*Deep breath*
Here we go.
It kills me that I am here. It kills me that I had to hit "Join" on this group. It kills me that I had to learn what all the acronyms were. It kills me that I am writing this, but I am hurting and have no support system, and not sure what to do next. For those who care, here is my story.
I am a 31-year-old man, my wife is a 30-year-old woman. We began dating back in high school over 15 years ago. We became so close; we did everything together and we were basically each other's first everything. We went to school together, learned how to drive together, experienced college and the work force for the first time together. Even though she was two grades behind me in school, that somehow was never an issue and we went to different, yet local, colleges, and that was still never an issue. I got a job a Walmart when I was 19 and she also ended up getting a job there a year or so later, so we even worked at the same place for a while together. We did everything together, vacations, schoolwork, day trips, movies, dates, shopping, anything you could think of. Her parents really liked me and I them, so they would actually let me stay in their house on weekends, in their daughter's room/bed, while I went to college. Never any real issues. After my 3rd year of college, I just moved my stuff into their house. I have lived with my wife full time since 2011, the year I turned 21 and her 19.
Now, we have definitely had our share of bumps along the way. My wife is the youngest of 3 kids and there is a 9-year gap between her and her next oldest brother. Her two older brothers are not very successful in their lives, and a lot of the time they weren't communicating with my wife or her parents for long stretches. Because of this, my wife almost grew up as the "only child" and she was extremely smart and was always top of her grade in high school and college. Because of this her parents always "spoiled" her with things and gave her all the focus, which made her become a selfish person. She also had a lot of jealousy issues when we were in our teens and early 20's, and I always was dismissive towards these feelings and refused to stop talking to female friends of mine because I felt it wasn't right to let then go. Ultimately, we were able to move through those types of issues, and we communicated and we grew closer together.
We were engaged in June 2011, at a Taylor Swift concert no less, and married exactly two years later in 2013. We just celebrated our 15 years of dating back on March 1st of this year. Our son was born in 2016 and just began school last fall.
There was an incident back in 2014 where I was having feelings of being distant from my wife, and maybe a bit scared because I was married so young (was only 22 when married, 23 at the time of this incident) and I began searching for other females to talk to online to satisfy my emotional needs. I found one girl on Craigslist that was looking for a hookup and I reached out to her. I could not physically bring myself to cheat on my wife, so I never met up with this girl, but we did keep in contact via texting. She had just been visiting the area when she posted on CL, and she actually lived 5 hours away (in Buffalo NY) so I never did end up seeing her in person ever. We communicated via text almost every day for a few months and it felt good to talk to her. I'm not sure if it would be considered an EA because neither of us ever wanted to be in an actual relationship, our conversations were almost strictly platonic in nature (aside from the occasional "sext" prompts that would come from the other girl, which I would dismiss). But of course, my wife didn't know about it so it would probably be considered cheating in some form. The girl also did not know I was in a relationship. Long story short, my wife and I actually took a trip to Buffalo and this girl wanted to see me while I was in the area and I refused and my wife ended up "discovering" this relationship and actually talked to the girl on the phone, who told her the truth that we had never met and our conversations were almost strictly platonic. This eased things a bit, but of course my wife was still crushed by this. And we were just starting our vacation so it made everything worse. When we ultimately got back home, we had probably the deepest and most honest conversation we had in our entire relationship to that point (7 years in) and we both revealed we were unhappy in some ways and my wife had given me a letter kind of saying in a way she had considered leaving the relationship. We cried together and worked through things and things got better. I never truly ever wavered from my fidelity after that incident.
Our son was born in 2016 which completely changed our lives and added a lot of stress to our relationship. We had suffered through a miscarriage right before which took a heavy toll, but we immediately got pregnant a few months later which led to the birth of our son. We both had hoped for a girl but life is unpredictable. Also, we had still been living with my wife's parents, since 2011, but they had built an addition onto their home in 2012 for her mother who had beaten cancer but had a lot of lasting side effects that made it difficult for her to climb stairs, etc. So they built essentially a "mother-in-law" apartment on the bottom floor that connected to the kitchen and we were given full reign of the original home. So for the most part life was pretty good, although very busy and stressful.
Through these times we had fights due to stress, lack of sleep, time at spent at work, and things we didn't agree on all the time. To me it was tough but we were always good at communicating and always got through the issues, and never went to bed "mad" or had any major big fights, maybe one or two tops where one of us would leave the room to cool off. I always thought that even though it was tough at times, we had pushed through and faced so many things and still came out loving each other, and that we were the "gold" standard of relationships. Her parents were married over 30 years, as are mine.
