Not my fault
I was reading an affair recovery book today. The author said something along the lines that betrayed spouses have to take an account of what they did to make the marriage an environment that an affair could happen in. Like so many of us involved in affair recovery be stressed that the choice to have an affair was soley in the lap of the wayward spouse.
This began the wheels of my mind, circling over and over. I have read time and again the affair is 100% the choice of the unfaithful but the problems in the marriage are 50/50. Some people, like this author I was reading make it sound as though the betrayed could have taken preventative measures though.
The fact is a spouse that is broken enough to cheat will cheat. I have seen many betrayed spouses reporing that their marriage history was re-written and they were villianized (certaintly true in my case). Then there are the other spouses that claim, “You were too perfect. I felt I didn’t deserve you.”
To me this is a prime example of how a person that is going to cheat will cheat no matter what. Will justify mo matter what. I need to know that becaue for years I tried to fix our marriae only to be ignored until one foot was out the door. I tried. You can only get so far alone.
What percentage is it when the betrayed had actually tried? Does it even matter? Because many times it would have happened no matter what. Whether you were ‘too good’ or ‘always unloving.’ Anything could mean an affair to a spouse willing to ignore their vows.
Where’s the standing ovation?
Everywhere in the news I see adultery and the wages of cheating. It’s always some form of pain.
Even on the recovery boards, there’s debate as to who should shoulder the blame. This clip says exactly what I have been saying all along.
Embedded video from CNN Video
don’t mind me
I need to rant about life for a moment.
My father lost his wife this morning. Her daughter and son lost their mother. Her mother lost her daughter. We should never have to bury our kids, yet she is flying to my dad and the kids to discuss funeral arrangements.
IT’S NOT FAIR!
She was young. She had just gotten a nursing degree. She had a daughter to see go to the prom, get married, a son to watch graduate. Maybe even a daughter-in-law one day to frustrate. Possibly in the future, grandchildren to hold.
I never met her and yet she was loving to my kids, more than my mom ever was.
My dad was a betrayed spouse too (my mother cheated multiple times). He’s been searching for that lifetime love and I believe he found it, only for it to be cut so short, so suddenly.
IT’S NOT FAIR.
We had so much in common. She always had a cheerful, bubbly hello for me when I called. She was such a blessing to my daddy and now she’s gone.
I miss her though I never met her. I hurt for my dad. For her kids. For her mom.
When I think of the people who do evil, wicked things and they never stumble on a pebble in their life- it just makes me cry out IT’S NOT FAIR!
I find myself questioning my faith and clinging to it at the same time.
Please, pray for my family, especially her daughter. The father is…fucked up. Pray that she will be put in custody with her grandmother, my dad, even her brother rather than the cruel man that is her father. It’s just a few years until she is of age, please pray she is able to live them in a loving and supportive environment.
just wondering
Why I have tried to be good my entire life? Where has it gotten me? In pain, alone, dissatisfied.
People always talk about karma and living well and pap like that. Yet the ones that hurt me most for their own selfish gain have moved on to more satisfying lives than I have. I am alone in picking up the pieces.
What is the purpose? The point? Where does it end?
They Call it D-day
Sunday morning, P. encouraged me to go to one of the churches I had picked out to try. I felt lonely every time I went alone. After the day before, I had hope and wanted to be close to him. Instead, he spent the day cleaning up his study, listening to a Hawaiian radio station streaming live through his computer. I’d pop in now and then only to be brushed off. Pretty soon, it was only the kids that went in to greet P. now and then.
Sometime in the late afternoon, P. went upstairs to go to the bathroom. He thought I was taking a nap. Urged by some inner sense, I went into his now clean study and touched his computer. The Hawaiian music was still playing as I went to the Hotmail site I had noticed weeks before. Unlike the last time, this time it allowed me to log on. All the emails were from one person, a woman named C.M.
Shaking, I forwarded all the emails sent and received. P. had learned from the AOL incident and this time had deleted all emails as they came in and went out. The exception was that day. C. happened to be online at the same time as P. and they volleyed emails back and forth while he hid from his family under the guise of cleaning.
