A Confession

[iamlost]

As many of you can relate to, the last 6 months have literally been the hardest of my life, starting with my husband coming home from work one day and announcing he was leaving and transforming into a person who I can't recognize or understand, a person who has brought me more pain than I can, apparently, handle. The last 3 weeks have actually been some of the worst of that time. I've been in a MASSIVE tailspin of just out and out suffering.

I admitted that three weeks ago I kissed a close male friend while extremely drunk. What I didn't admit is that incident touched off another incident that was even worse. This may sound like a soap opera, which is sad, but it's the truth.

I felt like I had betrayed my husband with that incident, but I didn't admit that I also felt like I had betrayed another male friend who I had rekindled a close relationship with over the last 6 months. OM #1 and OM #2 are good friends with me and each other, and both have been attracted to me for as long as I've known them. In a massive lapse in judgment while feeling extreme vulnerability and guilt, I told OM #2 after I kissed OM #1 that I wished that it had been him that I had kissed instead, and that I knew how wrong and stupid it was because, yes...he has a wife and child. I realize what that makes me.

He then revealed to me that he is still in love with me, and doesn't love his wife. Things spun quickly out of control, as I became his confidante about his feelings for me and his unhappiness in his marriage, despite the fact that he loves his son very much.

I wanted to express love to someone, and I do love him. We have a strange relationship, in which it would always have been too costly for us to try our hand at dating (he's also close friends with my ex-boyfriend), so we always wondered, what if? For him, that what if became sort of obsessional, where he can't make a distinction now between love for me and his own dissatisfaction with his life, which he readily acknowledges. He's told me that he loved me twice before (before he was married, but was dating his wife), and both times I demurred because I was with my husband. I became the girl he could never have, which was intoxicating for us both since he is a talented musician and has written several incredible albums with songs about me.

Because of this indirect communication, I think I gravitated towards him because in some way, I trusted that this man loved me, albeit in some f-ed up way, that he wouldn't hurt me/reject me like my husband had so extremely and painfully.

Despite all that, he and I both said that we really couldn't be together now because he has a family. We counseled each other honestly and without as much selfishness as we could--I told him that I thought he could be happy with his wife if he decided to be and worked at it, told him happiness was personal and love was a choice, and he told me that I could be happier with someone else free of all this baggage, or maybe I could still work it out with H, and that's what he wanted for me.

However, we made the mistake of hanging out two weeks ago in person because he really wanted to see me, and he literally grabbed me & kissed me. It was as incredibly erotic as I suppose all affairs are. I stopped us short of sleeping together and we decided that it couldn't go any further. I told him that even if he decides to end it with his wife for his own reasons, it can't be about me and he can't leave his marriage and come to me, cause I wouldn't be there.

Afterwards, he spent a conflicted weekend trying to figure out what to do, consulted his parents about it, and then he then told his wife that he had kissed me and that he's had feelings for me since before they were married. True to the man that he is, he is trying to work it out with his wife for his son's sake and he has stopped communication with me. I haven't communicated with him, either. His wife has called me twice from his phone to try to trick me into calling back, and I didn't. (He sent a simple text letting me know that it was her and thanking me for not calling back, to which I didn't respond.) She also sent me an understandably scathing e-mail, to which I responded with a heartfelt apology e-mail. She thanked me and told me that she forgives me, but I haven't forgiven myself.

Immediately after he told his wife, the reality of what I had done hit home hard. I realized how messed up I was to have acted in a way so far out of my character. I had basically taken the same pain that my husband put on me, and put it on another person, despite the fact that I knew firsthand what the pain was like and wouldn't wish it on anyone. I had become the OW, even worse to a man who had a child, after I had witnessed the pain it had caused children on this site. I confided in my brothers and husband, and a couple girlfriends, but haven't been able to bring myself to tell anyone else, yet, until now.

This spun me into a massive tailspin--a black hole of pain & self-hatred, deep depression, crying, isolating myself from friends and from this board, considering checking myself into the hospital, or dropping out of my life entirely and moving back in with my parents. It took everything I had to go to work or talk to friends and pretend like everything was normal.

My birthday passed during all of this, too. I consider birthdays major milestones, so it's effect on the situation wasn't minor.

My husband completely ignored my birthday (just another painful thing to add to the pile), and as I said in the last thread, we started the divorce process a week ago.

We've had several long, painful conversations in the past week about all this stuff. He knows everything, and he "cares", but he's so enmeshed in his own pain and guilt that we are like the blind leading the blind. I've been suffering so much that I haven't even tried to DB or even put a filter on my thoughts--I've just been angry & hurt by turns with him. Yet he is still the one person I can confide my most painful secrets to, and I am the same person to him.

Basically, it's a complete trainwreck.

I don't expect sympathy or anything. What I did was wrong, and I know it. I hadn't realized how messed up I was until that happened, and now I know for sure that I need help out of this situation. I'm going to look into individual or group counseling. I'm going to stay away from male friends for a little while, lest I end up making out with all of them by turns. Good lord.

I feel a sense of calmness right now. I'm down in my black hole still, but I've stopped panicking and now I'm looking around for ways to crawl out of it again.