Hello, everyone. I’ve been sitting on the fence for a while now, reading other people’s stories and hoping to find advice that I could use as well. I finally decided to jump in and share my story too, maybe someone will have advice for me.
I’m sorry this is such a long post – it’s a long story, and even summarizing it “briefly” comes out several pages long. Anyway I assume that my future posts would be shorter, but this time I have the whole long story to explain.
And so - H and I have been together for 40 years, married for 38. We have 3 grown kids.
About 30 years ago, H’s work started to involve a lot of travelling. It’s not just a job for him; the work involves training and mentoring of others in his profession, and he is considered a “big expert” in his field – very flattering for him. Due to the mentoring part, and due to the teaching of various communications skills that are part of the training he provides, some of the clients (especially the female ones) will sometimes ask him for advice on their personal problems. In most cases he helps them without getting personally involved, and has helped quite a few people in this way to solve personal problems or to get along better with their families or significant other.
But in some of the cases, he does get personally involved. It took me a long time to find this out, because over the years when I would see something that looked suspicious, he would always wave it away with a lame excuse, and of course I would feel like some kind of paranoid for suspecting an “innocent” H. Then, in May 2005, I got a call from the husband of one of our business associates, who had found email correspondence between my H and his W. My H and this guy’s wife had been having a PA for at least 6 months. I confronted my H, and I finally managed to get out of him an admission (on condition that I would not reveal this to OW’s H) that it had actually been going on for 5 years – i.e. practically the whole time that we had known OW. H claimed that this was the one and only time he had ever done anything like that, and I forgave him on condition that he wouldn’t do it again.
From time to time after that, I would sometimes encounter suspicious things, and H would again just wave it away with his lame excuses and make me feel paranoid. For example, in the spring of 2006 I discovered some personal emails between him and some of our female clients; he got angry that I was “snooping” (actually I had been doing some administrative tasks in our business email account and found these accidentally) and he claimed that there was nothing going on, he was just “talking to them in a friendly way”. The emails didn’t have anything explicit, but they did seem like they were on the way towards a developing EA. Or, one time I noticed a folder (locked with a password) on one of his USB flash drives. The folder was named after one of our past clients, with whom we still have occasional contact. I asked him, “why is there a folder here named after so-and-so?” and he didn’t reply, but just asked me very angrily, twice, if I had opened it. (Of course I hadn’t – it was locked!)
During this time (from 2005 to the present) I told H from time to time that I need him to be more open with me if he wants me to be able to trust him. He didn’t seem to care about me not trusting him – I suffered tremendously from the feeling of not being able to trust him - feeling stupid for not knowing about the 5-year PA (because if OW’s H hadn’t called me I would never have found out), and feeling both stupid for continuing to believe H, but paranoid for suspecting him – if you know what I mean. I’m sure that this feeling is well-known to many on this forum. From time to time I would try to talk to H about it, but he would deny everything and get angry at me for suspecting him. I told him that I felt like a ship drifting in a sea full of icebergs, never knowing when the next one would hit; but he didn’t care.
During the past few years, H started to have problems with impotency; and gradually this led to a SSM. He would come home from a business trip, and although we would spend time together in general, weeks could go by without him touching me in any way. If he did occasionally initiate sex, he didn’t always succeed. I did everything I could to be patient and encouraging, telling him that I realized that he comes home tired from all the travelling, and he shouldn’t be embarrassed if it doesn’t always succeed. I even told him that I wasn’t even asking him to “perform”, that even cuddling together was fine with me. But most of the time he didn’t even do that, and I just felt so rejected by him not even approaching me. (And in the meantime, I wondered – is he ignoring me because he is getting it elsewhere?) Eventually, I got him to ask our family dr for a prescription, and that has helped, although I still get the feeling that he thinks he is “doing me a favor” to have sex with me. e.g. when he initiates it, he doesn’t begin by approaching me or anything, he asks me (usually on a Saturday morning) whether he should take one of the pills. I understand that he wants to be sure I am “available” before he does it, because each pill is like $20 and we don’t want to waste them, but the way he asks makes it sound like he is only doing it as a favor to me. He says that of course he wants it too, but he is so “polite” about it – not insistent, like he used to be when we were first married.
