Ten years later

Tags

#affair #love #cheating #husband #misery

Leave. Leave now.

Because even after 10 years, the pain remains.

The marriage is dead.

The relationship is dead.

We have nothing.

Nine Years On…

Here I am, coming up to 10 years since I devastatingly discovered my husband of 20 years cheating on me.

Despite swearing to me and our therapist there was only the one woman, I later discovered multiple profiles on dating sites and email conversations with different women.

Conversations where he promised to spend nights with them, although not very often.

Conversations where whoring sluts told him they hoped nobody would get hurt.

Dating profiles with the header: Missing out after kids’ arrival.

This from the man who wooed me relentlessly.

Who told me he loved me every day.

Turns out he was fucking around with sad little married whores for the entirety of my third pregnancy, and for about 6 months afterwards.

Bastard.

It’s now more than nine years later.

The anger is still there.

I have no hope.

Seven years later…

Tags

#affair #love #cheating #husband #misery

November became anniversary 7 since I discovered my husband was cheating on me.

It’s hard to believe it was so many years ago.

Sometimes it just feels like yesterday.

There were so many trickle truth discoveries along the way that it’s like the trauma started all over again along the way.

Multiple dating profiles. Multiple women. Multiple affairs.

So, where am I today?

In a marriage where I despise my asshole husband.

There is no love.

Only tolerance.

And hostility.

I cannot find a way to forgive him.

If I had the means, I would leave his cheating ass.

But I have three children – two with special needs – and that weighs heavily on my decision to stay and endure this hideous situation.

I turn 50 this month and I hate thinking about the 31 years I wasted with this man.

Sometimes I wish I could cheat as easily as he did. I would not feel an ounce of regret.

But I can’t. I don’t have it in me.

I need a mental connection. Intelligence arouses me more than anything.

Besides, men hold no interest for me.

I’m over it.

A Fun Night Out

My husband and I went out on Saturday night.

This so rarely happens, I couldn’t even tell you the last time it did.

We went out to dinner at a Middle Eastern restaurant, enjoyed a concert which was giddily fun, then headed home, had sex, and crashed out.

Sometimes, we have these moments where it feels like everything is going to be just fine.

But they, too, are rare.

So I’m going to enjoy it for what it was: a fun night out.

Six years later

It’s not fun.

It will never be fun again.

I realise that now.

I can’t fix this fucking mess.

My husband can’t fix it either.

Affairs leave a devastating wallop to your psyche.

So much time is spent accepting that nothing will ever be the same, nothing will ever go “back to normal”, and that no amount of action will fix the disdain and resentment you feel for your cheating partner.

I can only assume that people claiming an affair made their marriage “stronger” are lying through their fucking teeth.

There’s nothing left for my husband and I.

We live under the same roof but in separate rooms.

Sex is a thing of the past. Not that I care – I don’t ever feel the need for it.

We spend more time arguing than anything else, mostly about how much he yells at the kids.

I do not know why we are still living together.

Is it because we’re both too apathetic to call it a day?

Thinking about the future with him fills me with absolute misery. What an awful prospect.

Why are we too weak to walk away from each other?

The lying cunt drains all energy from me.

The thought of another twenty or thirty years with this serial cheater weighs down my heart, my head.

I don’t love him so why am I still here?

I’m exhausted.

Valentine’s Day Can Just Fuck Right Off

Tags

affair, cheater, husband

I hate it when this ‘day for lovers’ comes around.

What is there to celebrate after you’ve been cheated on?

I came home from work today to find an enormous bouquet of red roses awaiting me.

My wedding bouquet was an arrangement of red roses, so receiving them on Valentine’s Day feels like such a slap in the face.

Did the promises he made on our wedding day ultimately matter?

Do these flowers today matter?

I hate sounding like an ungrateful bitch, but what are we really celebrating here??

Valentine’s Day can just fuck right off.

I Want You To Ruin My Life

I was driving to work last week, randomly flicking between radio stations and heard the following lyrics blast out of the speakers:

I want you to ruin my life
You to ruin my life
You to ruin my life, yeah
I want you to fuck up my nights, yeah
Fuck up my nights, yeah,
All of my nights, yeah

Oh my God, I thought.

That must have been me!

It was like I was parading around my husband wearing a sign on my forehead saying ‘I WANT YOU TO RUIN MY LIFE’.

Because, let’s face it, that’s exactly what happened.

Life ruined.

Mission accomplished.

And as for fucking up my nights, well, yeah.

My nights at the time were already pretty fucked, what with a newborn waking every few hours to feed.

To add to that sleep deprivation, I was now lying wide awake, asking myself ‘HOW COULD THIS HAVE HAPPENED?’

Hello, insomnia and anxiety. Nice to meet you.

