Sincere apologies in advance for how long this will be. I don't know how to tell the story without the backstory.

My wife and I have been married for more than 20 years. We got married way too young, at 20, and had 4 kids by the time we were 30.  

We were emotionally immature and got in way over our heads without being able to grow up or work on our own issues. By the 3rd or 4th year of our marriage I was writing and emailing old flames from high school and having emotional affairs.  This went on for a few years without ever going any further.

Sometime in 2004 she found out about that, and also about a lot of money I had spent in secret. She was devastated. We hung on and stayed together, but at some point in the next year the bottom fell out for her. By summer 2005 she was asking me to leave and started seeing other men (and going out drinking, a lot, which was not really part of our lifestyle at all prior to this).

She slept with someone. And someone else. And then others. I was devastated. She became an alcoholic. I became a miserable wreck; lost a ton of weight, got a horrible case of hemorrhoids, and started drinking myself. Got a tiny room to rent, and tried to numb the pain as best I could. Went through an emotional roller coaster of trying to work it out with her only to have her pull away time and time again. She started dating someone seriously and exclusively. I gave up, and tried to stop the pain by finding someone else myself. I met someone online and flew across the country a few times to be with her, flew her here a few times to be with me. This made my wife extremely jealous, which frustrated me to no end because I felt like I had tried everything to be with her and it wasn't going to work... and she was with someone else herself! Everything was a complete mess. At one point when she asked me to reconcile I flatly told her no, because I didn’t want to deal with the pain anymore.

In March 2006 my wife started going to AA meetings and got sober. Soon after that I moved back home - primarily under the reason of being available more for the kids so she could focus on recovery. However we did both break off our outside relationships. We proceeded very inelegantly and fumblingly  to work our way into a marriage relationship.

It was a very rocky first year or so, but she maintained her sobriety (and has to this day).  Years later she finally disclosed to me that she had been with another man (whom she had met in AA) sometime in late 2006 or early 2007. But that disclosure came many happy-ish years later and it didn't really hurt too much - I had long suspected it, and I basically considered that period to have been the end of our "first act" so I lumped that incident in with our whole awful separation.

We had another child together a year or so later. The new baby was a delight and really brought our family closer together. We had happy years, and I felt like I was a part of a miracle story of reconciliation.

There was trouble though - in retrospect I never realized how much trouble until a week ago.

(Are you still with me? That was the back story).

(Okay, I guess there’s still a little more back story).

The trouble that I didn’t give enough attention to was that over the course of our separation and her recovery, she had become a flirt and desired attention from other men. I thought that we had a good baseline of communication on this, though, and that I understood the extent of it. She told me about various guys that she interacted with, and a few men that pursued her at various times. She went to dinner and coffee a few times. These things hurt me, but we always talked about it, they always fizzled out, and so. I knew she had self-esteem and attention issues, and I knew that I couldn’t be too controlling of her, and I thought there were clear boundaries. She was maintaining her sobriety, and had a sponsor and people she was accountable to. So I lived my life with her, was thankful for what I had, and continued to feel like we were in our blessed second act and regardless of normal marital issues (complaints about frequency of intimacy, money, kids, etc.) that everything would be happily ever after.

More back-story. My wife has always struggled with depression. She attempted to take her life as a teen shortly before I met her. She lost a sibling to cancer while she was just a little girl. There have always been mental health issues.

A few years ago she started to get really dark, overwhelming thoughts and visions of being sexually assaulted as a young girl. By a family member. These thoughts would overwhelm and crush her, make her want to die. We talked about these things, and I tried to be a supportive and loving partner.

That’s the point, a few years ago, where - unbeknownst to me until last week - things went really bad.

Last weekend - 8-9 days ago - she started really struggling with depression and self-harm thoughts again. Friends took her to the ER on Saturday night, but she was not admitted to the pysch ward and came home. Sunday night things got bad again and we agreed that I would take her to the ER. She was having thoughts of hurting herself. I told her I loved her and she sobbed  “it doesn’t matter”.  Anyway we got into the car and headed for the hospital.

We didn’t get to the end of our street before she blurted out, through tears, “I had an affair.”

How I managed to not crash the car I’ll never know.

Everything moved fast after that. Once the words actually registered in my brain and I comprehended them, I immediately knew who she had had an affair with. All at once (and then ongoing over the days to come), I realized that the signs were there all along. I knew the guy’s name, I knew that he had a west coast area code, I knew that she had some sort of relationship with him, but I thought it was just another of those male friendships I was uncomfortable with but had no real reason to freak out about.

I remembered a year or so ago opening her phone in the night when it lit up and seeing a text message about how hot and sexy her new hairdo was. I didn’t see who it was from but angrily confronted her about it the next day and she apologized profusely and said it was inappropriate. I wrote it off and forgot about it.

How could I have been such a fool?

(In retrospect, I’m utterly destroyed at how naive I was to see a message like that and not realize it had to be from a lover. I’m trying to not beat myself up about it, but my God was I an idiot.)

All the evidence that had been there all along washed over me and told me what a fool I had been. Nights when she went to visit her sick friend in a nearby town... more than once I had intuition and things didn’t feel quite right, and more than once I looked at the phone records and saw that area code.

But somehow, even though it was all right there for any dummy to put together, I had never let myself imagine that she could be having an actual physical affair. Not when she came home every night and was always in my bed. Not when she worked full time, went to AA meetings, and was almost always home when she said she would be home.

Not my wife.

After driving around yelling and crying our way through the revelations for 20 minutes or so, I took her to the ER. She was admitted this time, with the plan being to stay in the hospital for 4 days or so. However the plan changed and she was discharged on Monday afternoon.

We spent most of last week delicately talking our way through the situation. She confirmed my initial “guess” of who it had been, how long it had been going on (a few years) and that it had been somewhat of an on-again-off-again thing.  

