My husband is a conservative evangelical minister. We've been married 14 1/2 years, two children, and growing on different paths for a long time. The first six years of our marriage he was involved with a very toxic religious organization that told him, within months of us inviting its leader to co-officiate with my father at our wedding, that I if I didn't accept the church's (very unconventional) teachings, he could divorce me. We met studying religion together ... I aced my courses, so it's not like I didn't know what I was talking about. It was bizarre and eventually the situation blew up, at which point he chose me and we moved forward.
Fast forward to today. He's everything I had hoped to have been married to when we first graduated school in terms of a minister, but my faith has been severely shaken and marred from multiple failed attempts at having another go at the church scene and it's definitely not what I want anymore. I keep trying to support him, though, and I get behind everything he's doing, but he keeps taking things to an extreme level, and I'm shutting down. He's feeling less and less able to talk to me about the thing he cares about the most ... his church ... which we support financially, and he works for (less than) minimum wage full time.
He carries a normal full-time job on top of the ministry to offset the lack of church income, which means he's out of the house 80+ hours a week. I've begged him to slow down, but when he doesn't, I pursue my masters degree, and counter his arguments that I'm not available with the idea that neither is he. We're a "power couple" in the community, or so it would seem on the outside.
DDay was 10/10/18 for me ... He's been texting multiple women within and without the church for years, and apparently the pattern of intimacy has been escalating. In his mind, it's counseling, but he's been slipping into patterns of talking to these women all hours of the day and beginning to have no problem telling them that he loves them. (I mean, it's gone from "Jesus loves you" to "Love ya, sis!" to "I love you" "I love you" "I love you")
In 2017, one girl (the main OW) he is close to (made her his unofficial secretary) has her hubby leave her for another women. I kid you not, he guilts me into allowing her to come move in with us. I'm just not ministry-minded enough if I say no! So she moves in and we have a heck of a time getting her back on her feet and out of the house. But in the meantime, she and I become fast friends. However, I keep pulling him aside to talk to him about his interactions with her. I keep catching him looking at her in a way he's only looked at me in the past and doing very intimate family things (playing games with the kids when I'm studying, cooking big breakfasts on the weekends before I get up). I keep telling me it makes me really uncomfortable. He says sorry, but doesn't change. She also says and does some really bizarre things while she's living with us and I make the running joke that people are going to mistake us for a "big love" type of family based on her behavior. How little did I know how right I really was. Apparently she was crushing on my hubby while she lived with us.
Finally she moves out, and I think thank goodness, it's over, but as I pull away from investing in her and focus on my studies and career, he keeps in touch with the OW. Later he'll tell me he was just trying to be a good minister and make sure she was okay, but he's meeting up with her and "forgetting" to tell me, and doing "counseling" sessions over lunch and dinner. Taking the kids to go see her and inviting her to softball games I'm not present for (kids are 4 and 11). She's texting him on weekends I'm out of town begging him to come over, and in general he's becoming her handyman and doing all sorts of household favors for her as she shifts gears to being single.
He begins telling her he loves her and to stay single for a while while she mends from her broken relationship with her husband. He's out with her either "ministering" or just doing personal, non-church stuff at least three days a week, and they are texting and having deep conversations every single day. I pulled the text and FB message log, and verified by phone logs. I knew she and I were close, but I HAD NO IDEA their intimacy level was so high. All I knew was that when I took breaks from school, my husband didn't come home to me, and when he was there, he was emotionally absent.
I actually cried to her at one point that I didn't want to be a pastor's wife anymore and wasn't sure we were going to make it; that I was constantly felt that there was another woman, but I couldn't figure out who it was. Stupid ... it was the two people I had come to trust most.
Anyway, I found their texts, and later, others with other women that I think helped build it up in his mind that this type of behavior was "okay." He had been flirting with her since his 40th birthday two years ago, long before he moved her in. They keep trying to steer the conversation back to being "kosher," but they both gush over each other constantly, tease playfully, and she calls him her "best friend." Meanwhile, he's constantly proclaiming his love for her and meeting up with her alone. I had a panic attack that day and had to take several days off of work because I couldn't function anymore (I work mainly from home). We live in a blooming parsonage. A parsonage!!!
For two months, he denied his behavior was wrong and called me crazy because I had to take an SRI after I found out, until I got professional help to have an intervention for him. I had also taken an SRI while she was living with us ... and I remind him of this timeline. After we went to marriage counseling, he's finally admitted to having no boundaries, but won't acknowledge responsibility other than inadvertently hurting me and not working hard enough on our marriage. Other than that, he's "just not attracted to anyone" and all these women, especially the main OW, are "just friends." He says technically, by his actions, you could say he had an emotional affair, but largely, he blows this whole thing off as something I just need to forgive him for and move forward from because his "intentions" were pure. That's also the advice he's getting from his family .. and mine. I've given him a lengthy discussion on the difference between intentions and actions ... you can intend to pay your bills, but that doesn't mean anything if your actions don't line up. I'm afraid the counselor let us go too early because I said I was happy with the initial results I was seeing ... but as soon as we got the sign off, he reverted to acting like he'd done nothing wrong.
We're leaving the church and moving. I've never been so happy, and I hate that it's a happy thing to have to leave. But I've spent three months alone and being gaslit ... felt like I was losing my mind ... I'm a professional with a great career and a lot of respect in my workplace, but this man has me so mixed up and vulnerable. The past three weeks I've no longer worked from home, and it's had a tremendous improvement on my well-being to be around normal, healthy people again. One person from the church knows, and they blame me. Awesome.
Part of me wants revenge, another part of me wants to wait and see if we can still truly work it out. I just don't know what's going to happen since he keeps minimizing his actions.
What happens when your closest link to God cheats on you then tells you you're the crazy one for calling it cheating?
[This message edited by textingministry at 12:23 PM, January 20th (Sunday)]