It’s been 26 months since what people in “the community” (yes, there’s an infidelity community) call D-day. This means the day you first discovered that your partner has been cheating on you. 26 months later, I was having a great day. I just returned from group therapy and I made a healthy meal for myself. We put on “The Simpsons” as dinner entertainment and there it was: the total destruction of my mood by a simple Simpsons episode about Marge considering to cheat on Homer.
Table Of Content
These days any mention of infidelity in movies, TV or song triggers a complete and detailed emotional re-enactment in me. Luckily I’m not a visual person so I don’t see anything, but I feel it. I feel the dread, the resentment and the utter humiliation of it all again.
I was planning to have a nice relaxed evening, but I guess I’m finally doing this. For four months I’ve been postponing sharing this story but it has to happen for my personal healing. I have to learn to write about the worst parts of my life openly and honestly.
A quick rundown
Me and my wife met in 2017 through an app. We became good friends almost immediately, talking through the night about travel, cars, videogames and more of our many shared passions. I liked her and she liked me, so I scraped together all my courage and asked her to meet me sometime. We did and I was about as awkward as I expected, but apparently she liked that. I kissed her after many hours of postponing and we decided to see each other again.
Again turned into every week. I drove for an hour to see her and an hour back, sometimes twice in a weekend just so we could spend time together. Her home life was bad and so was her mental health, but I wasn’t fully aware of how bad. Eventually, it came to a point where she was forced to live with her mom and that was certain to push her further over the edge mentally. This was about a year into our relationship and I, as an avoidant, wasn’t too keen on sharing my house yet but decided to offer anyway because it was pretty much her only chance to have the stable home she needed.
So she moved in in early 2019. Things went okay. I missed my alone time but we loved each other very much still and it was fun. In late 2019, my mother died and I fell into an intense depression that caused me to lose my job. Now we were at home together and then, just a few months later, COVID hit. This obviously put a strain on our relationship. I needed a lot of alone time and was suddenly cooped up in a small home with my girlfriend. Still, we managed. I wasn’t the most attentive partner maybe, but I was grieving the tragic early death of my mother so I kind of think I have an excuse. I still made sure she was comfortable, got her the pet rats she wanted so bad (and took care of them 80% of the time) and took her out on trips and dates where COVID and money permitted. 2020 is hard and she tells me at the end that she expects me to start working on my mental health or she’ll leave. It’s a fair ultimatum and I agree.
January 2 2021, I start SSRIs and start fixing myself through meds, therapy and incredibly hard work. It’s tough but I try so hard. By early 2022, our relationship is doing okay and I am thankful to her for sticking around. I take her to Paris and Disneyland and propose in front of the castle. She says yes. In may we have a small wedding surrounded by close family.
D-day
During this time I was working hard to fix myself still. I just quit my meds by myself and I was doing a course to start a new career path. I was still the sole provider for our family, as has always been the case. In october of 2022, my wife meets a guy online through a language learning app. They get along well but I’m not worried because I trust her. They talk sometimes but it sounds quite tame and the language barrier seems quite big. Very quickly, she asks if it’s okay if she meets him. Some alarm bells start going off now. I still trust her, but him not so much. I tell her to meet him in a public place and they go eat a pizza somewhere.
Just two weeks later, my wife has an event for her volunteer work nearby where this guy lives. The event is real and she stays with her dad, who lives in town. I still trust her and I never even consider the option of her making the choices she did.
That night, instead of sleeping at her dad’s place, she takes a train in the middle of the night and goes over to the shitty litte appartment of this sketchy dude she barely knows. She tells me it’s because the couch at her dad’s place was uncomfortable and this guy offered his guest room. He doesn’t have a guest room, what a surprise. They have sex.
The next day my wife asks me to pick her up from the train station. I do so, assuming she just went to her event and didn’t fuck some toxic little piece of shit. In the car, she acts like nothing happened. We get food and we eat like nothing happened. Then, suddenly, she drops the bomb and tells the story exactly as it is: she went over and they fucked.
What happens next
Unfortunately, this isn’t the worst part yet. I get incredibly angry. Rage to the point I have never ever felt before in my entire life. I want to throw her out but I don’t because she has nowhere to go. I want to hit her but I don’t because I still have a tiny bit of self control left. So I just scream and scream and call her all the most horrible things I can think of and then I leave for a friend’s house.
After having talked to my friend for a bit, I return home and this is where things go awry. My wife has suddenly changed her story entirely from a consensual sexual encounter into coercion and just minutes later full-on rape. I am now in a horrible situation. If this new story is true, what the fuck am I supposed to feel? Sympathy? She still went to his place and had an emotional affair for weeks. She put this horrible decision on me where I either call her a liar about sexual assault or I’m a cruel monster for having no sympathy for her sexual assault.
