Thank you again for the helpful words. I am to the point now where I feel like i'm losing my mind every other hour, and am close to having full-blown panic attacks at times.
In an effort to try to give a little more background to our situation, I'll try to lay it out somewhat. I warn you, it's very sordid and there are things that I (and he) are deeply ashamed about.
The affair I just learned of was a shocker. The entire manner in which I learned about it, coupled with him being fired from his Wall Street job two days later (largely due to the affair), was even worse. But through all the talking, I learned the following things.
- H had also had a very brief affair about 5 years ago with another woman who worked with him. His job caught wind of this affair as well, which helped bring him down.
- A few days later I learned that he had also had a bit of a fling with a different woman at work many years ago, shortly after 9/11 (an extremely traumatic event for me as H worked there and we thought he'd been killed). I also learned that he'd had a one night stand with an ex-girlfriend while we were still dating, apparently during a summer when he failed the bar exam once.
- And a few days after that, I learned that although he didn't have a PA, there was a girl at his original job in NY who he basically had an EA with. He characterizes her as being very similar in type to the OW in his life right now. I asked why they hadn't had an actual PA - he said because she stopped it. She was close to being engaged and came to her senses. He said this relationship worried him somewhat because it was not long at all after we were married.
- He has sworn to me that those are all the actual affairs, but admits that because of his tendency to want to hang with work friends and go to bars - what we've come to call "Single H" - he has willingly put himself in situations that were either inappropriate or invited trouble. I really have no idea how many makeout sessions and almost-sex acts that may have taken place over the past 22 years. Probably scores.
So those are his transgressions. It sounds really bad, and it is. But I will now relay some of the other side of this situation.
We dated for about three years before getting engaged. He was madly in love with me, and sometimes a little too clingy and jealous for my liking. I was never one of those women who was itching to get married. I always had plenty of dates, men considered me pretty good looking, and I was happy with the way things were going. I have a bit of a loner side, as does he, and I greatly need some personal space now and then. As we dated though, he became more secure in our relationship, and things went along nicely. He finished law school, and then decided to get an advanced degree which required one more year - he went to Boston (we lived in Michigan). I wasn't thrilled, but only because I missed him.
He got his degree, came home, and soon got a job offer in NYC. We were both ecstatic. Although I never gave any kind of ultimatum, I just knew what I would and wouldn't do, and I had no intention of moving 600 miles away unless I was engaged. It wasn't a threat or demand, it was just a fact, and if we'd broken up at that point I would have been crushed but I just felt that was something I would not subject myself to.
Unbeknownst to me, H had a cousin who had friends who were rooming together somewhere in the city, and I guess H had the opportunity to go hang with them and do the single guy thing. I now know this was something that sounded really appealing to him, and he was seriously considering that. But he said he was afraid of losing me, and when his dad made an offhand remark about "Well, obviously you and Lisa will be getting engaged and moving out there together," that remark was apparently highly influential to H. He respects his dad a tremendous amount and took that to mean, yes, it's time, we've been dating a long time, and it's just what people do (we were in our late 20s). And so we got engaged, lived together for a year in NYC, then got married in 1993.
During this time, H had some real dick moments. Like he resented me. He'd be short with me, which tends to be part of his personality. Soon after we got engaged, but prior to me moving to NYC to join him, I was asked to be a friendly date to the friend of a friend for some work function. I was confused about what a jerk H was being, I ended up getting entirely too drunk, and when the guy kissed me, I kissed him back. We ended up having sex later that night. I quickly came to my senses, realized that's not the person I wanted to be, and vowed to forget the whole thing and never be so stupid again.
We got married and had two kids. The time with our daughter, our first child, was glorious. H was totally smitten and it was a wonderful time. A couple of years later our son was born. H was somewhat afraid of having a son - he felt like he wouldn't know how to relate to him very well (he had previously had some issues with his dad). Our son was born perfectly healthy, but within the first year we knew something was different. We still don't have a very good label for what our son's issues are, but they fall along some kind of spectrum. In most respects he is normal, but with an almost non-existent frustration tolerance. From the moment he was born, our lives turned upside down and changed us all. Our son screamed at the top of his lungs, he rocked and rocked and broke down his crib. He had epic meltdowns and tantrums that could last hours. I spent two years crying every day when he was a toddler because he never stopped screaming or getting into things or breaking things. If I took a shower, he would lay on the floor in the hallway screaming and kicking the door with his feet.
It was an impossible situation. We didn't live near family, there was no one to watch him, we were afraid paid babysitters wouldn't be able to handle him. We couldn't have playdates very often as they always went badly. As he got older, kids sometimes gave him a hard time. He started getting into trouble at school - not trouble trouble, but not being aware of personal space, not being able to stop fidgeting, etc.