I wonder what my husband would have answered (pre D-Day) if I’d asked him, ‘What’s the best way you can think of to fuck up my life?’

Would he have said, “Cheat on you”?

“Have affairs”?

“Lie to you endlessly.”

I’m guessing probably not.

Because what ruined *my* life actually enhanced his (in his mind).

It’s so hard to shake the feelings of worthlessness and humiliation.

To be honest, I still feel those feelings from time to time.

You try to ‘move on’ but it’s always there.

That period of your life when he became someone else.

And you meant nothing to him.

And you wonder if any of your life together was ever real.

It still hurts.

I wish it didn’t, but it lingers.

PS The song is called ‘Ruin My Life’ by Zara Larsson. I’ve been playing it on Spotify over and over…

 

It’s Now Five Years Later

Tags

affair, cunts, five years, husband, infidelity, love, wife

I know I haven’t written much this year.

I haven’t felt I had much to say, to be honest.

Life has slowly rolled along. We bought a new place. We moved. Work was the same old, same old.

Then November came around.

Five years since D-Day.

And I just fucking lost it.

I just felt myself being angry all of the time.

REALLY ANGRY.

I took out on husband because –> cheater.

As justified as it feels taking it out on the whores they fucked around with, the sad truth is that it all sits with them.

They made the decision to cheat.

Real men don’t cheat.

But these cunts we ended up with, for better or for worse, fucked us over for something they felt they weren’t getting in the marriage.

Needy little boys having tantrums. “I deserve it.” “I only live once.” Whatever they tell themselves to justify an affair sounds outwardly pathetic to the screwed-over wife.

So I found myself snapping at my husband in a way that even surprised me.

Gosh, I turned into the bitch from hell.

That eventually eased and I even found myself feeling a bit sorry for him having to cop all this shit from me.

But he told me he understood where the hate was coming from and he sucked it up.

So here we are, living in our new house, with unpacked boxes still everywhere, and three kids causing constant havoc!

Aside from the tirade the annual November anniversary still sets off in me, we’ve actually been OK.

We still sleep together, have sex (when we’re not exhausted), go out, and try to enjoy life.

I’m not oblivious to the fact that most men who cheat once will likely cheat again in the future, so I do think about that a fair bit.

What will I do next time?

Who the fuck knows.

All I know is that for now, we’re progressing OK – not fabulously – but OK.

I can live with that.

Five years sounds like a long time, but I only have to think about that night where I discovered those life-altering messages on his phone, and I’m thrown back to 2013 and the nightmare begins again.

I practice mindfulness to keep me in the present and that’s been my saving grace.

Or I head outside and jump on the trampoline for 10 minutes and feel the wind in my hair and the exhilaration of flying up.

The aftermath of an affair never leaves you.

But I’ve found a way to move past it and not let it dominate my day-to-day thoughts.

I wish the same for you.

SWxo

 

 

 

 

I Think He Knows

Tags

affair, cheater, husband, infidelity, loss, love, marriage, new beginnings, relationship, wife

I suspect my husband knows.

About this blog, I mean.

He knows how much I live and breathe writing, and would expect no less of me than to write my way out of the hell that has been the past four years.

Yes, the blog is full of “vituperative nonsense”, as ‘Someone’ once described it, but what else would you expect from a blog written by a betrayed wife?

You bet it’s full of fucking vituperation!

It took most of that four years to work the anger out of my system.

My blog is full of swear words and bitterness and raw anger that only time could tend to and eventually tame.

Not erase, but tame.

That, plus my husband’s magnanimous efforts in righting his wrongs, have eased the open wounds that bled for so long.

For years — more than 3.5yrs, in fact — I could not see a way out of the despair.

The despair of reading your husband’s words of seduction to another woman.

The heartbreak of learning your husband meet up with multiple women for God knows what.

The utter devastation of learning he began cheating while his wife was pregnant with their third and final child.

It takes some real fucking effort to pick yourself up after being discarded so cruelly by the one person in the world you thought had your back.

What I’ve realised through this entire saga is that I’m a goddam survivor.

I may have been brought to my knees, drowning in depression and anger, but I made it out the other fucking side.

There is nothing I cannot handle.

I can never be hurt like that again because I have hardened and become more resilient.

Even if I discovered my husband cheating again one day, I could shrug and walk away. I’d be mad but I wouldn’t be destroyed.

I’m near fucking invincible.

Yes, it would hurt, but nothing like the first time, when it seemed my world completely blew the fuck up and I was left standing in the middle holding the remnants of a grenade.

Anyone who makes light of affairs has not lived through it, and for that they should be fucking grateful.

Life may not always be so generous.

But this is the life I’ve had to live and adjust to. I didn’t ask for any of it. It was dumped on me by a thoughtless and selfish individual. We all had this shit dumped on us.

