So, you’ve just found out that the only person in the world that you could trust with your deepest fears and vulnerabilities has just cheated on you after 20 years of marriage, what do you do?
You were already down. You were already at a crisis point in your life where you were questioning your own existence and just at the point where you thought there might be a way forward, your whole life is flipped upside down. That one constant, one support, one piece of stability has crumbled to sand and you’re left in shock. What now?
My body was pumping with adrenaline. It would have been easy to fall back into a pattern of self medicating with alcohol. It would have been easy to allow suicidal thoughts to take over, to grab a belt and hang myself from the loft ladder but that wasn’t my reaction. It was the opposite. I was furiously angry and for once that anger was not aimed at myself.
I promised her I wasn’t going to harm myself in anyway and I meant it. I was going to find away to turn this around. I’m always at my best when I feel like I’m the underdog. Forged in flames, as strong as steal.
Contrasting 40ths
I might not have been a perfect husband at all times but I was worth more than this. I was loyal. I was loving. I was giving. I treated her like a Queen. She experienced things that many women would kill for. She had the most incredible, thoughtful 40th birthday celebration where I rebooked the same venue as our wedding reception. All her friends and family were there. There was even the same wedding singer as we had years earlier. It was so exciting making that happen. All the times I spent sneaking around behind her back with her family, finding the perfect dress for her to wear. She had given me so much, put up with me burning the midnight oil to get through uni and now finally this was my chance to repay her faith in me and show her how much I loved her.
Now, four years on and it’s my turn to hit the 40 milestone. I didn’t expect the kind of fuss I gave her, actually that kind of attention would have been my worst nightmare and she knew that but it would at least have been nice if she didn’t sleep with another man weeks before my birthday. That doesn’t seem like an unreasonable minimum to me.
On the flip side
The good news for me was that she still loved me and wanted our marriage to work. There was hope there, she wasn’t bags packed with him waiting to pick her up outside. To an extent, the ball was back in my court.
She could have lied and continued gaslighting me as if nothing was going on. I wouldn’t have fell for it at that stage but I did give her credit for the confession. I had to think about what I wanted to do next.
I started making a list of demands
- Ring him in front of me without warning him and tell him it’s over on loudspeaker. They hurt me. I needed him to hurt. I needed her to hurt and feel uncomfortable after what they did. I wasn’t going to go after him or anything like that. After all, Mandy was the one that cheated, he wasn’t the cheat although he did know she was married.
- She had to block his number. I didn’t want any prospect of her going back to him if things got hard. I didn’t know at the time but she’d already cut off all contact with him, or so she says.
- We had to go to relationship counselling together.
- We had to do more stuff together. No screens, no distractions, no ear buds. We used to be so close but now we were neglecting each other. If the marriage was to survive, this needed to change. We had to remind ourselves why we were together in the first place.
- We had to tackle my situation with work and work out solutions together. I felt completely trapped to stay in a job that I no longer felt good enough to do because financially we couldn’t afford for me to lose my high wages. It made me feel suicidal. It made me feel like my death benefit was worth more than my presence. She needed to help relieve that burden so that it wasn’t just me doing all the financial worrying.
- We needed to change the way we communicated. This wasn’t just about her but both of us. She wouldn’t tell me her true feelings because she is extremely conflict averse and was scared of what I would say. I would shut down and not talk to her, cut her off completely when I was upset. We both needed to do better and that needed to start now.
- Both of us were drinking too much. She was drinking more frequently. I didn’t drink very often at all, only around New Year but when I did drink it was to dangerous levels. I haven’t touched a drop of alcohol since the day she told me she slept with another man and I have no interest in starting again.
- She needed to help me lose weight as it was destroying my self esteem. Just going on short walks together
- No more late night phone calls
- Either she delete Snap Chat or she allows me to install parental controls so that I get notifications if there are any sexual messages. I just couldn’t be sure I could trust her again and for now she was going to have to do things I wouldn’t normally expect of her just to make me feel safe again. She had offered to share her location data but the thing is I knew where she was when she was cheating on me, I just didn’t know whom she was with and what she was doing and I didn’t like the idea of tracking her location either.
- She had to hand over her phone and show me all the messages. It transpires that she deleted every trace once she decided she had made a mistake and I told her I was angry about this because it denied me any closure and confirmation that what she said was the full truth
- That she answered the remaining questions I had with 100% honesty
She agreed to most of the terms. I told her in no uncertain terms how much of a betrayal this was with the things I had been through and what she knew about my own childhood. I was also very conscious that if I pushed her too far that it might just make her more likely to seek comfort elsewhere, and that was the last thing I wanted. I had the emotional maturity to know that if I just brought this up every time we had an argument, it would make it insufferable for her, and it would sabotage our relationship.
