My Story

So, I decided to try and make the best of an unbearable situation. Don't worry. I can still hear you. Another wimp husband. It wasn't like that at all. A clean break just wasn't in the cards. So I did what I had to do. I took a long term approach.

It is hard to describe the madness that my life became. I felt trapped in a world of lawyers and their talk of asset protection and the joy I had being around my children and the rage I felt every time I thought of what Stacy had done to my life. But I also missed her. I missed our closeness and our carefree lifestyle. I missed the time when everything fit nicely into its place in my life and stability ruled the universe.

What was it like? It was like being a severe diabetic with a chocolate fetish. You know just one misstep and you could literally die. But every day someone put's a slice of freshly backed chocolate cake with chocolate cream cheese frosting and a scope of chocolate ice cream drizzled with chocolate sauce right in front of you at breakfast. You have to find the will deep within yourself not to eat it. You know it will have horrible consequences if you do. But you can't escape the fact that, deep down, you want to toss the fork and spoon away and dive face first into that plate.

There were times I would return to a white hot rage. The fact that Stacy's mother and Tricia wouldn't even look me in the eye the first time we saw each other absolutely pissed me off. They had been lying to me for years holding a secret over my head. I felt like a fool. When Tricia tried to mediate on Stacy's behalf, I told her to go to hell. She didn't return to our home for several months.

And then there were the conversations. Horribly uncomfortable conversations about things I had to know but didn't want to hear. Conversations that almost always ended with Stacy crying because, as much as she believed the conversations would help us reconnect, she could hear the anger and frustration and pain in my words.

"You have to know how much I love you. You know that, right?"

"Sure."

"And I know you love me, too. It just has to be true."

"I love you. A lot. Almost as much as I hate you."

Then there was her big confession about her tryst with the stud Robert Paulson. He wasn't that good. She had gotten a little too drunk and she was already irrationally angry with me. She made horrible decisions that she regretted immediately. It wasn't as bad as I was thinking.

"Did you do anything with him that you had never done with me?"

The laundry list of things I had discovered together with my wife was dramatically shorter after she finished. Things that I thought we shared exclusively and had discovered over years as a couple were just demolished. It was only sex, right? The most meaningless part of any real marriage. Yeah, she said that too. And I almost would have agreed with her, in principle.

"So why did you repeat all of your 'horrible decisions' the second night?"

She had no answer.

Did I catch her in another lie? Who knows? What was the expression on her face? It's hard to say. But after years and years of thinking I understood how to read my wife, I was as lost as a stranger meeting her for the first time on the street.

Stacy's next attempt at reconciliation was one that I expected or at least should have. She knew I would be horny. It had been six months of long showers and sleeping alone. A day or two had been our longest dry spell when I wasn't on the road. She tried to get me engage in small talk nearly every day. But I generally rebuffed her. She tried to touch me; hold my hand or touch my shoulder. I usually flinched away from her.

But she pushed me too far one night when the kids were all out with friends. Like I said, I had been pretty good at making sure that at least one of the kids was with us in the house. I had no reason to ever want to be alone with Stacy. But I had gotten dates and times confused and had my daughter at a school function and the boys with friends at a baseball game. When she came into the living room naked as the day she was born, something primal took over.

I hate fucked my wife that night. What are the expressions? Hammered? Plowed? Pick whichever one that you like. Gone were the gentle caresses and sense of closeness. They were replaced with a hair gripping face fuck and the sounds of gagging. I paid no attention to our mutual satisfaction. I cared only about my pleasure and the gasps of pleasure and pain that were coming from her mouth. The spanking and pinching of flesh was done to elicit a look of fear in her eyes. Normally, I would have been concerned that I had gone too far. But I wasn't. Was she dripping wet because she was that turned on by my actions or because it had been so long? I know I didn't give a fuck.

Normally, though initial stamina had never been a problem for me, I needed a nice long rest before I could go twice in the same night. But anger and frustration are as good as any little blue pill. She was writhing on the floor when I spewed my first load all over her chest. I barely lost any of my rigidity when I pulled her face back to my cock. When I was back at full strength I took her in that spot that was reserved only for special occasions and denied to me for years. The same one that had been given first to Robert Paulson.

I punished her asshole with my pussy juice and saliva lubed dick. In the past, on the rare occasions my wife let me have her anally, I always made sure she was comfortable and that our pace was to her liking. That night, once I was comfortably seated in her ass, I just fucked away. It wasn't lost on me that she had at least two more orgasms while I violated her. It was just something more to add to list of things that I didn't know about her. Apparently, she liked it a little rough.

