Still here. Still not detached... (Part 4)

[Chris73]

(This is a day late, but I was too busy having fun with my kids yesterday to write this… a good sign I think!)

I’m posting this in the Newcomers section in hopes that the folks who read it will find something useful to apply to their own circumstances.

Friday, May 27th, 2016.

I boarded the train at 7:29 for my hour-long ride to Philadelphia. I was in a very good mood. It was the Friday before memorial day. I was looking forward to spending the long weekend with my family and some friends. But more importantly, I was feeling optimistic about my marriage. My wife and I had spent the last couple nights discussing our relationship. She had been very open with me about the fact that she wasn’t happy, and we decided together that there were changes both of us could make to improve things.

I’ve always been a trusting person especially with the important people in my life. So when our cell phone bill went up because of my wife’s talk time overages, I just assumed that she was spending a lot of time on the phone with one of her girlfriends. I updated our plan to include unlimited talk time for her phone and forgot about it for a couple months.

Once I arrived at the office that day I spent a few minutes going over the bills and decided to check the phone records to see if her trend of extended talk time had diminished at all. But something made me look further at the details. The extra talk time on my wife’s phone was associated with one specific number. The extended calls, sometimes an hour or more, dated all the way back to January. I cross referenced the number with the numbers of our mutual friends and some of her girlfriends but found no match.

...It’s at this point in the story that I reflect on what I did next. The decision to keep researching the phone number was my first step down a rabbit hole of mistrust and insecurity that would plague me for the next 18th months. Maybe I should have stopped there. Maybe my life would be different today. Maybe my marriage could have been salvaged…

Deciding to dig a little deeper I purchased a one-time cell phone number lookup on the internet. At this point my heart rate was starting to increase. I submitted the number and it came back with the last name of my wife’s old boyfriend.

My entire body was immediately flushed with adrenaline and rage. I jumped up from my desk, ran down the back stairs of my building, outside to the parking lot, and called my wife. When she answered I confronted her immediately with the information and she confessed that yes, she had been talking to this person for most of the year. After some additional prodding, she admitted that they had spent time together in person and that there was some physical contact.

I hung up the phone and did not speak to her again for the rest of the workday.

...Sometimes it seems odd to regard this event as traumatic when compared to people who have suffered intense physical abuse or survived military battles. But I honestly don’t remember what I did for the rest of that workday and I attribute that to post-traumatic stress. We were permitted to leave work 2 hours early that day, in preparation for the holiday weekend, and my next memory is stopping at the bar before getting on the train to try to calm down a bit…

When I arrived home, the environment was total chaos. While I tried to make sense of what was happening and confront my wife in person, my kids (ages 4 and 7 at the time) had friends over and were running in and out of the house at random. Despite this, I was able to get her to admit to multiple sexual exchanges with this person since they reconnected. She was not smug or happy about the predicament that she was in. She was visibly upset and insisted that the relationship with him was over. She told me that she had made plans to start seeing a therapist because she wanted to fix her emotional problems. She insisted that she didn’t want to get a divorce.

I left the house and went for a walk. I thought of getting in my car and driving away, but I didn’t feel like I was in control. The walk didn’t last long. Honestly I’m not sure what I was trying to accomplish. Eventually I went back to my house and tried to act as normal as possible. The kids were still playing in the backyard and a pizza delivery was on its way to my house.

What happened over the next 48 hours is still a blur, but I will forever question if my response to the situation made things worse. Before I even understood what was really happening to my marriage, and before I had the insight from the Divorce Busting resources (including this board), I did the only thing that came naturally to me… I tried to work out the problem through talking. I tried to be empathetic to my wife’s emotions and insisted that we could get past this by working together. I immediately decided to forgo any anger I might have and work on a resolution. I blamed myself for pushing her away and driving her into the arms of another man.

4 years later, I now realize that I reacted this way out of fear… the fear of losing her forever, the fear of my family breaking up and the potential loss of my time with my children, the fear of ending up as a lonely old man who contributes the majority of his income to his ex-wife.

Had I understood that these fears were dictating my behavior, I would have acted differently. I might have decided to ask my wife to leave or move out. Or perhaps less dramatically, I might have stopped speaking to her for a period of time. At that moment it was important for me to stand up for myself so that she understood that her behavior was not acceptable.

But I didn’t do any of those things. And as a result my wife not only got a pass from me, but I’m certain that any respect she had left for me was totally wiped out.

Things got a little better, and then they got a lot worse. Most of what happened after this day is documented here in my posts. My wife moved out 18 months later and has since bought a new house and started a new relationship. He moved in (with his teenage daughter) at the beginning of this month.

The good news, as I reflect on this 4 years later, is that I’m pretty happy with my life right now.
I haven’t started a new romantic relationship and I’m content without one. I’d prefer for my kids to be part of an intact family, with one place to live and 2 full time parents. But I’m doing my best with what I have control over. I kept the family house and made it my own. There is very little evidence that my ex ever lived here.

I still reflect on the things I did that contributed to the downfall of my marriage both before and after this day. Some days I’m filled with regret, doubt, and guilt. But those days happen less and less frequently. It’s a worn out cliche that “time heals all wounds” but it really is true.

Anyway, I guess the purpose of this post (besides being a catharsis for me) is to provide the left-behind spouse (LBS) with some long term context. I think most LBS’s react the same way I did to a bomb-drop situation. So before it’s too late, stand up for yourself (respectfully of course) and don’t provide any additional reasons for your spouse to lose respect for you.