Tag: Adultery

.Weight.

WeightOfGrief

Weight of offenses against you.

Weight of misdeeds, intentional and not, curled in and through your being.

Weight of abandonment. Of abuse.

Of corruption. Of deceit. Of exploitation. Of injustice. Of perversion and manipulation. Of hatefulness and rage and retaliation. Of resentment and vengeance. Of scorn and mockery and neglect.

Of infidelity. Of betrayal and collusion.

Of exposure.

Of distortion and evasion and slander.

Of selfishness. And ill will. And disdain.

Weight of grief.

Valentine’s Day

Valentine’s Day has never been a real favorite of mine. Since we moved around so much, I found myself excruciatingly nervous about whether I would receive Valentine cards and was deeply grateful when my little handmade box got deposits.

ValentineBox

Valentine’s Day as a young professional brought the proverbial roses and/or chocolates. Always appreciated, never over-the-moon. Had I not received them from my lover, I would have been hurt I suppose, yet the day never held great significance, truth-be-told.

Valentine’s Day as a married woman was fairly routine too. Through the years, HUSBAND would leave me a lovely card, often send flowers by delivery or bring them home after work. He cooked a delicious dinner and gave me chocolates for dessert.

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Valentine’s Day 2014. Nothing.

I didn’t get anything. Well…I did get a card. A card that was not lovely and loving, but funny.?

It was a little niggle in my soul, but nothing too big. We had been married 27 years and were busy and had my parents living us and things were different. I had gone out and purchased Valentine’s cards for our children, and HUSBAND, and for my dying father to give my mother (something he always did). And I picked up three lovely, simple, crystal bracelets that looked like something daddy would give mom and that mom would like and I gave them to daddy to give to mom since he could not leave the house. And he cried. And she cried when he gave them to her.

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There was a little niggle, but all these things took over my heart and my mind.

So a few months later when I had discovered infidelity and I was ravishing records to try to put what life appeared to be and what life was together into one picture, I found a simple little email in HUSBAND’s account. It was from 1-800 flowers for a discount for Valentine’s Day flowers. And I asked him if he’d sent SW flowers. He had. He had ordered her flowers, an elaborate bouquet…one of the most expensive they’d promoted. And then he told me he had canceled the order because she said she had to travel and wouldn’t be in the office. And she really didn’t like flowers. Waste of money. She likes plants.

Paypal confirmed this story.

I love flowers. Beautiful, fresh flowers. I know they are a waste of money and they don’t last. But they are beautiful and if you get the right kind, smell good too. I love them and always have. She doesn’t. But she was going to get them.

Valentine’s Day. Still not a real favorite of mine.

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Underneath

New York City fascinates me…for all the obvious reasons…the flash and theater and amazing eateries and Wall Street and Central Park and Prospect Park and Bryant Park and coffee shops…oh…the coffee shops…

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But more than all that and the other thousand things I could list, I am fascinated with the life underground.

I am fascinated that the subway stations are such a part of the fabric of the streetscape that sometimes they are hard to see. I’m fascinated that people, young and old, fat and skinny, employed and homeless, move at a (relative) uniform (fast) pace and don’t see 20 stairs as a barrier to use (unlike much of the rest of the US). I’m fascinated that no one ever seems to glance at a schedule, or look at a map, but they get everywhere they are going. I’m fascinated that people bring their groceries on the subway, go to prom on the subway, go to work and school and dates and doctor’s appointments and meetings with their architects and, now that I know what I know, meetings with their whores. On the subway.

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I’m fascinated that there is a whole life underneath the ground. A life that includes shops and restaurants and advertising and crime and cops and rats and music and people. There is New York City on top, in the light. And New York City underneath, in the dark. And they are both filled with drama and death and life. The underneath knows about what’s above, but all of what’s above doesn’t know about underneath.

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My life had an underneath too.

There was a little bit of underneath that I knew about, but lots that I didn’t. It knew…my underneath knew what was above and outside, but only let little snippets of itself be known. Until it had to.

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My marriage had an underneath too.

There was almost nothing of the underneath in my marriage that I knew about…except little snippets that HUSBAND shared…little little snippets…until a big snippet came out and all the other snippets eventually appeared from underneath.

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I’m not willing to live with any underneaths in my personhood or personal life anymore. Truth is, they all are one anyway, they just like to keep the lines of demarcation and pretend they each have their own territory in my soul. But they were at war, battling…the underneath and the above.

They were at war. And I won.

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There.

There is a place I always want to go.

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There, when I’m here. And when I’m there now I’m here, and I find another there. It’s an odd reality – there is always another there, yet it never looks quite like I thought it would, so instead, I want to be – there.

