The other side of infidelity: the story of a betrayed wife

I had always loved being married. What he wanted was a happy home, a happy spouse. I had assumed that after twenty years of marriage that was true, we were happy. In our own way, in a way that suited our unique idiosyncrasies. We seemed to agree on all the decisions; not with difficulty, but with ease. “How should our marriage be?” It was not a question that I asked. This was our marriage; This was a mutual process and this was the result that we had reached after twenty years together. What I quickly learned was that it is only true in a relationship with no secrets.

Are the secrets suddenly revealed? When the truth arises, it may seem abrupt. Actually, the signs are there, but they are still dark. “How could you not know that your husband was having an affair?” replayed in my mind over and over in the days after disclosure. Is it because I didn’t want to face the obvious? No, it is because an affair is not always obvious to the spouse. Not until late at night. No lipstick on the neck. No unaccounted time. There are no strange phone calls. Where was he supposed to look? My husband was aware of his routine and his family.

The routine was broken one day. I walked into his office and he was huddled in front of the phone, whispering into the microphone with a wide smile on his face. I had forgotten that I would meet him that morning. He looked at me while still talking on the phone and said “I have to go.” The conversation was very friendly; My first thought was why can’t you share with this person that I’m here? When he hung up the phone, I asked, “Who were you talking to?” He stumbled and replied, “Nobody.” I replied, “It seemed like you were having a good time.” Then he replied, “It was Elise.” My heart skipped a beat. Immediately, I started to think, Elise? Elise moved out two years ago. She was your secretary. Why would you be talking to her? I blushed in embarrassment and walked out of his office into an adjacent empty office. He followed me and closed the door. I immediately blurted out the words “Did you have an affair with Elise?” “No” he shook his head and said “No” again. I didn’t believe him, but I couldn’t conceive of him lying to me either. He had never lied to me before, why now? What I can do? It seemed so fundamentally wrong to accuse your spouse of having an affair, and yet there it was, the words floating in the air between us. All I could do was leave to avoid discomfort.

My husband called constantly for an hour. When I finally answered the phone, she said she called Elise back after I left. He told her that it was wrong to keep his friendship out of respect for me. He assured me that there was nothing between them and that he would put an end to any future contact. At that moment, I believed him. I did not revisit the incident and often wonder why. I was on the cusp of discovery and hesitated. I can only say that the hesitation came from wanting to marry the person I knew and trusted.

Two weeks passed and the incident never entered my mind again. Then I came home late one night and he had left his work email open and the inbox contained a message from Elise. As I looked closer, wait, there were multiple messages over several months from Elise. I’ve never opened his email before, but this time I did. To discover the truth? No, seek the assurance that it was just what he had said: a friendship. What I found were not steamy love letters, but messages with clues that were impossible to ignore. A note that ended with “love” and another that talked about how much fun it would be to see us at a conference.

The slow process of disassembly began. I could feel the heat rise from inside my stomach spreading to dizziness as the ground seemed to move. I took several deep drinks and knew this was not just a friendship. How could I ask him? What was I going to say? I stayed awake for three hours before I finally woke him up. Those three hours were endless. He could hear the clock ticking as he tried to think of what he would do. I needed to know. I had to know. I lay down next to him, repeating Elise’s name over and over while he slept. “Please, please, just give me a nightly confession.” I prayed in my mind. I was not so lucky. Clearly, there was only one way to get the truth and that was from him. The passage from the trusting wife to hapless torture came quickly. At three in the morning I started crying. She woke up and asked what was wrong and I blurted out, “I know you had an affair with Elise. Just tell me. Tell me now. This is my life and I have a right to know.” Dazed from waking up, he quickly responded, “I did. I did.”

I wanted to hit him and I did. I stopped hitting. I didn’t stop because I felt it was wrong. I stopped because I didn’t know what kind of violence I was capable of. At what point could he turn away from the wife who thought it impolite to ask if her husband was having an affair with a cunning murderer? I did not know, but certainly this act of confession called for an answer to the question. The more rational part of me gained ground. He needed to have answers. The storm broke and questions rained down. If you were our neighbor and were unlucky enough to be awake, you would have heard the angry voices and the screams. We were the couple you listen to late at night when the voices are so loud you don’t know which house they came from. The couple are so desperate they don’t care if you hear them fight. If you were our neighbor, you would think that only stupid and ignorant people fight like this. We were that couple.

