When the man you love, to whom you have devoted your life and for whom you've made countless sacrifices, lies to you and has sex with another behind your back, it is an incomparable anguish.

This is only compounded if you had a good relationship, in which you sought to meet his emotional and physical/sexual needs and make him feel valued and needed.

The only thing to which the anguish comes close is the death of someone you love.

I remember mourning the death of my father when I was fifteen. This feels so very similar to that, yet more painful and complicated.

1. You realize that the person you loved truly is dead to you. What do I mean by this? Well, in my case, the person I thought I married was truly incapable of doing what my husband did. Perhaps the statement's wording would be better put that the person you thought you loved never really existed, or changed in such a fundamental way that he's no longer the same person. I'm no silly girl who doesn't realize how affairs occur and what often triggers them. This is a second marriage for me. I know I did everything right that I could possibly do, and even he admits we have a great relationship and that he wasn't unsatisfied with us. I now realize that I'm married to someone who is not who I thought he was. This doesn't (in and of itself) mean the person to whom I'm married is better or worse than the one I thought I married, just fundamentally different. The person I thought I loved, cherished, and devoted my entire life and soul to either never existed or died out. This pain, well, it is like the shock of death. After someone close to you dies, you go through periods where you almost forget they are gone, and then suddenly it hits you that you'll never, ever see them again. It is this insane-feeling, solid, immutable force that you seem to blindly smack into time and time again as your psyche can't seem to fully accept it. Only time brings this acceptance. The agony, the rage; they are all futile against it.

2. You realize that the person who KILLED the one to whom you thought you were married IS the one to whom you are married. Ouch. This is the hard part. No wonder so many women are so overwhelmed with rage. It isn't so much that the man at whom I'm now looking betrayed me; as it is that he killed the man I loved, killed what I thought we had together, destroyed the "us" that existed, and for such a frivilous reason as shallow self-gratification. I also know he can never fully comprehend what he's done, because he hasn't felt it. Even if there were a "revenge" adultery, which would be stupid, he still wouldn't "get it," because he would feel that he triggered it. He could never comprehend the nature of someone lying to him, deceiving him, gas-lighting him, and sleeping around on him, for no good reason whatsoever if that person was supposed to love him so deeply. He can never comprehend the pain. It is beyond him.

3. The person you're mourning from #1 and the person you're despising from #2 are all wrapped up into one person. Every time I see him, I remember and mourn the man I thought he was. Now I have to learn to love this new, weird person, and I have to alter and reshape how I fundamentally exist within this new relationship. It is either this, or leave.

Right now, leaving isn't an option I am willing to accept. Of course, this means I must prepare myself for what the most likely outcome of staying will be, and I must know how to react when the unfortunately distinct possibility of his unfaithfulness repeating itself becomes real.

In a less poetic fashion, this all sucks, and I am once again in the "club that nobody wants to be in."

~Waving my fragile petals in the dim, grey realm in which the joy of life is always just beyond your reach.~

...from 4/20/06

 

“Don't sacrifice yourself, your spouse has already shown a ruthless ability to do this for you.”

 

I will not sacrifice myself.  You have already shown a ruthless ability to do this for me.

...from 4/20/06

These are things that I will need to see occur for me to feel like this marriage has hope for a healthy future in which we are both secure and fulfilled.

 

1.                  Marriage counseling is not an option.  We must go.

 

2.                  Your attitude toward marriage counseling must change.  You must go toward it with hope and happiness, glad that you are able to offer something you know is important to me.  You must go toward it with an open mind that you might just not have all the answers and that something real and useful might be accomplished there that you didn’t even imagine existed or was possible.

 

3.                  You need to at least look with an open mind at the possibility that there might be some issues that you haven’t fully addressed and that you may not be fully aware of.  Please at least consider with an open mind that there may be some things you should look at more closely to realize why you have chosen a pattern of infidelity and what you can learn from that to break that pattern.

 

I think right now these three things are the most important and most essential to occur. 

...from 5/9/06.....much of the text borrowed from a "sample letter" shared on an infidelity forum, only slightly altered.

My husband,

I know you have felt the pain of guilt and confusion. I understand that you wish all this never happened and that you wish it would just go away. I can even believe that you truly love me and that your indiscretion hurts you emotionally much the same way it hurts me. I understand your apprehension to me discovering little by little, everything that led up to your indiscretion, everything that happened that day, and everything that happened afterwards. I understand. No one wants to have a mistake or misjudgment thrown in his or repeatedly. No one wants to be forced to "look" at the thing that caused all their pain over and over again. I can actually see, that through your eyes, you are viewing this whole thing as something that just needs to go away, something that is over, that she doesn't mean anything to you, so why is it such a big issue? I can understand you wondering why I torture myself with this continuously, and thinking, doesn't she know by now that I love her? I can see how you can feel this way and how frustrating it must be. But for the remainder of this letter I'm going to ask you to view my reality through my eyes.

