So, as it turned out everyone knew about each other but me. I couldn’t quite wrap my head around it. Their relationship was described to me by the boyfriend as “an open relationship but she was the only one living it,”. Him and I spent an oddly intimate Christmas Eve together on the phone and messaging each other wanting to be angry at each other but knowing it was deflected anger. We knew the other was innocent.
How had I come to piece this together you ask? When I finally found her Facebook, she had updated her Facebook profile picture the day before I pieced together the affair to a picture of her and the boyfriend. Up until December, it had remained that picture. The boyfriend’s profile picture was a picture of the two of them. The only piece of information my husband told me about her was that she lived with her ex boyfriend, but as a roommate. It always sounded odd to me, and I now knew why; because it was a bold faced lie.
Just about everything I learned about why my marriage failed, I learned from him. I learned it because my husband’s girlfriend had/has a boyfriend who she told most everything to. When he sought marriage “counseling” from her, she turned around and told her boyfriend what my husband had confided in her. I learned from him that they both swore up and down they were just “friends” and that the boyfriend knew I knew nothing of her and their “friendship”. He urged her to tell me or make my husband tell me, but it never happened. I learned more those in those wee hours of Christmas Eve into Christmas morning when I should have been wrapping presents about why my marriage failed that I ever heard uttered from his lips, from a perfect stranger. Not like the sitcom. From someone who also loved the wrong person.
I learned that all I did was lay on the couch. That he had to run the house. He would talk for hours on the phone at night to her, when I thought he was working out. What I was really doing was sometimes laying on the couch, reading, sometimes watching television, or playing on my phone. I could at times be found tending the yard or playing with the cat, but most of the time, I would come in end up on the couch, or upstairs in bed, waiting for my husband to come upstairs from his nightly “workout routines.”
When we ate dinner, which he started making a point to cook, most of the time, he was planning elaborate dinners, which I didn’t appreciate during the week, I started blissfully out the window thinking about how I was missing daylight in the garden, I didn’t understand the push for these dinners. He said he was doing them for the kids, who were ravenous humans, and never home at consistent times, so it seemed silly to me to put so much time and effort into them. I eat to live, not live to eat, so I don’t care really what I am eating. I want it to taste good, but it doesn’t have to be showy. I would just as soon eat take out, moreso for simplicity and because it is easier to please everyone. With covid, everyone was on edge, and this was no exception. It turned out, these lavish meals were part of some sick, twisted thing he was doing to impress his girlfriend, not his family. It worked, because we weren’t so impressed. He just wanted accolades for how long he poured into the meals and how good it all looked. If we weren’t all there at the same time, he was short tempered and annoyed at everyone. It wasn’t enjoyable. Really, he was just harboring his big secret.
I learned that he was portraying himself as so much he was not. He portrayed himself as a reader. Someone into global current event. He reads grocery store murder mysteries and listens to NPR for 5 minutes on the way into work. He watches sports center every morning in his robe while eating cereal on the coffee table. He gets the economist and many medical journals in the mail. I am not sure those things make him worldly. Unintelligent? No. Worldly? No.
The house is filled with books, which are mine and he implored me to get rid of repeatedly. He reorganized the house, displaying some of the more intellectual reads on the bookcase in the study, I am sure to make him look good. Like the world class reader he has put himself out there as.
He had this thing in his head that myself and one of his kids hate each other. I am a flawed person, but I do not hate any of the kids. I have a big heart and I will tell you, above all else, I love those 4 people under that one roof with everything in me; they are my family. It doesn’t mean there aren’t parts of them I don’t like, but I love them. It makes them who they are. I am above all else, his kid’s stepmother, they aren’t supposed to be running toward with me with open arms all the time. I may not have gone to every award ceremony, game, meet or banquet for his kids, but I asked and wanted to know about it. He certainly didn’t go to my child’s everything. Sometimes they even would have stuff on the same night! So, we really couldn’t go! I also always felt that they have a very involved mother, and I didn’t even want to make it awkward for them. The biggest difference is, my child’s father was never there. It was always just me in the stands for them. I needed my husband there for them. He could never see it that way of course.
It turns out, her boyfriend implored her to stop giving marriage advice to my husband. That she shouldn’t be doing that because she didn’t understand what it was like to have 3 teenagers, let alone a wife with MS. He found some oddities in the stories he was being told about me just “laying on the couch” while my husband was able to talk to her for hours at night. I knew nothing of their “friendship” or that she existed, which is why my husband hid while he talked to her. She however, talked very openly in front of her boyfriend to my husband. Had I known that she had a boyfriend, I never, ever would have left my house. I would have dug my heels in and stayed put.
As we talked that night, I realized what a double life my husband had been leading. The basement was his own place of solace and solitude. He could do whatever he wanted down there. I made the boyfriend repeat things because I was dumbfounded. It was like I was learning a new language at times. I would lash out, then apologize. He would do the same. I found out too that Saturday morning basketball had been missed for long walks at local ponds. He wouldn’t generally miss Saturday basketball for anything. Or had he just told me he basketball went for longer than it did during covid. I will never know.
Who knew in a two person relationship you could be the odd man out? That three other people could know your husband was having an affair and just assume you knew something? I had spent 6 months just thinking Covid had made my husband a little batty because I had turned a little odd. The world had turned odd. I had no idea he was having an affair all that time. I just thought he was adapting to this new world and trying to become super human with his workouts. I thought he was trying to work off extra stress with three teenagers stuck in the house with no social life due to Covid. I didn’t think he was being selfish and ruining my life in the basement with another woman. Not the love of my life.
Never had a white picket fence 