Taking the blinders off my marriage

My husband Chris said he needed to talk and sat me down in the living room. I had our 18-month-old son on my lap and our second daughter in my womb. At that moment, my husband of seven years confessed to cheating on me with another woman. The details of this conversation are fuzzy now, years later. But what I do remember is sitting in a therapist’s office, shortly after his confession, and hearing the counselor say “You know if you do this again, she’s gone right?”

I asked Chris about this recently and he didn’t remember the comment the therapist made, but I did. It had been stuck in my head for eight years. And now, 9 years later and 16 years of marriage, these wounds are re-opened because I caught him cheating. Again.

During a heated argument between us one night Chris said “I might as well go all the way and get it over with”. What he meant by this was, he might as well cheat on me again and end our marriage. I asked him “why don’t you?” I don’t think he responded or said his usual “I don’t know.”

This was on my friend’s Facebook page one day. It spoke to me because I feel like this is what Chris did to himself. I’m not sure if he realizes the impact of his selfish decisions to break the bonds of matrimony with strange women. I often wonder what he was thinking when he would email women and try to meet them. Obviously, he was thinking about sex. But didn’t his family or wife enter his thoughts at all? Didn’t he see the ramifications if I found out about any cheating?

Sixteen years into our marriage came the discovery of Chris cheating on me at a Red Roof Inn with another strange woman. Just prior to this discovery I had found evidence of him trying online dating and going to strip clubs when he had told me and our kids that he was working. I was such a fool.

“You can’t keep doing this stuff and expect to have a place to come home to,” I said.

I’m not sure if Chris meant to end our marriage with the Red Roof Inn encounter. But why would a guy keep a receipt for a hotel reservation and payment on a day and time when he was supposed to be at work unless he wanted his wife to find it? Why not throw it away? Maybe, he just got careless because he’s been doing it for so long, or maybe he didn’t think I would look in his backpack in his car in the garage. Maybe he wasn’t ready and was going to tell me when it fit his timing. But how many more chances did he think he was going to get?

I had already accepted and was willing to work through the online dating activity, money spending, 80-hour work-weeks without answering his phone, massages, strip clubs, and porn. I wanted to keep my family together. I wanted to follow God’s word. I wanted to be in alignment with the Bible. But looking back on this list makes me sick.

I reached my breaking point. I knew I couldn’t get past another physical act. I had enough experience to know what I was capable of. I was not capable of forgetting. I’m human. I can forgive. I can act with grace and kindness after I get hurt. Memories will fade and become more distant. But I can’t forget completely. And in the past, every time I suspected he was cheating, the memory of his original confession would come flooding back.

I had been married for almost 16 years. For the first seven years, I was blindly thinking we were pretty happy. Yes, we had sex issues. A lot of them. And they were impacting his happiness. But they were slowly improving — at least I thought they were.

I craved communication, as I think many women do. I desired to know what he was thinking. Chris was not a very good communicator. He had trouble conveying his thoughts and feelings. Sometimes I wondered if that was because he was afraid to hurt me or if he just could not find the right words. I would sit and wait for him to talk after I asked a question, and he would just sit there. Silent. A blank look on his face. No evidence of wanting to talk. Just an expression of “when is she going to let me go back to what I was doing?”

When he first confessed to cheating in 2002, he also confessed to several other acts. In our therapy sessions, the counselor had told him to tell me everything so that it would all get out in the open and I knew the scope of what I was forgiving. If I found out about the other stuff later, it would be harder than finding out now. So for the first time in a long time, maybe in years, he talked to me. He confessed.

Chris told me that during the early years of our marriage when he would travel for work and stay in a hotel, he would hire a stripper to come to his hotel room and give him a lap dance.

He told me that every time he had a dentist appointment or reason to go into the city, he would stop at a strip club. There were multiple incidents. And in that moment, the history and memory of our marriage was being rewritten.

I was devastated. I was beside myself. I don’t remember anything I said that day, I think I was in shock. I remember talking, I can see my mouth moving, but I have no idea what I said.

As I processed this information later, I realized this meant that he had been lying to me for our entire marriage. This meant the first seven years of our marriage were not as happy as I once thought. That I didn’t know the man I married at all.

As part of my recovery process to this new information, I told myself I just need to think of the times in our marriage when we were happy. I needed to think about the beginning. And work towards getting back to a similar place in our marriage. Then I realized — there wasn’t a happy time. That our entire marriage was a lie, and we were never happy — at least he wasn’t. And I was only happy because I didn’t know what was going on, what he was doing. I had blinders on like a horse in a race.

Trainers put blinders on a horse so that they are not distracted and focus on the race. So they only see what the trainer wants them to see. That’s how I felt right now. Chris had put blinders on me with his lies. I was only seeing what he wanted me to see. When those blinders were taken off, my marriage came crumbling down. It wasn’t a marriage at all. We weren’t partners who shared everything. We weren’t partners that were in a monogamous relationship. I’m not even sure if we were in love or just young and caught up in the idea of marriage.

I desperately tried to reflect on our past and find happy memories
that I could cling to, memories that would get me through this and give me hope. Some thread of a real marriage that I could build on. But every memory was now tainted — every single one. I had nothing to cling to and I was spooked like a horse without blinders.

Related posts:

From the moment that someone views a listing on the Airbnb website, to the moment they hand back the keys as they return home, there are many factors that can influence the rating score that a guest…

Our daily routines would not be complete without a shower, which can also be extremely calming and energizing. But if you don’t take care, you could unintentionally harm your hair while taking a…

Real quick for those of you who may not know. Lucid dreaming is the act of becoming aware that you are dreaming while you’re still asleep. And your dream person that is yourself knows that it’s a…