Here’s my story.
Part I
I will be honest with you, I was surprised to login today and see how many people had read and liked my first post. It was truly a shock. I thought for some reason, I would literally just be writing this into the void, for me. But I’ve found that for many, whether it because it resonated, or just because you’re here for the juicy details, it is interesting. And I hope this series will help you.
Well, before we can really talk about infidelity, you probably need to know what happened to me. If this story sounds familiar to you, it’s probably because you’ve been betrayed before too.
Throughout my discovery and recovery, I learned this: nearly all cheaters follow a very similar pattern. Cheating is old as time, and the “tricks and secrets” haven’t really changed much because, well, they are pretty tried and true.
I was married fairly young — my ex and I were both 22 at the time.
Our marriage progressed pretty typically, we had two children, had a couple pets, had purchased a house. We lived a pretty typical suburban life. In mid-2016 (we had been married nine years), we became friends with a new couple. We had known this couple for several years, but had not really been “friends” with them, so to say. However, we had a lot of mutual friends and through the mutual friends, we got to know them.
We did pretty typical “couple” things. We went out with them, hung out with them, went on trips with them. You know, normal things. At some point, however, my ex-wife and the husband in this couple started chatting separately from the group. To be clear, I and the wife in the couple did not have a separate chat. We had the group chat, and then there was my ex (who I will call Claire) and the husband (who I will call Paul).
They shared common interests, they were both into weightlifting and fitness, and to be honest, at the beginning I really didn’t think much of it. But over the months, it did seem that they had become quite close. They had inside jokes, they would meet up for lunch without me and the other spouse, they would go weightlifting together, they texted each other all the time, etc.
At some point, someone anonymously messaged me and said, “Aren’t you a little suspicious of Claire and Paul’s relationship?” And to be honest, I was a little bit at this point. But I also experienced some trauma early in my life (I’ll get into that at some other point) and so I wasn’t sure if I was seeing something that wasn’t there, and I didn’t want to make accusations when I really had no evidence. But I will admit, that someone else felt this way about them did bother me.
By March of 2017, my and Claire’s relationship seemed different and to be honest, seemed very sudden in the nature of its change. She seemed withdrawn and our physical relationship, which I would have probably described in 2016 as fairly infrequent, but at least robust, was basically non-existent. She always made excuses to not be intimate, which was not something that we previously experienced.
In April of 2017, I asked her if something was wrong in our marriage and she said there was. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to still be with me, that we had grown apart (which was surprising to me), and she didn’t feel the same way about me she once did. She said she could just use some space.
I wallowed in despair for a few days before I finally had the nerve to ask her, “Is something happening with Paul?”
“Absolutely not, why would you think that?”
I told her about how I felt it was a little odd they had a very separate relationship and I even brought up the anonymous message.
I was told, in no uncertain terms, that nothing was happening, that they were just friends, and that anything in our relationship was a result of insufficiencies with me. Of course, I spiraled downward. My marriage was failing, and it was because of me. It hurt so bad because we had two young children, had just purchased our dream home a year prior, and I was facing the possibility of divorce. I didn’t really understand it. I was the primary caretaker of our children. I cooked all the meals for our household. While I’m sure I was not perfect, I was a doting husband who wanted nothing more than to provide for my family.
Over the next month, Claire didn’t want to really talk about the marriage. I was begging her to stay with me and she told me that she wasn’t sure. Meanwhile, my suspicions continued with her and Paul. In late April, Claire told me that Paul’s wife was leaving him. Not “divorcing” but they were going to seperate and Paul was hurting badly.
The timing of this seemed to be all too coincidental.
In early May 2017, Claire was scheduled to attend a conference downtown (we lived only about 20 minutes outside the city). She told me that she was going to go into her work, park there, and then around 1 pm, she would leave work and go park at the convention center. Around 10 am, though, I was just looking through our joint checking account and noticed a charge for her work garage (where you pay as you leave at around 9:45 am). This was much earlier than the 1 pm she stated.
I knew that Paul lived only a few minutes from the convention center, so I got in my car to see if I could confirm my suspicions. When I pulled up to Paul’s apartment building, Claire’s car was, in fact, parked outside.
It was the strangest combination of being punched in the gut, but also having just an insane amount of adrenaline pumping through my veins. “I wasn’t crazy! I was right, she was cheating on me,” I thought.
I walked up to Paul’s door and knocked. Claire opened the door.
“What’s going on here?” I asked. “Can we talk outside, please?” she responded.
I told her I couldn’t believe she was doing this to me.
“Doing what?”
“Doing what?! You lied to me and you’re at Paul’s house!”
Instead of even denying it outright, she calmly told me, exasperation in her voice, that once again, I was attempting to sabotage our marriage over something that wasn’t based in fact. That Paul had told her he was feeling very depressed, even suicidal about his wife leaving him and called Claire. Claire, desperate to help her friend, didn’t have time to call me to tell me where she was going.
“I’m not sure what needs to happen, but you’re sabotaging this marriage and refuse to believe me, and you’re calling me liar.”
I was stunned. I was sabotaging our marriage. My reality, or so I thought, was wrong. Here she was, asking me for space, trying to help out her friend who was in trouble, and I was calling her a liar and a cheat. Why was I doing this? Why was I insistent on finding evidence of her cheating when that’s not what was happening?
I apologized profusely to her, and to Paul, for making an inappropriate accusation, and I promised her I would seek help. I made an appointment with a therapist.
I walked into the therapist’s office the first time and explained to them my problems. That I was attempting to sabotage my marriage but that I felt like the world was collapsing upon me. I felt like reality was no longer real. My therapist told me that it sounded like I’d been living with Generalized Anxiety Disorder for quite some time and that I definitely needed to seek counseling and I would continue to see her.
At this time, Claire, the kids, and I had scheduled a trip to Disney World for the end of the month — we had made the plans for over a year, but I wasn’t even excited to go. Claire was still non-committal about our relationship, and we were scheduled to leave for Disney in less than two weeks. I told Claire that if we hadn’t reconciled, I didn’t want to go to Disney. I couldn’t pretend to be a big happy family when it might have been the end of our marriage
I was sitting at work — therapy had been going well — when I received a text from Claire.
“I want to try to work things out with you.”
It was very, very much out of the blue. But I was thrilled, just beside myself with excitement. I hadn’t ruined my marriage! She still wanted to be with me! I still had my family! We could go to Disney and be the happy family we always were meant to be.
“I do need to tell you something though, I did kiss Paul. It was just once and it was in his car after we had lunch. It was a mistake and didn’t happen again, but it happened.”
She went on to tell me this was after I confronted them about what happened at Paul’s apartment and she was sad about our marriage, and he was sad about his, and they just had an emotional moment and it happened. But it was just once and never happened again.
Looking back on it, I have no idea why, but I just really didn’t care that much. I almost understood what she was saying. And I was just so thrilled that she chose me, that I told her I could get past it, and it was fine and we’d figure everything out.
I wish that was it. I wish that was the end of my story. But at the time, the trickle truth had only just begun.
This is end of Part I.