BUT…

Life is better today. It’s different. I’m different. I’m happy! I smile a lot, and most of the negativity I once carried has gone.

My husband and I have rediscovered a very active sex life, which has been a revelation. Sex four or five times a week is the norm. Previously, we could go months without being sexually intimate. I enjoy this new closeness.

I don’t think of a certain bunny boiler much at all these days. I look back to that time and I swear I must have been fucking mad. The thought of being with that revolting human repulses me no end, although I’m sure my husband would be excited at the prospect of a threesome LOL.

Before my husband and I turned a corner, he made a comment to me that he thought I had “checked out” of our marriage, terminology I had used when writing here. I thought it was odd, that he used that phrasing, but tried not to think about it.

Then, that night when we were lying in bed and I tried to tell him about you-know-who, he told me I didn’t need to tell him anything. Why not? Maybe he already knew?

So dear husband, if you are reading this, please let me know.

Just say to me, “I know.”

And if I’m stressing and in the middle of something and carrying on and I turn around and snap at you, “Know what??”, please cradle my face in your hands, look me in the eye, and repeat, “I know.”

We now know where we stand with each other.

Let’s make a clean break and be open.

I think we at least owe each other that.

xo

The Truth Comes Out

Tags

affair, cheater, cheating, cunnilingus, husband, infidelity, marriage, wife

I did it.

Last night after the kids had gone to sleep, I lay down in bed with my husband and talked. For hours.

I told him I knew about Audrey and that he had cheated on me while I was pregnant.

He said, “I know, you forwarded the emails to me.”

Huh? I did? Yep, sure enough I had. Guess I was more rattled than I thought when I found them. Facepalm.

I stayed calm.

“How did you feel reading them back?” I asked, ” Because I’m having a hard time reconciling that you now, and you then, are the same person.”

He closed his eyes and shook his head.

“I can’t believe it either,” he said. “I read those emails and it was like a stranger had written them.”

“You were cheating on me while I was pregnant,” I said calmly. “Throughout all the therapy we underwent, you never once mentioned this Audrey. You told her you wanted to explore with her, spend the night with her, lie to me to be with her!”

“I know, I’m sorry. I told you that over that period, I had spoken to lots of women online.”

“I know,” I said. “But come on. You weren’t just speaking with her. You met her — for an early morning coffee!”

He said I could ask him anything I wanted, so I spent the next 20 minutes asking anything and everything I could think of about the mysterious Audrey.

I learned she was the one that cut off contact, he wasn’t intimate with her, and he didn’t even like her.

“Her English wasn’t very good,” I said, for no particular reason.

“She was Asian,” he said, and I burst out laughing.

My husband might like perving at long-legged blondes or brunettes in short skirts, but has never, ever shown any interest in women from the East.

“You didn’t know that before you went to meet her??”

“Nope.”

I knew that to be true, as in the email chain, she refused to send a picture or even describe what she looked like.

His expression when he laid eyes on her that morning at Starbucks must have been priceless.

She sent him no messages after that date.

So as we lay there talking, I looked at the man I feel in love with 26 years ago and saw the lines etched deeply into his face.

After a long purge from both of us, I felt at peace.

Except for one little thing.

I had to tell him about Lorna.

In her last email to me, she threatened to expose me to my husband if I didn’t permanently remove this blog from the internet.

There was no fucking way I was taking this blog down. And I sure as hell wasn’t giving her the opportunity to out me.

“I have to tell you something, too,” I said. My voice was trembling.

He looked at me.

“Don’t say what you’re about to say.”

“How do you know what I’m about to say?”

“I can just sense it. You don’t have to tell me anything.”

“Yes, I do,” I said.

I took a very deep breath and began.

“Last year, I developed a crush on someone I worked with,” I said.

“I told them, but they weren’t interested and no relationship came of it.

“But what it did tell me was that I wasn’t dead inside.

“I’m telling you because they threatened to tell you and I couldn’t have you finding out like that.”

He watched my face as I spoke.

“Where does that leave us now?” I asked. “Are were committed to staying together?”

“I know I am,” he said. “I feel sick when I think about what I’ve put you through the past four years. I don’t deserve you.”

Well, that much may be true.

Here’s the thing: I know my own inner strength now.

Him cheating again, or even these additional revelations, won’t break me. Not again.

I’ve come a long way these four years. The marriage still has its ups and downs (more ups) but the overall projectile is upwards.

I love him.

And even though I thought it was all over last year, I stayed because I had not definitively decided what I was going to do.

“I’ve never loved anyone else,” I told him softly.

“Me either,” he said.

I snuggled into him.

Later, we made love, and I crashed out at peace with myself, with him, and our future.