The Confrontation

Unlike most people who discovered their spouse’s affair, I had about a month to prepare for my confrontation with my wife. That was obviously my choice as I could have addressed it with her at any point, but nonetheless it was a significant amount of time.  My primary goal over that span was just keeping the family together while maintaining some semblance of my sanity.

My other focus during that time was gathering evidence in preparation for confronting her.  I already had the clear pattern in the phone records that indicated when they together, and I could now line up those periods with specific lies that she was telling me about her whereabouts.  But I wanted evidence that was more definitive to ensure that she couldn’t rationally deny that this was at the very least and inappropriate relationship.  I had no intention of trying to berate her or overwhelm her with her lies, but I was determined to get her to admit the truth so we could start immediately down a path either to recovery or amicable divorce.  I needed to have information she couldn’t possibly refute so we didn’t waste any more time playing this charade.

I watched the credit card records noting transactions she made at suspicious times and locations.  The GPS in the car tracked where it had driven over the previous couple of days, so  I took photos of the screen tracking her path to other guy’s place or the absence of any tracking on days that she had claimed to have gone other places. Of course I had my self imposed limits on what information I would access, but what I did gather was absolutely definitive.  Once the date arrived, there was no question that she would have to admit the affair.  The only question was how much of that information I would have to use.

I made the decision to talk to her as soon as she got back from taking the kids to their first day of school, and I even setup that time with her a couple of weeks in advance.  I didn’t say what we were doing, and she later told me that she thought we were just going to have a nice lunch. I had no idea how she would react, and I was mentally prepared for a variety of possibilities.  My experience from a quarter of a century with her told me that we would have a calm conversation, but my experience from the last couple of months told me that I could no longer no longer rely on my past assumptions. She could refuse to talk to me, storm out of the house, accuse me invading her privacy, or a host of other nonproductive reactions.

When she returned that morning from taking the kids to school, I was waiting for her. I asked her to sit on the couch while I sat across from her.  I started with the opening that I had been rehearsing for weeks, telling her how the last couple of months had been even more difficult for me than I had shown. I told her that I been aware of the affair but had held back that information because I needed to wait for this moment when the kids were out of the house. Her first reaction was to attempt to deny, but it was quickly obvious that was futile. I fortunately had to use very little of the information that I had gathered before she admitted that this was an affair and she had been untruthful with me for months.  We had the calm conversation that I was hoping for, but it was going to be some time before we uncovered the actual truth.

Through the phone records, I already knew that the relationship had been going on for about a year and a half, and it appeared that the activity increased in the past few months. She confirmed that he was actually spending most of his time out of the state for the first year and had found more local employment about six months previous. That’s when they started meeting regularly. He was technically still married when they started the relationship, but they were in the process of separating, and his divorced had just recently finalized.

While she did admit that the relationship was an affair though, she claimed that sex wasn’t involved and latched on to the title of emotional affair. She told me that she never considered ending the marriage and reiterated what she had been saying that this was just a friend who she commiserated with. Any rational person could tell that wasn’t truthful, but I was so exhausted from the previous two months and ecstatic that she showed interest in saving our marriage that I believed her and accepted her apologies. She lamented about how selfish she had been, and I reassured her that she hadn’t destroyed everything. We could still get past this.

What we didn’t do in that conversation is make any plans. I didn’t ask her to cut off contact with the other guy, and she didn’t offer. I realize the first step in virtually all guidance for affair recovery is immediate termination of any communication between the cheating spouse and affair partner, but that didn’t seem like the right approach for a couple of reasons.

My first concern was having her resent me since I had barely showed any notice of her personal activities over the previous couple of years. I felt that I hadn’t earned the right to start making demands like that now. I fully realize how absurd that sounds since I had every right to make such a demand considering the lies that she had just admitted. But that was nonetheless a very real possibility since rational thought wasn’t exactly a strength for either of us at this point.  I was still felt that I had to simply keep the marriage together until I completely understood the situation and could make critical decisions with a coherent mind.

More importantly though, the motivation to cut off communication with this guy needed to come from her if we had any chance of building a quality marriage. To use a rough analogy, have you really cured an alcoholic if you just remove all the booze from the house and tell them you’re going to track their activities? Their true recovery comes when they make the personal commitment to no longer drink. I was risking my short term gratification for the long term health of our marriage. They could communicate using a variety of means anyway, so their relationship was only going to end when she made the conscious decision to end it.

But I will admit to being more naïve than strategic at this point. I was so desperate for some normalcy that I was willing to delude myself in order to get it. I had spent weeks contemplating worst case scenarios such as telling our kids their parents were divorcing or moving off to some little apartment while working out the logistics of weekend visits. I was so ecstatic at the notion of having hope again for the first time in so long that I accepted her admittedly unbelievable insistence that there was no sex and that this was not a romantic relationship.

You could argue that my accepting her downplayed version of the relationship was the wrong decision since, as I’ll detail in my next post, the affair continued for another three months. But I could also argue that it was absolutely the right decision since almost three years after these events we have a far better marriage than ever, and the affair is steadily becoming a distant memory. There’s not telling whether we would have had a different outcome had I challenged her at this point, although we both agree that it would have more than likely led to the end of our marriage.

What is certain is that this was just the first step in our eventual recovery, and we still had considerable work in front of us. That started with three months of additional turmoil as she pretended the affair was over, and I pretended to believe her.  I’ll save that part of the story for the next post.