In this pop-up series, anonymous writers share the most painful moment of their marriage: the moment they knew their relationship was over
My marriage ended on 20 November 2014, but I was too dumb to know it. I was too dumb, too hopeful, too patient, giving away fistfuls of second chances to avoid the inevitable because the inevitable was simply too much to bear.
On 20 November, my husband had just come home from a work trip and he was different, somehow. He was kinder to me and calmer with our daughter, and he helped with bath time (he’d never voluntarily helped before). He crept into bed beside me that night and whispered that he wanted to be better, to be home more and help more.
He made love to me and I fell asleep with his familiar body curled around my hips like a question mark. Lying there with his breath on my neck, I briefly felt like things were going to be OK, like our long storm had finally settled. It felt like seas would turn smooth and skies would clear. I felt hopeful.
But as the minutes ticked by and sleep continued to elude me, I felt a cold sense of unease work its way into my spine. It was with a slowly creeping sense of terror that I realized that what I was feeling wasn’t calm at all, but an eerie sort of waiting. The storm wasn’t over – we were smack dab in the eye of it.
I followed the uneasy lure of my intuition and found myself sitting in the living room, naked under my bathrobe with the heat of his hands still on me. I shook as I held his cellphone in my hands. It didn’t take long to find them: scores of intimate photos not sent to me, teasing videos not filmed for me. My heart bucked and crashed and split and stalled as I tried to reconcile the truth with this truth; my husband with this husband.
Cars sped past the house we’d just bought. Their headlights passed over the windows in pairs, two by two by two by two, and I slowly began to register the sound of each thread of my life snapping, one after the other.
•••
That should have been it. That should have been the moment.
Two years later, I sometimes wish it had been. I wish I had gone nuclear the way I’d always imagined I would in this scenario. Confronted with a cheating spouse, I always thought there would be some clean dividing line drawn: you cheat, we’re done.
For me, it was heartbreakingly impossible to do.
Instead, I stood shaking and crying in the doorway of our bedroom, frantically collecting his feeble explanations, asking questions I didn’t want the answers to, trying to regain some solid footing in this murky new reality. Through the shock and the pain of it, I realized that the clear line in the sand I’d imagined simply didn’t exist. Or if it did, I wasn’t strong enough to draw it.
I wasn’t angry, I was afraid. My blood ran cold as I began to contemplate losing life as I knew it: the family we’d started, the second and third children I desperately wanted, the almost 13 years we’d spent assembling a life together. His family whom I loved as fiercely as my own, the future I’d taken for granted.
I couldn’t do it. It was no contest. The fear won. I let the moment slip through my fingers.
I urged him to try counseling and doctors and antidepressants. I researched infidelity and gathered information from women who had been through similar situations and managed to come out the other side whole, their marriages intact. Inexplicably, I baked him sugar cookies and decorated them with multicolored sprinkles.
I kept his secret and felt ashamed of it as if it were my own. I couldn’t sleep and I didn’t eat and I kept up this furious, white-knuckled refusal to see things as they were for as long as I could. For three weeks I stayed dumb and hopeful and afraid. It took everything I had.
Until, sitting on the steps of his parents house 10 days before Christmas, I discovered that my husband had been continuing the lies, and continuing the affair, too. He had made no attempt to fix us. There were no doctors, no counselors, no antidepressants. The truth was stark and unflinching. I couldn’t look away.
I sat in the warm glow of the Christmas tree lights and allowed the knowledge to sink in. I could no longer pretend he was trying; he’d stopped trying years ago. I could no longer pretend we were fixable – the truth was there in black and white.
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