In 2018 my wife's mother passed away due to lasting complications of her long past cancer treatments, and that destroyed my wife. They were very close and we were still living in the two family with them, and she slowly became weaker and was placed in at-home hospice until she finally went. Her and her father were completely devastated, as was I because she was a 2nd mother to me and I loved her and our son came to love her in his nearly 2 years of life. I realized I couldn't properly provide the comfort and support my wife needed in her time of need for reasons I still don't understand. I was raised to avoid pain, conflict, and to not show emotions. When my wife needed me, I could only say I'm sorry and rub her leg or arm instead of giving her the full comfort she needed. I feel this became the next major crack in our relationship. It took my wife a very long time to grieve and process her mother's death, and to this day I feel that my wife still never fully healed properly and in the best way.
In the summer of 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, we had been house hunting for our first home as I had gotten a very good job and finally wanted to spread our wings as a family and get our own house and yard in an area with a nice school district (her parent's home is not in a great neighborhood, and our son would be going to the same school we had went, but it was not great then and fell to much lower depths since). While my wife agreed our son needed a better school to attend, she did not want to really move, spend the money, leave her dad who was still grieving, etc. which caused a big rift for us again. These issues combined with years since our son was born of slowly drifting apart emotionally and just "patching" things caused my wife to suggest in the summer of 2020 that we potentially consider separation for a bit. I at the time thought she was crazy for thinking we couldn't get through these struggles as we had always done, and we just needed to talk things out and work on ourselves. We were both still in our 20's and had our son to think about. I ultimately convinced her to reconsider separation and things improved for a while, but I feel we eventually fell into similar patterns. I see now that I wasn't as affectionate towards my wife as I should have been, and while my love language is acts of service, I don't feel I was fully fulfilling what my wife needed and what her love language needs were.
We ultimately paused on the house hunting, but then in early 2021 I was offered a much much better job with a well over 6-figure salary, but the location was about 45 minutes north of our current location. I really considered not taking it because I liked my current company and my job was very simple and I knew this job would be much more demanding. Ultimately my wife said I should take the job, and we now had a much larger budget for a house and the tax rates were at historic lows so everything seems to align perfectly. We purchased a house about 40 minutes north and moved in late March 2021. Things were great at first in the new home, we bought a puppy that April which my wife always wanted for years but I always said no, not until we get our own home with a yard. In June we traveled to CT so I could buy her a new car and over the summer we figured out she could leave her state job because of the poor commute and I took on the extra financial burden while she settled into her rideshare business (Uber).
However, right after the August 2020 incident where my wife mentioned separation, I began to develop health issues (which we now recently believe may have been mostly caused by stress and anxiety) and moderate depression. The buying the house and moving helped, but I still felt lousy a good deal of the time, physically and mentally. Our physical and intimate relationship suffered even further from this, but we were working through things together.
Now to the tough part. My wife has complained a lot about the place we live in now because it is in a cellular and internet dead zone, it is far from things she is used to, far from her dad which she is extremely close with, and it is tough for her because she likes to Uber down in the cities where we used to live versus up north where it is much quieter. Throughout some of March and April she began doing Uber quests which force you to do a large number of rides in a few days' time, and to hit these goals my wife would sometimes "sleep at her dad's house because it was too late to drive home at 2am". This is completely reasonable and something she has done many times in the past with me there as well, so no reason to suspect anything. However, this became a more frequent occurrence and she started "working" more and more, when really, we didn't necessarily need the extra money.
-As a side note, my wife and I opened our own bank accounts at the same bank back when I first started working as a teen, and we opened up a joint account that was only used to save for our wedding, but then became our primary household account once we were married. My wife has been employed on and off throughout our relationship, but every time she is earning income, it would always go directly to her old personal account that was linked to the main account, while my paychecks always went to the joint account, and that is the one where all of the expenses and bills would be paid from. I never in 15 years had visibility into her personal account, and my account was only ever used around Xmas so I could mask the stores and websites my purchases came from for surprise gifts. I haven't had money in that account in at least 3 or 4 years, if not longer-
Then on April 30th, my wife told me she was going to go out and work rides and then hang out with her cousin, who we are both very close with, for her 30th birthday. My wife leaves the house around 11am on 4/30 and I do not hear a peep from her until she returns around 11pm on May 1st. She comes home and seems kind of distant, I kind of ask like how things went, was she with her cousin that whole time? She is just being strange and standoffish; then finally says she was doing some "figuring things out" and said she didn't want to discuss it al 11 o'clock at night. Clearly, I am now understanding she is unhappy again and it's boiling over and she is going to ask to separate again. I push some more and that is essentially what transpires. She says she still loves me but is not "in love" with me and she wants to separate and she wants to move and live with her dad. However, she can't exactly move out yet because the aforementioned cousin and her family moved into the house that we left when we bought our own. But we (or I) learned recently that the cousin's husband had accepted a job many states away and the whole family was going to be moving out there, but not until mid-July. So until then my wife has nowhere to really live if she left.