I told myself what we had was more important than a one-off mistake and that we’re all human. I told her I forgave her, and after hours of talking and cuddling, I felt better, but then I would wake up, and it would hit me again as if it was the first time I was hearing it. She understood I was angry and that it was only natural and, to an extent, she just needed to deal with that and accept it.
Intimacy issues
I would kiss her and hold her but then wake up and think that I was kissing a mouth that had someone else’s penis inside and it made me feel like I needed to wash my mouth out. I knew I had to get over this hang-up. It was really important that we were intimate again and quickly, or I might get to the point where I had a phobia of touching her body.
On the Sunday night we had sex again for the first time and it was the most passionate, primal sex we had ever had. It was slow. We kissed a lot but with our eyes wide open. It was like I was looking into her soul. It was a really strange experience for me because all the time I was thinking about what she had done with him. I was thinking about how excited she must have been when he touched her and whether what I was doing to her was better or worse.
It was like I was reclaiming her body. The two things that made me feel a bit better were that she said they used a condom, and I do believe her and that she didn’t orgasm from penetration or oral sex.
She’s never been able to orgasm through sex itself. Apparently 70% of women don’t but with my body issues if he had done that for her and I couldn’t, I would never be able to carry on. It would have ended our relationship immediately. There was one time I did make her orgasm that way but it’s never happened again since and I’m not quite sure how that happened. It doesn’t happen with fingers or toys either so I do know she’s not lying and that it’s just me.
It’s always been very important to me that she enjoys our intimacy and I’ve always enjoyed bringing her to orgasm orally, in fact, I prefer oral sex (both giving and receiving) to sex. Oral sex is very deliberate and intentional. All your focus is on making the other person feel good. I love having her scent on my face. I love feeling her vagina contracting around my fingers whilst I’m licking her. It’s an assault on all my senses. Hearing her moan with pleasure, feeling the warmth and wetness of her body, tasting her, smelling her.
Making love to her immediately afterwards so I can feel her still contracting around my body. It doesn’t get more intimate than that.
If he had given her an orgasm in the same way, it would have taken something from me that was ours and that I could never get back. Of course, she could be lying, she could be telling me what I want to hear. She has about other things and that’s what I have to live with now, there’s no going back. I was her first and now I’m no longer the only man she’s slept with.
Sex differences between men and women
When it comes to sex, men and women are quite different. It’s a big risk for a woman to have sex with a man because she could get pregnant and that makes her vulnerable. Some men will happily sleep with as many different women as they can and the sex is just like scratching an itch, it means very little and they regret it afterwards but because I’m so insecure about my weight, it’s never been like that for me. I have to trust someone explicitly. I can’t just go out and find another woman to level up the score and get revenge, not that I’d really want to but my heart is fully committed and now I know that she could easily just walk out and find another man to sleep with really easily. The risk for me of trusting her is higher now.
It’s not that I think she would do this again, I can see in her face that her remorse is genuine, but she still could do this to me at anytime. That’s not a nice feeling. It makes me very vulnerable and insecure.
Emotional investment
She’s not the type of person to easily jump into bed with someone either so that makes it worse. She wanted him. She was prepared to risk everything. It was exciting to her, there was planning. She’s admitted to me now that she had phone sex with him on at least three or four occasions between October and December and that she had initiated that at least once.
She said it was when I was out of the house, so that really only means either when I’ve been attending Andy’s Man Club or the Pub Quiz. Both these activities are for my own mental health and she was always encouraging me to go, now I know it wasn’t out of concern for me but for her own selfish reasons. She planned to have sex with him. She would have talked to him about it. It wasn’t just being caught up in emotions in a moment as she tried to make out and I don’t blame her for lying to down play what it meant to her, I would have done the same in her situation, but it does mean I can’t take anything she says at face value anymore and I don’t want to feel like that. I want to trust her.
The thought of her in the spare room, talking to him like that creeps me out. I can’t bear to go in that room now and going out to my safe havens provokes these difficult feelings too. I made her stay at her mums on Monday when I went to AMC just to make me feel safe. Long term, that’s not practical. I need to let it go, but it’s not that easy, hopefully relationship counselling will help.
Mental block
On my birthday, she gave me oral sex for the first time since, but I couldn’t stop thinking about her doing that to him, and it took ages. It was just a complete mental block. I don’t know why I now find that harder than sex itself. You would have thought I’d be thinking about him inside her when we have sex too, but I’m not, it’s a primal instinct that takes over that wants me to mark her as my territory, to know that my DNA is inside her body. That’s always meant a lot to me. Knowing that the next day, as she’s walking about that she still has part of me inside her body, it used to be a special feeling for both of us.
