Hopefully, It’s Finally Over

Ok, so Mr. Other Man has continued to contact me, begging for my ‘friendship’.  I finally told him to back off or I’d block his number from my phone and alert his wife to his continued harassment.  I also gave him the url to this blog, hoping he’d get the hint.  He sent me a text message vowing to leave me alone.  A week or so later (yesterday), he sent me another text message.  I sent him a text back saying, “WTF?  I thought we had an understanding!”  So far, nothing.  Hopefully I’ve seen the last of him.  I suppose I ought to block his number anyway, just in case.  In fact, I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before.  All I know is that I’m incredibly sick of this.  I know, I brought it upon myself.  But I honestly couldn’t possibly regret my actions any more than I do at present.  I love my husband with all my heart; I sincerely do.  I wish he could respect that.  Mr. Other Man, if you’re reading this – I DON’T LOVE YOU, I DON’T WANT TO BE YOUR FRIEND, I DON’T WANT TO HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH YOU, LEAVE ME ALONE ALREADY, GETTING INVOLVED WITH YOU IS THE ABSOLUTE WORST MISTAKE I’VE EVER MADE IN MY LIFE, EVEN WORSE THAN MARRYING MY EX-HUSBAND!!!!

Confessions…

Confession #1.  

I have never told my husband that I once had an affair.  I have never come clean and confessed what I did, nor do I ever intend to, unless he finds out on his own, and then I will be completely honest with him about it because he would leave without a doubt.  It would be of no purpose to lie to him, even it were years later, because he would never forgive me.

Confession #2.

My husband almost caught me in my affair.  I know that he knew that I was lying to him, and that I had been concealing something about Mr. Other Man.  I don’t know how much he suspected, but I know that he knew immediately who it was that I was cheating with because he knows of Mr. Other Man.  He knows of him by name, and I believe that he remembers that name to this day.  I don’t know if he suspected me of having sex with this person, or just having telephone contact with him, but when he discovered that Mr. Other Man and I were indeed in contact with each other, it created an incredible damage to our marriage that I never thought we would be able to fix.  Maybe it’s not as fixed as I think it is.  Maybe it’s something that my husband has stored in the back of his mind, but will never really forget.  Maybe he really has forgiven me and moved on, and the happiness that we have now will last the rest of our lives.

Confession #3.

The last time Mr. Other Man tried to contact me, it was to notify me of the impending birth of his 3rd child – a daughter.  I felt like I had been punched in the stomach.  I don’t know if I have an old soft spot for Mr. Other Man, or if receiving that text message just gave me a flashback, or what.  It doesn’ t bother me any more, and I’m over it – I’m over him.  But I found it really disturbing that one unsolicited text message from Mr. Other Man could evoke such an emotional response from me.  I don’t like the idea that there might still be something there.  I don’t think there is, I think the emotional response was just reflex, but still…I will never cheat on my husband again, Mr. Other Man be damned!  But still, I am ashamed of that moment of weakness that I experienced.  Are my defenses penetrable?  I don’t think they are, but I don’t ever want to be in the position of testing them again.

Confession #4

My affair with Mr. Other Man began before my husband and I got married.  We lived together for quite some time before we got married, and I ashamed to say that I married my husband knowing very well that I had been cheating.  My affair with Mr. Other Man did dwindle greatly shortly before and for a time after the wedding, but my relationship with my husband has always been fire and ice, rage and passion, wonderful then miserable, and before long I was back in my old habit of running to Mr. Other Man whenever things were rough with my husband. 

Guest Blog Entry #2, From An Abused Spouse

Suspected_butnot_Proven writes:

Here’s a different perspective…My ex did everything but directly assault me in a physical manner. I don’t know if he was smart enough to avoid leaving visible proof of his abuse–or if he felt that physical violence would unleash decades of repressed rage from my emotional vault. His physical abuse manifested in his “spankings” of my oldest daughter and his forced masturbations behind me “in his sleep”.

After we separated, I began a sexual relationship with another man, but I was still married to my then-husband. Yes, I had justifications. The continuous emotional abuse–to me, to my daughter–after the separation. The post-separation relationship wasn’t a healthier relationship–just a respite from the estranged husband–but the estranged husband’s “accidental” discovery (he was snooping through my computer, my caller ID, and my mail while I wasn’t home) and the child that I bore with the other man…didn’t help matters.