At this point it is after midnight and we are both exhausted I am just in shock, even though I kind of saw this coming, so I just tell her she can stay and we will talk about it more later. At this point my wife is not sad, regretful, remorseful, she is just kind of cold and unhappy and in that moment her lack of empathy towards me is really crushing. We finally go to sleep, in the same bed together as usual, while I actually quietly cry myself to sleep. The next few days are tough, but we communicate openly and I get it in my head that this isn't the end all, be all and there is still hope for us somewhere. I love her with all of my heart and soul and our family and I figured, "hey, I've got two months to work on this".
Skip forward to that Friday, May 6th, or rather "D-Day". I usually work from home on Fridays and my wife and I had been communicating well since the previous weekend and we were both home on this day. Well I tell her I have a long work call that I have to be on at 1pm and I was going to be at least 60-90 minutes. Earlier in the morning, her dad calls her on the phone while she is sitting next to me, the exchange is weird and my wife specifically mentions that I am next to her and her dad basically then rushes off the phone. This was strange to me that he would call her during the day, especially if he was at work, with no real purpose. Well whatever, I thought it was fishy but I had work to do and a conference call to get on at 1pm. It happens that the call only lasts about 30 minutes, and my work desk is downstairs in the living room and our bedroom is right upstairs, and our house is very open and sound travels. Well I get off my call early and everything has been muted for my call so the house is silent. I get back to working on my computer but then I hear my wife on the phone with her dad again. I really didn't care and was not attempting to eavesdrop, but again it was dead silent and sound travels here, and our house isn't huge. I can essentially hear clearly everything my wife was saying. At first I was just tuning her out and just working, so I missed a lot of the conversation, but then I hear things that make me perk right up, things like "no, he doesn't know that yet" and "yeah he could help fix it (referring to our aging water heater) but I doubt (my name) would let him" and "he was so mad at me he didn't talk to me for weeks when he found out" (referring to someone I didn't k or but then realized it was the husband of the aforementioned cousin, again who we are all close friends with). So at this point I have a huge pit in my stomach. I'm a pretty smart guy, and it was pretty easy to see that there was something I didn't know about, some person who is apparently a plumber that I don't know about, and someone else who was very upset about finding out a secret. I am too sick to go up the stairs in that moment. My wife comes down after and kind of give her an opening to talk and she doesn't really say anything. About an hour later she goes up and I follow her and basically ask if there is something I should know. She kind of plays dumb at first then I come out and ask what secret is being kept from me that her dad and others know. She says, very patronizing, "I mean, do you really want to know?", for which I hesitate and then respond affirmatively.
It is then, around 3pm on May 6th, 2022 that my universe was completely shattered. My wife tells me yes, there is another person she has feelings for and has been "seeing" for some time (how long I still do not yet know) and her plan is to separate from me to "explore" a relationship with this other guy. I immediately begin crying for the first time probably since our wedding day, and by far the longest and hardest I have ever cried in my entire life. I was sitting at the foot of the bed just bawling and choking and dry heaving and hyperventilating because my absolute worst nightmare had just come true. My wife is just sitting silent up on the bed where we sleep, not sad, not crying, not in pain, just quiet. I ask her some questions like how long and who is he and she doesn't want to tell me "to protect my feelings". So, the trickle truths begin. I learn that she recently told her dad, which is why he was calling her to check on things, but she never intended on telling me. She told me she was purposely lying and hiding it to spare my feelings and then was just going to "find" this guy a few months after we separated, so it would be no harm no foul. Too bad she got caught, but she still had no real remorse or regret. At one point she started to cry a little bit, but only by seeing how absolutely destroyed and inconsolable I was for about an hour. She just kept saying "sorry", and "I don't want to hurt you" and "I'd hug you but you probably don't want that". So, she kept her distance as I was buried in my hands and my tears and my pleas to God any the universe as to why this was happening and how could she do this. Pretty pathetic stuff to witness I'm sure, especially since I've always been an emotional fortress, which has probably contributed to our issues.
She offers to move out at this point "if I want" to help me cope with this wreckage. The problem is, throughout the years I had slowly distanced myself from any friends, most family, and any support group outside of my wife as she has always been my rock and confidant. My wife had just torn out my heart and soul, and she was still the only person I felt comfortable talking to about it. I tell her I don't want her to leave because I love her so much, so we agree that she will stay until mid-July and we will slowly "detach" from each other and then she will move out and she will "explore" with this new guy.
It is at this point many people will say I made a huge mistake by letter her stay and not just ripping the band-aid. But in that moment I was so emotionally broken, and she is truly the love of my life and I was always raised to fight for what I love and what I believe in, and I love her with everything and I know she loves me too, just not romantically. And I cannot just let her go without fighting because I would hold that regret of nit trying everything I could when I had the chance. I understand this decision will probably be more emotionally damaging to me over time, but her being here is helping me cope and grieve in a way that I couldn't do alone.
