I posted this yesterday in the wrong forum since I'm a newb. Sorry for the obnoxious length – I had a lot to get off of my chest.
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I guess it all started when my husband (of almost eight years now and who has been my partner for 14) got a DUI while I was out of state visiting my family Labor Day weekend. I was, of course, upset and disappointed about the DUI (it’s expensive, after all), but never yelled or got mad at him. Driving when you’ve had too much is a very human mistake, and it’s one that I have made more than I’d like to admit. So I get it, and I just tried to be as supportive as I could be.
My husband has never gotten in trouble before and felt terrible about himself. And for the first time in his adult life, he couldn’t drink or smoke pot, which made it hard for him to stay home and relax. So he started going out almost every night.
My husband is a musician in two bands, and he works for a nonprofit here in town that is centered around music. He’s always gone to shows and always been busy with music. But this was a new level, and to make matters worse, when he was home, he wasn’t really there.
The one night a week he’d grace me with his presence, he wouldn’t talk to me. He’d look at his phone silently from the other end of the couch, as I pointlessly tried to get him to talk to me about anything at all. At one point during this phase, I broke down and told him I was lonely. I asked him if he could just be home a couple more nights a week.
He got irritated and basically told me that he needed to be out because he couldn’t stay home. He felt too anxious without being able to smoke, and being out was the only time he felt OK.
Also during this time, he stopped touching me. We’re not every-night kind of folks, but our sex life was fairly consistent over the past few years. And even if we weren’t having sex, he’s always been an affectionate person. That all changed though; he didn’t even want to have sex on our anniversary. And that’s the main reason I started believing that he was likely having an affair.
This goes on for most of October, and then the 18th or 19th, I go to a show with him, and I met this woman (I’ll call her Other Woman from here on out). I knew right away something was weird. He’s always been friends with women, but at shows, he generally says a quick hi to his friends and then watches the band with me. This woman stuck around and hung out with us, and then her husband came and hung out, too. My husband acted like it was nothing, so I tried to brush off my doubts.
I tried to quell my suspicions and told myself that she’s married, it’s OK, but the doubts still lingered. She’s blond and kind of petite, like me, which is his type. And they openly flirted in front of both me and her husband, but we were having fun, so who cares about a little flirting, right? We then proceeded to hang out with Other Woman and her husband a few more times.
Then comes Halloween. We watched Hocus Pocus and handed out candy, and I thought we were having a good night. I also thought that maybe we’d have sex later...finally.
We didn’t. He saw that I was getting sleepy and said, “Do you mind if I go out if you’ll be asleep anyway? This is the last show at this venue in town, and I really, really would love to go.” I said OK and tried not to show him how disappointed I was.
The next morning, he casually mentioned that he hung out with Other Woman. He said he was picking her up to go to the show but that they ended up getting drinks (he can’t drink, remember?) with her coworkers instead (something he would only reluctantly do for me even when he was able to drink). I point-blank asked him what was going on and why he didn’t tell me he’d be picking her up. He said he didn’t even think about it and wasn’t trying to hide it, but that he’d never cheat on me.
I then proceeded to tell him that I believed him, but that if he feels himself falling for someone else to please take a step back and think of me. He said OK but was dismissive and a little defensive.
The next evening (Nov 1), we hung out with Other Woman and her husband again. We spent the entire night drinking. After we’ve had a few, the boys start talking and the girls start talking.
She and her husband had also been together for a long time — 13 years (which is fairly unique considering we’re all in our early 30s), and she starts telling me about how she wishes she had been with more people and asking me if I felt the same way. I say no, and that I think it would take a long time for it to even be good with someone else.
Later on, she starts telling me that she thinks she’s polyamorous and has the “capacity to love more than just one person.” I tell her that that’s cool but not for me.
Then we meet our other friends at the bar, who know both my husband and Other Woman (he taught drums to both of them). She (the drum teacher’s wife) buys me a shot and then starts to talk to me while everyone else was in the other room watching the band. She tells me how f-ed up she thinks my husband’s relationship with Other Woman is (I blacked out so I only know because she told me later), and then I get super upset about my suspicions being validated in such a way that I start to run home from the bar crying (suuuper drunk mind you). I guess Other Woman ran after me for a second, and I told her to f-off, among other things.
My husband eventually collects me a of couple of miles down the road, and we Uber home. I only remember patches of that evening, but it comes out somehow that he’s also polyamorous, or thinks he is or something.
The next morning, he makes me feel terrible about how I treated Other Woman and about the things I said to him. I guess I told him I hated that he needed to be “best friends” with so many other women, that I was leaving and that I wanted to kill myself multiple times that night, but I don’t remember.
The next morning, I am so hungover that I feel like I might actually die, and I send Other Woman a message over Instagram, apologizing profusely for my behavior and feeling terrible for what I don’t remember saying. We were supposed to have her and her husband over that night to play Risk, and I begged them to please still come.
She accepts my apology, and then she and her husband come to our house. Everyone is drinking except me (since I’m deathly hungover), and I have a terrible night. She’s wearing yoga pants, and my husband clearly checks her out multiple times in front of both me and her husband — not great. Also, by this point, I’m all but certain there’s something going on but still trying to tell myself that it’s nothing.
