What I know and what I don’t

I’ve been lurking on this site since October 2023 and other than a couple posts thanking a member for their insights, I haven’t been actively contributing. I decided to write my story today for my profile (because I just read how to read others’ profiles), and I found it very therapeutic, so I wanted to give it a wider share. So here goes and thank you all…this site has helped me a lot.

D-Day was Aug. 11, 2023. I had known/felt for a while that something was off with my husband of 21 years, but I chalked it up to him being overworked at a stressful job and having just turned 50 in April (and him telling me that nothing was wrong). But on that day, driving home together on our hour-long commute from work from a busy tourist town in the height of summer, with me in the driver’s seat, I sideways glanced at him and flat out asked, "Are you having an affair?"

I sort of 80% believed that the answer was going to be no. But after he tried to change the subject by claiming he saw a moose (what the mind will do when it’s stressed, right?), and after I asked again, "Are you having an affair," he said, "Yes."

Then that weird wave of tingling and numbness, somehow at the same time, washed over me while I was trying to concentrate on driving while listening to my husband tell me who the affair was with (someone he met at his work), how long it had been going on (complicated because he had known her for about 4 years, been in an EA for what he said was about 6 months but was probably longer, and in a PA for 3 months), how I didn’t have to worry about a pregnancy because she was 10 years older than he (not to mention maybe because he’d had a vasectomy 22 years prior that seem to have taken…again, what a stressed brain will make the mouth blurt out), and that he thought he loved her.

Since then we’ve talked a lot of things over and he has taken full responsibility for his actions and we’ve both been to therapy and the whole nine. It’s now July of 2024 when I’m finally writing this, and we seem to be in a good place, but I still look at him sometimes and wonder if it’s love keeping me here, or complacency, or fear. So now I am trying to define love, and fear (I am all too familiar with complacency). And because we’re trying radical honesty with each other, he knows this.

And we’re working on staying together, although he knows it’s not a done deal for me while I work on myself and what I want for myself (including a post-nup). And this site is helping me navigate and keep my head on straight while I make some pretty heavy decisions and hope that it turns out to be love after all.

2 comments posted: Thursday, June 20th, 2024