About the time we realized how bad things were with our son, I learned that my mother - whom I was extremely close with - was terminally ill with ALS. The trauma of watching her go downhill over the period of a year or so was horrific. H says I was never the same after that. During the time she was ill, 9/11 happened. I did not hear H was safe until the early afternoon, so for four hours I thought for certain he was dead. Mom died about six months later, in 2002.
The next decade or so were pretty much spent trying to survive the days with our son. Some of it was normal stuff that everybody deals with in their 30's and early 40's, but most of it was extraordinarily stressful. Still, we did the best we could and often talked about how so much stress would have ended the average couple. We were proud of our marriage and thought it was strong. I believe he thought so, too. In fact, during those stressful years, I'm pretty sure he stayed true.
Fast forward to his brief affair five years ago. I knew nothing of it really. However, I knew our marriage wasn't quite as happy as I'd like. I attributed it all to me. After my mom's death, I began stress eating. Within a very short period of time, I put on a lot of weight. Sadly, the weight remained. I was the typical wife who let herself go.
Also, something about me. I have ADD myself. I am a tremendous slob - not with my appearance at all. But with the house. I never learned from my mom how to clean, and even if she'd tried to teach me, my ADD tendencies kept me from even wanting to try. I knew I was obsessive (would go from project to project and not buy just one book on it, but 25 books, etc.) but somehow I deluded myself into thinking that hey, I was quirky and lovably messy, but I had a great personality so it didn't matter all that much. WRONG. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
I am so, so, so regretful about this. I literally didn't understand how vitally important it was to someone like my H (who thrives on and requires a certain degree of order) to respect that and get my crap together. Please understand that I am absolutely NOT blaming myself for his affairs. However, I now completely understand the epic frustration he felt at never having a tidy house. I don't mean just a little messy or cluttered - I mean mounds and mounds of clutter, abandoned projects, books, everything. If people think that's not that big a deal, IT IS. I wish every day now that I could go back and have a do-over. I showed stunning lack of respect for him, for our family, and for myself.
The ADD tendencies carried over into spending money. I also believe that the more he pulled away - partly out of not really respecting me (because I didn't respect myself) and basically hating to come home to a house of chaos where he would have to then pitch in and do laundry, wash dishes, etc. because I'd lost myself in yet another project - so the more he pulled away, the more I soothed myself by spending money on new projects, always believing that I was doing it for our family (I'd want to learn to bake bread, I'd want to learn how to paint furniture, on and on)
So throughout our married life, unbeknownst to me, while I thought I was kind of eclectic and charming and a little disorganized in a cute way, to my H he found himself married to a lazy, unmotivated, rather selfish slob who didn't even do her own share of the housework (which should have been almost ALL my share). A timebomb was ticking and I was completely oblivious to it.
He had the affair 5 years ago and his therapist at the time (he is seeing her again now) was highly instrumental in helping him through it. He told me he'd always felt guilty about wanting me to be more organized and keep the house tidy, and the therapist helped him see that he should not feel guilty about it, that those were very serious problems and he was right to want them to be worked out. But she also helped him look at other people who he thought were more Type A than I am and think about whether he'd want to be married to someone like that instead. He said he had a total epiphany that he couldn't live without me, and he recommitted right then and there. If only I'd known then.
A few years later, I think we both began to have our own MLC. One of my kids wanted to join a gym. In order to be a good role model, I decided to go ahead and join the gym myself. Over time I began losing weight. It's the first time I'd ever stuck to something. H and I started really coming together, but somehow we also started taking a very bad detour. For whatever reason, we started drinking more together. That would get us hornier. And when he and I drink together and get like that, we started wanting to push the envelope a little more.
This part is where it gets sordid. Read no further if you feel you will be offended. I hesitate to talk about it, but I feel it's an important element to our situation. Somehow over the years, one of H's fantasies became seeing me have sex with other men. The very idea repulsed me, and I was beyond crushed that he would want to share me. It also didn't seem to fit with his ultra-jealous tendencies. Rather than do what I should have done if I still had any respect for myself, which is nipped that right in the bud by saying no way, don't mention it again, I would just try to change the subject. But over several years, it developed to the point where it started to feel like there was another man in our bed.
As we continued our downward spiral of drinking, over a period of several months we finally got to the point where we made it happen. The details aren't terribly important, except to say that our conversations about it tended to be incredibly circular. It turned out that neither of us ever REALLY wanted to do it - he was satisfied with it as purely a fantasy, and I didn't like it at all - but both of us were afraid of disappointing the other. We went for nearly two years - the first year we danced around it and joined a website for such things. The second year, one year ago, we actually indulged. The details are horrible, it was all horrible, and yet somehow we created circumstances where it happened a few times over the course of this past year, the last times this past summer. As it turns out, while he was also having the affair.