She told me that she had made a huge mistake, that she regretted it, that she hated lying to me, and that she loved me and wanted to be with me.

And I believe her.

She said she didn’t understand her own actions in great detail... but that she thought it had started out of a desperate attempt to get away from the dark evil thoughts of her childhood trauma. It was an escape, a vice, a distraction.

I slowly got my head around the timeline and how to look at the last 3.5 years in light of this new information. I looked through the cell phone records. I crunched data.

She started talking to him in the summer of 2014. A few weeks after I had left my job of 14 years and started a new one.

She spoke with him on the phone on 141 different days between June 2014 and September of this year. Usually 1 or 2 minute calls. Which I have to imagine often consisted of “I’m on my way over.” I don’t have the text info, thank goodness. Just the calls.

There were a few lapses of a month or two, but not many. She was with him this entire time.

During this entire time, I’ve been thinking that we were living a happy life together with problems but no deep dark secrets. We’ve been through milestones together, both celebratory and painful.

• 
  

  Our oldest child graduated and moved off to college

  
  


• 
  

  We went on a work trip together for my new job and spent several nights at a beautiful hotel

  
  


• 
  

  We celebrated our 20th anniversary together, both taking the whole day off and jaunting around. It was a beautiful day.

  
  


• 
  

  Our teenage son was diagnosed with cancer a couple years ago. It was devastating. He is doing great now, but it was and still sometimes is a scary situation.

  
  


• 
  

  We went on a family Make-a-Wish trip last summer, the vacation of a lifetime.

  
  

All of those things, and so many more, all those years of good and bad life experience together... and she was sleeping with another man the entire time.  

That’s what is killing me. The past is the past, and there’s always good and bad mixed together... but I feel like those years have been burned away in a fire, or lost in a flood. I can’t ever look at them the same.

We’ve had an active if not frequent enough sex life this entire time. We probably averaged once a week, sometimes more, sometimes probably going two weeks. She told me she wanted to be doing it more often, and I didn’t disagree... but in a house with 4 kids, including one with cancer, another with severe emotional issues... it’s been chaos. I’m often exhausted and she’s often already sleeping by the time I get the kids to bed. So I thought our sex life had room for improvement but was within the range of normal. I constantly reaffirmed that I loved her and was attracted with her, and that the reason we weren’t intimate more had nothing to do with a lack of attraction, and was more about a mutual lack of energy. I felt like we could make improvements, and I felt like we were making improvements.

Anyway, all those years and memories are the past. What about our future?

I love my wife and I am very attracted to her. I’m also deeply hurt by her actions and her lies. I cannot imagine a future without her - but only if I can find a way to trust her and if she can be faithful.

For her part, she is doing and saying all the right things. And I believe her when she says them. She loves me. She made a huge mistake. She felt trapped in her lies. She had wanted to break it off and never tell me, because she didn’t want to hurt me. She never loved him. She can be monogamous and faithful, and she wants to be. She wants to restore and reconcile and believes we can have our best years ahead of us. She is willing and eager to go to counseling (which I’ve already made an appointment for). She texted him last night and told him she wouldn’t be talking to him anymore, told him she was working on her marriage, told him that she had told me about him. (They hadn’t been together in over a month, maybe two, but she had texted him over the previous weekend when she was in and out of the hospital).  He was cordial (or maybe passive-aggressive, but who cares), wished her well, and said he was blocking her number so he wouldn’t be tempted to contact her. I blocked his number from her phone, with her consent and permission.

All of those are really good things. They all give me hope.

But I’m not stupid. Even in my wreck of an emotional state, I know that none of that stuff I just wrote is anything to lean too heavily on - none of it matters until time passes and it is acted on. People will say extreme things and over-commit in the midst of a trauma like this. Cheating spouses who want to reconcile will say irrational things, and so will cheated-on spouses who want to reconcile. Neither of us are our best, clearest-headed selves right now. I know all that. Our marriage is deeply wounded and on life support. Any additional trauma moving forward could break it beyond the point of healing.

And I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to comprehend how I experienced these last few years versus my new understanding of what her life has been like these past few years. It will never make sense. It will always hurt.

But still I am hopeful. I believe that she loves me and is deeply regretful of hurting me - and that she perceives the whole affair as a mistake and a lack of judgment on her part. She doesn’t see it as something she had to do to find herself or whatever. She knows she messed up. She is ready to walk away from it. She wants to be my wife and for me to be her exclusive partner. She wants to work on her own issues, get therapy, get treatment, get on the right meds, and be as healthy and happy as she can be.

I love her. I want her to live her best life. I want to live my best life. We both believe that entails staying together and rebuilding our marriage.

I’m going to be having haunting thoughts and bouts of severe depression for God-knows how long. I’m probably going to do and say harmful things at times, because that’s what harmed people tend to do. (I’m strongly hoping I can remain disciplined enough to never contact him - there’s no point and it would only make things worse).

But at the end of the day, each day so far, she is with me. I know where she is been and I know she is being honest with me. There’s a much deeper connection in our words now - we both know nothing good will come from leaving anything unsaid or keeping any new secrets from each other. She is my girl and I am her man. We are affirming that to each other several times daily.

And so I am hopeful. I am not completely sure of my sanity, and I know that “on paper” many would say I’m making the wrong choice by staying with someone who betrayed me so egregiously, who lied and lived a secret life for so long.

But I know her. I know she loves me, I know she has been wounded, and I know that she wouldn’t ever intentionally cause me pain. I have known this girl since we were 14 years old. I know her. And I love her.

And so even though I am scared as hell, and living with more pain than I would wish on anyone... I am hopeful.

Thanks for taking the time to read. I hope some of you can relate to some parts of this and find it helpful.