Initiating Sex

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affair, counselling, couples, husband, infidelity, sex, therapy, trauma

At our third couples counselling session, our therapist asked about the current state of our sex life.

I think it’s a fucking miracle that I actually feel like having sex with my cheating husband. I didn’t think I would ever want to. Not after he had an affair.

But we do have sex. And it’s not hysterical bonding sex (Google it), it’s actual regular married sexual relations. Gasp!

So there we were discussing sex when our therapist asked: “Who initiates sex?”

My husband and I both looked at each other.

“We both do!”

The therapist looked at my husband. “YOU need to be the one initiating sex. EVERY time.”

We both just sat there looking at her, probably with confused looks on our faces.

“You need to be the one going to her. You need to be right in there. Let her know you want her, that you need her.”

Hallelujah and amen to that.

My biggest worry about my husband’s affair was that he no longer found me desirable, even though when he eventually met the whore face-to-face, he said he would only describe her as average and certainly not pretty. And even though it sounds like a line, I do actually believe him.

Anyway, if my husband did in fact no longer find me attractive or desirable, then I did not want to be with him. I want to be loved and adored and DESIRED. Maybe that’s too much to expect, but the heart wants what the heart wants.

So hearing our therapist tell him he better get his act together, I must admit I breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, someone who understands and who has the power to make my husband understand!

I left our session feeling exhausted yet a little elated.

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Willing To Risk It All

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infidelity affair trauma husband wife risk cheater cheating

One of the saddest things about my husband having an affair was coming to the realisation he was willing to risk everything for the thrill of it.

Willing to throw away a 20+yrs relationship.

Willing to risk his wife walking out.

Willing to risk becoming a weekend dad to his kids.

Willing to risk looks of disgust from those who knew the truth.

Willing to put his wife through an emotional wringer.

But of course the cheating spouse thinks of NONE of these consequences when having an affair.

Having an affair is all about selfishness, ego, and cowardice.

‘Selfish’ to think YOUR thoughts and YOUR feelings not only matter, but take priority over everything else.

‘Ego’ because all the man wants is his ego inflated after his bitch of a wife knocks him down over and over again (according to him).

And ‘cowardice’ because instead of confronting the issue with his wife like a fucking man, he takes the easy way out and seeks solace/sympathy/understanding in the arms another woman. A goddam stranger. A NOBODY!

AND FOR WHAT?

It defies belief that a person you thought you knew so well turns out to be such a fucking prick.

But you can’t change what has happened. For the rest of our lives, he and I will both need to live with the fact that he cheated on me.

HE. CHEATED. ON. ME.

Almost four months on, it still pains me to say it.

But at least I’m no longer walking through the supermarket aisles with tears rolling uncontrollably down my face.

Or pulling over on the side of the road and having a quiet cry.

Or sitting staring into space for indefinite periods wondering when it all began falling apart.

No. I’m beyond that.

But it still fucking hurts that he was willing to risk it all. Everything he ever knew. Everything he loved. Everything he created.

Everything that ever mattered.

Benefits

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affair infidelity trauma husband wife betrayal diet

The one “benefit” to come out of my husband’s affair has been my dramatic weight loss. In the space of two months, I dropped 10+kg, or 20 pounds, or almost two stone, depending on which corner of the world you’re reading this.

I hate using the word “benefit” because it implies something good – and not a lot of good has come out of this mess. So if losing a shitload of weight is my only “benefit”, then so be it. (My face has aged 10 years in the same period so I doubt I’m #winning.)

The strange, almost unbelievable, thing is that I have been a comfort eater my whole life. In good times or bad, I turn to food.

So how, in my greatest hour of devastation, pain and anger, have I not come out of this the size of an elephant?

I have an (unproven and baseless) theory that your metabolism changes once you discover your partner has been having an affair.

It’s why this sudden weight loss is known as the BS (betrayed spouse) diet or infidelity diet.

When my husband commented on my new hot bod, I informed him of this specialised diet. His face crumpled and he apologised (yet again) for the trauma he subjected me to with his thoughtless actions.

Whenever we’re out and someone comments to me “you’re fading to nothing!” I cringe inwardly while managing a weak smile. I make excuses that I’ve simply dropped the baby weight, or am walking more, or simply eating less crap. I dare not look at my husband’s face.