By giving me two stories, my wife has robbed me of every knowing the truth of what happened that night. While she’s sleeping, I take her phone and unlock it. I go through all her chats with this guy and with her friends. She’s been talking about divorce and she’s been texting this fucker “I changed my mind” after supposedly being assaulted. Everything confirms her first version of the story. To this day, she can’t explain any of her actions with anything other than “I was traumatized”. She won’t budge and will defend her (possibly) fabricated lie with her life.
My feelings feel insignificant
To this day, I don’t know how to deal with all this. I feel like I was definitely being lied to but that she has started to belief her own lies by now. Everyone I talk to about it tells me I’m insane for staying and some days I agree. Others I don’t. But her inability to explain her actions properly makes me feel like she is protecting her own feelings more than mine. I feel ashamed even writing all this because of how absolutely ridiculous it sounds that I’m still with this woman.
Just a few days after she cheated, we were supposed to go on our honeymoon to Spain. I decide we should still go as it’d be a good opportunity to talk things through and make a final decision. We go and sit in the resort with infinite alcohol and we drink a lot and we talk a lot. It is incredibly intense and hard. I give her a long list of demands, the biggest ones being that she go into personal therapy, we go into relationship therapy together and that we switch our relationship to ethical non-monogamy. She agrees to everything.
But back home, things don’t change. She just gets depressed, feeling sorry for herself and avoiding any hard work. It takes over a year for her to actually initiate anything that feels like repair. I, in the meantime, get another job and work on myself through exercise and therapy. She doesn’t.
Self-esteem
And practiced all the things I would say
But she came over I lost my nerve
I took her back and made her dessert
If there’s one thing that’s good about all this, it’s that I started building up some self-esteem. Obviously not right away, but over time. I started fixing myself regardless of her. She was still living in my house and we were still having a good time casually, but the love was dead to me. I went for walks and runs and I started therapy again and started fixing me, not us. That was her job. This created a state where I was growing very rapidly while she was stagnant just wallowing in self-pity over her own choices and their consequences. She avoided more than me, which is unusual.
This state of personal growth and inequality in the relationship actually made me feel stronger somehow. It made me feel powerful for the first time. Not in a way of “I can manipulate her now” but in a way of “I am allowed to state my needs now”. I was always allowed, but I never felt so. What she did was so bad and so inexcusable that it made even me feel like it was not my fault, whereas I usually default to just taking the blame just to avoid conflict.
It also gave me a great motivator to keep up the hard work. This was incredibly hard because I – understandably so – felt very sorry for myself. I had just quit my SSRIs a month or so earlier so I was on my own fighting this fight. But I did it and that built up a sense of pride I had never felt before. I started respecting myself because of her disrespect.
The aftermath and the repair
In late 2023, I am tired of waiting for her to start and tell her to book relationship therapy or I’m gone. We go through a few couple therapists and quickly find out that most of them are absolutely horrible. Anyone can call themselves a relationship counselor and anyone will, apparently. My wife pays hundreds of euros and we get nowhere. That’s fine because at least we tried. I tell her that she needs to go into individual therapy right away and this time she does. She finally realizes the gravity of the situation and starts working on herself through her ADHD.
Now that we’re both in therapy and working on the hard stuff, things finally move into the fast lane. We start communicating about what happened but also about the many underlying issues in our personal mental health and our relationship health that caused this entire drama to happen. It’s all incredibly hard and emotional, but it’s also very real. Tears flow as we open up to each other. My wife finally shows that she understands the gravity of what she’s done and that she is open to finding out why this happened. She shows remorse and tries to understand which of her stories is the truth together with her therapist because she truly seems to be confused by now. We talk openly about where we want this relationship to go. About the communication, our needs, our future, the non-monogamy and everything else. We get real, and even despite the pain it feels good.
A blessing through a curse
Now, over two years down the road, I honestly feel different about it all. I still feel this immense hurt for what has happened, but if it wasn’t for this we probably would’ve kept our relationship going as it was before the cheating. We would’ve gone through life never learning to communicate properly, never openly stating our needs and wants, never fixing our mediocre sex life and never admitting our mutual interest in non-monogamy. I really wish this progress would’ve come in different packaging, but sometimes you need something bad to happen to crack open a big issue. Whereas my mother’s death was a rock bottom moment that caused me to work on myself, the cheating was the rock bottom moment that finally, with some delay, caused us to work on our relationship. Nobody wants death, nobody wants infidelity but I decided to grow from both and so far I have no regrets.
In future posts I’ll be diving deeper into specific details, but I needed to get the general story out there for my own peace of mind. I’ll also try to share some of the lessons we learned as a couple by moving through the incredibly tough process of repairing our relationship and broken trust, even though we’re still very much in this process right now. It’s hard to find proper resources on this because most people leave. But I truly believe there can be a beautiful kind of honesty and openness on the other end of all this hurt. Maybe I’m wrong and maybe I’ll regret it all someday, but this is the path I chose and I’ll be walking it as long as I can.
That’ll be all for now. Thanks for reading if you’re still here.
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