Our 10th wedding anniversary with my wife (36, I’m 38) is coming up at the end of May. We have been together for a total of 15 years and for the majority of our relationship, we have had an amazing marriage. We met in the city of Chicago and it was a fairy tale story. We had great families (for the most part) and I couldn’t picture falling in love with someone the way that we did, it was perfect. I am going to skip the character development of us before we had serious problems but the TLDR is that we had a great marriage. We had/have similar interests, we both had ups and downs that we were there for one another for and everyone was great.
Fast forward to 2018 and we wanted to have children. We tried for a long while before finally seeking help via infertility treatments. After 8 IUI’s, and 4 IVF’s we had our beautiful, brilliant daughter. For those of you who aren’t familiar with infertility treatments, it’s a lot. Its a lot financially, its a lot emotionally, but mostly its extremely hard on the mothers. We spent countless nights me poking and prodding her with hormone injections and it made the whole process of what is supposed to be the world’s miracle, such a stressful and uncertain thing. Despite it being hard, we made it out and we have our amazing daughter because of it. Our daughter was born in late 2019 and at just a few months old, the world changed for all of us. What started as an already stressful situation to conceive, now had the added layer of both of us working full time in excellent careers from home while trying to juggle a new born baby. We are both great parents, but this was the beginnings of us starting to become more angry and argumentative towards one another. We had the harsh realization that we didn’t have the support system we didn’t really know how much we’d need. Our parents help, but neither live in the same town and neither really understand the try hardships of not having their help when we need it. I know we aren’t the first couple of person to be alone raising a child, but this started to make less time for us as husband and wife, and more time as parents to our daughter. We both would argue about this, my wife saying she needed more and me trying the best I knew how to make sure that she still knew she was loved. I look back at this and wish I could do more, but I also know in my heart that I was a stable, caring, loving partner to her and I knew that there’s a reason couples statistically have the hardest time together when their kids are a young age. During this time my wife’s father was also battling cancer of the blood. He has been in remission for a few years but now it was back. My wife loved me even more for the son-in-law I was to him. He always wanted the son to talk football with, go golfing with and just do typical guy things with. In the winter of 2021, he passed away suddenly in his home with my mother in law. It was devastating for the family and especially for my wife. She had a closer relationship to him that her mother and had a really hard time dealing with his death. It also put in the position to now be there for not only my wife, but my mother in law as he has always done everything in regards to their life from a stand point of how to pay the bills, how to change a tire, how to get the mail, he did a lot for his wife and I had to take over that role and did so eagerly and with pride. I can’t imagine losing a parent, but both my wife and mother in law seem to be healing. We’ve been helping my mother in law look for a new, smaller place to live so that she can be closer to us which would be great for the help. Take all of this, add on covid, a lack of help and a multitude of other factors out of our control, we had a lot thrown at us. At the time we knew we were only given what we could handle and that we would come out on top.
During these years the company I worked for was acquired, and it was great for us financially. It at least alleviated that stress from our lives. It wasn’t life changing money forever, but it was a great cushion for us at the time. With the support of my wife, I/we decided to pursue my own business with the vision of being even more successful for ourselves and our family. I believe in enough is enough, but we were having fun growing in our careers at young ages. We always pushed each other to grow in that aspect and had fun doing it. A part of those changes also urged my wife to change departments within her work so that we could have more opportunity. She was moving to sales with the opportunity to make 5x+ what she was making at her current role at the time. We were seeming to find our groove as parents and as husband and wife again in an absolutely crazy world. We were considering moving to Montana (among other places) since remote work was possible and we felt care free about any decision we were making. In hindsight we were both also becoming more focused on our own individual journeys than each other. We chalked it up to not having the support we needed to go have date nights or vacations with just the two of us. All of our events were as a total family, which was great but there was less and less time for just the two of us. For the few times we did vacation or spend time together just the two of us, its like we were our young selves again and realized that we loved each other and the other stresses seemed to melt away for that brief period of time.
In the summer of 2022 we decided to move to a suburb of Chicago. We had a network of friends in Chicago and we didn’t want to move to any town and be even more on our own so we landed on a suburb and we absolutely love it. My wife was also starting to thrive in her work. She was landing those big deals and for the first time in our marriage, she was making substantially more than me who was still trying to make the new business work. This also came at the price of the stress she had due to this. She would tell me how stressed she was that we took on this new house and all that comes with it and that our entire financial livelihood was on her. I did everything in my power to reassure her that I was working to change that, and that I’d get a full time job again and give up the business because it wasn’t worth it for us. The business was growing, but not to the point where it was as much or more than I was providing before. The last 18 months have had me working now 2 "full time jobs" and a multitude of other side projects to bring in money. I have never had issues in my life with the jobs Ive had and have always excelled, but these jobs were a worse case scenario. Let go for no reason, lied to and just flat out treated unfairly.