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Is it just me, or do many of us want to go there and then there and then there yet we never get there?

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Or, if we do sometimes get there, we realize we never wanted to be there at all, yet here we are.

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And deep inside we wonder how we got there at all.

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I am not sure. But.

DareYou

Stockdale Paradox

Admiral James (Jim) Stockdale. Amongst many other things – former President of the Naval War College, US Vice Presidential candidate in 1992 – Admiral Stockdale was the highest-ranking, longest held captive in the Viet Nam war’s infamous Hanoi Hilton and even worse, the prison they dubbed ‘Alcatraz.’

The infamous North Vietnamese prison was the site of incarceration, torture and interrogation of US military personnel and included a predominance of pilots shot down during bombing raids. North Vietnam had signed the Geneva Convention of 1949 which included the requirement of decent and humane treatment of any prisoners captured and held during war…yet…the prison was the site of horrific atrocities to the American servicemen: extended periods of solitary confinement. Rope bindings. Shackled in 15 pound leg-irons. Intermittent beatings. Hung by their wrists, still tied behind their backs, from a meat hook. Kept at states of near starvation – then fed watery soup laced with pebbles or feces. Forced to stand on stacked stools for days on end. Held by stocks at the ends of their beds, lying in their own excrement while rats and roaches ran freely around and on them.

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Unimaginable atrocities that tore at them physically, emotionally, mentally.

Admiral Stockdale was interviewed for a book, and the author mentioned that obviously, Stockdale was an optimist, which had helped him endure his nearly 8 years of hell.  Not so, Admiral Stockdale declared. The optimists actually were some of the first to succumb, and some of the least likely to survive. He went on to explain: “They were the ones who said ‘we are going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say ‘we’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again, and Easter again. And they died of a broken heart.”

The author was puzzled…then how did you survive…through physical hell, but also through the mental and emotional devastation and torture?

Admiral Stockdale had remarkable faith in the unknowable and never stopped believing he would get out. He would be reunited with his family, return to the country he loved. He never lost site of the vision, yet ‘he faced the brutal realities along the way.’ In so doing, he set up ways to cope with whatever situation he was in in a given moment – leaving messages in the latrine, creating set times to say the Pledge of Allegiance or leaving code messages in letters home to his wife – even though he wasn’t sure his letters ever got sent.

The optimists failed to confront the reality of their situation, to face the challenges authentically and to use whatever resources they had to deal with that specific and particular moment.  They just kept hoping for the difficulties to go away – which may have made it easier in the short-term, but when again and again and again their expectations did match up with reality – they were broken and succumbed to death.

Several years prior to DDay, and my coming to find out that my 27 year marriage was really fraught with deception and betrayal, I had read about Admiral Stockdale…his Paradox of survival – even more – flourishing after the extended period of pain. It intrigued me…and I adopted this attitude, which required diametric change from my FOO. My family was filled with optimists who denied realities along the way, and always believed it would all just work out. I never saw, prior to uncovering Stockdale’s Paradox how ill-equipped this left me, and perhaps could be a reason for some of my blind acceptance, or out-of-bounds frustrations. I became committed to seeing and believing the vision for my life, my marriage, my family yet to face the brutal realities along the way. Of course…I had no idea what that would mean a few years later.

That is how I have approached betrayal, cheating and lying as it all unfolded. A vision – for me that I never stopped believing. For who I was and where I wanted to be. Did that include HUSBAND? Not so sure…because as each brutal reality unfolded, I faced it and continue to face it. I didn’t do it alone. I used the resources I could find. I dug through articles and sites and forums on the internet. I called out to a couple of therapists and spent time on their “couches.” Sometimes we, sometimes me. I reached back and reexamined memories and tried to see them for what they really were, not what my idealized mind had made them. I joined a support group with whom I am still intimately engaged, sometimes needing their help & guidance, and sometimes now, being able to offer my perspective.

I found this amazing community of bloggers who press me further and challenge and support. And care.

Slowly, I have come out of this torture more battered and bruised and broken yet more humble and grateful and whole. The Stockdale Paradox. Lived out.

Real

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Revealed betrayals that were repeated and repeated

Led to a ruptured heart

And reduced me to a remnant of myself

Running…returning…running…returning…

RETREAT

And then there was radical regret

And then there was radical regard for the ramifications of choices along the way

And then there was radical responsibility acknowledged

And then there was radical reconstruction with him

With me

With us

I was on a roundabout and could have gotten off

Considered removing myself as I went round and round and round

Yet remained

And the result is his redemption

The result is my rescue from repose

Regret?

