At this point it’s likely helpful to know a bit more about Handsome and our marriage. Handsome is in law enforcement, and he’s funny and outgoing at home, but can be shy and awkward in certain social settings or around new people. He has learned to schmooze with my clients at a hockey game, but if I take him to a cocktail party he’s likely to take refuge in a corner near the bar. I would say that he is confident at work, and at least somewhat insecure elsewhere. He has a quick temper, but a deep heart.
For as long as I’ve known him, Handsome’s preferred beverage has been a fancy, cold beer. We have mandatory recycling where we live so I thought I knew how much he was drinking. He loved a beer or two with dinner (rarely more) and one before bed. I thought that was a lot, but he was never intoxicated. So I stayed silent. Since DDay he has disclosed that he concealed the extent of his drinking from me. Six to ten beers a day was apparently not unusual, most of which were consumed when I was out of the house or after I went to bed. The excess empties were apparently tossed elsewhere or hidden in the trash. One more thing I didn’t know. (Since we returned from our family vacation he is down to one beer or less a day, and not at my insistence. I’m pleasantly surprised and proud of him for that. It’s a bright spot in the otherwise dark depths of these days.)
Handsome works rotating shifts which means that we are often at complete opposite schedules. My job is a steady but long lawyer schedule, and he can work daylights, nights, or overnights. It changes every week. So, some weeks we see each other a lot, other times we have to make the most out of seeing each other in passing. But that has always been true. I think (thought? believed? should it be past tense now?) it’s why we love to travel… we know we’ll be together and it gives us something to look forward to together. Whenever we’d have a stretch where he was on daylights – so we’d have all evening and night together – it was my favorite shift of his because we got to spend time together after we both finished work. I only learned recently that it was also his favorite shift with the Whore because they could text/ sext with impunity during the day since her husband was also at work.
In mid-January, Fire Dude called and asked to meet me. I told Handsome that I was going and while I think he was sad about it, he did not try to stop me. In short, Fire Dude handed me the Whore’s burner phone. He asked if I could somehow get the phone mirrored or copied for him and, if so, he was willing to lend it to me for that purpose and so I could read through it. (On DDay Handsome told me that when he found out Fire Dude had the Whore’s phone, he broke his burner phone into pieces and threw the pieces away in multiple places.)
I’d read all the blog posts and websites about the destructiveness of intrusive thoughts and knowing too many details, but my personality is such that I need to acknowledge and then move on. My imagination is likely much worse than reality. Plus, Handsome had told me that he never took the burner phone on vacation with us, either on long or short trips. It was important to me to confirm that. So, over the course of a few evenings I read through all 12,000 plus text messages, and compared dates with our calendars. Handsome had told me the truth. He never took the phone when he traveled with us. He did, however, often start texting her the very minute he was alone outside our house after we got home. He also texted her hundreds of times during two weekends he traveled alone, including one weekend from our home in New England… a home where I had gotten dressed for our wedding and where our son was likely conceived. He sent the Whore dick pics from our bedroom there. And there were texts on my birthday and my kids’ birthdays and our anniversary. And Mother’s Day.
I tried really, really hard to be calm and rational. Or at least not completely irrational. But I had a lot of venom in my system after I was done reading the phone. So I started to ask more questions. We would sit at our kitchen table and I’d ask anything and everything I felt I needed to know. I didn’t want to know the color of her skanky panties or who was on top, but I did want to know exactly when it started and how long the physical affair lasted (it does not appear from the texts that they were together alone or physical from roughly August of 2016 forward… just rampant sexting). The answer: “I don’t remember.” There are not three more frustrating words in our language. If he doesn’t remember, how am I to know and get closure?
There are things that he can and did answer: how many times they had intercourse (once); where (a cheap hotel); how many times they had oral sex (likely 8+ – far more than the one time he admitted to on DDay); where (her house); was she ever in our house (no); did she ever meet me or the kids (no); did he love her (hell no). Those answers are helpful, but I’m haunted by what I do not know.
I do not know, as I write this, with any degree of specificity when the affair started or how long the physical affair lasted. I continually ask “How is the very day, or even the month if not the day, that you decided your marriage vows no longer applied not burned into your brain for eternity?” He has no answer.
Handsome does not respond well to ultimatums. He’s likely to do the opposite and take pictures just to prove it. But I need an end to the trickle truth and an end to my wondering. I cannot spend the rest of my life with doubts about what occurred and when. So, I asked him to take some time – a few weeks if necessary – to put together his story, from beginning to end, what exactly happened and when (as near as he can recall). I told him to use all of the resources he has available, his calendar, his work schedules and overtime records, and anything else he can gather to help him tell me everything. I don’t want him to make things up just because he feels he has to… that’s not what I’m after. He can talk through things with his therapist or with our cat, for all I care, but when he is done talking I want nothing to be left unsaid. No other shoe to drop. No more trickle truth. I do not want to hear anything from Fire Dude or the Whore or anyone else that he could not have told me himself. I hope he takes this seriously, because I feel like my whole world is hanging on what he has to say.