Lonely Together: How We Drifted and What Happened Next
In the podcast episode, The Post-Affair Marriage, I talk about three different marriage patterns in which affairs occur. The most common is the “stressed marriage.” This story, submitted by a visitor to this site, is an example of that. —Tim Tedder
We’ve been married eight years and together nearly ten. We’re in our mid-30s. He’s military, and I moved countries to be with him when we married.
Unfortunately, our entire marriage has been marked by tragedy. In the first six years alone, we lost our nephew, his brother to suicide, my grandfather, my mother suddenly, and then his father. Not long after that, we bought a house, only to have horrible storms cause severe damage to our neighbor’s property (we share a wall), which then caused extensive damage to ours. For the past two years, we’ve been fighting to get our neighbors to take responsibility and make repairs. In the meantime, our home has become infested with dry rot, mold, and other issues that have made it unhealthy to live in. We’ve now been told the house isn’t safe and we need to move.
It feels like the huge stressors never stop.
Because of military demands and my career, we’ve also lived apart for much of our marriage. He lives on barracks. I’ve lived 200 miles away. We’ve been separated like this for the majority of our time together.
The week before Christmas, he messaged me to say he no longer wanted to be married. I asked if there was someone else. He said no.
That weekend, when he was home, he admitted he had cheated for two weeks with someone from work.
I stayed calm, but I was understandably very hurt. He talked about how he loved me but wasn’t “in love” with me. He said I was important to him and wanted to remain friends, but that he wanted to be with his affair partner. He agreed to counseling, During counseling, he insisted he didn’t want the marriage, but still wouldn’t let me stay home alone for Christmas.
He went back and forth constantly. One minute, he wanted to leave. Next, he suggested an open relationship. I mostly listened and tried to remain open, empathetic, and understanding.
Even his behavior felt strange. He wasn’t the man I’d known for the past decade. And yet, he still reached for me at times. He wanted connection. He would comfort me when my emotions overwhelmed me. He was completely all over the place!
I contacted his affair partner. I did so kindly, respectfully, and without judgment. She told me she had ended things with him before Christmas and that she was ashamed. She even offered me a sincere apology. I asked her not to contact my husband again, and she agreed.
One of the oddest parts of this is that she and I look so similar that we could almost be siblings.
During our second counseling session, the counselor suggested we needed space. The day before that session, I told my husband that if he truly was that unhappy and wanted out, I would let him go. I told him it was over because that’s what he said he wanted, and because I wasn’t going to cling to someone who didn’t choose me.
He cried. He held my hands. But he still never clearly said what he wanted.
He went back to barracks on New Year’s Eve. I stayed home. I didn’t contact him. I wanted to give him space, and I took space for myself.
He reached out to me once or twice a day. Messages turned into phone calls. And in the past four weeks, we’ve spoken more openly and honestly than we have in the past two years.
He came home again this past weekend. We had a genuinely nice time together. He was very upfront. He handed me his phone, iPad, and computer. He gave me access to everything and said nothing was a secret.
He explained that when he tried to change shifts at work to avoid his affair partner, he discovered she had already done the same. The few brief times they did speak at work, she told him she had made me a promise and intended to keep it. He said he told her she didn’t need to worry because he didn’t want anything with her.
He described the affair as a fantasy. He said he reached out to someone else to try to solve a much bigger problem: loneliness in our marriage. We had both been lonely and didn’t know how to ask for change.
During his time alone, he spoke to friends about what happened. He said they helped him understand my perspective. He realized he had been missing me for years, but the stress and repeated tragedies had pulled us apart while we each tried to manage our own pain.
He said the affair was a terrible way of crying for help and “shocking” the marriage. He told me he is deeply sorry for betraying me and causing so much pain. At the same time, he said he was thankful that we are finally talking. We are facing the hurt of the past eight years. We are connecting again. In his words, we are “finally seeing each other again.”
He knows there is a lot of work ahead. But he believes we can build a marriage better than we ever had before. We both acknowledge that over the years, we hurt each other through indifference and neglect. He says he never wants to do this again. He knows he should have come to me before stepping outside the marriage, but at the time, he didn’t feel capable of doing that.
We are continuing counseling. He’s being reassigned in February, and I’ll be moving into married quarters with him so we can start fresh and work on this together.
I can’t shake the feeling of being foolish sometimes, worrying that he’s lying and I’m too naive to see it. But I also feel that he is being honest. And he’s working with me to build a better marriage.
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