You were there. There is no detail left out from your point of view. Like a puzzle, you have all the pieces and you are able to reconstruct them and be able to understand the whole picture, the whole message, or the whole meaning. You know exactly what that picture is and what it means to you and if it can effect your life and whether or not it continues to stir your feelings. You have the pieces, the tools, and the knowledge. You can move through your life with 100% of the picture you compiled. If you have any doubts, then at least you're carrying all the information in your mind and you can use it to derive conclusions or answers to your doubts or question. You carry all the "STUFF" to figure out OUR reality. There isn't really any information, or pieces to the puzzle that you don't have.

Now let's enter my reality. Let's both agree that this affects our lives equally. The outcome no matter what it is well affect us both. Our future and our present circumstances are every bit as important to me as it is to you. So, why then is it okay for me to be left in the dark? Do I not deserve to know as much about that path, those thoughts, that pattern, that process that nearly destroyed our relationship as you do? Just like you, I am also able to discern the meaning of certain particulars and innuendoes surrounding these situations and just like you, I deserve to be given the opportunity to understand what nearly brought our relationship down. To assume that I can move forward and accept everything at face value is unrealistic and unless we stop thinking unrealistically I doubt our lives well ever "feel" complete. You have given me a puzzle. It is a 1000 piece puzzle and 400 random pieces are missing. You expect me to assemble the puzzle without the benefit of looking at the picture on the box. You expect me to be able to discern what I am looking at and to appreciate it in the same context as you. You want me to be as comfortable with what I see in the picture as you are. You say that I ask for too many details all the time when you relate conversations and situations.  Metaphorically, when I ask if there was a tree in such and such area of the picture you tell me don't worry about it, it's not important. When I ask whether there were any animals in my puzzle you say don't worry about it, it's not important. When I ask if there was a lake in that big empty spot in my puzzle you say, what's the difference, it's not important. Or, one day it is a tree, the next day it is a house, and the next day it is a mountain.  Then later when I'm expected to "understand" the picture in my puzzle you fail to understand my disorientation and confusion. You expect me to feel the same way about the picture as you do but deny me the same view as you. When I express this problem you feel compelled to admonish me for not understanding it, for not seeing it the way you see it. You wonder why I can't just accept whatever you chose to describe to me about the picture and then be able to feel the same way you feel about it.

So, you want me to be okay with everything. You think you deserve to know and I deserve to wonder. You may honestly feel that the whole picture, everything that happened is insignificant because in your heart you know it was a mistake and wish it never happened. But how can I know that? Faith? Because you told me so? Would you have faith if the tables were turned, twice? Don't you understand that I want to believe you completely? But how can I? I can never know what is truly in your mind and heart. I can only observe you actions, and what information I have acquired and slowly, over time rebuild my faith in your feelings. I truly wish it were easier.

So, there it is, as best as I can put it. That is why I ask questions. That is where my need to know is derived from. And that is why it is unfair for you to think that we can effectively move forward and unfair for you to accuse me of dwelling on the past. My need to know stems from my desire to hold our world together. It doesn't come from jealousy, it doesn't come from spitefulness, and it doesn't come from a desire to make you suffer. It comes from the fact that I love you. Why else would I put myself through this? Wouldn't it be easier for me to walk away? Wouldn't it be easier to consider our relationship a bad mistake in my life and to move on to better horizons? Of course it would, but I can't and the reason I can't is because I love you and that reason in itself makes all the difference in the world.

 

... from 4/18/06

I hate…

 

I hate how you defended her.  I hate how, when she contacted you in her “forwarded joke,” you subscribed only innocent intents to her actions, yet you chose to subscribe harmful intent to my reaction of contacting Terry.  You believed she had only positive reasons for her actions, all while believing my reasons were retaliatory.  You believed reasonings for her actions that she didn’t even provide, because you provided them for her in your own mind, all while refusing to believe mine, even though I told them to you.  I truly hate you for doing that to me.

 

I hate how you claim to be so dense.  I hate how you seem incapable of comprehending basic requests I make that are extraordinarily important to me.  I hate that I can’t even trust you enough to believe that you are as dense as you claim.  I hate that I can’t trust that even this isn’t an excuse to ignore my wants and do your own thing.  I hate that you put her ahead of me, even that Monday, by talking to her.  I hate how a request that I made under such pain and repeated four times didn’t even place enough importance in your mind to remember it.

 

I HATE how you compared your “forgetting” not to talk to the woman you had an affair with and lied to me about as being the same or even LESS important than me forgetting to drag you to the bedroom and have sex with you as soon as you came home during one of your cycles.  I HATE what the fact that you can even make this correlation says about your sense of ethics, right/wrong, and selfishness. 

 

I hate that you told me that one of the reasons you got involved in the bdsm sharing/grouping/swinging was because I wasn’t giving you enough sex.  I hate that you lied to me about your reasons for ever wanting to be involved in the first place.

 

I hate that you pushed me to allow threesomes in the first place, when you knew I was dragging my feet, and that you used my slavery as a means to control me so that you could have what you want.  I hate not that you forced me in slavery to trust you, but that you betrayed that trust, especially knowing my past.  I hate that I feel you have been like a child who wanted a puppy but wasn’t responsible enough to take care of it when it lost its initial excitement and became a chore.