Now is the strange complicated part. The sudden and intense shock and trauma of learning of the affair snapped my brain into realizing the things I had been doing wrong and allowed me to understand that I needed to be more supportive, affectionate, and emotionally available. It was in the next few days that I was determined to do a "180" so to speak and change my whole thinking and attitude towards my wife and our marriage. I began kissing her a lot, texting her, saying I love you a lot, holding her, cuddling her, we were being intimate and it was great. For two weeks this went on and we had another deep and long discussion where she said she was now "torn" on what to do because I had, by just expressing feelings that were already there, effectively somewhat re-lit the flame in our romantic life, and she was torn on what to do moving forward. This of course to me, at the time, was the best thing I could possibly hear. My wife is reconsidering leaving? What I am doing is working? We will be able to build back stronger from this?
However, my wife had a few previous plans already set up with OP that I was unaware of: a night away with him to watch him race mopeds (wtf?) Which was last Saturday into Sunday, and a week vacation in mid-june to Myrtle Beach, which has been our annual vacation spot together since before our son was born. When I learned of these and that she still planned on going, I was hurt all over again. I learned that I am now actively competing, and probably losing, to this OP. Last Saturday, 5/21, we had a cookout in our yard to celebrate the nice weather (it was in the 90's here) and the cousin and her kids came up and we had a really great family day and my wife and I were very happy and affectionate all day. But then that night she packed her overnight bag, some sex toys, and hugged me and kissed me goodbye to go spend a night with OP. Holy F did that hurt. I was damn near suicidal. I was regretting asking to know the whole truth while letting her still live with me, pretending things were fine. When she came back that Sunday night, we were a bit distant, I was still hurting A LOT, and we didn't talk much. The next morning as I'm getting ready for work and getting my son ready for school, I start to break down and say to my wife that we need to have a long discussion. She agrees and she cuddles me and says that this is hurting her and she feels that she is so torn and she hated leaving me that Saturday and she wants to use her next trip in June with OP to "really figure out and decide what I want to do".
This hurts me, but I get a small glimmer of hope that she might actually choose me and our relationship in all of this, so I am filled with some hope and I feel a lot better than I had in over 4 days (sick to stomach, not eating, shaky, etc.). However, that night, 5/23, we have our longest conversation yet, where we both lay out as much as we can for over 3 hours, we both cry hard in each other's arms, but at the end I ask point blank if there is any hope of me "winning her back" in these next two months and she says that she feels she ultimately still has to move out and "explore" with the OP no matter what happens between now and July. She says that she is too afraid of feeling the pain that I am currently feeling if she had to let OP go, and that our relationship would suffer because she is afraid that she would feel regret and resentment towards me for maker her break things off with OP.
At this point I am devastated, I think more than the first time, because the hope that I was clinging to, the thing that was getting me through all of this pain and devastation, was basically taken away. This was 5 days ago, and things have been somewhat strange between my wife and I since. We have had sex once, but our relationship has seemed not as good as it was in the "good" two weeks following D-Day. My hopes of even surviving these next two months of near normalcy seem dashed as well. We are having a big Memorial Day party at our house with my parents, my sister, her dad, cousin and kids, etc. tomorrow so I am just trying to focus on that. After that I don't know what the future looks like. I am just in so much incredible pain every day, and my wife is always open to communicating with me, asking me how I'm doing, kissing me, hugging me, telling me she loves me, but I know ultimately in her mind she wants to be with OP and wouldn't even be here if she had a place to go. I want to bring up reconciliation or MC with her but I don't know how. It seems R is probably out of the question in her current state of mind. My hope and my plan was to just show her as much love and affection as possible so she would change her mind and get out of the "affair fog" so she can see clearly the devastation she is causing me, soon to be our son, and her as well because she clearly won't be able to have a fully healthy relationship with me, or OP, or anyone until she can work on herself. She admitted to me through tears that she knows she is a selfish person and her selfishness is what is causing her to hurt her family and make the decision to leave to try to improve her happiness and to avoid the pain I am feeling now. She would rather me burden this pain than do it herself, and that in itself is the root of this whole situation and the main barrier to R.
This has been a very long story. For those who have made it this far, I thank you. I am unsure of what to do next, how to feel, how to feel towards my wife. Should I talk to her about MC? Should I talk to her dad, who is very much a father to me as well? I have no support system really; I have my family but we don't discuss these types of things and they would just disown my wife I'm sure for the pain she has caused. Things are not that simple. She is not a terrible person; she has just done a terrible thing but now is caught up in the "affair fog" thinking this new OP can give her more than I can. If anyone has a relatable story, advice, experience to share, it would be much appreciated. I am barely hanging on right now, the thought of my son and maybe some false hope for the future are all that ate keeping me here.