It also didn’t help matters that my estranged husband stopped attempting to be a father to my oldest daughter, because she witnessed him canoodling with another woman in front of our youngest child. It didn’t help that I found a used condom wrapper dating back to a time when I was 7 months pregnant with our youngest child (I wasn’t pursuing an outside relationship then; and I thought my ex-husband wasn’t either). It didn’t help that I found a receipt for auto maintenance for a car that we never owned…belonging to a woman that I never met…but we were too broke (during the receipt’s transaction period) to buy Christmas presents or go to a relative’s home for Christmas dinner.

Yes, I’m venting and I have no remorse. My ex-husband is still trying to punish me for ending our co-habitation and having a child outside of our marriage–but our marriage was over…long before I had the courage to say so.

Our “marriage” was over when my ex-husband began using the threat of abandonment to intentionally bring me to tears. Our “marriage” was over when my ex-husband admitted that making me cry at all costs was a source of sexual gratification. Our “marriage” was over when I started waiting for one of “the phone calls.”

The first call would have been from my ex-husband:
“Baby, I’m not coming home. Me and ___ are in love. I’m moving in with her tonight. I’ll kiss the kids when I get my things. (Click)”

The second call would have gone like this:
“Mrs. ___, there was an accident on the job site…”

I was primed and ready to start messing with someone else by the time I met up with my youngest son’s father; and I knew he was no good, the first time I talked to him. He was supposed to be a pass-time, because he was so shady…I couldn’t prove–but always suspected–that he had other women on retainer. When there wasn’t a reason to lie anymore, he eventually verified that I had the right instinct the whole time–but I ignored it before the confirmation because of my low self-esteem and emotional neediness (I wonder how many “amens” respond to that statement?)

Even a crazy person has moments of clarity. When he told me I was on my own if I didn’t have an abortion, I stopped calling him for sex and stopped responding to his requests to “come by.” He got so deep with it that he offered to do something that he previously WOULD NOT do for me sexually…Four years of no communication between father and child (at the father’s insistence) and no sex for the mom (at my insistence) preceded the brief resumption of the sexual relationship. For six weeks, I entertained the delusion that this man would acknowledge his son–after finally seeing him for the first time–and introduce him to his other siblings. This time, I didn’t wait over a year to regain the sense God gave me. All it took was a repetitious evasion of two simple questions:
“When are you going to see our son again?”
“Are you going to tell your other children–and your [fill-in-the-blank] of 7 years–about our son?”

I know six weeks was too long–but so was four years without sex. And I know that four years of abstinence doesn’t trump seven years of fidelity.

I just know that the woman who has supported my youngest son’s father for most of the last decade…has stayed with him because she too has always suspected…but not proven what he so casually admitted to me when he no longer feared that I could damage him with the truth.

Guest Blog Entry #1, From The Other Side of Cheating

Trying to move forward after her husband's infidelity.

Claudia writes:

I never truly understood what a breaking heart would feel like, until you. Even when I lost my sister, the wounds, while shockingly painful, did not, could never, run as deep as the ones I experience now at your hand. I went from trusting you implicitly and without reserve, unconditionally, to trying to understand who and what you are, and how love, the most exquisite and unconditional gift of all, could bring with it such utter and cruel betrayal. Like a double edged sword, your presence in my life exists only as pain tinged with memories of pleasure.

From one moment in time to the next it was as if I saw the sun set with no moon rising in it’s stead to fill the darkness, only cold and endless black, the sky pulsing with bitterness, attrition and discomfiting disorientation. I look at you and the face, the features are familiar, but yet, I don’t know you. I can’t see you. I can’t reach you through the crepuscule calamity your actions have spawned around me, around us. I look in to your eyes and seek the truth, unsure of what that means anymore, but still desperate for a glimpse.

You undid our love with one self-indulgent pantomime.

You vow to spend the rest of your life fixing your mistake, fixing us, but as sweet as the promise you extend sounds, in truth, I find the words hollow and lacking. Barren. I long to curl up in your arms, the beat of your heart against my ear, my hands buried in the warmth of you, but I fear your proximity will set me on fire, burn me up, be the death of me. All the life inside you, all that energy, is tainted by your selfish curiosity. The breath of you that I used to inhale to fill my own lungs, to live with, is now poisoned air. I reach for you and my fingers fall away from you.

Who you are is not who I thought you were, and loving this part of you is taking more energy than I can muster.

You think I am angry. I am not, beloved. I am battered, bruised and bleeding. I am mutilated, scarred and tortured, but angry? No, my heart is too broken to even feel that anymore. I teeter on the line of sanity. I stand on the mountain of derangement and long to feel the tearing of flesh under my shoulder blades, to sprout wings of exemption and step off the edge, to soar to the sun where there is warmth and light, leaving behind the vacuous frigidity of what is now my reality.

