Tag: cheating

Safe Places

While I cannot believe that it’s July already, I am excited that means that my family’s annual summer sojourn to New England is just around the corner.

Handsome has a younger brother who, throughout the entire 20+ years I’ve known him, was in a long term relationship with a lovely woman my kids have known as “Aunt _____.” They never married but they were together as a couple during that entire time. In January, Aunt ____ was summarily replaced with a 23 year-old new girlfriend. (Handsome’s brother is 57.) It is reasonably clear that this relationship started as an affair. They were living together within days of the breakup with Aunt _____.

I’ve met the new GF. She’s what you’d expect from a young woman willing to date a recovering alcoholic who is older than her parents and whose last long term partner still had clothes in the closet when she moved in.

Handsome asked if I “minded” if his brother and the GF would stay with us on vacation. 🤔

Yes. Yes, I do mind. Very much so.

I worked incredibly hard to reclaim my happy place there from any acting out Handsome engaged in while in that house. While she isn’t an OW of mine, the GF is an OW of someone I still think of as family. I don’t need that gigantic trigger around me on my vacation. I also don’t want to normalize any of that for my kids.

I note that Handsome did not ask whether they could vacation in the same place at the same time. Evidently, they are planning to be there. (To be fair, I’m confident Handsome didn’t invite them or suggest that. I believe they planned their own trip.) The only question is whether they stay at our house so I’m compelled to see them 24/7. I think not.

Thoughts? Am I being unreasonable? Should I just suck it up and not make waves? Old me would have done that, to be honest. I’d have chewed on that poop sandwich throughout the main vacation I look forward to all year just to avoid rocking the boat. New me would prefer to burn it all down and have a bourbon while watching the flames.

A New Member of the Club We Never Wanted to Join

image from Recovery Warriors

I work in an office with about 100 other people. It’s large enough to give most folks the ability to vanish into their offices and tune out, and yet small enough that on the lower staff rungs there is a fair bit of gossip and schadenfreude going on.

My legal assistant, Sunny, is young, both in terms of her age (23 – very, very young for her position at my firm) and her outlook on life. The effect of this on others is likely compounded by the fact that she is 5’3″ and looks about 6 or 7 years younger than she actually is. She will be the woman getting legitimately carded well into her 30’s or 40’s. She is bright, fit, and simply gorgeous, with the kind of symmetrical features and sharp cheekbones that are usually purely aspirational absent the assistance of a good plastic surgeon. She had a somewhat disadvantaged upbringing, but she has her act together. She has a great job, she owns a car, and she’s in the process of buying her first house. (Did I mention she’s only 23??) She is kind and funny and is a really hard worker.

One day last week, Sunny went home early from work because she developed a severe migraine. She walked in on her live-in boyfriend (of 4+ years) in bed – their bed – with another woman.  There was the predictable “It’s nothing,” and “You mean everything to me,” and all of the other things we’ve all heard. She was utterly crushed. Gutted. I don’t exactly know how she made it through the days at the end of the week, but she showed up and did her job and went off to cry when necessary, trying to avoid the stares and comments of her coworkers. The rumor mill got cranking, but the truth of what happened to her is actually worse than what they ginned up about it.

Over the weekend this young woman who has an entire lifetime in front of her and who is wonderful and fierce and and kind and who has the world at her feet… she tried to end her own life with a bottle of pills. Why? Not because of him exactly. Even in her pain she knows he isn’t worth exiting this life and hurting her family over. No… instead it was because in that one instant her entire self-worth was stolen from her. Vanished. Gone.

I talked with her briefly yesterday. Her words were incredibly triggering, but I get where she’s coming from. “I thought I mattered to him and that the future we were building was real. If nothing else, I always felt certain that he was my friend, but even just true friends don’t destroy each other like this.” And also, “Nothing I thought was real is true.” Sunny is young, but her pain is raw and real and not very different from a lot of betrayed partners here in the blogosphere.

Sunny did not ask my advice and I didn’t give her any. I did assure her that she could always talk to me. (I’m pretty sure she has heard me weeping in my office on many an occasion, and I know she knows why.) She has ended the relationship. (“If he can’t keep from cheating before we get married what’s to stop him from cheating after we get married?”) Her family will pack and move her out of their shared apartment this weekend. She found and started seeing a good therapist. Sunny has reached out to her lender and has removed her boyfriend from her mortgage application. She’ll buy the house on her own. She’ll be fine one day. It just won’t be tomorrow or the day after that or maybe the month after that. Sunny will get there, but right now she is suffering. I am just hoping that she will see that speck of light at the end of the tunnel and keep reaching for it, however long it takes.

A Week of Brutal Honesty – #5 – Handsome’s Clock is Ticking

This is the fifth and final post in my week of soul cleansing. You can find the first four posts here,  here, here, and here. If you’ve hung in there with me all week, thank you. Getting these things off my chest has been cathartic and I appreciate all of the comments.

I keep waiting for Handsome to do a number of things: express empathy appropriately and when needed, get his head out of his alternate reality, and demonstrate a feeling of urgency about his recovery (including addressing his integrity and intimacy issues). So far, I’m mostly still waiting.

I had intended this post to be broadly about the issue of staying versus going and how I continue to struggle with that decision. And then… well, then this past Monday happened. Two things occurred on Monday that have amped up my sadness and apathy about Handsome’s recovery. Note that I didn’t say “anger.” I find myself slowly shifting away from anger and disappointment and into apathy.

Over the weekend I was going through our bathroom closet looking for a particular product I needed and I came across not one, but two boxes of condoms. The first box, a 40 pack (must have been wishful thinking), I recall purchasing myself after our son was born in 2009. He was born in May and I had to wait until September of that year to get an IUD. Thus, the condoms. Handsome hates condoms with the fire of 1,000 suns, and I think we used no more than 3 or 4 of them. After I got the IUD, we had no need for condoms and the box sat in the back of the closet collecting dust. Imagine my surprise at finding a second box of condoms with a much later 2016 expiration date (which would mean they were purchased in roughly 2012 or 2013). It was a 12 pack. Six were left. Handsome and I have not used condoms together since September of 2009.

My truth = Handsome bought the condoms to act out and have sex with his APs.

His “truth” = “I’ve never seen those before, but they must have been for us.”

Mind you, the issue isn’t actually the condoms. I know he had sex with other women, of course. (And a part of me would be glad/ relieved if he actually did use condoms with them because even though he insists he did, he hates them so much that I tend to doubt that.) The issue is the distorted thinking and/ or the lie. He knows he bought them. Even if he doesn’t remember buying them he at least knows that I did not buy them and that we did not use them together. And yet he can’t bring himself to own that reality.

After that discussion on Monday, Handsome headed off to his weekly therapy appointment. He generally calls me afterwards and I wanted to ask him to stop and pick up milk at the grocery store. When 20+ minutes had passed, I checked “Find Friends” on my phone to see if he was still at the doc’s and saw that he was apparently parked at a beer distributor between his doc and home. I didn’t freak out. Find Friends is often less than precise. I called him and asked him where he was. He told me that he was several miles away in a different town. Find Friends is not that inaccurate. I said nothing further. I can’t make him get a grip on his integrity. I can’t force him to tell the truth.

And that brings us to today. He admitted in our session with the CSAT that he drove from his therapist’s office to the beer distributor and bought and drank a beer on Monday. Handsome will still lie to protect himself. He will still gaslight me even when it’s obvious that I know the truth and I’m not buying his BS. I’m not sure what happened in his therapy session, but it clearly stressed him and rather than using any of the tools in his toolbox to deal with it he resorted to drinking. Again.

And me?  I believe he is engaging in self-sabotage. It’s as if Handsome thinks he can’t recover so he is going to ensure that he won’t recover. It’s sad. He does so well on some things and on other things he is just floundering, but I’m the collateral damage. I’m going to enforce my boundaries. He needs to get himself to another multi-day intensive program of some kind within the next month. He needs to ramp up his meeting attendance and make daily calls to his sponsor and SA buddies. He can, as always, choose not to do these things, but then he needs to find an apartment to live in.

Boundaries and consequences are great, but my patience is wearing very thin. The goodwill I have for him is diminishing with each lie, with each incident of acting out (not sexually that I know of, but he’s clearly acting out in other ways). I’m not getting mad. I’m sliding into apathy. Our CSAT told him today that if I’m not mad he should be terribly afraid because it means that I’m finding my life jacket and putting it on and getting ready to jump ship. If he can right the ship, I’ll stay on board, but I’m not going to be dragged down with him. I love him more than he can imagine, but the clock is truly ticking. I cannot endure this for much longer. That’s the brutally honest truth here: I wanted deeply to move into 2019 with renewed hope and faith and energy, but I see that I’m still dealing with the same BS I was dealing with a year ago. I don’t think that I can do it for one more year, and that breaks my heart. 💔

A Week of Brutal Honesty – #3 – A Crime of Passion (a.k.a Why I’ll never get picked for a jury)

This is the third post in my week of soul cleansing. You can find the first two posts here and here.