But inside, I am screaming “MY HUSBAND HAD AN AFFAIR AND FOR SOME INEXPLICABLE REASON, I’VE STOPPED EATING.” But I keep my mouth shut.

Until this point, whenever I dropped my kids off at school, I’d look around at all the obese mums, the unattractive fatties with huge guts and thunder thighs, and wonder to myself “Does your husband still find you attractive?”, “Does your husband actually have any desire to fuck you?”, and even “I hate to tell you this but there is no way your husband ISN’T cheating on you!”

I mean FUCK, what a judgemental bitch!
No, it’s OK, you can say it. I say it to myself every single day.

Now look who’s eating humble pie – ME! Didn’t see that coming in a million years. My adoring husband, the love of my life, the adoring father of our three amazing children, fucking cheated on me. Fuck, fuck, FUCK.

Now I see those same women in the playground and I see someone who sacrificed herself for her children; a selfless person who put everyone else’s needs before her own; a mum who lovingly prepares everyone else’s meals while eating standing up, shovelling in whatever she can in the tiny space of time she can get. Or maybe she just eats to relieve the boredom of her monotonous life.

But I also now notice the thin 40+ mums, the ones who turn up in athletic gear, the ones in pencil thin dresses, Immaculately made up. And I wonder “Did your husband cheat on you?”, “Do you work out to keep your husband interested?”, “Do you tend to your looks so your husband doesn’t look elsewhere?”

The affair and the aftermath sucks, but it has given me a different perspective on life and taught me not to be so fucking arrogant and dismissive.

How about you? Have you seen any “benefits”?

Three Months On

Today is three months since I discovered my husband was having an affair.

My husband says she wasn’t particularly pretty. Only that she listened. And that hurts. Because while I was trying to negotiate three children under 5, including a newborn, my selfish prick of a husband was only concerned about getting his needs met.
Who was listening to me? I didn’t get to go to work and interact with other adults. I didn’t have a life I could leave behind for 8 hours a day. I struggled through every fucking day. And what did I do about it? Nothing. What did my husband do? Went off and had an affair with zero fucking thought as to who was actually making the sacrifices needed to hold a family of 5 together. Me.

Some days I can barely function. I move my cart around the supermarket aisles with tears streaming down my face and I don’t care who sees me.

Other days I think I can get through this, that our marriage will be one of the lucky ones that survives.

It’s been a three month emotional rollercoaster ride.

I don’t know how strong I am, but I’m still here, figuring this out as I go.

I am sometimes hopeful, sometimes hopeless.

When does it stop hurting so much?

The Deleted Secret Email Account

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affair, cheater, counselling, couples, D-Day, husband, infidelity, liar, trauma, wife

After our first couples counselling session last week, I thought we were making progress.

My husband agreed he needs to be more open with me about his communication with others, including Facebook and text messages, as well as giving me complete and open access to his phone and computer.

A week before discovering my husband had been having an affair, we’d been talking about something he wanted me to do for him so I asked him to send me a reminder email.

The email came through, but not from my husband. The words were my husband’s, but the account it was sent from was not my husband’s regular email account.

He hadn’t realised he’d sent me an email from a secret account. I didn’t say anything.

Fast forward to the day after our couples counselling session. I foolishly thought it might be a good time to ask my husband about this secret email account, given he was being open and honest and all.

Big mistake. HUGE. Why? Because he immediately deleted it. While he was at work. And I never got to see what was in there.

I could smash my head on the wall at my stupidity. What the FUCK was I thinking sending him a ‘please explain’ while he was at work?? If I’d had any brains, I would have waited until he returned home that night and demanded to see the contents of that inbox.

But like I said, it was the day after our first counselling session where he made promises to me about being honest and not deleting things. I bought into it. And now I felt like a fucking doormat.

He responded to me via text message before he left work that day: “I’ve been away from my desk. It was the address I set up to sign in to the chatting app which needed an email to create an account. I didn’t use it for email. I only chatted on the app. Because I didn’t use it, I forgot to delete it when I deleted the app. As it would have been empty, without even checking it, I deleted it today. I realised after I did so that the fact that it was empty might have been obvious to me, but it isn’t to you. I’m sorry. I haven’t had any contact. I just wanted the reminder gone.”

