On Friday 3rd February, we had our counselling session and once again, I thought it went well. It didn’t go the way I thought it would, in the first session we talked a lot about the miscarriage and it felt very therapeutic, although the weekend after that was the disaster where I actually spoke to Tony and got the full details.
This week I was going to talk about the things I had done wrong in our relationship but the counsellor asked about how our week had been so it just kind of flowed out. It was really helpful hearing Mandy admitting what she had done to the counsellor. The counsellor was great, she wasn’t judgemental, just empathetic and allowed us to talk and it ended on a positive note about some of the things we had done together, the big holiday and her 40th party.
I could see Mandy was genuinely trying and wanted to save our relationship and that was a big relief for me. I was getting something real from her and it meant a lot. I asked her to redo the emails that she sent me when I asked her questions when I first found out. I wanted the truth, the full truth and nothing but the truth so that I could put it behind me and move on.
She had already been writing those emails on the Friday and sent three covering the whole backstory of how it happened and what exactly happened. Of course, she knew I’d already got the full story from Tony so there was no point lying, but hearing it come from her, not him was supposed to bring closure.
I was going to wait until she had finished all the emails to deal with it all in one block. I knew it was going to be painful to read and I didn’t want it drip fed, I wanted it to be like pulling off a plaster. However, Friday night I was getting very anxious knowing that those emails were just there waiting for me. I knew the first one was mainly backstory and probably wouldn’t be too bad so in the early hours, whilst I couldn’t sleep, I read it. It wasn’t nice to hear, but it was ok.
The second one was the one she said would contain the more triggering details, the dates and events, the majority of the sexual activity. I read it and by this stage I actually felt a sense of relief because I’d read it, it was unpleasant, but I was still ok. I didn’t know how I would react to reading the truth beforehand. I told myself I had to be brave and just get it over and done with but I’d read it and I was calm. So I read the third one covering the last couple of months of the affair. It did make me angry, knowing that the actual day I called her out, she was with him and intimately so but still made out that she wasn’t with him that week. I was also angry that she could do that so close to my 40th birthday. Not that there’s a good time to cheat on your husband, but it felt particularly cruel and ironic given the kind of treatment she received for her own 40th.
I went back to sleep and felt a bit better. In the morning I was really trying to help repair her relationship with her sister and best friend. I told Jo she had been crying her eyes out because she felt isolated from her and that she was going to email her soon and that they needed each other and that this was probably just a kind of midlife crisis.
We were going to be going out to the cinema in the afternoon and then out for a meal later. I was in a much chirpier mood. I knew she was writing the final email but I wasn’t worried. It was around lunch time the final email came through. We did discuss me not reading the emails before going to the cinema in case it affected my mood. She hadn’t actually told me she sent the email at that point but I saw it in my inbox as soon as she sent it and I just thought, I’ve read the rest, including the ones with the sordid details, I may as well just read the last one.
I was expecting it to be a bit more of an apology and response to a very angry email I sent her quoting her own responses to me from an email chain between us from January 2021.
In the original email I sent her I poured out my soul about how I felt about my body and how I feared that she would want to sleep with another man that could do things to her that I couldn’t do and in her responses she reassured me that she had no desire to sleep with anyone else and that she couldn’t abide by cheating and talking about her low libido.
This email chain was also where we discussed trying for a baby. It resulted in us getting pregnant three months later and the subsequent miscarriage so it was very significant to me emotionally.
In her response to that email, she admitted that maybe deep down she did want to know what it was like to sleep with another man. She said she felt more adventurous with him and admitted that what Tony said to me about her telling him that he had been the only man to make her orgasm in a certain way was true. She said she had a g-spot orgasm with him.
Even though I already knew what Tony had said to me and suspected it was true, reading that confession flipped a switch. We went to the cinema and I tried to act normal, then we came home and chilled and I struggled to keep it together. We went for an Indian and it was torture. I just wanted to get back home, go to bed and then discuss it but I just couldn’t do it.