My heart was in my throat as I feverishly moved my evidence to my email account, then ran to my computer and changed my password. My vision began blurring, I was dizzy. I checked P’s email one more time and reeled, reading his email to her about how watching the movie “Click” the night before was making him reevaluate what was important in life.
I tried to hold it in, but I rushed upstairs. Throwing open the bathroom door, I shot out, “I know about her!”
“Her? Her who? There is no one!”
“C.M.” I answered, putting as much sarcasm and disgust as I could into her full name.
“Oh, you have it wrong, we’re just friends.”
“‘Every time you are with me instead of your kids, I am thankful.’” I sneered the quote from her recent email.
His normally tan face blanched, I could swear it did at least. I supposed it was good he was on the throne, he likely needed it.
“Just a minute, we need to talk.”
I agitatedly left, allowing him to clean up. He came into our bedroom and closed the door. I was calm, eerily calm. He confessed to an affair with C. It had only been going on a little while, he claimed. They had sex once, a few weeks ago. Shocked that P. admitted to sex with C., I asked if he had had sex with S. all those years ago. I got a strenuous denial.
He did it because I was depressed and didn’t bother to get help, he said. P. was tired of me and so sought someone who did not have the drama of me.
We talked, who knows how long. I don’t even know what the kids were up to at that point, likely watching t.v. We took a break. I know now that he likely contacted her during that break, though he claims now he can’t remember. We talked more when the kids were in bed. I revealed how I had put all the blame on myself for our distance. I had shopped for sex toys, our first ever. By the time they came he had rejected me so often, I just packed them away. I was trying to be who he seemed to want. I was searching for answers, never knowing that the problem was something I couldn’t have changed.
Every loving action, every attempt at growing closer, was twisted by him. Or, if he shared it with her, she found a way to twist it. I was fighting a losing battle, one I did not even know I was in.
He promised to ‘take a break’ from her so he could concentrate on our marriage and family. So he could decide without undue influence. I fell into his arms. I don’t know why. I had always said I would leave if it happened again. Here it was, worse than before. Yet I yearned for him. We had passionate sex that night. What I now know is termed as ‘hysterical bonding’. That dual need to feel wanted and to claim your territory. At the time, it was so uplifting.
I came to regret it later.
I had had my d-day. Discovery day. Unbeknownst to me, I was yet again on the early discovery ride. Stops include rounds of trickle truth, minimizing, blame-shifting, gas-lighting, fence-sitting, and (as I found out later) cake-eating. I will explain all of those in the next posts. If you are a betrayed spouse, or suspect you are, I highly recommend checking out some of my links. Each affair is different, but they all follow the same script. Leonardo DiCaprio may have played a modern Romeo, swords may have been replaced with guns, but the lines were still the same. So it is with affair partners.
“I love you but I’m not in love with you.”
“We’re just friends.”
“It was only a kiss.”
“It was just the one time.”
“We used protection.”
“You drove me to it.”
“We’re soul mates.”
“You never understood me like this.”
All to excuse the inexcusable. Each time, each word, each careless phrase, is a bomb into the betrayed heart. Everything will be said to protect the affair and its participants, no matter that the betrayed will be obliterated until our tears feel like they are rivers of blood.
Each d-day is its own pain, own destruction. I am two years away from the one I share here and my heart still quakes reliving it. I can go to that day in June ‘99 and feel the utter devastation of having the man I love tell me he loved my friend. It is like an emotional time machine. Suddenly I am standing in the doorway to my bedroom and its the first Sunday of December ‘06. My husband is telling me that the woman he is seeing is everything I am not. Believe me when I say, there is a mark left on you forever.
My world was invaded, my family facing destruction. Where would we go next?
Time to re-Focus
forewarning- I didn’t bother to be PC in this post.
First, let’s get this straight. I am Christian. I belong to a conservative church. Am I conservative? Yes and no. According to conservatives- more no than yes I am guessing.
