My Faults Do Not Justify My Wife’s Bad Choices
Coming to terms with change can be incredibly difficult, particularly when there’s a lot of pain involved. Even worse is accepting your role in that same change. It’s important, though, as there is no growth or healing without it, just like understanding what role you didn’t play.
This is the journey I find myself on in the wake of finding out my soon-to-be ex-wife cheated on me. Accepting and understanding that my faults and failures as a husband do not rationalize her bad choices has been one of the hardest parts of this ongoing experience.
It’s Easy to Blame Yourself
The default setting. That’s what it feels like sometimes. When something goes wrong, it’s easiest to blame yourself. You want to know who is at fault and it’s always so very easy to put yourself at the center of the shitstorm. For some people, it’s almost second nature.
As odd as this is going to seem, that’s selfish and egotistical. Not everything can be your fault. Many of the things that go wrong in your life have little or nothing to do with you. To be more precise, you didn’t do anything to cause it because you simply couldn’t have.
That something I’ve struggled with for years. I don’t do well when it comes to rolling with the punches and tend to put the blame for anything that goes wrong on myself. Then, I try to fix things. It took me a long time to realize how arrogant all of that was.
In truth, I needed to learn to give up control of my life in some ways. The more out of control I felt, the more I struggled to find solid ground. I was drowning in own insecurities and didn’t even realize it. Even worse, I didn’t realize what any of this was doing to my wife.
Being Unhappy Isn’t a Crime
I knew she was unhappy to an extent. Instead of trying to really help, her feelings became another problem I blamed myself for and tried to fix. That was my biggest mistake. She wasn’t unhappy because of me and I couldn’t fix things for her. But me constantly beating myself up over it just made things worse.
There’s nothing wrong with being unhappy. It happens. What’s important is how you handle it. What I wish my wife had done was sat down with me and talked about where she was at. We could have gone to counselling or taken a break from each other. There were options.
Instead, she decided to hide everything from me, to lie anytime I tried to engage her. Then, I filled in the blanks on my own and put myself at the center of her issues, which was unfair to her. I understand how hard it would have been to talk to me about these problems. I get why she wanted to avoid the conversation. It wasn’t one I was anxious to have, either.
Regardless, her unhappiness doesn’t justify the choices she did make. Lying to me. Cheating on me. Hurting me in ways I’ll be unraveling for the rest of my life. Tearing our family apart, leaving both myself and our kids wondering what the hell had happened.
It’s Not Your Fault
What I have been working to understand is that all of this was my wife’s choice, not mine. She did what she thought was best in the situation that confronted her. She was, of course, 100% wrong, but she made the decisions she believed were best for her at the time.
Accepting that none of this was about me has been incredibly difficult. She cheated because of something inside of her, not because of something I had done. I had to accept that our marriage couldn’t be fixed because she had been one foot out the door since the day she said, “I do.”
I certainly played a part in our marriage ending. I know that. I also know that nothing I did or didn’t do gave her license to behave that way. If she wanted out, she should have said she was done. Instead, she emotionally beat me up until I finally tapped out. I may have “officially” ended our marriage but she left me with no other options. That was her plan.
It’s been years and I’m still working on the acceptance portion of all of this. Having the divorce finalized will certainly help, though that is nowhere in sight. Still, I at least understand that everything isn’t my fault. Maybe I’ll find a way to grow into a better man from all of this. It’s not the brightest rainbow after a storm but I’ll take what I can get.
