Hi everyone, I'm new here and I wanted to share my story with you. For those of you struggling to deal with infidelity. Its a complicated story and a long one, I'll try to keep it concise.
Somewhere approaching my 42nd birthday and in my 19th year of marriage I decided that I wanted to deepen my relationship with my husband. somewhere in my mind I saw myself aging, hurtling towards middle age and I took a good look at my life and realised I was stuck in this place for what seems like forever.
I've been a housewife since the birth of my second daughter 18 years ago. Its meant a lot of sacrifice and I began to feel, almost right away, that I could not be attractive to my husband in the way I was before. First of all, I need to explain that we met at work and I quit the department after we became engaged but continued to work in the same company. So, basically our relationship was born in a working environment and we still rode to work together each day, saw each other on lunch breaks etc. After about a year of being at home I started feeling that intellectually and physically (I'd put on some weight with the babies) I wasn't going to measure up.
There's a whole lot more to that, but anyway, back to my story.. I decided to try to create my own "Escape" situation.. you know the Pina Colada song by Rupert Holmes? If you don't check for it on youtube and you'll get where I'm coming from. I decided to write my husband as a secret admirer. Up to this day I don't know where the thought came from, but I went through with it. I was actually stunned when he replied and at first the conversations were really kinda formal and general. I asked him lots of things about his family, I was always turning him towards me and the children.
I used my alter-ego to tell him all the things that I wanted from him, by saying things like "I bet your wife loves ... " or "you sound so romantic, your wife is a lucky woman" etc. I also wanted to use this "other personality", to let loose the passionate woman that exists inside me, that I'd repressed for so many years to be this role model wife and mother. I basically allowed my children to consume me when I felt that my husband was neglecting me. I didn't have an affair like other people, I just made the best of it and poured all my attention onto them.
Before long I'd been telling him how much I admired him, that I thought he was sexy etc. I lost myself in this.. it was like having an affair. I couldn't wait to get emails from him., it was exciting and I felt so alive. I never realised what dangerous ground I was walking on... while I knew i was talking to my husband, he didn't know it was me. Technically, he was getting intimate with another woman.
Each day as things progressed (we were never graphic or sexual, just intimate details started pouring out of him.. things he never even told me) I had this bittersweet addiction to it. I cried like a baby when I read some of the things he said, knowing that he'd never told them to me, yet I was elated because it was to the inside me, the real me he was revealing himself.
I fully intended to tell him it was me, I even had an email set up in my drafts folder to him cause I was sure he would crack my password, he was almost desperate to find out who I was. In there I explained to him that it was me and why I'd done it. That my primary goal was to make him fall in love with me again.
One day, I realised that he seemed to be falling in love or at the very least becoming attached to "me" and wanted more so with an aching heart I told him that I thought we should stop talking to each other because we were both committing emotional adultery.
He seemed devastated and said I was probably right and that he wished there was a way we could still talk to each other but we probably couldn't keep the intimacy out of it, so maybe we couldn't. He said he would miss me and my heart broke that day. I printed out the letter intending to tell him that evening when he came home.
Unfortunately, the back page with my signature fell out and before I could tell him, he found it. It was definitely not the way I wanted him to find out. As you can imagine, all hell broke loose in my house that night. He accused me of setting out to trap him, he refused to listen to me and I thought my life was over. Not only did he find out the wrong way and thought the worst of me, but I also had to live with all the questions our secret relationship had revealed. WE slept in separate rooms for 3 days and for 3 days he didn't speak to me He knew he couldn't hide anything from me now because I was the one he had confided in. He was like a caged animal, cornered, lashing out. I received so many mortal wounds to my heart. I didn't think we would ever recover from it. More to come