A marriage falls apart

In February of 2020, I found out my husband had an affair with a woman he worked with. I had met this woman. She had come over to my house and I made her dinner. She was new in town and we had been here a few years, so I thought it would be nice to invite her into our lives.

The first time I met her, she has come over to my house after she and my husband got off work. I felt awkward and uncomfortable, as she totally ignored me and only spoke to my husband. He left to get some ingredients for dinner and while me and her were left alone, she asked me if I knew she was coming over and if my husband had told me about her.

“Of course,” I said “he asked if I was ok with you coming over.”

“Oh.” She said in an almost disappointed way, as if she was sad my husband didn’t keep a secret from me.

Then she proceeded to not talk to me unless I asked her a direct question.

Of course, this is probably just my mind making things up now that I know what happens next.

I lost my mind. My husband had been married previously and his ex wife had cheated on him. I KNEW he would never hurt me like that. He had experienced it and wouldn’t inflict that pain on another person, right?

That made it worse. The fact that he had someone’s total and complete trust and that it didn’t mean anything, really, in the end.

I’m finally coming out of the fog that 2020 had left me in. We didn’t get a divorce. We are trying to work it out.

This destroyed me. But fire is a cleansing force, necessary occasionally, for a lush and beautiful forest to flourish.

My goal is to write a series about my experience. While looking for something that would help me through my year of hell, I found myself not finding quite what I was looking for. Most literature about affairs seems to be written by mental health professionals or religious leaders. The ones that weren’t, were all about how to move on after an affair - through divorce. I didn’t want a divorce! So where do I go? Internet forums where people who are still struggling and in pain go to wallow in their sorrow. I was trying to find help and hope that this feeling wouldn’t last forever and there were people who were years... sometimes decades out from discovering about the affair and still so upset about it. That didn’t help. My therapist suggested I stop looking at them because I lamented about feeling hopeless and that I will never feel happy again based on these people’s experiences.

The pandemic started shortly after I discovered the affair, I was hospitalized at one point, me and my husband both lost our jobs, I was almost killed, and I reached rock bottom. I feel like I have connected with the earth in a physical way. When my mind was at its worst, the coronavirus was raging it’s hardest. When I was so depressed that I couldn’t leave my bed, my state was put on a 6 week lockdown where only essential services were open. When I found myself still depressed and unhappy at the end of November, I was fired from my job and found a new one within a week, in spite of the pandemic, that allowed me to have a totally fresh start. I can almost see the light at the end of the tunnel with managing my own mental health issues that I have collected like trading cards over the last year, right as a new administration cleans up a mess left by the previous one and vaccines are being administered.

I wanted to fight for my marriage. Not because I am religious, because I’m not. Not because I have some lofty opinion of marriage, because I don’t.

But I made a promise to myself and to my husband. To try my hardest.

I keep my promises.