Anyway - last summer, when doing some housecleaning, I found some letters that H had received from some female clients in the 1990’s. One of them (the one whose name was on the locked file on the flash drive – I’ll call her OW2) had sent several love letters and a very explicit Valentine’s Day card, another one (OW3) sent suggestive pictures of herself, and another one just wrote about her problems with her elderly mother and her siblings. (I’m not sure whether the 3rd one was involved in an affair with him or was just one of those who occasionally asked his advice about personal problems.) After this I again confronted H, and he claimed that this was all ancient history and there is nothing going on between him and these women for at least 10 years. I pointed out that we are still in occasional contact with OW2, but he said that the PA between them was over a long time ago and the only contact between them now is for business reasons.
Of course, all this time H was very secretive about his email, never allowing me to look at it. (After I found the emails in 2006, he changed his password.) From time to time I would try to talk to him about this, and he would claim that it is just that his privacy is very important to him, because when he was a teenager his mother would pry into his personal affairs and tell all her sisters about it. (Another lame excuse.) And that there is nothing going on (of course) and I would need to take his word for it. In the meantime, I read a few self-help books. One of them was “Not Just Friends”, which had so many parts that I identified with. I tried to get him to read it too; after a lot of begging and pleading he agreed (unwillingly) to read a few small parts of it, but I could see that he wasn’t really taking it to heart, it was more like “ok, I read those pages (without paying any attention to them), will you stop nagging me now?”. I read DR about a year ago (I didn’t share that one with him though). Also I found some good articles online by Peggy Vaughan, about what needs to be done to restore trust after infidelity, and (again after a lot of begging and pleading) got him to read some of the main articles. But even after he read the articles, he didn’t change anything. Whenever I would try to talk to him about what he needs to do to enable me to trust him again, he would just listen without responding (like someone waiting for a thunderstorm to pass, so they can go back to what they were doing before) or he would claim that nothing is going on and he “doesn’t know what I want from him”. I told him many times, that a person who has nothing to hide, doesn’t need to hide it. But it didn’t faze him.
Then, this past Feb (after repeated discussions and begging and pleading), I finally got him to agree to show me his email. He gave me the password and I spent a whole night (after he was asleep) going through them. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack, but I’m good at research, and let’s say I found a whole pincushion. And it turns out that I was not paranoid. There were emails there from 2008 to the present, and even though a lot of messages had obviously been deleted, there was still plenty there. Including, at the end, a message to OW2, OW3, and a few others that “from now on please write only to xyz (a new email address) because I am about to allow my wife full access to this address.” (I think those might have been in the “deleted” folder.) Also there was a message to one of the women (I’ll call her OW4) arranging to meet the following week “at the same place we met last time” while he is on his way to his next business trip. (Just a note, when I had asked him regarding the 5-year affair that I knew about, why he had been unfaithful – he said it was because it was “so lonely on the road”. But in this case, he had been home most of the time for 2 months straight, first due to the holiday season, and then local business in January that didn’t require travelling. So this was going to be his first weekend away after we had been together for 2 months and he was already arranging someone else to spend it with.)
Until that time, I had assumed that he was just pursued by admiring female clients who idolized him as being “the big expert” and “the great mentor”, and that it was difficult for him to resist the temptation and flattery. But after reading the emails, I realized that in many cases he was the initiator – i.e. that he would start out by advising them on their personal problems, and gradually develop a personal and then physical relationship with some of them. Obviously not with all of them – most of our past clients didn’t ask him for personal advice at all, and some only asked for brief one-time advice; but this modus operandi of hitting on our clients happened with enough of them to have several PA’s going at any given time.
