My marriage story began over 28 years ago when I met my now ex-wife. We were both young, 23 and 22 respectively, and after dating for a while and her asking me not to propose because she didn’t want to have to say, “no,” she asked me to marry her. We were married in my church among family and friends, and embarked on our life together. We bought our first house, children came along after about 7 years, a son and a daughter, and we were happy. We were not without our difficulties, but we were best friends, we loved each other and we were united. We saw many of our friends and family divorcing and we said, “That will NEVER happen to us.”
Intimacy was never very easy for me. I came from a broken home, raised by my mother, and had no father around to model what husband/wife intimacy should look like. This is not blaming, it’s just a factual wound in my life that has shaped who I am. Sex was filled with anxiety for me and I found release in pornography, individually and with my wife. She said she didn’t have a problem with it, as long as we did it together. But it made for a difficult sex life between a husband and a wife; definitely not the way things should be. She, at one point, asked me to get some help and talk to a counselor. Out of fear and pride, I declined. How do I talk to anybody about my sexual difficulties? The social norm is that husbands are constantly petitioning their wives for sex and being turned down. For us, it was backwards; she was the aggressor and I was turning her down. That is a very immasculating scenario; very difficult to talk about, even with a doctor. So, I apologized for my dysfunction and we moved on. What I didn’t know was that my wife, at that very moment, gave up.
Fast forward 9 months to Friday, February 13th, 2014 (note, that is the day before Valentine’s Day), and my “Ground Zero” happened; my wife confessed that she had been having an affair for 5 months, and was unwilling to stop. Talk about time standing still! I had no idea that the human heart could absorb so much pain. For those of you reading this, you know what I’m talking about. It’s a form of devastation that cannot be described. This was my love, my best friend, my wife, and now I have to deal with the reality that she has enjoyed another man.
We separated for 4 weeks and she finally came back saying that I was her future and she wanted us to reconcile. So we began a year long struggle to rebuild our marriage. I confessed my sexual dysfunction to a psychologist, we went to individual and couples counselling and tried to resurrect our love for each other. I joined an accountability group for guys addicted to porn and began purging that blight from my life. All the while, my wife was reassuring me that she was devoted to me and that there was no contact with her affair partner. Well, my wife had honed her skills as a liar, and she “came clean” after a year and admitted that they had seen each other a couple of times (translation, they had gotten together to have sex). We separated for 2 months so that I could decide if I wanted to continue or not. My kids were still in high school and, honestly, I still loved my wife. So, we tried one more time.
Fast forward 3 years, and we have continued with counselling, I haven’t touched pornography in almost 5 years (my wife couldn’t say the same thing) and she is going to visit our son out of state for 3-4 weeks. She is assuring me that this is not a trial separation. I have a bad feeling. My feeling is substantiated when, after about 2 weeks, she tells me that she “doesn’t want to do this anymore. I’m never going to get over what she did.” So, when she got home from her trip, she said to me, “You can’t afford the house and I can, so you need to move out.” Translation; “You need to move out so that my affair partner can move in, because this has been the plan from the beginning.” So, she kicked me out, I moved into my travel trailer and got myself an attorney. She gave the new diesel truck that was supposed to be mine to her boyfriend, had sex with him in our bed with our daughter in the next room and cast me aside so that he could take my place. I have my trailer, a small crappy truck that can’t pull it, and, soon, my tools. It is staggeringly difficult, and immasculating, to be removed from your family in favor of another man. Everything I have worked for from before I was even married, is gone. My life, my family, my home; all gone. I do have my adult children and they are worth every sacrifice. I know it could be a lot worse, but this is all very hard to bare.
That’s my story and it is ongoing. I know there are worse and more painful stories out there; I’m hoping that we, put into this position, can find strength in community.