 

I hate that you gaslighted me…that you made me feel guilty, crazy, and unbalanced for thinking what I thought when I suspected you (both with The 2nd other woman and Your x-wife), all while knowing you held all the cards and all the knowledge, and not loving me enough to put my need to not be further harmed above your needs to hide your transgressions.

 

I HATE that all I have to do is look around, while trying to be happy, to have the memories of your shit thrown in my face.  I hate that I can’t even see you for lunch, and receive a hug and kiss and company from you, without the thought flying through my mind that “he did this less than fifteen minutes after his dick was inside her.”

 

I hate how embarrassed I feel.  I hate how something I once took so much pride in now feels filthy and I feel stupid and a fool.  I hate that you stole that from me, my one and only pride and joy out of the mess of a divorce, etc.

 

I hate how you dare to make me feel weak and say that your strength and willpower are stronger than mine, when all you’ve shown has been weakness.  I moved out, signed custody, got an apartment (2 apartments!) and lived alone, all without any tangible physical proof of your commitment, whereas you dragged your feet for six weeks, even when I had demonstrated my commitment by making all the sacrifices up front and showing I was “for real,” and that even when you moved in with me, you could not stay faithful for even a single month.  I got a divorce, sold my house, got it all over with.  You still don’t have a settlement agreement from your first wife, all while you spent a weekend just a few weeks ago contemplating a second divorce from your current wife, all because of your own LACK of self-discipline and commitment.  I hate that you’ve made me question and second-guess myself and that you’ve pushed me to rely on you mind, body, and soul, when you were not mature enough to deal with it. 

 

I hate that I have lost SO much respect for you, when I used to respect you more than anyone I knew. 

 

I hate that I wasted two years wallowing in my own guilt, feeling that it was all my fault that you cheated on me with Your x-wife, only to realize that my understanding of your psyche and basic sense of morality was flawed.  I hate that I have been the only one in this relationship who has demonstrated true, never-faltering commitment, while you have wallowed here and there and blamed ME for your transgressions and inability to commit and stay committed.

 

I hate that you could come home, having lost your title, car, and salary, and lie to me.

 

I hate that you could spend that time making me (again) feel stupid, foolish, unloyal, and undeserving, when it was only YOU who were those things.  I hate that you loved yourself more than me, even in those moments.  I hate that you weren’t MAN enough to own up to your own actions, and that instead you would chose to play mind-games with a woman who has loved and trusted you above all others.

 

I hate that I wonder if you are fundamentally flawed as a person, and unable to be honest and committed.  I hate that I wonder whether or not you are so in love with martyring yourself, and always feeling sorry for yourself, and always in love with your own melodrama, that you will always find a way to self-delude and rationalize in your mind anything you ever want to do.

 

I hate that it is impossible for me to believe that this won’t happen again, when it has already happened twice in less than 3 years.

 

I hate that you have made me weak, encouraged me to be weak and lean on you, especially knowing my past, only to turn on me.  I hate that I honestly don’t know if I can ever forgive you for that.

 

I hate the hatred I feel.

 

I hate that I don’t know if I can make this work, and that I am terrified to relive this all again in another year or two, only to find another year or two of my life wasted.

 

I hate that every time we have sex, I have to fantasize about a scenario that doesn’t involve you in order to be aroused, because when I think of you I feel nothing but pain, betrayal, and anger.

 

I hate that even now you can superciliously act as if I need counseling, but still can’t see how much is really WRONG with you. 

 

I hate that you had convinced many at work that I was SO special and that you left Your x-wife for me and that it wasn’t “just an affair” but something that was special/different, only to show that it really was just an affair and that I must not have been worth the sacrifice, since you had no problem tossing me aside so soon for another.  I hate that anyone at your work knows this.  I hate that I can’t stomach showing my face in front of them.

 

I hate that I’ve found myself feeling sorry for Your x-wife, and questioning everything you ever told me about your relationship with her.

 

I hate that I have to keep hearing “echoes” in my head of all the people who said you would do this to me, who I turned a deaf ear toward.

 

I HATE HATE HATE that this is all happening to me AGAIN.  That I AGAIN married someone who people said would not be who I thought he was, only to AGAIN learn I was WRONG WRONG WRONG and to AGAIN feel trapped with someone I love who has mislead and betrayed me and AGAIN feel that there are no happy answers. 

 

I HATE that I find myself driving in my car and thinking that if I was hit by a semi and killed instantly it would be a blessing.

 

I HATE that you did this all to me.

 

I HATE that I allowed you to do this all to me, but trusting you and opening myself to a level that I had learned the hard lessons my whole life not to do.

 

I HATE that I told you it was the last and only time I would try to trust anyone at that level, and that if I was burnt again I’d never try and open myself again, only to have you burn me.

 

I HATE that the door to my core is SHUT now.  You will never, ever, have that deep level of emotional union that could have been possible.  I will never trust you to that level again, unless it is after years and years of growing trust, and even then I can not promise it.

 

I hate and am disgusted by the things you had to say to her, how you discussed planning working late on projects so you could be together, how you were doing to ME exactly what you did to Your x-wife when you were with me.