I was listening to a radio program (which will remain ‘nameless’) today and the hosts were going on and on about voting about gay marriage. Marriage should be between a man and a woman you see.
Biblical principles aside, as I have yet to see a completely convincing argument, homosexual marriage is hardly the death knell to the traditional family. Infidelity and its growing acceptance in society (refer to sites such as Ashley Madison) is far more dangerous than the less than 10% (just throwing a number out here) of the population that happens to be queer and also want to get married.
When current estimates put infidelity rates somewhere between 50 and 85%, I believe that reveals a much larger risk to the traditional family. Infidelity leaves a footprint on the family that is not easily washed away. Even many experts do not understand the psychology of an affair- and recovery from affairs. Infidelity carries it’s damage into the next generation. I would say that most people on the support forums I have visited were children in a house that was affected by infidelity. How it plays out usually depends on the gender of the wayward parent and the gender of the child. I wish I could remember the study I once saw quoted, but I am pretty sure a daughter of a betrayed wife is more likely to also be a betrayed wife. Also, the son of a cheating father is more likely to cheat. In my case, P.’s father was a serial adulterer. I recently learned that his mother likely also cheated, if not on P’s father then on the fiance she had after the divorce. My mother cheated often. The three times I know about include the final other man, one of my dad’s friends and one of my mom’s friends…yes, a female.
The legacy can be crippling. There are also real life “Fatal Attraction” scenarios, some to differing degrees. If you are tempted to cheat, even if you are not the spouse be aware of the high emotions that run through a betrayed spouse after discovery. Though I am more prone to self harm, at one point I had a vivid vision of confronting the other woman and stabbing her with a screwdriver. It scared me, but what about the spouses that it motivates?
In geometry a triangle is the strongest shape. In love, it usually means at least one person is unbalanced. You are taking a risk when you create that unbalance. The papers are littered with any person involved in an affair- the other person, the wayward and the betrayed, snapping and committing a crime.
This brings me back to my point. If we want to protect the family institution, we should legislate the breaking of a marriage contract. Infidelity increases the occurrences of STDs (after all, your ’soul mate’ can’t possibly be ‘unclean’ so why use protection?), children born outside of the marriage, emotional abuse (by its very nature affairs are emotional abuse) and divorce. When we signed our marriage license, we signed a contract and it should be treated as such.
So please, let’s not focus on the fags. Leave them alone if you want to preserve the image of family. Go after the infidels…the cheaters. Those that help a spouse break their vows. The companies like AM and the ‘alibi’ company that promote it. This is a much more insidious issue. It affects Christian couples as much as anyone else. There is definite harm…and definite strictures against it in the Bible.
My guess is this is such a shameful topic that nobody wants to touch it. That and politicians, not known for their fidelity, don’t feel the burning desire to pass such brave legislation.
Though, keeping on the course a wayward is on, one is bound to feel something burning eventually.
Betrayed Spouse Bill of Rights
I posted this today on a support board and felt I should share it here.
Betrayed Spouses Bill of Rights
In a world where a marriage is as likely to end as not, we sometimes forget what a partnership is in the early days after discovery of infidelity. We lose ourselves in the desperation to hold onto your loved one. Remembering your rights will help you no matter which path your marriage takes.
1- You have a right to the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. By having an affair, your spouse has closed off the relationship with you and opened one with the OP (other person). You have a right to insist this is reversed for your healing and to assure that loyalties have been realigned.
2- You have the right to trust- but verify. Trust has been broken, ‘snooping’ is not snooping. It is verifying that someone proven to be a liar, sneak and cheat has changed their ways. Like an addict, a WS(wayward spouse) will often go back to their emotional fix. You have a right to verify this is not happening.
3- You have the right to insist there are only two people in the marriage. That choice was made when you made vows to each other. Even a moment with a third person is too much. You owe your WS no time to ‘think about it’. There’s a marriage or there’s none.
4- You have a right to know who the OP is, the flip of this is you do not have a right to harm or harass this person. Hold yourself to a better standard then the OP did.