I was both crushed and furious, and I confronted H the next day, and told him that I was not willing to continue like this; my anger finally shook him up and he said he would stop “cold turkey”. He wrote an email to each of the current OW’s (those to whom he had written the previous day regarding the new email address – there were 6 of them) that the infidelity was causing an internal conflict for him, and he is breaking it off and returning to his wife. There was also another recent client with whom he had started to correspond in a sort of personal way, and he wrote to her saying that from here on they should correspond only about business (if at all, and as needed) but not about personal matters.
I checked his email for a few days after that (both the old one and new one – I insisted on getting the password to that too) and most of the women didn’t reply. But OW3 wrote a long email saying “I am shocked and confused. We no longer have a sexual relationship. What do you see as wrong about us? What has happened to make you say this after all these years?” and then she went on to bash me with accusations that are completely opposite to reality: “You were put into a very unfair situation in your marriage and you did the best you could to be responsible to your family and also remain sane. Your wife has never been fair to you and you shouldn't feel any guilt. From the beginning she picked through the marriage taking what she wanted and leaving you cheated and unfulfilled. A man can only be expected to endure so much. Most men would have divorced her but you stuck it out. Please talk to me. I care so much about your happiness and I am coming to you as your loving friend, since the sexual part of our relationship that you are feeling guilty about no longer exists.”
I was really crushed by this, because it is the complete opposite of the truth. For the past 38 years I have been a loving, devoted and faithful wife, but H did not always reciprocate. And for the past 30 years, my “career” has been, to promote H’s career; to raise our children and take care of our home and family when H was on the road most of the time; to manage our office and also to be available 24/7 for anything H needed (such as – “my car is making a funny noise, can you find a dealer in the next town on my route, who can fix it right away?”) Not to mention emotional needs, if he was feeling down or discouraged or upset about anything, I was always there to encourage him and cheer him up. I was always everyone else’s “cheerleader”. But nobody was ever there for me. If I needed encouragement or cheering up, most of the time he would criticize me for “always getting depressed”. (Ok, sometimes he would say things to cheer me up, but I couldn’t depend on it like he could depend on me to do it for him.) So everything she was saying there was the exact opposite of the truth – I had always been there for H, he had not been there for me. If anything, I am the one who was “put into an unfair situation” and who was left “cheated and unfulfilled”. I had given everything for him – all my time and energy, while he wasn’t there for me physically or emotionally, often criticizing me and making me feel worse when I needed encouragement. And the way she patted herself on the back for being a “loving friend” – what had she done for him at all? As if her giving him occasional free sex was such a big contribution, compared to my 24/7 loving and constant attention to all of his needs. I confronted H about this, and he said that he had never told her anything about me that would make her think these things (yeah right!) and it was all her imagination.
Anyway I insisted that he not leave this hanging, but would write to her saying it wasn’t true, and he did – he wrote: “My decision is not because of you. I got up this morning and I saw the light, and I decided to make my life a lot saner and complete. My wife has been a very good wife, partner, and friend to me and I am very sorry I didn't act accordingly. I plan on doing my best to save my marriage... I love my wife and I care for her and I am terribly sorry for the way I acted. I wish she will forgive me. I wish you the best, just that I cannot be for anyone other than my wife. Please accept my decision and forgive me as well. Also, please consider this email as the last one from me, as I cannot go back to the way I acted."
After this she wrote again, but we agreed that he would not reply to her anymore.
In the meantime, OW2 also wrote, saying "I am sorry for the problems that I know you must be going through right now. It must be really bad. Take some deep breaths. You will get through this. You will come out on the other side stronger and better and wiser. I care about you and want you to be better." (Actually a letter like this could be taken either way – e.g. a friend could write these same words to encourage H to rebuild our marriage. But I think that OW2 is saying the exact opposite, i.e. she means that I am “the problems he is going through” and she is the solution. Even though I have met her and spoken with her as a friend, before I saw the letters she sent H in the 90’s.)