I’ve been pondering this post for a long time, but frankly it just seemed way too awkward – and revealing – to write. I was on a support group call a few days ago and someone had a very similar experience, so I’m thinking that perhaps I’m not as alone in this as I thought. So, if this makes sense to even one betrayed spouse out there, just know that you aren’t the only one.

I am not a physically aggressive person. I don’t think that I have ever actually struck another human in anger… ever, even as a kid. I did throw a bottle of water at Handsome’s head at some point in the last few months, and it seemed to shock the hell out of him – which is probably indicative of how out of character that kind of thing is for me.

Based on that, it might surprise you to know that I’m reasonably certain that I seriously considered killing him the night he first disclosed his infidelity to me. I feel really weird just writing that sentence out, but it happened. After dumping his initial disclosure of lies on me, Handsome headed downstairs to sleep in our basement. I wept initially, and then… well, then I got mad, (like really, really mad), that he had done such a thing, to me, to our family, and that he only came clean because the Whore’s husband was going to out him. I was seething hot with rage.

Rage is probably the most relatable word that I can use, but it was really far beyond that. I felt with absolute clarity the depths to which he had betrayed and harmed me. I did not want revenge. I wanted him to no longer exist. The maelstrom of fury inside of me was truly like nothing I had ever felt before.

We are not gun nuts, but he is in law enforcement and my dad was an accomplished skeet shooter, so we have guns in our home. For the record I’m all in favor of gun control and background checks and closing the gun show purchase loophole and… well, generally anything that the NRA opposes. Nonetheless, I know how to shoot.

And yes, I thought seriously about where the guns are in our house, where the ammo is, whether he might be expecting my rage or if he actually managed to fall asleep now that his guilty conscience was relieved (ha! if I only knew how far from the truth that was at the time)…. and then one thought popped into my mind. I pictured our kids and how that would be the loss of both parents for them, since I knew I wasn’t going to get away with anything. I recall being absolutely fully aware that I’d go to jail. We had just had an absolutely terrific day with the kids and I couldn’t imagine them without either parent, losing their home, moving to their godmother’s, having to give up their friends and their school and their pets because of me or their asshole cheater-father. I wasn’t going to cause that.

This was not, to be honest, as linear an argument in my head as this makes it seem. I sat with these thoughts running through my head for longer than I care to admit. I did not ever touch a weapon that night (nor since then), but I had run through about every scenario I could think of in my mind. In the end, it wasn’t my great love of my husband that saved him that night. In that white-hot fury I truly did not give a shit about him. He was saved by my great love of our kids and my own moral compass.

I used to think that crimes of passion were some BS concept that defense attorneys used to get their clients off. That’s likely true in some cases, but if I could be driven to seriously evaluate the pros and cons of homicide, then I’m reasonably certain that just about anyone can. I’m pretty even keeled (or, more precisely, I was before DDay). I don’t have anger management issues, and I’m very often more pushover than powerhouse at home. I’m also a pretty law and order kind of girl. Today though? If I were on a jury and a betrayed spouse had whacked their mate in an incident worthy of 48 Hours, I get it. I can empathize. I would sign on the “not guilty by reason of temporary insanity” line in a heartbeat. I’m not talking about someone who plots and schemes for weeks, but in that heat of the moment after discovery or disclosure? I know that crazy pain and the crazier thinking that goes along with it. I’ve been there. I’m not saying that it’s right or that it makes sense (and, in fact, that’s precisely why it’s so crazy… because it makes no sense). I’m just saying that I understand.

Tomorrow: A Week of Brutal Honesty – #4 – L is for Loser

Show me the love

Apparently Handsome spent his individual therapy session this week talking about the difficulty he has showing me he loves me in the wake of our 3 – count ’em, three – disclosure days.

Well… duh.

I think we come at this from very different perspectives. First, to put it diplomatically, Handsome’s social/ emotional skills are stunted. Blame it on his family of origin (I do). Second, he is dumbfounded that it is hard for me to believe that he loves me simply because he now very often says he does and he has ramped up the thoughtfulness and kind gestures. To me, that’s all truly lovely, but insufficient.

At 10:00PM on December 9th last year, I knew without a doubt that he loved me. By 11:00PM…? Not so much. And we all know now that initial disclosure was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Almost a year later, I do believe Handsome loves me (though I admittedly waffle on whether it is romantic love), but I also believe his interest in self-preservation is even stronger. I can’t exactly say that he loves himself more, because it’s clear to me that his compulsive behavior arises from self-loathing. Nonetheless, if it’s between him or me, he picks himself. Each and every time.

Forget (if you can, and I cannot) the individual aspects of the five (5!) simultaneous, long-term affair partners and the 20+ encounters with paid sex workers. How about the fact that condoms do not prevent all STDs and STIs? How about depriving me of the knowledge of this high risk sex life for at least three years, thus ensuring that I couldn’t protect myself? Imagine sleeping next to someone you say you love, knowing your behavior could literally kill them, and yet continuing to engage in that behavior without a care in the world? (Or, maybe you care… but not enough to give them a heads up or anything.)

Is that loving? I think not. It’s beyond selfish. As a lawyer I would label it “deliberate indifference” (reckless disregard for the consequences of one’s own actions or omissions).

To me, that’s the hurdle that Handsome has to overcome. I’m not hung up on the idea that he gave a crap about any of these women. I don’t think he did, with the possible exception of the Flame, and he appears to now see her for the homewrecker she is. I even believe that he loves me in his own way. I just believe that he prioritizes himself over me. His behavior over time (including now with his staggered disclosures) evidences that when there’s a choice between him or me, he almost always sacrifices me to save himself.

When you come at the issue of how he should go about showing me he loves me from that perspective, it’s very different from the norm. Hugs and snuggles aren’t going to cut it.

Step 1 – Stop lying (even by omission).

Step 2- Stop engaging in other behavior that is harmful to the marriage (we can call this the “just quit being a dick” step).

Step 3 – Display appropriate empathy and compassion.

Step 4 – Prove that you can be self-sacrificing for the benefit of others (not to the point of martyrdom, but just recognizing that the world doesn’t revolve around you… a point most other adults already understand). Do this without the expectation of anything in return.

Step 5 – Repeat steps 1-4 daily.

Step 6 – Do what normal people do to express love (this is where the thoughtfulness, consideration, and romance comes in).

Note that there is nothing in this list that is really about his recovery.  That’s for him. While it’s helpful to him and that trickles down to be helpful to me, at the end of the day it is for him. His new emphasis on thoughtful gestures, neck kisses, hand holding and saying “I love you” is wonderful, but talk is cheap after what I’ve been through. If I am important to Handsome, he needs to prove it, every day, with meaningful actions (see steps 1-5).

*** I’ll be mostly offline for a week for our holiday trip, but I wish my blogging friends in the States a very happy and safe Thanksgiving!! And a good, safe week to all of my blogging friends outside the US as well!

The Confession – DDay #3

Patience may be a virtue, but I don’t have any to speak of, at least not when it comes to Handsome’s lies and secret keeping. I received a very insightful comment from Joshua Shea to my last post. To paraphrase him, his question was “So your husband is still withholding. What are you gonna do about it?” Fair point.

For the reasons I explained in reply, my hands were a bit tied, but I told Handsome that he needed to make calls to his sponsor and SA contacts every day before our Thanksgiving vacation, and attend three meetings this week and one meeting next week before we hit the road. That is way more than he normally does, and I knew the calls would take him far outside his comfort zone. He agreed.

Nonetheless, the very fact that he was still keeping secrets (even if they would be included in the big therapeutic disclosure planned for early January), burned  – and burdened – me deeply. As I asked him: “How am I supposed to tolerate hugging you or being physically or emotionally intimate with you when the knife is still sticking out of my back and you are twisting it every day?” He was frustrated. He thought we had both freely agreed to hold everything until January. Indeed, I had agreed, but (1) I had been blindsided at the CSAT’s office by the development that what remained secret was “big” and (2) I didn’t feel as though I had the agency in that moment to insist that I hear it then. After pondering it endlessly I decided to go back to my long-held position that whatever Handsome has disclosed to someone else he sure as hell had better disclose to me. Why was I agreeing to have that anvil hanging over my head until January… or later? No thanks.