In the end, I was spent, but she was broken in a pile on the floor. I left her there to take a shower and head to bed. The lack of commotion when the kids returned from their outings were my only indications that she had eventually moved.

The next day, I was surprised to see a look in her eyes that indicated that she thought we were in a better place. I ended those thoughts a few hours later.

"I guess he was right. You are a whore."

She had no reply.

That is how we began our years as uncomfortable roommates. After awhile our lives returned to a normal, if somewhat morbid routine. The kids stopped asking if everything was OK after several more months, content with the fact that they received an enormous amount of attention from both Stacy and me.

I regained my comfort with being in the same room as Stacy as long as we weren't alone. We chatted on occasion about meaningless things. We did talk about us and our marriage on occasion, too.

I tried hard to forgive and forget. I am not just giving that lip service. After almost four years of hell, my divorce preparations were complete. My business, my assets, a large stash of funds were all protected and waiting for my decision. That helped me relieve the feeling of having a gun to my head and being forced to make a decision that wasn't in my best interests. That's when I started doing almost daily research. Marriage problems. Forgiveness. If there was a book or an article or something written on the subject on the internet, I read it. Fiction or non-fiction. If there was a movie about betrayal I watched it. In fact, Stacy and I watched one together. It was a story of an ostensibly happily married woman who meets a young lover on the street by accident and their brief torrid affair. In the end the husband killed her lover and they appear to reconcile, though the ending was somewhat vague.

Stacy quietly sobbed through the entire movie. I wasn't moved at all. It was then that I realized that I was so desensitized to these feelings that I wasn't even angry when a wife cheated on her husband. I felt nothing. So I started seeing a therapist. A few months after that, Stacy and I started marriage counseling. Like I said, I really was trying.

Our story was simple. My wife cheated on me. One time over a period of two days. Stacy loved me and no other and had made a terrible mistake. I had tested her truthfulness on all of those subjects and I believed her. My daughter's biological father was my wife's lover. I loved my little girl with all my heart and that hadn't changed a bit. But I couldn't get past the years of lies. I tried but I couldn't.

I was stuck in a purgatory of wanting to move on, and probably away, but unable to do so without the things I cherished most about my very existence.

Months and months of rehashing didn't do much for our awkward relationship. Frankly, I thought the sessions with both therapists were mostly a giant waste of money. But talking and reliving and exploring my thoughts and memories did lead me to a revelation. It came to me during a joint session where I was being urged to find it within myself to truly forgive my wife. But my focus was on a picture hanging on the wall. A print of a picture of the Rocky Mountains. That is when it hit me. A $100 print could have saved me thousands in medical bills and years of self doubt. I honestly felt more of an idiot when I realized what had been holding me back.

"You know I agree with both of you. It is up to me to forgive my wife. And I certainly haven't done that. But it has suddenly occurred to me why I haven't really been able to do that. It's so simple I kind of even feel stupid for saying it out loud, but I suppose it's never too late."

"Stacy, I have never forgiven you because in all of our long drawn out discussions about saving our marriage you have never, not once, said you're sorry."

Those who are truly repentant make amends and are forgiven. Once again, my mother was there to help me.

She said the words shortly after she recovered from the shock of my statement and came to terms with its validity. But I think she knew at that moment, even if only subconsciously.

"I am sorry, Jacob. More than I have ever been and more than I ever will be. I am so sorry."

Stacy and I lived together for six more years after that night. We were roommates and occasionally fuck buddies. But the love that had filled both of our spirits had truly died that night in my hotel room so very ago and so very far from home. Eventually, I was able to tell Stacy about that evening without feeling sick to my stomach. During that discussion, we may have been the closest we ever were to understanding one another. Her betrayal and my discovery had killed our love and try as we might, there would be no rekindling of the passion of our youth, no growing together as partners into old age. We never said it out loud, but she knew.

My final epiphany came when the twins were juniors in high school. There were doing some type of science project and I was watching, no marveling, once again, at their ability communicate without speaking. One of the boys filled a large beaker with some type of clear solution. The other placed a single drop of another, blood red, chemical in next. I sat and watched that tiny, insignificant drop of liquid infect the entire solution. It weaved its way though the clear liquid, sometimes streaking other times billowing but in the end the entire beaker was a pale pink. No portion was left untouched.