Since that time (in Feb when I went though his emails and we had the confrontation), H has agreed to talk to me a few times about the past, and answer some of my questions. But on the other hand, these conversations are few and far between, and nowhere near the amount that I need. When he is travelling and working, he puts in long days and is really exhausted in the evening, and I know I can’t impose on him then, even for important business questions. And if he comes home for a week or a weekend, he doesn’t really want to talk about it, and how can I jump on him with these discussions and “ruin the good feeling of being together”? Sometimes, if I even ask to have another discussion on the topic, he gets angry, claiming that I am “just trying to make him feel guilty”. Even though I have explained to him repeatedly that this is not the case, I am not “trying to make him feel guilty” but just trying to make sense of what happened, and to undo decades of deception by learning the truth. Or, he asks “why are you always rehashing this?” As if the few discussions so far could possibly be sufficient to undo years of damage, and why can’t I just let him sweep all the rest under the rug? And even if he finally agrees to talk about it, he “stonewalls”. He claims that he “doesn’t remember” or he answers in really general terms that don’t really answer the question I asked.
Also, even though he let me see those past emails, how do I know that I can trust him now? For all I know, he might have opened another new email account and still be corresponding with these women, or others.
I don’t want to throw away a 40-year marriage. If not for the multiple A’s, I would want to stay with H because I do love him and he has a lot of good qualities. I want to save my marriage and I want him to be faithful and to reciprocate what I have given him. I want him to be supportive and encouraging towards me, as I have always been for him.
But I just feel so discouraged. While he has his admirers and fans (all of those adoring clients, both those with whom he had affairs, and those who just admire and flatter him), I don’t have anything like that – all I have is him, and sometimes I just feel so discouraged and worthless. Even though I know, logically, that it isn’t so – I know that I have done a lot of amazing things in my life, both for our immediate and extended family, and for our business, and for other people in our community. In recent years I have also been doing tutoring, helping school kids with their math and science homework, and I know I have done a lot of good in helping the kids feel better about their abilities. So I know, logically, that I am not “worthless”, but I just feel that way when I think about how for all these years, my own husband was so nice to all those other women, and often not-nice to me. He doesn’t hesitate to yell at me if he’s not satisfied with something, but I’m sure he never yelled at them. And in the emails, he wrote a lot of romantic things to them, that he never said to me. (He claims that he “didn’t mean it and just said what they wanted to hear”, which I don’t believe, but even if that were true, why didn’t he do the same for me?)
There is nobody among my friends or family with whom I could share these feelings, because I can’t tell them the real reason I am feeling down and upset. Not just because it would shame him in our family and community, but also because most people, like my friends and family, who have not experienced infidelity, assume that infidelity equals divorce, and they would not be able to understand why I am not abandoning the marriage immediately.
So I really have nobody to talk to about this, and nobody to encourage me, unless H is in a good mood and “kindly” says some nice things. And even when he does, he says it in such general terms, that I get the feeling he is just saying it to pacify me, not because he cares. Then there are the other times when he is not in a good mood, and he gets angry at me for “rehashing the past” and I just feel so attacked. I have spoken to a DB counsellor a few times, and she has really helped, but I can’t afford to have conversations with her as frequently as I would like.
So I finally sat down and wrote out my story, and maybe someone here will have a good word for me, to help me get out of this bottomless pit. (And no, I don’t want to take medication, as a matter of principle I want to use my mind to feel better, I don’t want to be drugged into feeling that way.)
Yes, I know the usual things, such as GAL, and I am doing that, and it helps somewhat. But it’s not enough to help me quickly enough, and I’m just feeling down and discouraged in general. I don’t feel depressed all the time, it comes and goes, but when I do start to feel down, I just feel so unwanted and undesired and worthless.
