Me, 37
WH, 39
Together 11 years, married for 8, 3 kids
2 affairs in past 4 years, d-day for both June 2022

Whelp, I’m new here 👋

I am glad to have found this resource as I navigate this new topic in my life that I never wanted to know anything about. In June my husband returned from a work trip, after a month of acting really off and saying some alarming things in regards to our marriage. I went through his phone and found three weeks worth of messages with his AP. A woman he had met at the end of April on a work trip works in his industry. They met up in person two times after that also on mutual work trips and talked in between.

The utter shock I felt seeing those messages still shakes me to my core to think about. Her initials "KG" Labeled the chat and are seared in my brain and my hands shake just picturing that moment. I left the house with his phone without telling him what I had found, called my oldest, best girlfriend and met her and we scrolled through them. He had realized within five minutes of my leaving what had happened, and was calling me to bring his things back. I ignored him. I had no idea what I was going to find out, if he wanted to leave our marriage, anything. But I just had the strangest, most shocked calmness throughout. I messaged the woman and told her what I had found, I corrected some of the lies he had told her in regards to his and my marriage, our (active) sex life, etc. And I finally went home and faced him. He admitted to everything, told me that he wanted to stay in our marriage, and owned it all of this was because of him. And the few days that followed we met with our marriage counselor, who we had met with once prior because I had found him due to the crazy things my husband was saying during the month of May. Obviously in that first meeting the therapist and I were unaware that my husband was being unfaithful, but he has been a great resource since. In the first week following the day my husband seemed to realize a lot of things about himself which seem crazy to me he could possibly not have known. That he has a lot of the behaviors of a sex addict, especially around pornography. That he has had such an avoidant attachment style and has stuffed down his feelings for so long, that he had become completely emotionally disconnected from me, and more recently our family life. But he realized this recent affair and the one-week affair he had on a trip three years ago that came out in the d day period (she was seated next to him on a flight To London) was the result of him creating this false narrative to himself that these women basically fell into his lap who were attractive and attracted to him and that they had some sort of special connection, "this sort of thing doesn’t just happen". He was in full on limerince with the most recent woman, and after in the first hour of our D-Day talk he expressed that he should maybe call her and explain that he wouldn’t be talking to her anymore, and my telling him that that was unacceptable and if he had any hope of us working on that he would never have any contact with her again, she agreed. He blocked all of her ways of contacting him, and even got a completely different work phone with a new number. He has taken a brand new job in hopes of establishing less travel and a better work life balance. He enthusiastically is meeting with our marriage counselor, has found himself an individual therapist who he sees weekly, and has An appointment next week with a psychologist at the sexual wellness center in our city, to learn more about some of the sex addict characteristics of his behavior. He says that this felt like a near death experience, that he has been living his life in an increasingly foggier state over the past three years and that for the first time that fog is gone. He says he had convinced himself our marriage had fizzled out, but realizes now that was just another false narrative he was telling himself. He has given me full access to all his technology, he has stopped watching pornography. He spends at least an hour every day listening to podcasts and audiobooks about affairs. In short (actually in length sorry for the novel) he is "doing everything right".

But none of this changes the devastation I feel 95% of every day since this happened. None of it stops the intrusive thoughts. None of it stops the obsessing about the other woman. None of it stops what feels like my out of control mind and out of control emotions. I wish there was a roadmap for what comes next. Because I mostly feel stuck as I try and figure out whether his transformation is enough for me to want to stay in this marriage. I told him on D-Day in that weird state of calm that I don’t know where it came from, that I would never tear our family apart without knowing I had left it all on the table. I am committed to trying and staying around to watch him try. But I often feel stuck. This was so long, thanks for reading.

8 comments posted: Sunday, August 14th, 2022