5- You have the right to choose to give the gift of reconciliation or to divorce. You have the right to take some time to make that choice. If you one day realize you cannot live with the truth of what has been done, you have the right to walk away.
6- You have the right to insist your WS gets STD testing done and to see the results. Even if the WS claims it has not gotten physical, as many WSs will admit to “only a kiss” when it has gone much further.
7- You have the right to insist that your WS initiates and honors NC (no contact) immediately. You have a right to have input and to be a witness to how NC is established.
8- You have a right to set and enforce boundaries. This is not blackmail or any of the other negative words your WS might use. This you protecting yourself.
9- You have a right to hold onto evidence for as long as you need it to feel safe. Your WS has created an atmosphere of risk and danger. It is natural to have a safety net to counteract what has been brought into your marriage.
10- You have a right to know who your WS’s friends are and the nature of their interactions. If it is kept a secret, it is not healthy for the marriage and therefore something is amiss.
11- You have the right to out the affair to anyone you deem will help you and/or your marriage. This is not your secret to keep, this is not your shame to hold. You owe no protection to those that failed to protect you.
12- You have a right to heal on your timeline. As long as you are making steady progress, you are healing. It is a slow process and a WS that says things along the lines of, “You’ll never get over this!” does not have a full grasp of the damage betrayal causes. This is a healing process that takes from 18 months to five years.
13- You have a right to yell, cry, fall apart and otherwise handle this in any way that relieves some of the devastating pain, shock and loss of trust. Your world has been turned on its end. You do not have the right to physically, verbally or otherwise abuse your spouse.
14- You have the right to insist on a true marriage. A marriage of partners, where you love, honor and protect each other. If you feel your marriage is missing one of these components, either fixing it or leaving are your only two options. You don’t have the right to cheat and/or turn someone else into a betrayed spouse.
15- You have a right to love yourself. Often the betrayed have forgotten themselves as an individual. This is the optimum time to remind yourself that you are unique and lovable in your own right. That as much as you might love your spouse, you should love yourself enough to refuse any sort of mistreatment.
Two Lives
I decided to make the best of this situation. We moved near the end of the school year and I spent part of the week commuting C. to his last weeks of school.
Then I began to look around and try to get into the community. I did not want it to be like it was in Hawai’i. I started a mom’s group based on my interests in attachment parenting. I found a couple of playgroups and tried them out, I started to go to Weight Watchers and I began to explore the streets I ran my errands on. I amped up my little at home business of sewing and crafting.
I did the mom thing like I never had before. I juggled appointments, tried to keep our home nice, attempted to socialize even out of my comfort zone. All the while, P. began to come home later and later, blaming new traffic patterns. I knew for sure we had a problem when I tried to kiss him and he turned his face. I couldn’t say anything that night, but I confronted him the next day. In a series of emails he said that it was obvious I didn’t love him any more and wanted a divorce. He kept pushing it. I begged for marriage counceling instead. He kept dragging his feet. Desperate, I ordered some sex toys. We had never used anything beyond bodypaint. I wanted to be what he needed and if that was it, I was going to be that.
By the time that non-descript box came in the mail, P. had pushed me away so thouroughly that I just hid the box and its contents in my sewing room.
By early November I realized I was pregnant. There was a faint positive on the test, I hadn’t been charting but I knew the signs and knew the last time we had sex we had cut it too close to ovulation. I was torn. I had wanted a third, I had a third. Now though, I was looking at being a single mom to two and one on the way. I began making plans to free myself. To go back to our old college town where I had a church and support. In the meantime I sought out a church nearby.
I’m not even sure I can define the misery I felt during September ‘06 and the end of the year. I would crawl into the bathroom in the middle of the night, shutting the two doors between myself and my sleeping family. I would howl silently, beating myself on the breastboone for maximum pain, minimum bruising. Not that P. would have noticed anyway. He had all but completely checked out from the entire family.