This is when things started to get their worse. My wife was getting more and more stressed about her job and providing, we were spending less and less time on each other and my approach was to try to work harder and harder on the things that I thought were the biggest stresses (me not filling the gap with our financial situation). That meant me staying up late and working in my office, with the door shut while my wife watched shows and went to bed. Our routine for the past ~6 months was me in my office from 8pm till midnight, or even up to 3am trying all I could to work what jobs I could find (I work in tech so these jobs are often contract positions to create things for clients which allows me to work various hours). We would still talk throughout the day and we would spend time together with our daughter. I was still present for all of the normal daily things, but at night I would spend it working. I also developed a very bad habit of being dependent on marijuana late at night during this time. Something I had a problem with in my college years and quit cold turkey and my life improved drastically. My wife and I did it together in 2021 as a way to let lose that it was now legal, but as my wife sort of stopped doing it, me being the extremist that I am started doing it more and more. I spent a few months doing it basically every night when I was done working, and sometimes even earlier in the day but it was making me into a shell of a person that I once was and my wife saw that. I was lost, depressed about what life was throwing at me and justified it as just a controllable addiction that I had since I was only doing it at night and not in excessive amounts. I was still functioning, I wasn’t letting it effect my mission to find another stable job, but it was absolutely sacrificing the time I could have been spending with my wife and that makes me so sad. We both needed each other at this time, I was lonely and she was lonely but we just didn’t connect. As our marriage started dissolving more, I scared myself into once again quitting cold turkey and have since then (this has been about two months) and really truthfully know that there’s no such thing as moderation for me. I have the will power quit things that I know are bad for me, but I can’t do things in moderation. I’m worried that any of that is just too little too late. It wasn’t a life long addiction, but man was it the wrong time to choose to do something like that.
We started fighting more, and my wife would tell me how I was a crappy husband for not being able to give her everything she needed. I could see her losing her faith in me and losing the pride she used to have of being my wife. She started making time for herself to go out with her girlfriends from work while Id stay home and watch our daughter. We share finances for the most part and one of our savings accounts that I had put money into from my previous job, we took out a substantial amount to pay off debts and relieve some pressure. She also started training to do fitness competitions, which she would say was her main priority and that she just wanted to focus on herself. She was getting so angry at me that she felt like I wasn’t there for her that she finally just told me she had basically given up on us, but wanted to be together for our daughter. We were so angry at each other at the time that in hindsight this is when I should have seeked counseling. I would ask her if it was completely over and she would leave an opening but she was very shut off emotionally. After months of these arguments, things started to finally show a bit of light. I found a better place for myself and started doing small gestures towards her that showed her that she was my priority. She always had been, but there was a dark, lonely time where everything just distracted me from that.
After a few weeks of this we went to a neighborhood party and came home and I heard her whispering in the bathroom. Her tone was soft and my heart just sunk because I just knew she was talking to another man. I overheard her in the room saying "I know, I know, I know and say she loves him": in a tone I haven’t heard her use with me in months. I opened the door and confronted her and she tried to act like it was one of her girlfriends but knew she had been caught in the act. She said she was too drunk to explain but I had to know. She said that this person who was a coworker (who she won’t name when I asked) reached out to her back in the end of January as they had a situation where he was married, had two kids and was living a separate life than his wife. She said it started as talks about that and grew into more. I asked her when she even had time to develop this relationship with someone given our crazy lives and she said shed been texting him while I was in my office at night working. I was and am so absolutely gutted to hear my wife tell another man that she loved him. Drunk or not, those are serious words and of course my mind spirals into thinking, this can’t just be a six week thing. She assures me it was just talking on the phone, but that he wanted to meet in person and she said sadly that she was becoming open to the idea. I felt so many emotions. My gut tells me it’s more but she won’t admit that. I knew that she just wanted someone to love her and show her attention, and for those months that it wasn’t me, she found it with someone else. I feel angry she can let that happen and risk our marriage and the life of our child for this. I feel angry at this man who has his own broken marriage trying to wreck another one. I just wish I could go back just a short amount of time and tell her every second how much she means to me. I only worked hard to try to solve one problem at a time. I still was more than great to her when she was cold to me, and her attitude 100% shifted towards me when she went to a work conference back in January. She said that’s when this relationship started with the other person, but she ensured me that there was nothing physical that happened on the trip cause he wasn’t there. (He reached out after the trip apparently 😒) I feel in my gut that something happened on that trip. That’s when she came home and gave up, told me I wasn’t enough for her, told me that I was holding her back, told me that she had nothing else to give, told me that our relationship wasn’t there anymore and that we are just doing this for our daughter. But man, that amount of time to fall in love with someone and give up on the lives we’ve built over the past 15 years?
That night I didn’t sleep at all and haven’t had thoughts and feelings like this ever in my life, it’s horrible. She came to me early that next morning and said she wanted to give us another shot and that she wanted to do counseling. I said I wanted to and we hugged. I asked her if she loved this guy and she scoffed and said no, she was drunk. This is the morning after I caught her in the bathroom on the phone.