Until you, there was never a desire or need to trust. You knew that letting you inside me would require patience. You begged me to give my all, to let go. You promised to never hurt me. I asked you to wait, to let me find myself and when I finally did, I gave myself completely to you.

For the first time I offered all that I had, all that I was, a small orb of light in the palm of my hand, myself stripped, ego exposed and esteem vulnerable, with hopeful heart and genuine gratitude I extended it ALL to you. I gave it to you for safekeeping, reveling in the sensation of having someone I could finally succumb and surrender my true self to. I felt my heart melt and open and bloom that day, and joy, like winter crocuses, tiny, vibrant flowers bravely pushing past the ice and snow to herald the impending spring, burst forth and spread their color and rapture inside and outside of me.

In one single moment, one single gesture, you ripped the blooms from the cold earth and trampled and crushed their violet vibrancy in to the ground. On my knees before you, you stripped me of every ounce of meaning, of hope, of my dreams, and left me empty handed and bleeding in the snow. You were my life. You were my future. You were my knight in shining armor. You built me up and then tore me down, and left me panting, gasping for air. For life.

Where you began, I ended.

Conversations From The Trenches

Excerpts from conversations with real people “in the trenches” (names with-held):

HusbandCheatedOn: I am in a troubled marriage and my wife has cheated on me recently.  It might help me to here the cheaters side of the story.

JustAGirlAnonymous:  From personal experience, your wife is probably in almost as much agony as you are (I don’t know how you feel, but I know how she probably feels).

HusbandCheatedOn: To answer your question, I feel like shit.  I can’t even put into words everything that is going thru my thoughts.  I can’t sleep and when I do I normally have nightmares.  It’s all still pretty fresh.  She says her affair is over and that she wants to stay married.  The problem is I know she has contacted [him] via email just last week.  She said he emailed her and she just responded.  I know you don’t know me or my wife or anything about us, but based on your experience, don’t you think that she would not have contact with him if she were serious about staying in our marriage?

JustAGirlAnonymous:  If it’s still very recent, she might be going through a process of trying to shake him off.  It wouldn’t suprise me if the other guy was pressuring her to be “just friends” and she may believe on some level that this is possible.  I’m at the stage, developmentally, that I now know that Mr. Other Man and I cannot be “just friends”.  Maybe, under different circumstances (as in, if we had never had an affair), Mr. Other Man and his wife and my husband and I could have all been friends.  But given that we have an adulterous history together, we can never be friends, and I wouldn’t want to be his friend anyway.  Your wife may not be at that stage yet. 

There was a time, during the breaking-up process, when Mr. Other Man was using every trick in the book to convince me to continue the relationship as “just friends”, and because of my emotional vulnerability and stage of the process, I thought we could maintain “just friends” status, I thought I wanted and needed his companionship.  Remember, this is a person that was an emotional support, in a twisted and convoluted kind of way, and I went through withdrawals from the habit of cheating much the same way that I am now experiencing withdrawals from smoking.  It really does become a habit, and at this point in the process, your wife might not be able to understand how irrational it is think that “just responding” to his emails are ok.  She may still be at a point in her emotional process that she is having a hard time distinguishing what is acceptable and what is not in terms of her marriage and her affair.  You have to think of it as similar to steps in the grieving process (I don’t know them off-hand, you can look them up – I think there are 7?).  After looking up the steps in the grieving process, you can probably sketch out some stages that you and she might be going through and what still lies ahead. 

But in response to your wife still having contact with him, she absolutely has to commit to never contacting him again.  She doesn’t need to “notify” him that it’s over (in fact, it’s probably better if she doesn’t), she doesn’t owe him any explanations or apologies or last goodbye’s or I’ll always love you’s – in fact, it’s huge regression if she does.  She just needs to decide whether or not she’s truly committed to you and salvaging your marriage.  If she is, then there should be no question, no doubt about going cold turkey.  It may hurt, but in the detox phase a lot of emotional turmoil is going to come to the surface.  Just like with drugs, you just gotta suck it up and tough it out, and if she feels like dogshit in the process, well, you reap what you sow.  I’m not saying this to be a bitch – I just know from firsthand experience.  It’s just plain ugly to face what you did.  But if you never face it, you can’t move forward with saving your marriage. 

HusbandCheatedOn:  It is still very recent.  It’s just been 2 weeks since I confronted her about it and she admitted it.  I had very strong suspicions for quite awhile before I confronted her.  When she admitted to me what was going on I also confessed to her that I had almost cheated as well…(portion omitted)… she told me that she was done with the other guy and that she wanted to fix things with me.  A couple of days later I agreed to stay together. 