One day, when I was maybe seven weeks along, I began cramping. My period started and it was awful. The same tissues were present as the time I lost an early pregnancy right before I concieved J. I had no reason to hide this secret anymore. I had kept it to myself, I didn’t want P. to feel trapped in a marriage that he didn’t want due to a baby being on the way. I told him, that night- days later- I can’t remember. He was sad for me, said I could have told him, he would have understood. It was a turning point of sorts. I had seen glimpses of my husband in the weeks prior. This was new. He took an interest in us. I still felt isolated. I lost my baby. Not ours, mine.
One night soon after that I was in the bathroom again. The pain was so palpable that I couldn’t believe my family couldn’t feel it. My body shook with sobs, cried into my bitten lips. My hands were trying to beat the pain out of my chest. I cried out for help. What I was given was the revelation of small demon-like creatures. They had pointed ears and faces. Their hands were like claws. They had razor sharp teeth and they were tugging at me. Trying to pull me to that brink of suicide that I had been to before. Then, a thought in my head. “Moment by Moment”. I realized, moment by moment I could live through anything. I bought a posey ring to remind me. Divorced or married, I needed to adjust my life to moment by moment. If not for myself, for my kids. I thought I had found a church, but they were unwilling to provide the help our first church had. So, I contacted my old pastor and his wife. They prayed over me and reminded me, prayers are our moment to moment in this life.
I cooked my first from scratch Thanksgiving dinner. Always until then we had gone to the in-laws or a friends. I did cook a dinner in Hawai’i, but part of it was take-out from a local resteraunt. J. had just had oral surgery the day before and P. missed it due to training to prepare to go to Iraq. I pulled out all the stops and made sure I had his favorites. He was kind, complimentary and loving. I did fall apart a little when I was cooking all morning and nobody spoke to me, then again during clean up. There was a blip that day. T. the psuedo-sexual encounter guy had found my (other) blog. From that, he found my MySpace page. I had a tracker on the blog and could see he searched for his old username. As if I would mention him in a blog about my life ten years later. I didn’t even like to remember him.
He sent a fishing message through MySpace. He didn’t sign his name and I only knew it was him due to the blog tracker. I told P. and deleted the message, blocking him. P. got very angry and kept insisting there was more between T. and myself if he looked me up after all this time. I was so deep in denial I honestly kept insisting there wasn’t. All I remembered after nearly a decade was the disgusting way he kissed, a feeling of intense shame and relief when P. knocked on my door.
The next weekend we went to get our Christmas tree. It was one of two happy family outings between September and December. The other was a trip to a local pumpkin farm and corn maze. On both outings I felt my husband might actually love me. I tried not to give myself false hope. In the store, he put his hand on the small of my back to guide me through the crowds. I put more into that protective gesture than maybe I should have. When we got home, he was happy and loving and insisted on taking so many pictures of me.
I felt, things were looking up. We had a chance.
Focused and Unfocused
If we were to keep with the curtain metaphor from the last entry, we’d call this intermission.
A new dawning had happened in our lives. Our darling son, C. had been born. Suddenly what mattered didn’t and what didn’t matter did. I went from working full time, as I had been doing for so many years up until then, to staying at home. Sometimes I felt at a loss.
All I had learned of having kids while working with kids flew out the window. The things you were told were right felt wrong. Given my background in child development, I began researching. We became an attachment parenting family and it felt right. I honestly could write so much more about the different aspects of parenting like this, but I know it’s a tangent that will just avoid the painful topic this blog is about.
P. was a loving and doting father. At some point, that began to taper off. He was always loving, but C. began to matter less. I began to matter less. P. began to push the boundaries we had established after S. He began to talk to female co-workers about their relationships. This is how he told me S. drew him in, by asking for a ‘guy’s perspective’. We agreed…that was a boundary not to be crossed. He crossed it and told me it was ok- as long as he didn’t reciprocate by talking about us. There were other incidents of me struggling with my trust. But I had been counselled to ‘forgive and forget’. P. had insisted I don’t show my pain, or even be overly effusive in my love. He called it manipulative.