For the record, I don’t believe that our CSAT intended to put this stress upon me. I think that her suggestion of the therapeutic disclosure at this time of year was well intentioned but missed the mark, and that Handsome should have been encouraged to disclose what he had to disclose to me, and it could then be rolled together with his prior disclosures and addressed again in some organized and orderly fashion in January. I also think that she believes that I am stronger than I really am. I put on a good public show, but inside? Some days it’s like a cyclone inside my head.

So, what was all the hoopla about? He was withholding one additional physical affair (if you can call it an affair… he claims to not know her last name and claims he only knew her by “Katie”), and the use of escorts and a local massage parlor. All of this allegedly occurred from 2015 forward -the same period as all the other mayhem.

How do I feel?  Some combination of hurt beyond belief and numb. There are so many things about this that I only believe with difficulty. I am dismayed that he so compromised his morals and values that he committed illegal acts. I am dismayed that he is an embarrassment to his job and that he is no better or different from the people he arrests. I am dismayed that he would ever EVER scream at me about money when this is how he saw fit to spend it. I am dismayed that he put my health at risk without a care. (He is in dire need of a very basic 6th grade lesson on how HPV and other diseases are spread and how a condom isn’t a magical shield.)

The flip side, of course, is that as disgusting and repulsive as I find this behavior, the escorts and massage parlors were business transactions. Nothing more. It’s not as if these women liked him. Based on the hooker/ prostitute/ escort blogs I’ve read they were likely (1) high, (2) revolted by him, (3) completely faking it, and (4) terrified. I find it pathetic that he’d be turned on by that, but at least he wasn’t talking with and texting them daily. There were no real relationships. He claims to not even know the physical affair partner’s last name – despite texting with her for the better part of 3 years and screwing her at least twice. It was just cock + scabby cum dumpster = release. The very reasons that made it so difficult for him to admit these things are, ironically, the very things that make them somewhat manageable to my brain.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that if he only had sex with pros that this would all be a cake walk.  Far from it. I’m simply saying that in the scheme of what my husband did, this is not the most damaging disclosure to me. His emotional affair with the Flame (and the related lies and secrets) is far more painful to me… less disgusting and vile, for sure, but much more painful.

At the end of the day, my husband has to live with what he did. I have lived through our marriage with honesty and integrity. Handsome is my last first-kiss. I am likely not even in the 5 most recent first-kisses for him. I’m probably not in the 20 most recent first-fucks. That’s on him. I do not need to worry that anything that I have done may harm his health or well-being. He has to wonder what might pop up on his STD tests or mine in the future (since HPV can go latent). At least since 2015 he has not been the person I thought I married, for sure, but I loved him with every fiber of my being and I was present and committed. I did not waste time or opportunities. He has to account for his years in his addict bubble. It has taken months (and months) but I’m good with me. I honored my marriage vows and my husband. I will not bear his shame.

Do I think I finally know everything? Nah. I’ve been around this block before. There are a few details I could still call bullshit on, but we’ll see how it all parses out in the therapeutic disclosure he’s working on. My gut tells me that he’s nearing the end of what he’s keeping inside, but maybe I’m just sensing that he’s as exhausted  with this process as I am.

Therapeutic disclosure (DDay #3??)

Been gone for a bit. We just wrapped up the second of two long family weekends away. We had a decent time in NYC (Handsome was highly agitated all weekend, but the kids and my mom were good fun), and we just got back from the Breeder’s Cup in Louisville. That was an awesome trip. Beautiful horses, great racing, fancy hats, Derby pie, and bourbon.  Lots of bourbon. What could be better?

Before we left for NYC, our CSAT said that she thought a formal therapeutic disclosure would be a good idea for us. She has been able to see what Handsome has voluntarily disclosed versus that which I’ve had to investigate on my own. She has observed his responses to various questions about his acting out and, in particular, how certain answers just don’t make sense or seem a bit lacking. She also sees the frustration this causes me.

If you’ve been on this roller coaster with me for a while, you recall that our first DDay was December 9th last year. At that time Handsome disclosed parts of his affair with the Whore. He minimized the heck out of it, but most of the truth trickled out about their involvement once I got a chance to go through her burner phone. On February 26th, we spent hours doing what was supposed to be a full disclosure on our own. Within days it became apparent that 90% of what I had been told was absolute BS. March 3rd became our DDay #2 when I learned about his numerous other affairs and acting out behaviors. It’s also when it became obvious that Handsome has serious issues with compulsive sexual behavior. I knew then, even before he was formally diagnosed, that Handsome is a sex addict. Since that day there have been smaller disclosures, most of which I would consider to be “filler” around the broader stories of his acting out. Many of those little disclosures have been during our weekly check-ins in response to the question in his check-in format from Dr. M regarding a lie or secret he is keeping. I do believe that he has told me the majority of what he did. I also believe, however, that there are certain things that he has decided he should keep secret. Some of those things have become obvious in our therapy. I, on the other hand, believe that the absolute least he can do for me is tell me the full truth. I have always said that I don’t need the color of someone’s lingerie or who was on top, but I do need to know the totality of what I am supposed to be forgiving him for.

The CSAT sent us a template for the format of the disclosure and, frankly, I find all of the limitations “for the protection of the betrayed spouse” to be utter BS. To me, if it is supposed to be a disclosure it had better be exhaustive and thorough. A therapist or his SA folks should not know things that I do not. If he knows something and fails to disclose it to me, it’s a secret and that’s a problem for me. I really wish that everyone else, including Handsome, would accept the fact that I’m an adult and quit perpetuating secrets under the guise of “protecting” me. I find it insulting, patriarchal, offensive, and unnecessary.

I raised that point with the CSAT and also said that if all Handsome intended to do was to waltz in and tell me only what he has told me thus far, we should just skip it. I’m not going to put myself through torture so he can check off a box to say he accomplished something. If I’m going to go through this, it had better have a point. She informed me today after meeting with him privately that “there is new information that will be coming forward.” Lovely. So much for telling me 300+ times that he has told me everything. It’s a good thing I never bought that completely. (Does anyone wonder why we betrayed spouses develop trust issues that we never had before after all of this??)

Despite this development, I know that I’ve made personal progress over the last 11 months because I’m not in tears or a basket case over whatever might be forthcoming. I have assumed that he slept with everyone he says he didn’t, and then some. I have assumed that he engaged in other acting out behaviors that have yet to be disclosed. In short, I’ve already steeled myself against the worst of the possibilities. That’s not to say that the new disclosures won’t hurt me. They just won’t destroy me. He did that already, but I feel as though I’m doing a commendable job rebuilding myself in this new epoch.

Our CSAT wanted to get the disclosure scheduled and completed in December, but the holidays are upon us and I refuse to destroy another Christmas and New Year’s with new disclosures of Handsome’s acting out. I would love to start 2019 fresh, but I’m not willing to sabotage my 2018 holidays to do so. He can toil away at his part in this disclosure till the new year rolls around. Let it weigh on him for the next few weeks, not me.

Girl Code vs. Awkward Work Event

I saw this in the New York Times yesterday and, frankly, I’m just not sure what to make of it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/02/style/baby-shower-do-i-have-to-go.html?action=click&module=Features&pgtype=Homepage

How would I handle the situation?  I’d get a nice gift for the baby and find any reasonable excuse to be out of/ away from the office that day.

I absolutely understand why the woman who wrote the letter is uncomfortable participating in the shower. You don’t have to be a betrayed spouse to feel awkward about celebrating someone who apparently had no qualms about ripping apart a family (or at least felt no need to hide it).

Thoughts?

Updates & Tying Up Loose Ends 1.0

I enjoy shows like 20/20 or Dateline that cover true crime cases, but I’m always a bit sad if there is no conclusion or a “since this story was filmed” postscript. Thus, please accept these updates (in no particular order) to some issues raised in my previous posts:

Fire Dude & the Whore:  Having the Whore’s burner phone in my possession was like keeping a flaming coal in my pocket. It’s mere existence hurt me, and as long as I had it, I had an unsettling link to Fire Dude. He would text me at all hours of the day and night and send me pictures of people he thought looked like Handsome driving by their house. I finally managed to have the burner phone copied and I returned it to him in June. I haven’t heard from him since. He and the Whore welcomed a baby girl to the world on August 4th. That child would have been conceived during the Whore’s affair with Handsome, although he swears that he hasn’t had sex with her since 2015.

Vasectomy: Handsome had his initial consultation with the urologist and scheduled the surgery for mid-October. Given the amount of time he will need to be off – about 2 weeks since he doesn’t have a desk job – it may be delayed due to his work schedule, but he did follow through and make the appointment.

Post-nuptial agreement: This is a work in progress. Handsome tells me that he’s open to it and willing to discuss it, and then it never happens. He avoids it like the plague.  When we do manage to talk about it he says that he feels as if I’m discounting his contributions to our family and that he fears that I’m asking for the agreement only to hurt him. Those are fairly big accusations. I can understand why he might perceive those things to be true. Neither is true. This is solely about sharing the risk of staying in the marriage and protecting me and our kids in the event he is unfaithful again and the marriage ends in divorce. This is a major item on my “I need this to stay” list, so I’m not giving up and I’ll raise it in front of our CSAT if he continues to dodge the issue.