Just wanted the reminder gone. JUST WANTED THE REMINDER GONE. FUCK! I want the reminder gone every single fucking day.

I basically responded that if he was going to tell the counsellor and me one thing but do another, then we were wasting our fucking time and money.

From thinking we’d made progress, we were back to square one.

When he got home that night, we waited until the kids had gone to sleep then sat in the lounge room together in silence.

I was the first to speak.

“You shouldn’t have deleted that account.”
He buried his head in his hands.
“I know, I’m sorry,” he said before basically repeating the contents of his text message.
“We agreed you wouldn’t delete anything.”
“I know. I did it without thinking. There was nothing in it.”
“Yeah, well, I guess I’ll never know.”

I went to bed angry and disappointed. My husband didn’t try to speak to me again that night.

And to make matters worse, tomorrow was my birthday. My first birthday, post-affair.

Couples Counselling Begins

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affair, cheating, counselling, couples, emotional affair, husband, infidelity

Last Tuesday, my husband and I began couples counselling, almost 3 months after I discovered his affair.

Neither of us knew what to expect but our therapist put us at ease as she began asking family tree questions to work out where we were coming from. Children, parents, siblings…it seemed like we were never going to get passed this very elementary information. And at $220 AN HOUR ($360 for a 1.5hrs couples session), I wasn’t keen to dwell on this. I came here for guidance, woman! Reassurance. Hope. Something!

On and on we went filling in names and relationships until finally we’d finished.

Then she asked my husband what had brought him to couples counselling.

Long pause.

Was he trying to come up with a delicate way of saying “I cheated on my wife”?

The silence was deafening. And then he spoke.

He said there were two reasons he was in her office. The first was inappropriate sexual conversations he’d had online about a year earlier. And the second was that he’d cheated on me.

Just hearing him say it made the tears start rolling down my face uncontrollably.

My. Husband. Cheated. On. Me.

I write those words, I read those words, I SAY those words and none of it makes sense. Did my husband really cheat on me? Cheat. On. Me.

Yes, I just heard HIM say it to our therapist.

The therapist listened and she turned to ask me if I would use those words to describe what he did. I nodded. It’s too painful for me to think along the lines of “he had an affair”, or “he fucked around”, or “he betrayed me and his children”. So, “he cheated on me”, it is.

The therapist made us turn to face each other and we did the next part of the session with him looking at me. I couldn’t stand to meet his gaze.

The therapist asked him if there was anything he’d like to apologise for.

He said a few things, but the one that sticks in my mind was this: “I’m sorry for causing what may be irreparable damage to our marriage.”

Irreparable damage. The phrase still rings in my ears.

I couldn’t speak.

The therapist asked how long I was going to punish him for. I had no answer, but in my head I was screaming “FOREVER! I WILL PUNISH HIM UNTIL THE DAY I TAKE MY LAST BREATH. I WILL PUNISH HIM UNTIL HE UNDERSTANDS HE BROKE MY FUCKING HEART. I WILL PUNISH HIM UNTIL HE UNDERSTANDS OUR RELATIONSHIP WILL NEVER BE THE SAME. I WILL PUNISH HIM UNTIL HE UNDERSTAND HIS ACTIONS HAVE PERHAPS TORN OUR FAMILY APART.”

“I don’t know,” I mumbled.

The therapist tapped her head. “You do too much thinking up here,” she said.

Well, THAT much I know!

She turned to my husband and told him that he better get used to apologising. A LOT. Several times a day, if necessary. And if I ‘shut down’ and he didn’t know how to get through to me, he should come up to me and apologise. Over and over, until I got sick of hearing it.

The rest of the session is a blur. As the session was coming to a close, our therapist made a startling observation. She looked at me and she said: “He loves you, you know.” I looked back at her with what obviously must have been a stunned look on my face. She went on: “He does.” And she nodded her head.

And then a little more hope. “I think you guys have enough glue there to make this marriage work,” she said. “And your marriage will be stronger, better.”

Hope. It was the reason I came. And I got it.

Until the next session…