That day goes by and I’m still just so torn, we bring it back up again and I tell her that if this is going to work then this other thing needs to be over. She tells me that she cares about this person, and that she has to consider his feelings with the way to tell him. Quite the change in direction from our first conversation. This makes my head spin even more. Later that night (last night) we start talking about it again. She doesn’t really seem sorry for how she’s made me feel, she just says that I have the right to be sad/angry you name it. She said she’s a bad person for doing this, but says that almost like it’s an excuse. I make a remark about how this guy doesn’t care about me or our daughter why do I need to care about you saying you need to break it off on your own terms? She basically defends him, says she was a lot of respect for him and she tells me that she doesn’t want to say more until we go to therapy cause she doesn’t want to hurt me more. I tell her that’s non-sense and not the way to do this. I insisted on her saying. She said she’s developed feelings for this guy but she is also angry that it took this event to wake me up into wanting to do counseling. She doesn’t really show any feelings of remorse for how awful I am feeling. She’s more getting angry that I am asking her about it and she is stating how she just needs time to process things. She also mentions how this person brings her joy which isn’t something she’s felt with us in months, and she’s scared to give us another try because of that. She’s leaving a door open for us, but is it really open? Trusting my gut has become insanely complicated during this. Fast forward another couple of days and this comes up again. I tell her that I set my boundaries on what needed to be done with her affair, and in her heated state she said, "and I didn’t agree to those" and went on to tell me that they talked the prior day and he told her that he felt bad for what she’s going through and blah blah. Basically what you’d say if you wanted to be the crying shoulder while we’re here in a broken marriage.
I mentioned a lot of examples of what I did wrong here and that’s me trying to understand what I could have done diffferent. I know that she made the decision to have this emotional affair. I know that I am a great father and husband, we’re just going through a rough patch. Instead of supporting each other it took her barely anytime at all in the grand scheme to find something else. I’m sad and angry that when she was at her highest personally and professionally, and I’m at my lowest for the first time ever in my life is when she chooses to do it. We spent so many years with the situation being the opposite of that and I did nothing but uplift and support her. I wanted her to be with me through struggles and for us to figure it out together. Instead it was just blame and the opposite of calm communication. I don’t want our marriage to be over. But man the struggle of self respect, the feeling like there’s more than what’s on the surface which is driving my absolutely insane, and the 24 hours it took her to tip-toe around the feelings she has for this person is horrifying. I let her emotionally beat me down when she came home in January unplugged from our marriage. It’s like she was acting in a way where she wanted to drive me away and have me make the decision for her. It would be days of that, to days of being ok and a constant back and forth. She seemed more remorseful when my initial reaction was just detached like someone who is in shock, and someone who might be filing for divorce the next day.
I set my boundaries on ending what she has and it’s been a few days since I found out. I don’t want to watch over her shoulder, but she’s not really making me feel warm and fuzzy on the inside that she’s sorry and that she is ending it asap. We’ve talked that I need that to know that when we do counseling we are giving it our all, and she just sounds annoyed, saying how she needs time to think but then will also say see needs counseling to navigate this and figure out what she wants to do. She’ll also see-saw saying that what we do has nothing to do with this other person and that there’s no pick-me dance at play here. She seems to be closest to me when I’m the most stoic and potentially secretive about my actions. I spend my time scheduling counseling and showing her that I do still love her, thinking with my heart. I’ve been staying busy and doing projects around the house, eating healthy and finding time to work out, partly to show her that this won’t break me cause bet your ass it won’t and partly because I deserve to grow in a positive direction and know need to develop habits that are good for me. Habits I was adamant about in every second of my life outside of this dark time for me professionally and personally. I have also reached out to divorce attorneys thinking with my head so I’m not left with my pants down if this is the worse case. Two completely conflicting view points but I feel like I can’t be naive.
I’ll give her time if it’s what she needs, but part of me thinks that’s delaying the inevitable. It’s showing me we weren’t strong enough to make it through these hardships, and now I have to drive myself crazy of thinking of my wife with another man. Thinking about our daughter spending half of her childhood not with me. It breaks my heart that I did the things I did to contribute to this, it breaks my heart to see her disconnected. But why is she still around? The worse side of me thinks well, you think I’m so worthless and can’t provide, go on by yourself and start fresh. Does she really want to try or is the worse case scenario she’s plotting something bigger with this guy who she’s been in a relationship for much longer and the added physicality of what she’s saying?
I finally slept last night, and when I woke up, the first thing is my head of the sound of her telling this man she loves him, and it stays there 24/7 just like it has since the second I heard it. Im just so conflicted. I deserve better but I want this marriage to work. I love my wife and I’m trying to think with my heart and my head at the same time. She has her moments of leaving a door open but she admits she’s just so angry at me for 1) being the way I had been even though I know she’s seen the change in that and 2) angry that the change in me had to be spurred by what she did. To me I find truth in that but I also find it as a way of diverging her actions onto me.
This is the worse thing that’s ever happened to me in my life and the conflicting emotions in my head are unbearable. I go from stoic, to sad, to angry, to paranoid, all while having this overwhelming feeling of love for my wife which makes me feel pitiful in a way that I still love her after what she’s done.
Thanks for reading this long thing