Suddenly everything stopped. “How long did the adventure last?” to which he replied “Four years”. The room began to swim and I began to hesitate. I was falling, but I was still standing. It’s no different than that moment in Alice in Wonderland where she’s ready to chase the White Rabbit and you’re not sure if she’s dreaming or still awake as she falls into the rabbit hole. Alice screams in terror as she falls, but begins to realize that the fall is so slow and ridiculously long that she cannot bear the fear. Soon he begins to experience the event as simply falling and wondering when it will land. The hours seem to pass and she spends her time staring at the walls as she goes down. There are jam jars on the shelves, plates, teacups, and books. He sees them all, but keeps falling, so he can’t understand why they are there.

When you discover that your spouse has been unfaithful to you, you never land. You travel down the well believing that there are days when you have landed at the bottom of the well. Do you tell yourself that you feel so horrible, that it surely couldn’t get any worse than this? Surely this must be the bottom line? You want the background. You long for the bottom of the hole only to land somewhere. Like Alice, if you land, you can find out where you are instead of wondering where you are going. Once you land, can’t you plan the return trip?

With infidelity, there is no landing to undertake the journey back to what was. What you knew is gone. Imagine being suddenly homeless with no friend or destination in mind to help you. You are looking for a place to sleep, a bite to eat, a place to shower, but it is never enough to recover. You’re never clean enough, you never get enough rest, and food doesn’t seem to fill your hunger. You want more, but even after a few homeless nights, you can no longer remember what it feels like to live inside a house. Memories of safety cannot sustain you because if everything was taken from you, how can you feel safe knowing that?

Death was in my dreams. I opened doors and there was no one. The glass broke but no one was there to hear it. I looked for my children, but could not find them. There was never anyone in my dreams. He was alone, searching and on the verge of a violent death. If she found someone, it was usually Elise, the other woman. I woke up from my dreams as if I hadn’t slept and my body throbbed with pain. I faced the day but couldn’t do anything. He would do what he had to do, but nothing more. I fed the children, did the housework, went to work, but each activity took me away from the thoughts that I did not want to leave. My job was to deal with this deception, even if dealing with it meant absolutely nothing. It occupied my whole being and took everything out of my mind.

I wanted to kill her. I had met her. She had met my children. She had attended parties at my house. I sympathized with their stories. I defended her when my husband complained about her job performance. She had moved 2000 miles away, but I was hanging around her old house. Crying and wishing I could knock on his door only to punch him in the face. As she was driving, could she just cross the street and I would hit her with my car? “Officer, I never saw her cross the street. She was recklessly crossing the street.” Surely, this is why the defenses against insanity were devised?

Drawers and drawers filled with scraps of paper, coins, matchbooks, old numbers began to take on a new meaning. They were treasures of possible clues to the past that he had never known. My children asked me what I was doing and they replied that I was cleaning. Yes, that was cleaning. I was trying to clean up the past, make sense of it, and make sense of everything that I had missed. He hadn’t really lived those years. Oh, I thought so, but you can’t when there’s a lie this big. He was fighting below and above the walls of memories to fill those gaps with this information. The knowledge arrived as fragments in the discarded garbage can. In the midst of innocuous conversations, I would ask my husband questions that just wouldn’t rest. “Did you drive down the freeway with her? Did you ever eat lunch together? Did she make you breakfast?” Relentless and useless questions, but the balance of my emotional state was based on the answer. If I could only put the pieces together, I could put myself back together.

The answers came, but they weren’t enough. The gaps and gaps of those years remained. Between discussions, we sat and ate, watched television, slept together. We were passionate. We proclaim our love and our commitment. I was dying. Days turned into months and finally we got to the point where the anger and disappointment had passed. He passed the arguments. It was peaceful for my husband and he embraced these hard-earned days after months of my tumult. Peace can seem calm, but also despair. Anger was life and it was a way of trying to take over my life and reshape it. Twist it, fold it, return it to something I knew and understood.

I didn’t know where things were for my husband and me. I thought I knew it most days. He was the repentant spouse who saved this marriage. I was the one who had reached the edge of sanity, but was coming back. I could forgive, but not forget. That seemed absurd. How do you forget one? Would anyone forget they had cancer? Would they forget a car accident? My husband and I had lost touch over the years; something I know now, but could not understand without his confession. The rabbit hole seemed to have light at the end of the tunnel. I wasn’t going to land, but maybe I would start coming out myself; exploring the contents of the tunnel along the way.