I thought it was a fitting metaphor for my life. One lie. One two day period had infected my entire life. Nothing was left untouched. The memories of my marriage. The relationships with my children. My sex life. One lie had infected them all and, even though my rage had faded over time, the thin discoloration of lack of trust was left over everything in my life. I just couldn't get rid of it, not matter how hard I tried. When I finally decided it wasn't worth the effort to try, I just lived with it. When that didn't work, I gave up.

I don't know why Stacy stuck around. I stayed for the kids and the memories I would cherish being the best father I could be. Stacy was a supermom. Just the best. But, as the twins moved into high school she started working full time. She didn't go out with a new set of friends or try to move on from me. She went to work and came home. That was her life. Whatever kept her static did not treat her well. She gained a few pounds every year. She lost most of her generically pleasant personality. After a while she just looked old and tired.

After the first year or so I stopped saying mean and hurtful things to Stacy, but looking back maybe that was the most cruel thing of all. It certainly seemed as though the true opposite of love was apathy. I kept making moves to further separate our finances.

I found hobbies and other things to occupy my time. I started investing my time more and more in friendships with my golfing buddies and people at church and basically anyone who shared an interest with me. Finally, we just truly grew apart not that I made much of an effort to keep us together.

I contemplated making our almost loveless relationship a permanent one. Simple fondness was almost enough. But a single night at a hotel bar changed all that. A night of unbridled passions of the lonely made me realize it was time to let go or grow into a person I never wanted to be.

When the twins left for college our divorce was the most anticlimactic event of all time. I set the papers in front of her at dinner on our third night as empty nesters. She gave a small sad smile and said two words before she signed them.

"OK, Jacob."

The division of assets was generous in her favor, but left my business completely intact and left me set for a very comfortable future retirement. With minimal effort, Stacy would be very comfortable too. And that was it. That is how I find myself in this place, even today.

In the end, it wasn't Stacy that killed our marriage. It was me.

If I had laid out a series of requirements that Stacy absolutely, without question, had to meet to save our marriage, she would have passed with flying colors. There wasn't a more contrite, submissive, dedicated woman on the planet. Stacy denied me nothing, ever. Quite frankly, that pissed me too. Gone was my partner, my equal. That woman was replaced with a scared little girl. I often wondered how Stacy had lived so long with her secret. Having that knowledge over someone definitely tips the scales and when they were tipped in my favor, I couldn't help but treat her differently.

When I was growing up, drilling rig accidents were a common occurrence. Some of the stories of those accidents stuck with me. Like when workers in steel toed boots would smash their foot in an accident, it wasn't the initial damage that caused them to lose their foot or even die. If they could have just remained calm enough to leave the boot on, a doctor might have been able to repair at least some of the damage. But, if they took the boot off, the real trouble started. It could be difficult to stop the bleeding. Bones could shift and possibly be displaced permanently. The best thing to do was to duck tape their mangled foot and boot together until they could get professional medical attention.

Stacy had definitely mangled our marriage. There was no doubt about it. And I tried to wrap it in duck tape. But I just couldn't leave it alone. It just hurt too much. I had to pull the tape off. And when that didn't work I had to lose the boot. What was left was a bloody shattered foot that would never really function properly again. So I amputated it. Did I feel good about it? No. I would always walk with a limp. But I didn't really feel bad about it either. The foot was starting to get infected and was a risk to the rest of my body. So I did what I had to do to survive.

The saddest thing about the whole thing is that I truly believe that, to this day, Stacy loves me. She doesn't date and I can always find her at home alone if there is anything regarding the kids or grandkids that we need to discuss. But I just couldn't wrap my brain around the years and years of lies and I could never find the strength in my heart to truly forgive her. Even if it would have been better for me.

If you are able to follow that logic, then you are a better person than me. That twisted logic is what is left of my personal life. I know full well that I can never regain what I had with Stacy. I am too old to even consider starting over and everyone I meet seems to have some sort of baggage that eliminates any possibility of making serious commitment. But I really feel I did right by my kids and Stacy too for that matter. So I sleep well at night, mostly alone but sometimes not.

I have no problem if you question my judgment. I know I did. I still do. Was one event, so long ago, something that should have been so unforgivable? Or was my life one compounding lie on top of another? Did I raise someone else's daughter as my own? Yes, but I never loved her any less after I knew. I never told her the truth, and I don't think Stacy did either. If she figured it out on her own, she never said anything or changed her behavior towards me.

I don't know the right answer. Is there one? Who fucking knows? I am not a genuinely happy person any more. But I am not miserable, either. I get by one day at a time, some days longing for my old life. But not too often. Honestly, I am mostly OK.

Real life has endings. They are not always happy. And that was my story.