I as said … previous[ly], she has contacted him a couple of times since via email.  I confronted her yesterday about the emails.  She said that she was very sorry and swore to me that she would never contact him again.  She did send him an email yesterday telling him that she would not be contacting him anymore and telling him not to contact her, so I guess she regressed. 

While we were in bed last night she told me that she feels closer to me now than she has in a very long time.  She told me how all the lies had been tearing her up inside and how she felt so relieved to have finally told me the truth.  I may be a fool, but I have decided to trust her that she is committed to us and that she wont have anymore contact with him.  I guess my choices are to leave or to trust and I’ve decided to give her one more chance at trust.   

 This is by far the hardest thing I have ever been thru.  I honestly can’t believe that I am doing what I’m doing.  If you had asked me just a very short time ago if I would stay in my marriage if my wife cheated on me my answer would have been HELL NO I’D DIVORCE THAT BITCH IN A HEARTBEAT.  I don’t really know what has changed in me, but something has.

JustAGirlAnonymous:  I think you deserve a lot of credit for how well you’re handling all of this!  You’ve been through quite an ordeal, and even though I’m sure it’s probably not easy for you to trust your wife right now, I don’t think you’re a fool for giving your relationship another chance.  I think it’s great that the two of you are communicating and that she is feeling closer to you than she did before.  To me, that signifies huge progress on her part – I remember going through the same experience of feeling closer to my husband once I ended my affair.  It was like an emotional re-routing, from Mr. Other Man being my main source of support and affection to my mind replacing my husband back into that role.  Continue moving forward with the open, honest communication – that is what has been the saving grace in my marriage!

HusbandCheatedOn:  I am not handling this well.  You have no idea the lengths I have considered going to to make sure she isn’t still seeing him.  It’s ridiculous and at times has total control over my life.  I have had nightmares about the 2 of them.  I’m just trying to find a way to get past all of it and one thing that helps is admitting that I am responsible for all of this too.  [Author's note - it is not your fault.  You are responsible for your contribution to your relationship, but you are NOT responsible for your partner's actions.]

JustAGirlAnonymous:  Traumatic experiences don’t go away over night.  If you need her to delete email accounts and start new ones or change her phone number or whatever else in order to start moving forward, it’s totally ok to ask that of her.  I mean, it needs to be an open forum or setting new rules and guidelines and compromises that you can both live with, but that’s acceptable and reasonable. 
Good luck with things!

 

Readers, some words of support and encouragement, please for this tortured soul.  Perhaps your prayers:

SorrySheDidIt:  I ran across your site…I feel kinda funny responding to it. Some of the stories touched me.
I also years ago was in this situation. I can say there is not a day that goes by that I don’t have this on my mind. I live in the pain of what I have done. If I could save anyone from living with the aftermath of this, I would. I have been told I was forgiven. But, it is not acceptable to me. I can’t. So, recently I have figured out what I need to do to end what I live with. One Day.
Thank you for your site.

JustAGirlAnonymous: Your statement, “I live in the pain of what I have done.” is the the most eloquent expression of the way my own actions have pierced my very soul…[portion omitted]…One thing, though – what exactly do you have in mind to end what you live with?  Please tell me you don’t have something self-harmful in mind…?

SorrySheDidIt: Yes, I have thought in depth (I know its selfish and I rightly deserve my demons). I love my family tremendously. I know the timing is not right, right now…[portion omitted]…I am so sorry for being so open.

JustAGirlAnonymous: I will pray for your pain to lessen, and for you to have the strength and grace to move forward with your life and to forgive yourself and find the will to keep on living and doing good in your life.  Pray for yourself as well.  You don’t have to live in agony forever, God forgives – if you ask.  You’re not unworthy.  I don’t mind your honesty, but I DO care about what happens to you.  That’s why I tell my story – to be of some good to others.

What’s the “reason”?

Is there even such thing as a “reason” why someone cheats?  That’s probably debatable, but nonetheless, the perpetrator is a person, a human being, who is subject to stress and emotions and is imperfect, capable of error.  No one just wakes up one morning and thinks, “You know, I think I’ll cheat on my spouse today.  That sounds like a good idea!” 

