sentiments, except I questioned whether or not my husband actually liked me. So, that may be the same thing we were feeling, only expressed differently. Before our recovery, my husband would insist that he loved me, and he likely did in his way, but I didn’t feel as if he liked me as a person. He never understood what I meant by that. I think you do.
I definitely do! Here is my line of reasoning: Handsome would never, ever have betrayed one of his friends (intentionally caused them as much pain) like he betrayed me, so he must not think of me as a friend. Yet he was my best friend. I asked him who his best friend is and, no shock to me, it wasn’t me. (He tried to walk that answer back when he saw that it hurt me, but I think his initial answer was true.) And although he would occasionally say nice things about me to others, he hardly ever referred to me as his wife, spouse, or even partner. He referred to me as the “Boss Lady”. That’s a cold, unfeminine, moniker that just screams “distance.” It’s a lot easier to cheat on the Boss Lady than it is to cheat on your wife or friend.
Being in love versus love? How or why does this difference between agape and Eros matter? And is it a real thing? Romance – the Twitterpated loving butterflies garbage everyone rails on about… its fleeting. It’s not a thing. It’s biology to cause you to mate and then your actual commitment to a person and your offspring and the things you learned about them while biologically binding is meant to provide you with the overall ability to have compassion and care and focus and moral obligation and ethics and interest in this person who initially gave you butterflies is supposed to be what keeps you a solid person and partner. If you want to be the person who always feels like butterflies are there, you’re searching for adrenaline, not an actual real life worthy love. If you think he needs that, it’s hogwash. He needs to understand that he should not be a turd. The end. His love, is in love. His hard on for the whore? It was the rush. The excitement from lying to you and having this clandestine secret. He gets off on the power.
You make great points, but I think maybe I didn’t explain myself well. When I refer to being “in love” I don’t mean the fleeting butterflies. I think I was (poorly) trying to differentiate between a non sexual/ almost platonic love versus the kind of love that should exist between spouses. I wrote about it a bit later on, but at some point I think Handsome started to view me more as a dear roommate than as a wife/ lover. It’s easier to cheat on your buddy (or the “Boss Lady” as he often referred to me -to my disgust) than it is to cheat on your wife. In short, he started to believe his own spiel… that he was in an unsatisfactory marriage with a wife who didn’t really care. Trouble is, that was far from the truth.
But you hit the nail on the head with Handsome and his secrets. I almost think the secret of the acting out is a bigger rush for him than anything else.
Yeh. His addiction isn’t sex. It’s his personal gratification and self grandiosity. He loves to be loved. To be the big man . I’m sorry. I know my comments seem… mean. My anger from my world is spilling onto yours. But… he’s taking advantage of you. And you just keep on giving darlin. (And so do I in my world, albeit from far away and without a lot of give from my side but I keep the world in the dark about his secret life and how betrayed I am… and you seem to be feeding from the same trough) …. oh wow. I feel for you lady. I feel a lot. But don’t read in just on how to help handjob bob. What are you doing for you?
No need to apologize for sharing your perspective. We all come at these situations with different viewpoints and back stories. I do agree that Handsome took advantage of me -and took our marriage and family for granted- for the last several years. Clearly and unquestionably that is true. Now? Not so much. He realizes he’s walking a slack line over an alligator pit. If anything, he’s stepped up to bear a greater share of the family load because I.just.cant. He sees that, he knows he caused it, and he is doing every single thing I’ve asked him to do in furtherance of fixing himself.
I am lucky to have a few great, supportive friends to lean on through this. Plus our counseling. And I’m taking full advantage of his guilt to institute some long needed changes at home. To name a few: Financial transparency ? Check. No more drinking? Check. A bigger hand with kids and housework? Check. Those are all things that benefit me as well as the whole family. If none of that was happening, we’d be done.
Xo
THIS! “I mostly believe he thinks he loves me, but I am very uncertain whether he is actually in love with me.”
THIS best sums up this awkward numbness I’m in.
Eight months later, I am certain that he loves me. (It was not an easy road to get to that certainty.) I admit though to still waffling on whether I think he is truly in romantic love with me. He says he is. He insists on it, in fact. I feel as though it is likely true, but I don’t have that “know it in my bones” sense about it like I used to feel. (Probably because I always felt it before and yet he was engaged in all manner of acting out.) Hopefully that will come with his proven behavior over time and re-built trust. It’s still a work in progress.
🙂