This fall when my husband I were fighting about who was in the wrong and why our marriage of 17 years had failed, because now I want a divorce, a truth came out that changed everything. I have been revisiting that one point in our relationship recently that set the stage for our whole marriage, only I had no idea at the time what that would look like.

He was already an alcoholic before I met him, but I didn't find this out until this last year either, that he had started drinking when he was 16. He was just 22 when we met, I thought that he would grow out of drinking, it was just a stage and all. The more time we spent together, the more he started drinking, like when I moved in, got engage and then married. By the time we were married, he was drinking himself to sleep at night by 7 or 8. I was always lonely and had talked to him about this on many an occassion, with nothing done about it. I had a friend at work that slowly turned into an emotional affair, until I decided to actually meet for drinks one night. But when I did that, I realized it wasn't this guys attention I was seeking, but really had wanted all this attention from my husband, whom I wasn't getting any from. So, I slowly got out of that situation and told this guy I wasn't interested. 

I had written my confused feelings on paper, to clear my head and see what was really going on, but threw it away, but my husband had found it and it was the start of something hard to go through. I had gotten pregnant with our first child at this time and miscarried at the almost 3 month mark. Very hard thing to go through. I didn't find out until recently, that he had thought that I had been sexual at that time and gotten pregnant from this guy. All these years he held onto that idea and thought the worse of me, but hiding all of these thoughts about that time.

I had chosen to make this a point of trying to better myself and do everything I could for this marriage and fight even harder to make things work, since at that point we had only been married about 6 mos. But, he had chosen to think the worst of me, not have any faith or trust in my character, that I could not or would not do something like that, and carry this secret of his for all these years, infecting every aspect of our marriage. All while I was unaware of his thoughts and feelings from that time and doing everything in my power to hold our marriage together and make things work for us and our kids.

One of my biggest problems with people in the past was when I felt like they questioned my loyalty or honesty. To find out now, that he was questioning two things I pride myself on and tried so hard to prove all these years to him, is just the last nail in the coffin of our relationship. At first, it hurt to think that he was so willing to think the worst and not forgive me and heal and work toward a better marriage, that he had also secretly wished for us to get divorced someday, because all these years he hid that he thought of me as a cheater. Yes, I was in the emotional sense and I feel bad about that, but there is and was always that line I would not cross in our marriage, nor did I ever desire to need sexual satisfaction from another man. 

It is like he jut needed an excuse to have some reason to keep drinking and blame it all on me. But I have put my heart and soul into this marriage all these years and it all meant nothing to him because he held onto this one thing and focused on that and not on anything else I have done all these years. It is like all these years don't really exist to him, because of that one awful time in the beginning.