Beyond Affairs:  We just wrapped up the last of the post-intensive calls following our participation in their Healing From Affairs weekend. In retrospect, altogether it was a very worthwhile experience for us. We are (generally) communicating much better than we did before and I think we have a better understanding of how we have each viewed certain things that occurred in our marriage. We have identified our vulnerabilities in tremendous detail and talked through them in a way that most couples never do. While Handsome’s SA puts a slightly different spin on certain things, he still cheated and I’m still a betrayed spouse. There was enough relevant material in the weekend and in the after-care that we both agree it was worth the time and expense. I note for anyone considering their intensive that there are six big follow-up group calls after the intensive. Those are spaced out and are just for the participants of the particular recently concluded intensive. They also have calls every other Wednesday night throughout the year that are essentially open in perpetuity to the people who participate in any of their programs (there is a call for women and a separate call for men). The men’s calls seem to always be pretty secular (as was the intensive itself), but the women’s calls shift through both secular phases and bible-study related phases.

The Flame: Perhaps the gum is wearing off my shoe. Handsome realizes (now, finally, duh!) that The Flame isn’t all sunshine and light. He recognizes that just as he was having an emotional affair with her, she was also equally cheating on her husband. He seems to have gained some insight into why she was such a willing participant with him and what that says about her.  The Flame has gone underground on social media. I had heard that her husband was filing for divorce, but I’m not checking. She seems to have lost one of her two jobs in the last few months. One way or the other she will get what she has coming.  (Karma!)

The Unicorn: Believe it or not, but things appear to be working out for Handsome with his unicorn of an SA sponsor. I’d even go so far as to say that perhaps The Unicorn is an ideal match for Handsome. They resolved their initial communication issues and now talk fairly regularly. He has given Handsome space and time to do recovery work outside of SA, like our affair recovery work from the intensive, and because his schedule is crazy he is forgiving of Handsome’s crazy schedule as well. In short, things seem to be just fine with the two of them.

Today Handsome hits 9 months of sexual sobriety. On Sunday we will be 9 months out from our first DDay. I would say that it seems like a lifetime ago, except the pain is still so very fresh and close to the surface. We are hanging in there together though. I am trying to stay strong, one breath at a time and one hour at a time and one day at a time. Some days I do a better job than others, but writing here helps me through good and bad patches. I didn’t start blogging because I thought anyone would ever see it. I just needed to shout on paper (or a screen, to be more precise). The fact that I have received so much terrific advice, commentary, and support here from men and women that I’ve never met – even when we agree to disagree – has been both a wonderful surprise and a tremendous blessing.  I don’t really have the words to express how much you have all helped me in my healing, but I want to say that I appreciate each of you. Thank you all. ❤️

Financial Infidelity – Show Me the Money

This is a tough post for me to write, and I apologize in advance for the length. My reasonably blue-collared upbringing impressed upon me the decidedly blue-blooded notion that you don’t discuss money with people outside your household. Ever. Nonetheless, it plays a big role in my story with Handsome and I’m guessing that I’m not the only betrayed spouse who feels this way.

Before the Spring of 2012 (when Handsome’s acting out really commenced) Handsome and I would bicker, but rarely fight over anything other than politics. Maybe we’d feud over a scheduling/ child care issue, but these were fleeting matters, and quickly smoothed over. Starting in 2012, however, Handsome suddenly started to pick fights about our finances.

A touch of background: Handsome and I work full time (plus) and our jobs permit us a comfortable, culturally rich life. We have a lovely home and a summer home and retirement savings and we take nice vacations. We carefully pick and choose what we spend our money on and we are generally in agreement. We aren’t buying the $14 organic peanut butter at the grocery store, but we have taken our kids to Europe and South America. Our kids are a big source of spending (activities, camps, babysitter, etc.). Collectively, I don’t think that we live beyond our means, but we don’t live below them either. There is no great big pot of money left at month end, and a major unexpected expense (like a big home or car repair, for example) can still sting.

I’ve written here before about how Handsome and I divide our finances. I bear the vast majority of our expenses, but my income is significantly higher. The idea has always been that we each bear our proportionate share of expenses and neither of us should be penniless throughout the month. Imagine my surprise when I would be having a discussion with Handsome about paying for something relatively minor and he would suddenly start SCREAMING at me about how he has “no money” and “can’t live like this anymore.” When these outbursts started in 2012, I just started bearing a greater portion of the financial obligations, both to try to help him out (was the division unfair or overly burdensome to him? I didn’t know…) and to avoid the conflict. The outbursts continued, and they got more frequent.

By our first DDay, I had been subjected to these screaming tirades about money every few months for the better part of five years. Tirades from a man who, when he needed to replace a Ford Escape that was aging into a money pit in 2015, called me one day out of the blue because he found a new Land Rover he wanted to buy that very day. He wanted to get me to agree – sight unseen – to the purchase of a car that didn’t meet our needs (we had discussed getting something with a third row) and which I sincerely doubted he could afford to maintain. That proved to be true. He couldn’t afford the dealer maintenance. (I now know he bought the car when his physical affair with the Whore was at its pinnacle, in an apparent pathetic attempt to impress a woman who has neither a car nor a driver’s license and spends the vast majority of every single day on her cat pee- stained couch.)

In the back of my mind I always kind of wondered – why is he always broke? If anything his monthly expenses decreased while his income increased, so what’s the issue? He was so very highly agitated about it though, that I figured it wasn’t worth the battle to get into it with him. For the past few years I mostly bought my own Mother’s Day and birthday gifts for our kids to give me so that they could feel like they were actually participating in the celebration. I almost solely and exclusively bought our kids’ birthday and Christmas gifts because he plead poverty.

In the wake of both of my DDays I’ve come to learn where his money was going. Several hundred dollars a month went to buy beer. Then there was the porn he purchased, the expense of his burner phone, the fancy meals he squired the skanks to, the hotel room for the Whore, and all of the cash he showered on them. Hundreds of dollars out the door each month. By my general estimation, he blew at least $16,000 on his acting out from 2012 through 2017. All the while he would stand in our house and scream at me till he was red in the face about not having money.

For Christmas in 2016, Handsome told me that he was “short on cash” so he couldn’t buy any of our kids’ gifts. He seemed sincerely remorseful about it and I just did what I always do and handled everything. Our kids had an awesome holiday. He has since admitted that he found Angel Baby “outside on the street at work, crying in the rain” (note: that bitch needs to get an umbrella because in his tales of woe she’s always outside in a downpour) and that he gave her “a couple hundred dollars” to buy Christmas gifts for her kids. There are no words that I can think of to adequately articulate my white-hot rage at that scenario… her brood and her opening gifts purchased through my husband’s largesse when he didn’t spend a dime on his own kids.

I know that Handsome’s screaming fits are what Dr. M considers “intimate partner abuse.” They were uncalled for, offensive, and yes, abusive. I am still terribly scarred by them. Handsome complaining about money is an extreme trigger for me. To put it into perspective, as of today I have as great a physiological response to his financial infidelity as I do to his physical infidelity. Any hint of a complaint from him about money is enough to send me spiraling into nausea and misery.

This past weekend – over the holiday – our hot water tank decided to die a quick and untimely death. You say “no big deal BW, they’re cheap.” Well, not ours. We apparently have the Ferrari of hot water heaters and replacing it is a several thousand dollar expense. We replaced the condenser for our AC just a few weeks ago for another few grand. This, of course, led to a dreaded discussion about where all of this cash was to come from and Handsome said “well, I’ve been saying for years that we really need a slush fund for these kinds of things.” Yes, Handsome, you asshole, you have been saying that and we certainly do. All or any fraction of the $16,000 you spent on your acting out would have made a lovely pot of cash to rely on for these things. Or the tens of thousands of dollars we’ve spent just this year on your SA recovery or our betrayal recovery.  Yes indeed. That would be quite helpful now, wouldn’t it?

I went there. The place I normally bite my tongue and avoid like the plague. I pointed these facts out to him. His initial response?  Deflect with anger. Blame me for bringing it up. Act as though the problem isn’t that these things occurred, but that I dare mention them. Shortly thereafter, the shame appeared, but I fear that this too is an addict’s manipulative tool. Pout and sulk enough that I feel badly for raising the issue. Make me never want to raise it again. Here’s the new thing though… it doesn’t work on me any more. If he apologizes to me sincerely for creating this predicament and stops acting like he had nothing to do with the situation, I’ll show empathy. We’ll figure it out together. Otherwise? I love a hot shower as much as the next girl, but I’ll freeze my tushie off on principle. The burden to fix what he broke cannot fall on me alone. I didn’t put us in this position and I’m tired of coming to the rescue.