Revulsion to the remembrances of the life-rape resonate…

But reverence to the reconciliation of two souls is

Real

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Questions.

Curiosity is something I often simultaneously value and disdain at once. When each of my children began to talk, I embraced their newfound voices and was excited by their questions. And then they hit the “why” stage…I found myself gritting my teeth as I searched for a response to satisfy their curiosity and then they would ask that profound question that I was elated to be able to address.

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It’s like that in much of my life. I am thrilled when we bring a new strategy to my company, and excited to train staff…embracing their questions through training and even early stage implementation. But it becomes tedious after a time, and the questions become a source of low-level irritation as I find myself hoping employees will stop asking and start doing and if they need support then? Welcomed.

So when sexual betrayal was revealed in my marriage, I was surprised to find myself overwhelmed with the need to ask questions. Questions. Questions. And even more questions. For the first two months of initial denial, leading to one small revelation and the next small revelation and eventually some enormous revelations that dramatically altered everything I understood about the whole of my married life, HUSBAND was avoidant – answering questions with minimal responses – at best and lying – at worst. But once he broke and quit hiding bits and pieces, he became transparent as my myriad questions continued. Questions as I tried to make sense out of all that was senseless and the revelations that had created a new was that didn’t look like what was before.

I asked questions that made sense: when, where, who, how? I asked questions that were important: protection, pregnancy? I asked questions that were driven by my pain: how could you? Do you know you have destroyed me/us/your children? I asked questions that revealed my confusion: why didn’t I know? How did you hide it? I asked questions that showed my anger: you spent our money on her? You talked to her for 2 hours and me for 2 minutes? I threw out questions that were traps:  who did you love more at that time? Did you ever really love me? I craved answers for questions with no answers: what caused you to fuck other women? How did you come home and look me in the eye?

And HUSBAND answered them. And answered them and again, he answered them. Once he moved into remorse, and the progressive realization of the depth of devastation he had wrought, he never faltered in his resolve to answer any question at any moment at any time. No defensiveness, no frustration. Nothing out of bounds, and no resistance even if I’d asked the same question many times before. At some desperate moments, I asked outrageous questions – and he answered them. Sometimes, the answers felt hurtful, but the beauty was that this willingness, this transparency resulted in a couple of huge strides: I began to believe his answers. Since he was no longer lying, his answers didn’t change. Over and over I could ask the same question and get the same answer. So before we both knew it, I began to realize I had a baby-amount of trust beginning to form for him – something I never thought would EVER be restored. Another result was that the more open he was and the more willing to bare all – even if the answer did hurt me – the more I felt like we were on the same team, and his past affair partners were off the team. As I learned of the secrets they’d shared with him, words they’d spoken, places they’d gone…I now was on the inside and they weren’t.

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I know questions are hard from the betrayed to the cheater. Especially a cheater who has turned from his behavior, and is really committed to moving forward in honesty and newness…but if there is one thing that seems to really be beneficial for helping a spouse heal it is the willingness to be transparent. To meet her where she is, with whatever level of needing to know that she has (and we are all different – no “normal” or “regular” here….) If HUSBAND had been unwilling to take my drilling, or acted exasperated or looked at me and said STOP! Enough!…I’m not sure I would have been willing to move forward with him at all, and it definitely would have been a more rocky path.

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OR.

A tiny word, just two letters. But a word of enormous implications. It is literally pivotal, and sometimes the only thing between right and wrong. Good and bad. Healthy and unhealthy. Wise and foolish.

OR is fundamental into most moments and most days. We stop at Starbucks OR we don’t. We do? Perhaps we are a bit late. Perhaps we spend the $10.00 that we would be better not spending. Perhaps we take in calories it would be better to avoid.

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Woven throughout so much of our journey, we have OR junctures, and we often –  even mostly – zip right past them without too much thought, and usually get it right. Even if we don’t, the cost isn’t too high: We get up (make the bed OR not? This outfit OR that? Breakfast OR not? Vitamins, yes OR no?) We head out for errands, work, volunteer (Make time for the gym, OR not? Take this route OR that? Stay in this lane, OR change?) You get it. You live it.

And then there are big OR times…these we realize have implications of huge import, and we weigh lots of factors and consider outcomes. Things like get married OR not? Have a baby OR wait? Send the little one to this kindergarten OR that? Big university OR small…rural OR city… You get it. You live it.

There are also categories of OR that we think we don’t have to consider but later realize we should have. Things like sunscreen OR not? Eat dessert nightly OR not? Dinner out frequently OR not? And twenty years later, we realize the better answer as we deal with basil cells, added pounds or smaller bank accounts. You get it. You live it.