So I buried it. I focused on our family. I had already been exposed though, and the illness began to take root. The depression that slowly grew was blamed on postpartum depression, on my Gram dying, on the lifestyle changes. Never once did anyone dig deep enough to make the connection. Finally, on the heels of a job disappointment, P. decided to take a job in Hawai’i. He believed the sun would wash away the depression. He refused to listen to me when I told him that it was the situation that needed to be changed. I felt unloved and ignored. He thought things were just fine. My attitude needed to be adjusted. It wasn’t him. It couldn’t be him. I had the cause of my pain buried so deep that even I didn’t realize what this was all about. I just longed to be heard, to be loved.
This habit of not listening is deeply ingrained in P. I watch him totally tune out his mother. I can’t stand for it, it’s so disrespectful to me- not acknowledging a human being is speaking to you. He didn’t listen to me either though. Our first home he insisted on buying. Our first dog, a Greyhound. The move to Hawai’i. Even the house we bought in Hawai’i…and another Greyhound. As though the first hadn’t been so emotionally unstable we had to return him.
We lived in Hawai’i for a year and a half. During that time, P. was pretty much in paradise. He could play gold of his lunch breaks, go the the beach whenever. To be honest, I don’t really know what his life was like then. I know I suspected him of cheating, but I had on and off over the years and he still denies it to this day. C. and I were isolated. We didn’t fit in unless we were in a tourist area. There were very few stay-at-home-moms and those I met were hard to wedge myself in with, I was an outsider. I was also trapped by this mild but chronic depression. I found a church, the only fellowship I got was when they learned I used to work in childcare. Suddenly I would get phone calls asking me to volunteer. When I sat alone during fellowship time, tears streaming down my face, I was not good enough. We did go through an intense period of lovebird nesting. So much so that by the time we had an opportunity to move back, I was six months pregnant with our second child.
We moved back home. The housing prices had come up. We had to live in a rental. I had a hard time fitting back into my old life after being isolated for so long. Our second child was born about two months after we got back to the mainland. Unlike C., J. was a fussy one. She was great at first, but then fought sleep as I paced the rental.
I was fighting depression all the time it felt like. I found a therapist and went onto anti-depressants. The problem was, no dose was high enough to take away the suicidal thoughts. I began to have full body shakes and insomnia. The anxiety attacks were the worst though. My therapist refused to switch me since J. was breastfed and she didn’t want to play with meds that were working for her. Even when I researched other alternatives. I eventually ended up just never going back.
After two years, P. decided it was time to own our own home again. He looked at the other side of the D.C. ‘burbs. It wasn’t as built up there. He found a house. We agreed- it just wasn’t for us. I had been watching the signs and I knew the housing market was finally falling. No, that wasn’t to be. P. insisted on buying the house even though we had agreed not to. So we moved. Two hours from my closest friends.
Just so you know…you’re not special
I originally posted this on an infidelity support board, I am reposting it here.
a vent letter to the cheating husbands…or those thinking of cheating.
She’s chasing after you? Giving you coy smiles? Rubbing up against you? Leaning in, filling the air around you with her perfume?
You feel chased after? Wanted? Desired?
You’re not special. You’ve come across a woman that knows how easily men are led around by their egos. She’s feeding her own ego by seeing how easily you become a mass of hormones. She likely throws it out there to anyone, hoping for a bite.
The phone call, the welcoming voice in your ear. Why isn’t you wife like that towards you? Because she already feels safe, secure. Unlike this woman, she’s not seeking something that hasn’t been given to her. She is content with what she has.
You.
If she doesn’t act it, think first…do you always act like a man newly in love towards your wife? Why expect of her what you don’t give?
Instead, you’re letting your eyes wander. Soon it will be your mind, body, maybe even heart.
All for a woman who needed to eat a part of your soul to feed the emptiness that is hers.
If she’s chasing you, it’s because she thinks your an easy mark. People don’t go after rejection. So stop. Think with the head made for that task. Go show your wife some of the attention you crave and it will be returned in ways that hollow woman grasping after you never could.
