D-Day – Deceit as a Lifestyle Choice

One thing that I have come to realize since my own Disclosure Day (DDay) – December 9, 2017 – is that all betrayed spouses have had to experience such an unfortunate day.  I’m not alone in that.

If you had asked me at 11:17pm on that night if my husband would ever have an affair, I’d have told you that you were out of your mind.  By 11:19pm, my life as I knew it was forever altered. It’s not that I thought it impossible for Handsome to behave inappropriately, but rather I thought he would never cross THE line…the line between monogamy and infidelity.

To give you some background, my husband – I’ll call him Handsome in this blog – and I met in 1997. We were colleagues first, as we were both in other relationships, and eventually we started dating in 2001.  We fell in love and, between then and our eventual marriage in 2005 we lived at various times both in the same city, as well as a long distance from one another, but our relationship was solid despite that disruption. After we married we settled down in a small house on a lovely quiet street in our borderline Mid-Western city. Two children followed – a daughter in 2006 and a son in 2009. Life was, I thought, good.

Flash forward slightly to 2012.  Handsome and I shared a single home email account.  On that account I started to notice a number of emails from a woman I did not know. He volunteered that she was an old girlfriend and that they had met for lunch and exchanged a few emails. Her husband was supposedly gravely ill.  The emails were, indeed, platonic.  Until they weren’t. After seeing two fairly flirtatious emails referencing the merits of his butt and her chest, I hit “reply all” and suggested that if she was lonely she should to talk to her own husband instead of mine. He wasn’t happy with me and called her to apologize for my over-reaction. She was never heard from again and he later (over a year later, in fact) apologized and said that he did not want to be shady or for me to ever think he was anything less than transparent.

Flash forward to the end of 2013.  I log into my cable account to put parental controls on our TVs and learn that Handsome has been secretly ordering and paying for porn a few times a month for a year (the cost of which we could ill afford at the time). I confronted him and he denied, denied, denied (“we were hacked!”).  It was not until I printed out all of the detailed cable invoices showing all of his purchases that he finally fessed up.  I figured that he felt ashamed, and I didn’t want to further embarrass him by pressing the issue. While there was no further porn ordered on our cable account, I always assumed that he switched to free online porn.

Between then and DDay life had ups and downs. We both lost parents. Our beloved pet died unexpectedly of cancer. Our daughter had multiple serious health issues. But we also became more prosperous as strategic job decisions began to pay off. We could travel, and we did. We closed on a long awaited purchase of a summer home in New England. We both worked really hard, but we seemed to live life to its fullest. In fact, we had a two week family trip to Europe planned for 2 days after DDay.  That trip was long awaited and several years in the making.

On DDay night, we took our kids and a group of my clients to an NHL game.  My kids had a ball, and Handsome is a huge hockey fan and he does a great job of chatting me up to my clients. It was a fun night. Later, with the kids tucked in and asleep, Handsome came into our bedroom, stood next to the bed and told me he had something he needed to tell me.  He went on to disclose that “roughly three years ago” he slept with a woman in the town he worked in and that he bought and used a burner phone and that they had “kept in touch” since then.  He might as well have taken a shotgun and shot me.  I felt absolutely shattered.  Obliterated.  After those words I have very little recollection about the specifics of the rest of the conversation. I do recall:

Burner phone

Hotel

Oral Sex (“just once!”)

and the word “years”… I just could not get that word out of my mind… this wasn’t an “accident” or a “mistake” or a “one time thing”.  No.  The life I had been living was a lie.