 

ORs are a hard thing for us betrayeds. You see, we think the decision to step out of the bounds of the relationship you have established as exclusive is one that should have been weighed, and the outcomes should have been considered. We struggle with the early steps of cheating: when the cheater first signed up for a dating site. When he wrote up a Craigslist ad. When he opened the door at a certain establishment. When he first had a conversation with someone that niggled at his soul a bit because he knew it was slightly out-of-bounds…but made him feel good. When he chose to share his cell phone and exchange text messages or set up an alternate email or agreed to meet at the art museum. Each one of those steps, those moments wasn’t OR screaming don’t forget me! Don’t forget there is an OR and there will be fallout from this step and this step and this step?!!

We betrayeds don’t understand how OR didn’t shake him up, how he could make this momentous occasion a zip-past-the-moment time and just stepped right on into his betrayal. Maybe it did…and he did it anyway after weighing it all? And the Other Woman, too…she was faced with OR after OR after OR and kept choosing the OR that lead to deception and pain and rippled out from there.

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Nearly two years out, and HUSBAND has searched his heart and mind and soul. He can’t really answer this one – how he had the OR minutes and junctures and just simply ignored it little  moment by little moment until he was making that call and sending that text and meeting that woman and taking off his clothes and it may be one of the areas I have to know that I don’t know and never can or will know. He admits he had to quell it, but he can’t explain now how he did. It is one of those haunting thoughts that tugs at my soul, because I, too, have had those OR moments. And I chose him. I chose us. I chose honor.

So OR…speak up. Shake up. Don’t give up. And may we become a people who give you a voice – you are wiser than we want to admit…

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Nauseating Nostalgia

We all know what nauseating means…and probably nostalgia too: a longing…sentimentality…yearning. And a sneaky little creature that sometimes tugs at the edges of our emotions luring us into rewriting times and events into something they really weren’t in the first place.

My dad was military and we lived all over the place. I remember how I thought of one of our houses in my mind’s eye…a really nice neighborhood, mid-size home, pretty yard, other homes that were lovely and spaced out too. I returned to the area of that house as a young adult and nostalgia hit…so I took a detour to drive by that home that loomed large in my mind and memories.

But it wasn’t so big. As a matter of fact, it was really really small. And all the houses in the neighborhood were small. Honestly, they weren’t nice houses in a small neighborhood, they were shoddy and poorly constructed utilizing minimal materials with small yards and very, very close together. Definitely not what I remembered…what I’d clung to all those years.

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It happens with people too. Some of the people who loomed large in my mind’s eye – physically and in esteem – upon revisiting just – didn’t. Perhaps it was my younger age, smaller size and perhaps it was also my stage of life and experience, but when we met again later, it just wasn’t as BIG as I’d remembered.

And that’s how it is with Affair Partners. Statistically, most affairs start one of two ways: at the workplace, or someone from the past. HUSBAND’s affairs were both. His “past” affairs followed high school reunions: of the three he/we attended, affairs were birthed from two. And he sees now how nostalgia played a role…painting a picture of a past that really wasn’t…and enticing him to take a journey – which he was already working toward in his sex addiction – but this made it easier.

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I talk with Other Women who have reconnected with friends, boyfriends or lovers from their past. They are determined, almost to a one, that fate messed up. That they were always meant for each other. That their MM (that would be married man) just married the wrong girl, and if they got married, it happened to them too. It really wasn’t anyone’s fault…that they are soul-mates, or twin-flames and that’s what justifies them having an affair now. Because it is really bigger than them…out of their control…the heart wants what the heart wants is what they say.

And I say nostalgia is playing its grand trick on you. It’s making that time, that friendship, that relationship more than it was. That through the years of reality and hard knocks and life, nostalgia helps you believe it was all good even when, upon closer examination, those early years were also fraught with fear and pain and uncertainty. Oh, there were good times back then – but bad times too. Ironically, much like the present, perhaps?

While submerged and engrossed in his journey down nostalgia lane, HUSBAND agreed to a point with SW’s urgings to recreate the past, to make it something it never was. She made music play lists of songs and he shared songs back from the early days…and they listened to them again and again. She spoke words related to events from high school, reminding him of his youth and virility and he gladly rewrote history. As he moved into recovery, and stepped out of the fog, he began to talk to me about high school – the real memories – and they weren’t all so great. Actually, there was fun…but also lots of pain, and angst and rejection. Yet while wrapped in the figurative and literal arms of his reminiscent lover, those memories took on different form, nostalgically pulling and drawing him and promising him a future that would look like the past that really wasn’t.