Nothingness

Handsome and I are going through a good phase at the moment. Life is hopeful. We are getting along well and he continues to work hard on his recovery. I refer to this as a phase though because I know that the winds of change can come swiftly in this stage of our collective addiction/ betrayal recovery.

I try very hard to stay on an even keel. I avoid obsessing. I’m not really actively checking up on Handsome. I’m done looking into his APs other than to check their criminal records to see if they’ve been arrested recently where he works or where we live and to Google certain pertinent info just to make sure that the supposedly parallel lines aren’t crossing. I know I can’t undo the horrors already done. That said, my spider senses are on high alert. Always. I’m hyper-vigilant, but I prefer to say that I’m just more attuned to my surroundings, to be diplomatic.

So, when Handsome and I have an incredible evening together and all of a sudden he becomes quiet and sullen and wipes a tear from his normally dry eyes, I naturally feel a question coming on.

“What’s up?” (I try to keep it light…)

“Nothing.”

With that one word, I feel like I’m set back a dozen steps. I go from rational to nut job in a nanosecond. Outwardly, you might notice no change save, perhaps, for the tick I’ve developed in my left hand since DDay. Inside my head, however, I’m thinking (cue the crazy sirens):

“What is it he feels too guilty to tell me?”

“What lie is he keeping?”

“Is he acting out again?”

“Did one of the ho bags reach out to him?”

“Is he miserable that he’s with me?”

“Here we go… he doesn’t want to tell me that I’m too fat for him.”

“Wait, what happened to sharing our feelings?”

“What happened to building emotional intimacy?”

“He’s throwing in the towel on that already???”

“Asshole.”

All of those thoughts go through my head in WAY less than the time it took you to read them.

It’s exhausting, and I never thought that way prior to DDay #1. Just one more gift from the Infidelity Fairy that keeps on giving.

The Tale of the Tampon

I wanted to write here about an incident that happened some time ago, but that I’ve been forced to revisit in the wake of DDay #1 and DDay #2.  I have said that if you had told me before December 9, 2017 that my husband had a long-term physical affair, I would have thought you were crazy. That is true, but that’s not to say that I never had a period of doubt.

In the Fall of 2015, I had a work trip to LA for five days. It was a longer trip than usual by about two days, but it was across the country and I had two speaking engagements and a series of meetings and a few work events to attend. Handsome and the kids were at home. During those days, when Handsome was working, our kids were either in school or with our nanny at home. Our youngest was in kindergarten and our oldest was in 3rd grade. Handsome was home alone for several hours a day by himself while the kids were at school and the nanny was off at another job.

I got home late on a Sunday night and everyone was in asleep, so I just abandoned my luggage in our foyer and snuck into bed. The next morning was a jet-lagged blur of getting the kids dressed and off to school before I finally found myself with a few moments of peace in our bedroom. I was making the bed and I turned around and noticed… a packaged tampon resting on the window sill beside the bed. On my side of the bed. Aside from the fact that I haven’t needed a tampon in years (shout out to the Mirena inventor!! woot! woot!) it was neither my size nor my brand. It was unopened and appeared carefully placed there, at the edge of the window, closest to the head of the bed. It was, in fact, where you might put something if you wanted it close at hand but you didn’t want to put it on my very crowded nightstand.

This was post “Porngate” that I’ve written about here, and also post the first email incident with the Flame. I immediately assumed that Handsome had another woman in the house while I was gone. I took the tampon, found him in the basement watching ESPN, and flung it at his head while doing my best impersonation of a screaming banshee. I hurled accusations and he denied, denied, and denied. He seemed astounded, shocked. I wasn’t buying it. I did not believe him. I wanted to believe that he knew nothing about it, but he seemed to almost be trying too hard to convince me or, alternately, dismissive of the entire incident.

I later inquired of the nanny if the tampon might be hers (yep, that was an embarrassing conversation) since she was to have been the only other woman in the house in my absence. She was a lovely girl (completely and utterly unimpressed by Handsome so I wasn’t concerned that was an issue), but a bit of an airhead, and her response was along the lines of “I don’t think it’s mine, but I don’t know.” Now, the ladies out there likely understand that once you have a tampon you trust and rely on, that’s the one you are willing to go to three stores to find in your preferred brand/ size. It’s not something you switch up. I think she was trying to not get Handsome in trouble (even though I was the one paying her), but I was unconvinced.

Ultimately Handsome settled on the story that our cat, who likes to play with crinkly things, swiped it from the nanny’s bag and deposited the contraband neatly on my window sill. (Again, that pins ownership of said tampon on the nanny, and that is far from certain.) I never bought that story, although the cat was indeed in the midst of a streak of doing just those kinds of weird things. I would find the plastic wrap from a tissue box under our kitchen table, or a piece of foil on the stairs. The perfection of the placement though was always the nagging issue in my mind. It was tucked away on the sill, on a window the cat was rarely, if ever, on. Also, there were no teeth marks on it. None.

Handsome told me that he relayed the story to his buddies at work and lamented getting blamed for something he “didn’t do.” He laughed about it and acted as if I was crazy. The thing is, at that very moment I now know that he was in the midst of two emotional affairs and his physical affair with the Whore was in full swing. He may have been wrongly accused about the tampon (although I doubt it) but he was nonetheless guilty as sin at that moment. In retrospect I believe this was likely his best effort at gaslighting me.

Before my DDays I really wanted to believe that Handsome was truthful. I wanted to believe that my kleptomaniac cat just grabbed the wrong thing to play with and that it was all a big, bad coincidence. I never fully believed that – my logical brain wasn’t buying it – but I really wanted it to be true with all my heart.

Today, even after all of the disclosures and all of the therapy and the intensives, Handsome still insists that he has no idea how that tampon got there other than by way of the nanny or the cat. He says yes, he engaged in complete and utter shithead-fuckery, but that there was no other woman in our house while I was away on that trip. I want very much to believe that, but having been through what I’ve been through, I just don’t.  I don’t think I will ever believe it.

I believe in my head and my heart, based on Handsome’s other behavior, that there was another woman in my house while I was away. I don’t know who it was, and I guess it doesn’t matter. In my mind, he slept with the Whore or some random anonymous skank in my house, in my bed, while I was off working. It’s basically the same thing he did last summer with Angel Baby (except they supposedly didn’t have intercourse, although I don’t believe that either). I’ve dealt with that to some degree, and I’m dealing with this by lumping it into the same pot. Do I wish that I could just believe him?  Of course!!! He has 8 months of sexual sobriety under his belt. And for all I know he may very well be blameless as to this one instance and telling the truth about the tampon. But like the little boy who cried wolf he no longer gets the benefit of my blind faith and trust.

It’s his loss, but it sure seems like mine too.

Packing for Trigger City

At the end of this week I will put my kids and my mom and her dog in my car and make the 11+ hour drive to our vacation home in New England. Normally we leave closer to Father’s Day in June, but I made the decision pre-DDay to shift our schedule this summer so that my kids could do swim team and tennis camp. Handsome will be home for about two weeks by himself, until he comes to join us for the final two and a half weeks.

The triggers this Summer are plentiful. July 2nd of 2015 was the day he screwed the Whore in a no-tell motel while I was off having lunch with my elderly mom at the seaside resort where he and I had our wedding reception.

Last year at this time I was still in pre-DDay ignorant bliss. Now I know what was going on right under my nose, and while I was away, all unbeknownst to me.

  • As of the day our kids and I left for vacation last Summer, Handsome was involved (emotionally or physically) with four other women.
  • Three days after we left, he and Angel Baby had a 2-day sleepover at our house that included their field trip to the museum, lunch, and drinks.
  • He was in daily contact with The Flame.
  • He was in daily contact with the Whore and in between their sexting he made sure to remind her how I was going out of town for several weeks, that they should get together, and vividly describing all of the sex acts he wanted to perform on her.
  • He was in regular contact with the woman (The Janitor) he took out on a date two days after he returned to town from vacation.

Handsome joined us in New England for about 12 days last Summer. We did fun things as a family and had a great time. Then:

  • He had his date night with The Janitor at the high-end romantic restaurant two days after he returned home.
  • He tries, but ultimately fails, to set up another hotel meet-up with the Whore two days before I get home with the kids (this time offering up a hotel far from her home but right down the road from ours).
  • He remains in daily contact with all of the women.

To say that I’m uncomfortable leaving him by himself is an understatement, but I’m not his mom or a baby monitor. It’s up to him to stay sober. I’ve asked him to double up on his therapy appointments or meetings while I’m away and he has agreed. That’s great, but boredom, loneliness, and unstructured alone time are all problematic for him… which makes them problematic for me.

