An ever-present shadow

[Lonely Room]

Thank you very much for your replies.

The "official" reason why we separated in 2011 was because I was sad and depressed. Things weren't good between us, I was living abroad, having work problems and my mother was just diagnosed with a cancer.

I never felt I had the support I needed at home, the weight on my shoulders increased and eventually I got into the depression. Two weeks after my mother was diagnosed, I was kicked out of the house. Cold and simple. I found myself alone in a foreign country, having to support my mother remotely and travelling to visit her whenever I could.

I then found these books and the forums, started working on myself, things got better at work, I got better each day, and eventually, after almost 1 year of separation and many months of no contact, we got back together. She said I was again the same man she met years before, we got pregnant and here I am.

But things aren't usually that simple. I suspected for a while that she was having some form of affair with the other man. After we got back together, I got the confirmation that it was a physical affair, at some point. I also know that they know each other since their youth. I confronted her and she said it was a "hiccup" and that she was over it, moved on. She wanted to be with me.

I think that affair, at least emotional, mined our relationship for a long time before we separated. In retrospective, it explains many things, the lack of support, the lack of sex, the sadness when she was next to me. That made me sad, and when the work and my mother's health problems came, I was already vulnerable and she used that as the catalyst for the separation. Is this the Truth? I don't know, it's my truth. I know that I'm not a bad person, so, it's highly unlikely that only I was to blame.