We both came out of that and cried and said we absolutely, positively never wanted to do that again. That was early August. I was ashamed and devastated, as was he. I thought that was the worst of our problems, and they were epic. I knew we had a lot to heal from.
Now, knowing all this, my feeling is that his affair with the OW represents an escape from everything that is bad in his real life here with me. And there is a lot of bad. Our son is still an issue. We are thoroughly messed up about our sordid, epic mistake. He has lost his job. I am a sad sack here all the time now, not knowing what to do. The house is still a mess, although I feel like I've had a natural dose of Adderall and suddenly I see the mess and hoarding for what it is. I've been purging and cleaning like there's no tomorrow - not for him, for me. I am so sad for what I've done to myself, to my family and to my marriage because of my lack of respect for myself.
And now, since last night, my H seems to have made a break. We both left to "run errands" separately. While I was out, he texted that he was driving into the city for some college football event. I don't even know what that means, a game or a fundraiser or what. Since he didn't say with whom, naturally he is with her. He is making no attempt to hide it, he doesn't care that my son keeps asking where he is, and he doesn't care what he's doing to me as I try to cope and cover for him. He just texted again and said he's still not sure when he'll be home, he guesses he won't be home for dinner, that he will text later.
I guess it's time for me to clear the guest bedroom. I'm both devastated and also wondering, as I type out what he's done over the years, why on earth I think I want to keep him around. I don't recognize this man at all. Not at all.
Lisa- I can't imagine how you must be feeling after typing all of that out.
All you should worry about is, as is written often around here, cleaning up your side of the street. You recognized a lot about yourself in the last few days, I'm sure. Now is the time to rebuild yourself and rise from the ashes like a phoenix. Not for him. But for you. To gain your self respect back. So you aren't riding this roller coaster. So you can feel good about yourself.
You can't do it all at once. So make a list. Set some goals for the rest of today. For tomorrow. For this week. They can be as easy seeming as "take a shower today". But I'm worried that you're going to get lost in an emotional ocean. So set up a few tent posts that you can work towards each day.
Try to stay organized so you don't flail around trying to do it all at once.
I am sure it was hard to share all of that information. It is important to remember that you are here because it took two you to get your M to this point. Yes, you are 100% responsible for half of your M issues, but you are not responsible for your H's As. He owns those on his own.
We all have our issues, but the past is the past and it is time to move forward. Now you have been given the gift of time to start working on turning Lisa 1.0 into Lisa 2.0.
How has the weekend been? Please give us an update on what is going on. Have you come up with few goals for the next week?
Sending positive thoughts your way!
Me: 42 H: 40 M: 12 H moved out - 8/2015 I filed - 8/2015
Brave, brave Lisa. I feel for you, really. I've finally had 2 days of blessed space and I'm starting to wake up a bit. Still crying, but it's slowing down. Full of remorse for my part in my marriage breakdown, but beginning to realize H literally threw me under the bus to make HIS actions make sense to him. My spine straightened a bit today. :-)
I know how you feel. I keep fantasizing that in a couple of weeks I will be able to come back and post a Hollywood ending. My DB coach tells me maintain faith and hope, but in reality I am very fearful that I am clinging to a hope that will financially be exploited by my WAH.
What's especially sad is when you read old posts describing amicable interactions between LBS and WAS and the focus on baby steps and hope and then when you catch up and read the current posts they describe some pretty volatile twists.
The best advise on the whole DBing theory really is to maintain dignity and stay away from the relationship talk and pursuing behaviors. I have also found it helpful to understand the psychology behind the WAS. There is a lot of very deep insight from many of the posters herethat you will not get from friends and family and possibly not even from marital counselors.
Me: 42 H: 43 Twins age 5 Physically Separated 7/2015
Lisa, find and read Ahoy's last post. She didn't save her M, but she came out a stronger, happier woman and is entering her next relationship with her eyes wide open. If that's not a success, I don't know what is.
It is a very discouraging process and we're here with you on that one. We all have those down days. It CAN work, and has in several cases, but remember that at the heart of DB, it is about changing you, not changing someone else. Actions always speak louder than words. Stay strong Lisa.
Me:29 W:27 M: 4 years T: 5 years No children S: 7/7/15 EA: 7/7/15 BD/"I'm done": 7/15/15 MC: 7/7/15-8/21/15 (failed) PA: 8/29/15 W Files for D: 9/9/15 D will finalize in 60 days