It does not help that our vacation home – which I owned since before he and I ever started dating and which was always my very hard earned safe haven and happy place – was the site of some of his compulsive behavior. The epic sexting that went on there (complete with photos and videos from our bedroom) during his “work weekends” is still repulsive and vile and pathetic. And there are other triggers and reminders all around me there. I have to turn my head when I drive by the church we got married in… a church where my dad used to put me on his shoulders and take me to puppet shows when I was a little girl and where I take my own kids now for the same events.

Our summer vacations in 2015, 2016, and 2017 are all tainted by his affairs. In particular, in 2016 we took our regular family vacation that included our extended families, and then we took a “secret” trip – just the four of us – and had an absolutely magical week laying on the beach, playing mini-golf, eating ice cream, and relaxing. There were no schedules to juggle, no elderly relatives to please, no pets to take care of, and it was wonderful. “Best secret vacation ever” is how we jokingly and lovingly referred to it. I now know he was texting and sexting the Whore, Angel Baby, and the Flame literally within hours of pulling into our driveway at home.

Could I sell the vacation house and just start spending summers elsewhere? Sure… if I want to give up nearly 50 years of memories with my parents, friends, and our family. I’m not game for that. The skanks and his addiction aren’t going to take any more from me. I’m trying to ensure that I can take all those things back.

It’s all quite overwhelming. I’m trying to stay grounded. I’m trying to practice self-care. I’m just worried that the next few weeks may all be a bit much for me.

He’s doing everything he should be… and it’s still hard for me

A few days ago, I was feeling overwhelmed. During our last check-in Handsome disclosed both something that he had been holding back and one thing he says he just remembered last week. I appreciate and respect the effort (late though it may be) for transparency, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t still painful.

He had, apparently for months, been holding back that the relationship he had with the woman he took out on a date last summer was more involved than he had led me to believe. I haven’t even given her a nickname here because I was initially led to believe it was of such short duration and insignificant that it didn’t merit further discussion as compared to his other APs. He minimized it. (Minimization is a part of Handsome’s Compulsive – Abusive Sexual – Relational Disorder (CASRD) according to Dr. M.) While they did only have one restaurant date, he was at her house once, briefly (no sexual contact), and she was in his car one night (touched her breasts), and he apparently made out with her multiple times outside her house, in the town where he works… while he was in uniform and working. (Because, apparently, risking your job and getting disease at the same time is… sexy???) This just squeaked through his polygraph because his answer to a single question about her was accurate. The question simply wasn’t comprehensive enough.

The new thing he says he just remembered is that last June when Angel Baby stayed at our house for two nights while I was away, on one of the days they got up and went for lunch at a trendy restaurant near my office, then to a museum, then to a nice restaurant for a drink before he drove her home. To exacerbate this issue, he had originally told me a sob story about picking Angel Baby up in the rain because she was standing on the street crying with nowhere to go. Allegedly it was her temporary homelessness that led him to bring her to our house. (A pathetic excuse and by no means justification, but that had been his story.) After learning of their “field trip” I checked his financial records and pinned down the precise day. It was three days after I left to take our kids to summer camp. Moreover, there was no rain where we live that week. None. (Thank heavens for the internet.) I was/ am less upset about the detail he was revealing (the field trip) than I was/ am about the dismantling of the already bullshit excuse for how she could have possibly ended up in our home in the first place. He insists that what he told me originally is what he actually remembers. Maybe. Who knows? In my mind though he has lost the benefit of the doubt. Plus, it is objectively impossible and untrue. Given the timing – his first two days off after I departed with the kids – my belief is that he premeditated to get her to our house. He denies this. He may even believe it to be true. I do not.

The following days have been tense, to say the least. I struggle with being appreciative of the transparency yet not hiding the fact that I’m crushed, yet again. Over the weekend we talked one day while the kids were off at activities and he made the mistake of telling me that it’s “hard” for him to admit to bad things when life seems to be going well between us. I proceeded to then explain to him that if he thought telling the truth was “hard” he should walk a mile in my shoes, and then I lit into him with a diatribe about all the things that are hard that I deal with every moment of every day because of what he did.

I then sent him this message a day later:

“I know that over the last weekend you were, I think, surprised to hear me express some of the very specific reasons why I am so sad and continue to find this all so very overwhelming and hard. It occurs to me that you are surprised because I don’t ever actually share these thoughts with you. You get bits and pieces of my anger, confusion, and hurt, but I seem to have adopted your method of stuffing things down inside and trying to keep my chin up.  Long term, that doesn’t do us any good. So, in no particular order and without any suggestion that this list is complete, here is a list of ten things that I am finding excruciatingly hard and challenging at the moment. Perhaps we could talk through each of them together?

  1. It is hard to know that there were so many (yes, 3 or 4 is “many” in this circumstance) other women that you wanted to sleep with when you chose not to sleep with me.
  2. It is hard to know that you communicated so much with these women when your kids and I could often barely get a few kind words from you.
  3. It is hard to know that you maintained a wholly separate life that your family was neither welcome in nor acknowledged in, except with complaints.
  4. It is hard to pay witness to your over-familiarity with these women, when you lack anywhere near that level of familiarity with your own family and things related to your family.
  5. It is hard to hear you talk about not wanting to hurt their feelings when my feelings were utterly irrelevant.
  6. It is hard to kiss you without wondering who taught you to kiss the way you do now when it was not the way you kissed me for years.
  7. It is hard to have sex with you without wondering where you learned all of the completely new things that you started doing last year and which were never part of your previous repertoire.
  8. It is hard not to feel that you gave the best of yourself to these women in desperate attempts to woo and impress them, and you didn’t care when you had nothing left for your family (emotionally, physically, financially).
  9. It is hard to know that you were spontaneous and kind and took initiative with certain of the other women when I have longed throughout most of our relationship for you to do that with me.
  10. It is hard to know that these women all believed that you picked them over me.”

Those ten struggles are probably the best status report that I could give for myself at the moment. It’s not a pretty picture. I would love to be “better than” or “above” this, but today I am not. Maybe tomorrow will be better.

Moving Beyond the Affairs

Like Olaf of Frozen fame, I love warm hugs. From the front, from behind… wherever. I think a good hug is like a tactile reminder of comfort and security and, in the right circumstances, of love.

I got lots of hugs this past weekend. Some great, some I’m still chuckling about. More on that later.

Handsome and I headed off to the Healing From Affairs intensive weekend put on by Anne and Brian Bercht from Beyond Affairs. I was really tense in the days leading up the intensive, and I wasn’t sleeping well at all. Handsome signed us up for the intensive back in January after DDay #1, and we had a couple of phone sessions with Brian over the last few months. In those sessions I found Brian to be a down to earth, frank, no-nonsense guy to talk to, and I wasn’t put off by his history as the betrayer in his marriage to Anne. They appear, by all public measures, to have healed both individually and as a couple. Given where I’m at right now, I laud them for that. It’s inspiring.

There were 20 couples in attendance and my only shock was that so very many of the couples were in their late 50’s and 60’s and measured their marriages in numerous decades and grandchildren. There appears to be no expiration date on infidelity. Among the betrayed spouses, the collective group faced physical and emotional affairs (some, only one such affair, others a few, and several faced many), porn addiction, use of paid sex workers, and a myriad of other horrors. Two of the betrayed spouses were men. One commonality? People can be freaking resilient. While there were spouses there all along the “stay or go” continuum, and at various points away from discovery, not a single one was operating from a position of helplessness.

This was a full weekend of activity, with each night running past 10:00PM. As with any program like this, there were parts I wasn’t crazy about (for example, sex addiction gets short shrift but is at least acknowledged and discussed). For me, the most impactful part of the weekend was a talk that Brian gave where he literally walked the group through each step of his affair, showing how it started innocently enough and then, over time, how his boundary of what was acceptable versus not acceptable moved to accommodate where he was at the moment (cognitive dissonance), and ultimately how he ended up far on the other side of his own boundary and felt “stuck” there. It was deeply personal, raw, and was a much more articulate way of explaining what Handsome has struggled to explain to me. Most importantly, Brian didn’t try to justify or to normalize how he got from one side of his boundary to the other or to make excuses for it, he just told his story.

We also did a vulnerability assessment (for the 18 months prior to the start of the affairs) and Handsome and I broke the scale apparently. On a scale of about 0-168, with 0-10 being low risk of an affair, I think our score was 125 or so. Ouch. While our current vulnerability level is quite low, based on the assessment there are definitely things we need to be mindful of over time. I think it’s something that we’ll do from time to time just to stay on course as a couple.