The next day, my husband and I really start to talk about the polyamory thing, and it comes out that he’s “always wanted” to be with other people throughout our entire relationship, making me question every minute we’ve ever had together. I spend most of the day crying about how I’m not enough. He tells me that’s not it, that he loves me, but that he just feels like he has “too much love to give.” He tells me that he’s going to be brutally honest with me about it, even if it hurts me, because he believes honesty is the most important thing. He also staunchly denies that there’s anything going on with Other Woman.
I do some research and learn more about polyamory, trying to accept it but knowing that I really will never be able to live like that. And then I ask Other Woman to meet with me, so she could tell me a little more about her experience exploring polyamory and her husband’s take on it (who is a monogamist, like me, and was upset about it, too).
I meet with her and cry to her about how my husband wants to be in love with someone else. She tells me that it’s upsetting to hear that you’re not compatible this late in the game, but that it just might be the reality of the situation. She also tells me that they’re just friends and that she’s not a threat to my relationship but will stop being friends with him if I want her to. I stupidly tell her that I’m glad he has such a good friend during this tough time and that I would never presume to tell anyone who they could be friends with.
The week was terrible. I missed a couple of days of work and thought my relationship was over. My husband wavered between feeling bad that he hurt me, asking me not to leave him and acting like I was totally overreacting and that I needed to get over it. We get through the week and find a shaky peace that weekend.
Then, on Sunday 11/9, my husband gets a call from Other Woman (who is traveling out of town for work or something). He sees it’s her, and then immediately runs outside to the front yard to take the call. I ask him why he need privacy if nothing was going on with them, and he says he doesn’t know.
Then he tells me that she got a text from her husband that said, “I know what you did with ___.” He tells me they didn’t do anything, so he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
We then go about our day running errands around town, all the while, my husband is constantly checking his phone waiting to hear back from Other Woman about what her husband thinks they did.
Finally, he gets the call while we’re at Barnes and Noble. I give him his space while he talks to her for probably 30 minutes. He then gets in the car crying and tells me they can’t be friends or even talk anymore.
After probing him for several minutes about why, he admits that her husband found her diary, detailing the fact that they were in love with each other.
I start crying on the way home, almost wrecking the car, and then we get home and he begs me not to leave him. He tells me he’s sorry and that he loves me, has always loved me and has never stopped loving me, even through this. He tells me that nothing physical ever happened between them, not even a kiss, and that they tried to just be friends by making it a point to hang out with their spouses.
I try to be level-headed about the whole thing, but the reality is that I’m just in denial. And then, a few days later, I really start to feel it, and the crisis begins.
Now, a little more than two months later, we’re in marriage counseling and trying to work through it, and it’s a day to day thing. I’ve gotten to the point where I have moments of happiness, but I spend a lot of my time hurt and angry.
After finally admitting to himself that he had an emotional affair (at first, he very much believed that he did absolutely nothing wrong because he didn’t have sex with her), he now feels terrible and is questioning everything about his life and who he is. He’s thinking about quitting his bands, leaving his job and even moving to a new city if I would go with him. He says he’s depressed and that he hates himself for what he did and just wants to be the person I need him to be.
He also says that he loves me and wants to be with me, but now I feel like the consolation prize. I’m now that crazy, jealous, paranoid wife who disregards her husband’s privacy in an attempt to ease her own insecurity, and I found a message he sent to his friend a couple of weeks into recovery.
He said that he feels bad about everything, but on top of everything else, he misses Other Woman, and that it was nice to have someone love him for who he really is for once. Ouch, and that certainly didn’t help with the consolation prize feeling.
I want to be with him, I really do, but after everything, how do I trust anything he says? How do I believe that he wants to be with me — and just me, which is what I really need out of a relationship? How do I stop comparing myself to her and hating the way look and talk and act, and that I’m not this cool, bisexual, polyamorous girl who plays the drums and wants to have threesomes?
I can’t even get to the bottom of what they talked about, the timeline of all of it or if they were actually in love, because he says he doesn’t remember. How can he not remember if he was really in love?
While I hate the fact that he had feelings for someone else, I’ve also had feelings during our relationship, but the difference is that I never shared them with the other person or had a secret relationship with them behind my husband’s back. What I really hate is that he lied so often, even after telling me that he was being honest. I hate that he could so easily disregard my feelings. I hate that he forced me to hang out with this woman because he just couldn’t stand not having her in his life, even though, at that point, he knew his relationship was over the line. I hate that he told that he was in love with her. How can you love someone you’ve never even seen without makeup on or had an argument with? His cavalier use of the word makes me feel like love doesn’t matter to him.
I sort of hate the fact that they didn’t have sex. I guess I’m glad that he at least had the foresight to draw the line, but in my opinion, the fact that he allowed himself to get so far in that relationship that he was able to fall in love with her is so much worse than a purely physical relationship. And if they had been physical, at least there would be no question as to whether or not he had an actual affair from him or any of the other people who know.
I also hate the fact that I tried to open up to Other Woman. I’m an introvert and have always only had a few close friends with a lot of friendly acquaintances, and it’s never been easy for me to really reach out to people. I was really trying to tell myself that I was crazy about my suspicions, and I genuinely thought we could be friends. The fact that it was so easy for her to lie to me hurts, too.
I don’t want to give up our life together. I love my husband, and I know he loves me. He’s the person I send funny memes to, and when anything at all happens, he’s the first person I want to tell. I hate the fact that he hurt me, but he’s been my best friend for almost 15 years; I can’t just give up on that, can I?
But I feel like, at this point, we’ve said everything there is to say on the matter to each other and that we’re stuck with no way to move forward. I guess I just want to know, will it ever get better?