So, you’ve been cheated on. I get it. This entire blog is on my story of my wife Allie cheating on me three times! (that I know of) It chronicles the heartbreak, the pain, the confusion and the isolation I have felt. It questions everything that I ever believed to be true.
It rocked the very foundations of my life and made me reevaluate who I am and what I want out of life. Is it hard? Yes! Is it painful? Without question. But I want to share something with you as I have journeyed for the past seven months since finding about Allie’s affairs.
I want to share that I am good. No really. I am.
I am moving out in a few weeks and for the first time since March of 2000, I will be living separately from my wife. We’ve been married for 18 years and in that time we’ve dreamed, we’ve striven, we’ve worked, we’ve built traditions, we’ve had children, we’ve laughed, we’ve cried, we’ve hoped and we’ve been let down.
While we can always look back at the negative aspects of our relationship, I am choosing not to (as much as possible). I am choosing to see the myriad of blessings that have come from the two of us being together. The biggest blessing of all are our three sons we have together. They are fantastic young men and I love being able to pour myself into their lives.
Allie has some pretty tough & deep issues to work through. In 18 years of marriage, she had three affairs. The first was 6 years ago. The second was with her boss (who she still works for) last year. The third was the knockout punch. An affair with Mark, the guy she and I both knew from Crossfit.
Sometimes we can look at these things and decide that we “wasted 18 years of our lives.” In some ways that has some truth. Because had we not chosen this spouse, we could have chosen another spouse. In theory, if all went well, we wouldn’t be here now with this kind of pain and these massive hurdles. But that’s hindsight and we didn’t see the future. We can’t beat ourselves up for something we had no idea would happen.
But we don’t have yesterday do we? We can’t change the past as badly as we might want to. So, we have today. And I look at it this way. I am actually letting go and being saved from a lifetime of pain. Imagine spending even more of my life with someone who doesn’t want to be with me. Don’t get me wrong, her words say she wants to be with me and she loves me, but actions speak WAY LOUDER than words. Three affairs? That speaks volumes.
It would be much too complex to lay out our entire story. But suffice it to say that I was very sad about what I was having to deal with in my life. You see, i because my mom’s legal guardian because she had horrible dementia. Because of that, her memory was terrible. She got to the point that she no longer knew anyone else. Not me, not my brother, not her grandchildren.
So, this journey with her was very difficult for me to say the least. I was very close to my mom and often called her my “superhero.” When I would visit her, I would get thrown into a mild depression of sorts. Just kind of in a daze as I was completely helpless to do anything for her. The woman who had sacrificed for me and my brother, given everything as a single mom, and I couldn’t do anything. There’s literally nothing we can do with that disease.
But Allie has some strong narcissistic tendencies. And she couldn’t stand that my attention wasn’t being given to her 100% of the time. So, she looked for another’s attention. Read the quote below:
Even at your best, you will NEVER be right for the wrong person. But with the right person, even at your worst, they will remind you of your worth.
Look, that quote doesn’t exactly fit, but it does say this. You are worth everything. I am worth everything. It completely devalued me with what she did. While I was walking through the toughest emotional journey I had ever been through, she piled it on by having two affairs. Sharing her body and sexuality with another man. “Falling in love” with a complete stranger. It is sickening. But I am free. And I am worth it.