I left feeling really glad that we went. It was an expense we didn’t need, but it taught us several new tools we can use and it opened each of our eyes to new things and it certainly increased the level of empathy we have for one another (and I had been thinking that we were doing okay on that front, but we are doing even better now).

Now, those hugs…

I’m not a “let’s hold hands and sing Kumbaya” person. I’m just not. I can do it if I’m compelled to, but that touchy-feely thing with strangers just isn’t me. There are a number of times during the intensive when music is used to communicate a concept. On the last full night of the intensive, just before closing the day out, they played a song (it was some 80’s hair band anthem Handsome and I found terribly corny, but the lyrics were on point for the night) and the couples were encouraged, if they were comfortable doing so, to hug one another deeply. Fine. Handsome and I are enjoying the hug with my hands around his neck/ shoulders and his hands (I count them…one, two…) around my waist, and I’m enjoying the moment and then… hey, wait! One, two… three? I felt a new arm on me. Again, I count Handsome’s hands in my head and I’m thinking WTF!, but before I could start throwing elbows I quickly realize that it’s just Anne joining us in a surprise group hug. Handsome apparently had the same reaction I did, and I think Anne is likely oblivious to how close she came to getting pummeled. 🙂 We’re still chuckling about that one…

Thinking about betrayal (and driving myself nuts)

I try mightily to be fair(ish) to Handsome when I write here. Yes, I often vent, but I aim for rigorous honesty and if it looks bad for him, that’s on him. I don’t need to portray his actions in a negative light because they were horrific enough all on their own. When good things happen, I try to recognize that too. For example, Handsome finally got a sponsor. He’ll have six months of sexual sobriety and three months of sobriety from alcohol this week. This coming weekend we are going to the couples intensive he arranged for us a few months ago and he’s doing the pre-session homework. He’s keeping up with the after-care from his intensive with Dr. M including journaling every day (which I never thought he’d do, but he actually says he likes it).  All good things.

Occasionally though, things come up that I just have no idea how to process. Perhaps they are too overwhelming, or create too much confusion, or are too triggering. Or maybe they just make me ask myself, “What the actual fuck am I dealing with?” One example: during his intensive with Dr. M, Handsome was incredibly raw and overwhelmed. We were talking one night about his cheating in broad terms and I asked him out of the blue whether he had ever cheated on me during the 27 months I lived and worked on the other side of our state, when we were commuting back and forth to see each other. I had never had occasion to ask him that before, because it never occurred to me (before DDay #2) that he would have cheated all the way back then. Keep in mind, we were either married or engaged for 21 of those 27 months.

Now, I don’t know about you, but when someone asks me if I’ve done something awful and I haven’t, I answer immediately, emphatically, and without hesitation. When Handsome’s answer was “Welllllllll… (crickets chirping during long pause)… not exactly.” I knew the answer was just “yes.” His story is that we had a big fight, he didn’t think we could recover, we didn’t talk for “weeks” and he went to a local bar and he met a girl and he later took her out to dinner. During dinner he says he realized it was just absurd and not what he wanted, so he finished dinner, took her home, and that was the end of it.  I didn’t want to sound like Ross and Rachel, but I grilled him on whether he was under the impression we were on a break or that we had broken up. No, he wasn’t. He acknowledged we had never broken up.

What do I make of this revelation now, years of marriage and two kids later? His story simply isn’t plausible for a variety of reasons. First, we have never, ever gone weeks without speaking. In fact, we’ve never gone more than 48 hours without speaking. Memories can be faulty, so I actually went back and reviewed my cell phone records from back then (I swear I’m not a hoarder…I have them only because at the time the phone was a plausible work expense, so they’re in my tax files). There are only a handful of times we didn’t speak each and every day. Next, I simply have zero recollection of this allegedly big fight. I went back through my calendars to see when this might have happened, and over the 6 months I lived there before we got engaged we saw each other regularly every two weeks if not weekly. We talked daily, sometimes several times a day. We took trips and vacations together. It just doesn’t add up. Plus, this was not a hook up. By his own admission, he chatted her up at the bar, got the girl’s number, called her, set up a date, and then took her on that date. That takes a few days, and we’d have been in touch in that time. In short, my conclusion is simply that he cheated. We hadn’t broken up and he took someone else out on a date. That’s cheating.

By my best guess, this occurred sometime in late January 2004. We had seen each other over the New Year holiday and then again over the long holiday weekend mid-month. Then we didn’t see each other again for three weeks (we spoke daily) until we took a long-planned vacation together to Punta Cana the week of Valentine’s Day. Why do I suspect that window? When we got to Punta Cana, Handsome was an asshole. I mean a miserable jerk face. He snapped at me so badly before we checked in that I thought about turning around and flying home alone. The vacation improved greatly over the week, but those initial few days were incredibly difficult. At the time, I attributed it to a dozen things: his hatred of flying, exhaustion from work, maybe I really was a bitch? Now, post DDay, it’s the same behavior I saw throughout his acting out… picking fights and blaming me to “justify” to himself whatever crap he was up to.

So, then I start to wonder… now that I know, what exactly do I do with the information?  To me, this ties to my post a few weeks ago on betrayal and whether our choices would have been different if we, the betrayed, had the whole truth (click here for that). Would I have kept dating him if I knew he did this? Hard to say. Maybe not. Yes, I was in love with him, but I was also living hours away and had plenty of other non-cheating, educated, employed, single guy options at hand. I’m not entirely sure what I would have done. Would I have agreed to marry him? Even more doubtful, and certainly not so soon afterwards. I most definitely would have wanted him to do some serious work on himself first.

Just like now, he had choices then. He could have actually had the balls to break up with me before dipping his toe (or anything else) back into the dating pool. He could have admitted what he did at the time he did it. Or, better yet, he could have chosen to work through whatever disagreement he claims we had and stay faithful to his devoted girlfriend of three years that he kept talking to about marriage.

Many of my decisions that have flowed forth since then have been based on my ignorance. I used to confidently tell people that I actually thought our long-distance romance was helpful to us early on because we had to learn to communicate really well with each other. Unbeknownst to me, it also seems to have been when Handsome started honing his compartmentalization and deception skills. I had no idea.

So, what am I going to do? Likely nothing, other than ruminate on how long he has actually been betraying me. That’s the sad fact of it. I don’t see a point in driving myself more nuts over something that happened 14 years ago. I can dissociate myself from that. Compare and contrast that though with driving myself nuts over whether he’s been keeping secrets throughout our entire marriage, as opposed to just the last five years. (I say “just” now as if that number of years is de minimus, but it isn’t. It’s a hair  under 40% of our marriage, to be precise.)

Does it matter?  I don’t believe the answer makes his cheating better or worse depending on the answer.  It’s all bad either way. Nonetheless, the more time passes the more I reconsider previous events that I thought I had processed and moved beyond. I’m not suggesting that Handsome is still overtly lying (of course, he very well might be). He is, however, a master at lies of omission. I am left to wonder what secrets he may still be holding on to for dear life… the tightly held mysteries of our marriage and the vestiges of his addiction.

Our weekly check-in follows a format from his intensive program, and one of the  questions is “What is a lie or secret that you are keeping?” No matter how much thought or effort Handsome puts into the rest of the check-in, and it’s usually considerable, he inevitably glosses over this question. He has, on occasion, tried to skip it entirely. When he does address it, either the “secret” will be something hardly secret or the lie will be something along the lines of a white lie. (“Daughter asked if I liked her haircut and I said yes, but I really don’t care for it.”) It’s maddening. I’ve started to call him out on it, to hold him somewhat accountable for half-assing that part of the exercise. You would think that 5+ years of acting out would give him fodder to come up with legitimate, meaningful answers to that question, but he can’t (or won’t) as of yet.

I know he’s an addict. I know that secret keeping is as much a part of his addiction as what those secrets are about. There is probably very little more he could disclose that would shock me. We’ve been through a polygraph that he passed with flying colors. Certainly, what I can imagine in my head is likely worse than anything else that may have happened. (As I commented on another blog, I’ve told Handsome in all seriousness that if someone called me tomorrow and said “Hey, BW, I just saw Handsome fucking a monkey,” I would politely thank them for calling, hang up, and then start Googling intensive treatment programs for monkey fuckers.) That’s the tragic part here. I just want to know the totality of what I’m dealing with, process it, forgive, and move on. He wants to keep his secrets to save his pride and to protect himself from further shame. The two are fairly mutually exclusive, and so I continue to drive myself a little nuts over things that are totally outside my control.

 

Today is our 13th wedding anniversary

Yep… today is lucky #13.  On my work calendar – which I must have filled out late last Fall but before DDay #1 – the date has pink and yellow highlighter all over it and “Our Anniversary!!!” scrawled across it as if it belongs to a love struck teenager rather than an actual, gainfully employed, responsible adult. (If, of course, said teenager still used a paper calendar…) It makes me sad. Then versus now.