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Nostalgia. Not the same as fond memories, or a smell that reminds us of a moment in time or picture that takes us back to an event. Nostalgia for things that really weren’t but we thought they were, perhaps also called foolery, can play a role in justifying infidelity in the minds of cheaters. And that kind of nostalgia? Nauseating.

 

Mixed Up Marriage

I just happened to hear a news clip on a major network’s morning news show talking about marriage. The talk was that some people are now choosing a “menu approach” to marriage, and negotiating up front things like 3 free cheat days per year. Or sex with another person every 10 years.

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Cheating and sexual abuse is not new. Yes – I equate cheating with sexual abuse. So the oxymoron of writing in “cheat days” to your marriage contract? The term ‘cheat’ means to defraud, to swindle. It means to deceive or influence by fraud, to elude or deprive someone of something expected. Ergo, when a person enters into a marriage, it is with the intent that they are defining something unique and special about the relationship. They are declaring to the outside world and to each other that this is different, this one is for keeps, this is for the good times and the bad times and the reason I’m willing to this to everyone is because you matter, you are valued and I want to mesh with you like none other.

It’s somewhat easy to stand on the outside and look at news stories about new types of relationships, watch videos about girls who share their guy or listen to a podcast about a couple of folks in an “open marriage.” To kind of say “Oh, I wouldn’t do that, but whatever makes you happy.” Pretty much sums out how I lived – never really engaging in the conversation or caring. That is until it is about you. Until you find out your partner considered your marriage open but forgot to mention it to you. Until you realize that your partner invited someone else’s DNA into your vagina and someone else’s sexual desires into his mind. Until you see that he remembers, or maybe wants, to send her flowers on Valentine’s Day. But not you. Until you realize he can’t be bothered to make a restaurant reservation for you, but is planning plane trips and getaways with her. No…when it comes to your house, contracted or not, it is devastating. I know this personally, and I know it from spending hours and hours and hours with other women – both betrayers and betrayeds, and even some who agreed to open marriages or other such inane arrangements. It may look good on paper, but when it begins to be lived out…the pain…the agony…

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So I don’t buy it. I don’t buy any concept of marriage that isn’t committed and unique and sacred. We are humans – not animals thinking from just our limbic brain. Yes, our sexual needs are great and need to be met, but apart from engaging our minds and spirits and souls they are empty and uninspiring. They may release dopamine in our brains but don’t spur tenderness in our souls. Anyone who understands cheating knows it isn’t about sex anyway. And if your partner hasn’t dealt with whatever it is that causes him/her to need something else, something out there, then he/she isn’t bringing all he/she is to the table. To your table. To your life and your relationship.

I sat around a work table recently with five unique women from vastly different backgrounds. All are beautiful, and smart, and caring, and kind. All five…ALL FIVE…100%…have been directly impacted by infidelity in their lives. This was not a support group, or a women’s group for troubled marriages. This was a professional setting that had nothing to do with sex or sexual abuse or cheating or marriage. But the subject arose, and around the room, this is what came out:

One woman’s father had cheated on her mom…the aftermath a traumatic time for a preteen. The next one discovered after 20 years together that her husband was a cheater, and not the father of her children only. The next one is the daughter of a mom married to a cheater, watching her mom immobilized to move out of the abusive relationship and feeling completely and utterly impotent to help. The next? The daughter of a serial cheater who watched her own mother wither into oblivion, and who met numerous ½ siblings through the years…and is now grieving as her own daughter experiences a cheating spouse. Then of course, me. You know my story but in case you don’t, I’m the wife of a serial cheater, a sex addict, who artfully hid it from me for 25 years sending me into complete and utter trauma, and deeply impacting our beautiful children through his lies and manipulations to keep his double life secret.

No. Don’t buy it. We are selling out our humanity, our souls, our spirits, our minds if we allow ourselves to believe that having some sham of a marriage is healthy, or leads to wholeness or growth or peace. We are just furthering whatever hole is in the cheater, allowing him to fill it with temporary crap that ultimately leaves him more desolate than before.

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If you don’t want to have a marriage, don’t get married. If you don’t want to forsake all others, then don’t take on the promise. If you don’t want to press into the challenges and find strength you never knew you had, don’t enter the race. If you don’t want to bare all to become one, then don’t. Marriage is about so much more than sex – a commodity that is for sale on a street corner, on the internet or through a device. If you enter marriage…it is just different and about the whole you, the complete you, if you even know who that person is. The trail of turmoil and agony you leave behind when you forsake your marriage, not only for your partner, but for friends and family and any precious children just isn’t worth filling your emptiness or curiosity with lies. And I speak from one who has found deep intimacy; there is nothing and no one out there that can compare or who is worth the risk of damaging the beauty of real marriage.

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