Rock Bottom

Anyone who’s experienced an affair can tell the details of that traumatic moment when they first discovered it.  My story is a bit different though because once I discovered the relationship, I went a month choosing to believe my wife’s insistence that the guy was just a friend.  I knew that she was still in contact with him, but I assumed it was limited to friendly text messaging.  I was focused on changing the issues in our marriage I had recently discovered and naively thought the relationship would steadily taper off as her need for it dwindled.

Then came the worst moment of my life.

My wife was preparing for a regular getaway that she and our kids took each summer with a friend and her kids.  They were leaving on a Sunday afternoon, and that morning my wife told me that she had some errands to run in preparation.  She specifically mentioned getting cash and filling the gas tank in our van.  I was innocently doing some work with our bills when I noticed a withdrawal entry come through on our electronic bank statement.  It wasn’t surprising because she said she was getting cash, but the branch she visited was several miles away…right down the street from where the other guy lived.  There was no possible reason that she would be on that side of town, other than meeting him of course.

I hadn’t checked the phone bills in a couple of weeks, choosing to believe her when she said she was having dinner with friends or off “doing errands”.  But now I forced myself to do just that and found exactly the pattern that I had feared.  Continuous messaging with the other guy throughout the day but then distinct gaps during those times she was out of the house, which meant that they must have been together.  I checked my phone during those times and saw a variety of messages she sent me giving false details about where she was and who she was with.  All lies.  Explicit, detailed lies.

The charade was over.  My wife was having an affair.

They were leaving within a couple of hours, so I couldn’t confront her now.  I certainly wasn’t going to ruin my kids’ week, and I wasn’t going to send them off with a bombshell like that.  I made some excuse to get out of the house for a bit and then focused on some mindless tasks in the yard to kill time.  When they finally did leave, I collapsed just inside the front door literally unable to stand.  My family was gone.  My wife not only didn’t love me anymore, but she didn’t even like me.  I laid on the floor for an hour sobbing with an overwhelming sense of despair and failure.

I work at home so I was by myself the entire week, and it was the closest thing I hope I ever experience to sheer hell.  The pattern for each day was similar.  I woke up around 4 am after only a couple of hours of restless sleep and wandered around the house in the dark until sunrise.  I tried to get some work done but couldn’t sit for more than a few minutes before getting restless and wandering away from the computer.  I broke down regularly, vacillating between fits of depression and rage.  I cried, I yelled, I threw things.  I’m actually fortunate that the neighbors didn’t call the police in response to all the noise.

As the cliché goes, you don’t truly appreciate something until it’s gone.  I didn’t show my appreciation for my family and certainly not for my marriage.  I had failed at the most important goals of my life and had only myself to blame.  I had always enjoyed my solitude and even fantasized about having the freedoms of someone single, but now I realized the emptiness of being truly alone.  I had always been closed off with my emotions and scared to expose my inner self to the point of developing the deep emotional connection that my wife was looking for, and now she had found someone else who would provide her with that.

Regardless of any guilt that I felt though, I didn’t deserve to be lied to.  I spent the last twenty years providing for my family, ensuring that my wife could realize her goal of staying home and raising our children.  I made sure our mortgage was paid, the college fund was growing, and that we still had enough for a family vacation.  I spent time with my children and always encouraged my wife to get away from home with friends.  While I may have not shown the affection that I should have, I at least deserved to know if my wife was longer in love with me.  She was just as responsible for the slow deterioration in our marriage as I was, but I didn’t look outside of our marriage for a solution.  Unlike her, I never lied.

I would go through mock conversations with my wife in my head, thinking how my confrontation with her would go.  One moment it would be me screaming at her and throwing her out of the house.  The next I would be crying and begging her to stay.  At one point, I wandered into our dining room, and one chair happened to be pulled away a bit from the table.  I imagined my wife sitting there and started yelling at her how I didn’t deserve to be lied to.  Then I broke down in tears and pleaded to her to not break up our family.  I described to her the hell I was going through and how desperately I wanted to rescue our marriage.  A week of isolation in that emotional state put me on the edge of insanity.  I was yelling at a fucking chair!

But isolation can also be transformative.

I had lucid moments during that week where I was able to do some constructive thinking.  I knew that I wanted to keep our family intact, although at this point I had very little hope of that.  I had previously underestimated the situation in every way possible, thinking that some minor changes could return us to our old marriage.  Not only was it obvious to me now that our problems were much deeper than that, but I realized that our old marriage was the wrong goal.  That was tainted now anyway, and it obviously hadn’t led us to positive results.  We needed some means of retaining the positive aspects of our family while building an entirely new relationship.

I clung on to the bit of hope that if she really wanted out of the marriage, she would be gone by now.  It was obvious though that if I gave her an ultimatum now, I would lose. Our family would lose. I couldn’t accept us trying to tackle major life decisions while both of us were in such an irrational state of mind.  I had to at least keep us intact until we could get to the point of open communication free of the influence of this invading third party.  I certainly had no strategy for achieving that goal at this point, but my family needed me to at least try. I’d worry about my personal well being, my pride, and my anger later.

We obviously couldn’t continue with this façade though, and I needed to determine how I was going to confront my wife about the affair.  Our kids were still home from school for the summer and gave us little privacy to discuss our issues.  I knew that divorce was a very real possibility, and we would obviously need to be honest with them should that become a reality.  I would not put them through any more trauma than necessary though.  They were not going to witness volatile confrontations between their parents, and they weren’t going to have either of us leave the home until divorce became inevitable.  I had no idea how my wife would react to my confrontation.  She had never been the volatile type, but by this point I didn’t feel that I could rely on any of my past experience with her.  I made the determination that I had to wait until school started in four weeks.

During the next month we both played our roles.  She pretended that she wasn’t having an affair, and I pretended to believe her.  She would tell me that she was meeting a friend or had some commitment for the kids’ school, and I would go along with what I knew was a complete lie.  I wanted to scream that I knew exactly what was going on, that I wasn’t so stupid as to believe the bullshit she was telling me.  But I had made an agreement with myself that I would wait.  That’s what my family needed to me to do.

The toll on me was considerable.  I was an emotional wreck having regular panic attacks and breaking down to tears with the slightest provocation.  I tried to hide it as much as possible, often closing myself in our downstairs bathroom when I couldn’t maintain my composure.  I couldn’t sleep and continued to wake up about 4 am every morning.  I had no appetite and hardly ate.  I started working out obsessively, going on long bike rides to channel my nervous energy and give myself some time alone to contemplate.  I started rapidly losing weight to the point that friends were worried about my health.

As difficult as that month was though, nothing that I was going through could compare to the horror that I imagined telling my children that their parents were divorcing. I was also concerned about my wife who I obviously thought was making some very bad decisions. Perhaps I should have focused on my anger at her, but I couldn’t throw away the twenty years that we had supported each other without making every effort to save her and salvage our marriage. The anger would have to wait. My family was in crisis, and I needed to do everything I possibly could to save it.

As of this writing it’s been two and a half years since those “two months in hell”.  As time passes, it gets more difficult for me to identify with that time because we have both evolved into such different people.  The memory of it used evoke a significant visceral reaction, but now it just feels like a sad movie with someone else playing the lead role.  While it was unquestionably the most difficult period of my life, it was also one of the most valuable.  I was able to experience the loss of the most important things in my life without actually losing them.  It helped me to clearly identify my priorities and to refocus on them.  Too many people reach that point when it’s too late to salvage what they’ve lost.  I consider a privilege that I had that awaking while I still had time.

(I’ll get to the confrontation and the ensuing months in later posts.)