I lost all control, I was hyper-ventiling, my heart was pounding and I had an ESG machine attached at the time too so it will be interesting to see what those results look like. It all becomes a bit of a blur but I remember listening to my MTD (music to die) and funeral playlists and kept thinking about waiting for Mandy to go to sleep, grabbing the car keys and disappearing, driving to Banff, where we had a holiday the previous year and totalling myself and the car into a railway bridge. It was outside of my normal plans. I normally wouldn’t consider anything that could endanger other people, but the thought of Tony giving my wife an orgasm in the one way I could never was just too much and all bets were off.
Mandy never went to sleep though, she didn’t know why I was distressed but I’m sure she would have guessed but it was obvious I was in a bad state and my mind and body were starting to separate as if no longer connected.
At one point I got up and went downstairs and grabbed a kitchen knife. It was blunt and I knew I didn’t have a lot of time otherwise I’d have sharpened it but Mandy was getting up to check on me. I tried to stab myself in the heart but couldn’t do it so I just kept hitting the knife against my right arm, hoping it would break through the skin. It left a mark but there was no blood. She came down and I tried to keep away from her in the downstairs toilet but she made me go back up to bed. Shortly after that I went to the toilet but she didn’t let me close the door. I knew she was watching but I thought if I was subtle I could get the razor from the bin without her noticing and cut myself with it. I went for the door and closed it, locking it. Not sure whether she managed to unlock it from the outside or whether I hadn’t managed to lock it properly, I was going to make another attempt with the razor blade. Not an attempt to kill myself, this wasn’t about that by then, it was just self harm to release the pressure I was feeling and all the horrible thoughts.
She got in and stopped me and again we went back to bed. I tried to grab hold of the pills by my bed quietly without her noticing. It was only blood pressure tablets. I knew it wouldn’t kill me but there were only three in the packet I could get easily and she took the packet off me. I’d never done stuff like this directly in front of her. That’s how out of it I was, it didn’t even matter that she was there.
It’s very blurry how it happened but later that night I ended up in my office and began writing a response to her letter. I also found a pair of really shit blunt scissors and began trying to cut my other wrist but it barely left a mark. I remembered I had an electric lighter that I used to burn incense sticks and was going to use that on my arms but it wasn’t working. I tried charging it as it’s USB powered but it still didn’t work. I considered wrapping a USB cord around my neck or making it into a noose and hanging myself but I knew it wasn’t long enough.
After finishing the email I calmed down a little. She came into the office and explained that it was just an ambiguous choice of words and that it wasn’t through sex that she had orgasmed and that did help calm me down more but I also thought she could be lying.
We went back to bed and she got rid of any pills or sharp objects, my keys, ties and belts and we eventually slept. It was like an out of body experience. It didn’t feel like it was me at all. She reminded me that I promised I wouldn’t do that, not just to her but other people too. She was messaging them through the night and Sunday morning and threatening to call the crisis team or 999. I was back in more control by that point though. Still distressed but I wasn’t going to do anything else. It passed. It’s like a tornado blowing over, you’ve just got to hope that the storm doesn’t do fatal damage. There’s still shock and devastation after but once the thoughts are gone, I’m back to something more like normal.
I did tell her I was thinking of having an affair or hiring an escort to level the scores. I also suggested wanting to watch her having sex with another man, which sounds odd but it would have been me in control, not being excluded. I changed my mind the next day but I was serious at the time and have changed my mind about it several times. My moods are just so dramatically unstable at the minute.
I am out of control and swinging from one extreme to the other. When ever she’s upset, I just want to help her, protect her and promise everything will be ok. Then other times the anger and realisation of what has happened hits me. Things just get into my head and I have to write them down to get them out then I feel better. It’s not a nice experience. Hopefully it will all settle down in time but I think there are still more waves to ride before we reach a point of stability!
Rant Over 