I know how crude that sounds but we are mammals after all and many of the things we do, we do on pure survival instinct.
Love or revenge?
My mind keeps flip-flopping from an urge to look after her and wanting her to suffer. It felt very unfair that I had to keep it to myself. Everyone loves Mandy, even my own family hold her in higher affection than me. Part of me wanted everyone to know what she had done and take her down a few pegs from Mrs perfect.
I got angry with myself that I’d made it so easy for her. From all the screwed up relationships that I’d seen, when a partner allows a cheater back into their lives it normally ends up badly for the person doing the forgiving and here I was trying to comfort her and protect her from the consequences of her own actions. I wanted everyone to know what she had done.
Divorce not off the table
On Thursday 12th January, I handed her completed divorce papers and a copy of some of the emails I sent her in August trying to save our relationship. I had no intention of sending them off and I told her that too but I just wanted her to see how easy it would be for me to completely change her life forever. I was very disappointed with the form to be honest, there wasn’t even an option for a fault divorce, no box to tick to list adultery as the reason, just irreparable breakdown. It felt good to hand her the forms. It felt like I was taking back control and asserting myself.
Space to heal
I told her that I had been thinking about kicking her out of the house. In the end, we both decided that some time apart to think and process things would do us good so we arranged for her to stay at her sisters, at least until the weekend. I wanted her to show me that she was genuinely sorry. I mean, she said the words enough, but I needed her to show me a vulnerable side to her. Having the space apart gave her time to write a letter to me and at the same time, I wrote a letter to her with all my remaining questions and also to go through all the stuff related to the miscarriage etc. We had both been through a lot of trauma and although I was angry with her, I did recognise that it wasn’t just a one way street and I had made things hard for her too.
To be honest, I really missed her and was glad to pick her up on the Saturday. I wasn’t cross with her by that point, I just wanted to sort things out. I told her to take some time off work, with the heightened emotions and stress we were both going through it would have been very difficult for her to work and we needed to spend some couple time together to rebuild.
Since this all happened we’ve had more intimacy than at any other time during our marriage, even compared to when we were trying for a baby.
Telling close family
She told me that one or two of our close family had been asking if she was ok. They’d twigged that she wasn’t sleeping at home and then it’s not difficult for people to put things together so I decided it would be better all round if I wrote something to let them know. It wasn’t about revenge any more, and the message I wrote was as non-judgemental as possible, it had the bare facts but also just asked for space. Again, I felt like I was taking back the assertively, which released some of the pressure.
Doing stuff together again
On Tuesday 17th January, we had a really good day. We were going to go for a walk but it was cold and icy so we went for a drive to a garden centre with a cafe. It felt like old times. I showed her a nice email that one of our family sent me. It was a really beautiful message, not attacking Mandy in anyway but showing support.
Whilst we were eating, she started crying. Seeing the message affected her emotionally and it triggered my protective instincts. I just wanted to reassure her that everything was going to be ok and that we would get through it together. It really meant a lot to me to see her cry like that. It was something that I needed to see from her. She’d seen me doing a lot of crying since the whole thing happened.
In the car on the way home, I drove with one hand, holding her hand. I always used to tell her I loved her and she would say “I love you more” but since the event, she would just say “I love you” back. I totally understand why she did that and yes, if she said she loved me more right after what happened, I’d probably have told her that if she loved me more she wouldn’t have slept with another man but in the car she reverted to the normal exchange. It was probably by mistake, but it made my heart melt, and when we got home, I asked her what she was upset about, and I felt connected to her again. She was scared about what other people thought about her and that she felt isolated, but also that she deserved to be isolated for what she had done.
I told her how much it meant to me for her to open up like that and also told her how much it meant to me to hear her say “I love you more” again. It was a big step forward.
Unstable mood
I still feel angry with her every now and again. She tried to initiate oral sex on me this morning and I just didn’t want that. I didn’t want the thoughts of him back in my head. I was also annoyed that she’s essentially made me dislike something that always used to make me feel really happy. Hopefully with time, the dust will settle and I’ll stop feeling like I’m in competition with another man I’ve never met. Especially someone whose 6 ft tall and a regular build. I can’t compete with that.
I will get over it, we just need to spend a lot more time together doing things that we both enjoy, talking, cuddling each other and loving each other because deep down that bond is very strong and if we can get through this, we can get through anything but there will be hiccups along the way.
Forgiveness is a choice
It’s very difficult to forgive but it’s a choice and you don’t do it for the person you’re forgiving, you do it for yourself because the alternative will rob you of your peace and eat you up from the inside. I’m ready to let go. I want my wife back. I want my spark back. I want to show the world what I can do and how beautiful a soul is within me underneath it all.
Rant Over 