But there are always factors that contribute to the situation, to the decision to do it, to the person’s inability to cope with life and thus to seek an escape.  Maybe you’re a stress cheater, like I was;  just like certain stressors triggered a need to smoke a cigarette (or 5), sometimes the harsh realities of my life left me craving the positive attention, the high of adrenaline, the thrill of sneaking a phone call and not getting caught, the delusion that Mr. Other Man really cared about me and understood me and would never make me cry like my husband did .  I still struggle with my smoking habit, but I’m learning (slowly) to deal with things without the aid of nicotine. 

Again, this is not an excuse, or a rationalization for what I did.  I’m just trying to be candid about the contributing factors.  My husband and I used to fight A LOT.  And it was ugly.  Our home bore the evidence of holes in the walls, doors knocked off hinges, door jambs knocked off the walls.  And my body bore evidence in the form of bruises, which I always kept covered.   And, yes, I played my part in these fights.  I would yell and scream, and accuse and insult when I was angry, instead of talking to my husband and working cooperatively toward a solution.  But so did he.  His “drug” was to smack me around, mine was to sneak around with another man.  Does that make us equally wrong?  No, I don’t think so.  I was more wrong.  I don’t condone my husband’s behavior, but I could have called a girlfriend to talk it out, I could have smoked a little more, I could have written or blogged about it, or whatever, but I committed adultery.  I was more wrong than he was.  Will I ever forget certain things that he did to me?  No.  To this day I don’t keep kitchen knives in my house.  (I’ll leave it at that.)

Anyway, whenever this would happen, I always had the same thought “He wouldn’t do this to me!”  And then I’d go crying to him to get my “fix”.  I always harbored this idea that Mr. Other Man was such a better person than my husband.  Yeah, right, he couldn’t have any better a person than I was – he was married, too!  However devastated his wife would have been if she found out about us, I’m sure he would be capable of doing the same to me.

So, let me throw a question out to all of you – if you’ve cheated, why did you do it?  What were your triggers, your environmental factors, your relationship problems that contributed to your decision to do it? 

 For those of you who have been cheated on – are you willing to take a good hard look at yourself and ask yourself if you are adding fuel to the fire of your relationship?  Do you have some fault, like my husband did, that your partner or spouse can’t cope with?  It’s not your fault that your partner cheated, but could the problems under which she or he cheated have involved you? 

What do you say, readers?

The Beginning of my Nightmare

 I was married once before. Early in my first marriage, I happened to meet this man, who would eventually become Mr. Other Man; I never thought much about him. I met him, I was vaguely aware of who he was, he just wasn’t a factor in my life in any way.

 

A little over a year after I separated from my first husband, I ran across this man again. A chance meeting, that I now wish had never happened. He struck up a conversation, and eventually we began dating on and off (I still never slept with him, the a-hole!). But something was wrong with our casual relationship. I can see now that, really, something was wrong with him. He tried so hard to conceal his marriage from me, but his efforts were pretty transparent. I ignored the obvious signs screaming in my face, “This Man Is Married!” and tried to rationalize everything that was wrong with this man. At this point in my life I was newly single, still devastated by my failed marriage, and desperately needed to feel beautiful. Oh, did this man ever know how to play to my weaknesses!

 

He was definitely a charmer at a time in my life when I needed to be charmed. He said everything I needed to hear, except “Come on over to my place.” Because he had a wife there. Eventually I got tired of the “don’t call me, I’ll call you” routine, and started seeing another man, who really was available. This man would become my husband; the husband against whom I would commit adultery with Mr. Other Man.

 

How ironic that the man with whom I would cheat on my husband was the same man that I originally dumped because I didn’t want to be the home-wrecker in his marriage.

 

Anyhow, when I met my husband, all contact with the other man ceased. I wasn’t interested anymore. I had a new love and everything with him was fantastic! But, of course, things with my husband didn’t stay fantastic, and when I was about halfway through my pregnancy, the violence started – the knocking me down, the bruises on my arm where he had grabbed me or on my chest where he had pushed me so hard that he literally knocked me off my feet and flat onto my back (or onto a box in the closet, which left a lovely line-shaped bruise from my hip to the back of my knee), the flinging me around like a rag doll.

 

I’m not telling you all this to justify what I did. I just want you to know the circumstances surrounding me at the time. This was the survivor-mentality I was living with. I also don’t want you think that I’m trying to portray myself as innocent in all of my marital problems, either. I played my role in our fights, too. But just as I could have made better choices when it came to my affair, so my husband could have made better choices when it came to his violence against me.

 

Ok, fast forward a couple years, more or less, and another chance meeting of Mr. Other Man. Again, I didn’t take any notice of him. I didn’t even speak to him, I just saw him out in public and continued on my merry way. But the next day or so, he called me at work. And that, my friends, was the beginning of my affair.