How are we celebrating the day? We aren’t. I cannot cheer for under six months of sexual sobriety. I won’t buy a card for honoring your wedding vows recently. I do not yet wear my wedding rings. (He does.  I’ve never seen him without it. Go figure…)

I’m not trying to be an asshole about the day or wallow in self-pity. Hey, I’m still here, trying very hard each day to work through things. That is, I suppose, my way of honoring our marriage. He’s still my person, despite the horror he brought to me and our kids (literally, to our home). I can’t, however, pretend for a day that the world hasn’t shifted off its axis and that we’re all good.

Instead, my son turns 9 in two days. I’m going to focus all of my energy on him and put out of my mind how his dad’s deceit traces all the way back to before he turned 3. I’ll ignore the previous anniversaries where I thought I had something to celebrate, or the kids’ birthdays where I’m smiling in the photos because I’m oblivious to my husband’s acting out. Don’t get me wrong. I’m truly grateful that we are both committed to healing and making our marriage work. I appreciate all the work Handsome has done and is doing in that regard. I’m happy we can celebrate our son’s birthday as a united tribe, together in our home, and I’m sure it will be lovely.

It just doesn’t mean that I’m not sad too.

On being betrayed

I was poking around the depths of the internet recently and I found an old, but still relevant, article on betrayal in the NY Times: https://nyti.ms/2k8oupp .  As much as I dislike the level of discourse in most comment sections, the NY Times moderates and curates theirs pretty carefully.  Two comments to the article hit really close to home:

From stuenan in Kansas:

Liars are also thieves. They steal time and possibilities. What life might you have led if you hadn’t believed all their lies? What opportunities did you miss out on because you made choices based on the lies you were told? What did you give up and sacrifice for someone you loved, believed in and trusted?

It’s hard not to feel that you have been preyed on in the worst way and that your life has been wasted.

and

From Amy in Chicago:

Discovering betrayal is like taking a hit from a baseball bat to the knees. It takes a lifetime to learn to walk upright again and look the world in the eye.

To me, both comments ring true in a very personal way. Yes, Handsome is a sex addict, but his addiction involved multiple forms of cheating and betrayal. I’m no different from any other betrayed spouse except my cheater now goes to 12-step meetings. Any infidelity is sufficient to cause these feelings, whether the betrayal is emotional, physical, or otherwise.  Perhaps I’m wrong, but I don’t even think it matters much if your spouse cheated five times or five hundred, or over the course of one week or one decade. While some may find consolation that what their spouse did wasn’t “as bad” as what another spouse did (or, conversely, believe that their misery is greater because of a longer duration or greater number of misdeeds) it’s a distinction without a difference.

If you are betrayed, you suffer. You hurt. You cry, rage, scream, and lash out. You question. You doubt. And then you suffer some more, usually for a very long time.

What life might I have led if I hadn’t believed all of Handsome’s lies? On my good days I think that if I had pressed harder in 2012 (after the Flame reared her ugly head the first time) maybe we wouldn’t be where we are today.  Perhaps I should have believed less or doubted more.  On my not so charitable days, I feel as though I was sold a bill of goods about Handsome from the very beginning and that had I been shown a truthful picture of him from the start, I’d be blissfully living a trigger-free life with someone else. I can’t imagine being with anyone else and the very thought of it makes me sad, but still…

What opportunities did I miss out on because I made choices based on the lies I was told?  What did I give up and sacrifice for Handsome? I left an amazing job with fantastic benefits, dear friends, and a full, independent life in a big city to move back to where he and I met, because he said he’d love and honor me forever.  And here we are, facing the fallout of that unfulfilled promise. I seem to have also sacrificed healthy portions of my self-esteem, dignity, and confidence to his lies as well.

Most days, I get by okay. Some days now, I actually do well. My mind only reels for portions of the day, not all of it. Nonetheless, Handsome’s betrayal has maimed me and inflicted a trauma of the type I’ve never had to deal with before: a Tonya Harding-esque bat to the knees for sure. So, when Handsome exited his therapy session with the Doc yesterday and started talking about forgiving himself? Well, forgive me, but my initial reaction was along the lines of “Now? So soon? That’s it? You’re told to magically let this years-long shit storm you created go after 6 months, but I get the joy of dealing with it, and you, forever?” Uh, no.

I should have seen this coming though. As the article says: “…it is often the person who lied or cheated who has the easier time. People who transgressed might feel self-loathing, regret or shame. But they have the possibility of change going forward, and their sense of their own narrative, problematic though it may be, is intact.” Yes, Handsome certainly knows his own story, while I grasp at straws to figure it out. He knew the life he was living, even if it was compartmentalized. My narrative, on the other hand? My life hasn’t been what I thought it was for a very long time.

I’m all in favor of Handsome not carrying shame with him every day for the rest of his life. Shame was a driver for his acting out. And yes, at an appropriate point he should forgive himself. To me, however, that point comes after he has (i) made a full accounting of his behavior and the harm he has caused, (ii) endeavored to make amends for that harm, and (iii) evidenced the commitment to never betray his family again by living a life of integrity day in and day out for longer than a red-hot minute. Once he does these things I will be prepared to forgive him as well. But he’s nowhere near that point, and neither am I. I’m still struggling to walk upright again and look the world in the eye.

 

Reclaiming Mother’s Day (Part 2)

Mother’s Day flowers

Just a quick update. In short, Handsome did go away to visit his dad and I had a pretty terrific weekend with the kids.  The flowers? My 8-year-old son came shopping and helped me pick them out and we made arrangements for me and for my mom.

On Sunday I had a hearty breakfast of berries and cookies in bed (better than it sounds because there was no syrup to clean off the cat… or the steps… or the carpet…). In the evening we went to a great new steakhouse downtown for dinner.  I love seeing my kids dressed up. I love seeing them in anything really, but when they’re all shiny and clean it just rocks.

Handsome wasn’t great about observing the boundaries of the day, but I had my phone off so it didn’t matter.  He called twice and texted me once and then tried to text the kids (“Tell Mom I said… .”). Whatever.  I had the wonderful day I wanted and he was utterly uninvolved.

Back to reality today as Handsome returns home and there are a few things we need to deal with from last week.  I’ll write about those later. But for now I’m still basking in the glow of a terrific weekend. Thanks to everyone for the kind words of encouragement. I needed that support and I needed this weekend to myself.

Reclaiming Mother’s Day

So very true.

I’ve sent Handsome away. Not permanently, mind you, but for a long weekend this weekend. “But it’s Mother’s Day,” you say? Yep. Exactly.

Last year over this weekend, Handsome was at our summer home, ostensibly for the purpose of getting it ready for the season for our family, but rampantly texting three other women the entire time. He was sexting one of those women – the Whore – as well, taking dick pics throughout the house and exchanging them with her for pictures of her dirty vajeen. There were videos too, if I recall correctly. (sigh…)

In the text messages on Mother’s Day specifically, he flattered each of the women, praising them as exemplary parents and shining examples of motherhood. That includes the Whore who, you may recall, was arrested and jailed for punching her young son in the face with a closed fist. Handsome knew that, but he fawned over her the same as the others. Angel Baby doesn’t have custody of her first illegitimate child, but she was praised as well.

What did I get last Mother’s Day? A five-minute phone call from him completely devoid of any praise or affection. And the gifts and cards from my awesome kiddos… that I had bought and paid for myself.

“But he’s so busy getting the house ready! You can’t expect him to chat forever.”

“He’s a little strapped for cash, but if you buy your own gifts at least you’ll get what you want.”

“You’re not his mom.”

Those were the things I told myself. And then I sucked up the hurt and enjoyed myself with my kids.

I have the specifics about last year because I was able to see the text messages. I have to assume that the prior two Mother’s Days during his acting out were more of the same. I have no reason to believe otherwise.

So, even though Handsome took this weekend off, I’m not inclined to celebrate with him. I don’t even want to see him, frankly. I’ll buy my own flowers, enjoy a great meal somewhere with my mom and kids, and try to demonstrate to myself that he is utterly unnecessary in order for me to enjoy this holiday. The whores will not ruin it for me and neither will he.

He is traveling to visit his father who lives several hundred miles away. (I didn’t want him here, but I did want someone keeping an eye on him.) I’m sure that on Sunday he will miss his own mother who passed away in 2012. Hopefully, when Handsome and his dad go out to eat on Sunday and he sees all the families celebrating together he’ll take a moment to process why he is excluded this year and why his wife can’t bear to look at him on that day. I’m sure it would be a comfort to him to be with me and the kids instead, but this weekend my self-care means having him be far, far away.