Forgiving Me: My Side of the Story

This post is part of an ongoing series written by “Rising Phoenix,” a woman giving an honest account of how she’s learning to rise out of the pain and destruction of betrayal. Read all her posts by clicking the Rising Phoenix link above. To read all her posts chronologically, start with her first post and then click the “Read Rising Phoenix’s Next Post” link that appears at the bottom of each article.

This is where it begins.

Forgiving him was hard — for his betrayal. But forgiving me was harder.

My therapist once told me that this journey begins when I choose to heal me. That healing isn’t about fixing what someone else broke, but about carrying the pain I didn’t cause and choosing—against all logic and fairness—to heal anyway.
Naturally, I told her what she could do with that idea. Politely. Kind of.
Because how is it my job to clean up the mess someone else made with their eyes closed and both hands tied behind their back?

But eventually, I stopped fighting it. Not because it suddenly felt fair, but because I was tired of bleeding from wounds that weren’t getting any better.

That’s when the real work started: forgiving—not just him, but myself. For the red flags I ignored. For the boundaries I never set. For sitting in silence with pain that I kept convincing myself wasn’t that bad.
What he did nearly broke me.
But the part that really gutted me? Realizing how many times I broke my own heart trying to keep his love. How often I ignored that gut feeling, quieted my voice, and shrunk myself just to make things work.
I wasn’t just carrying the weight of what he did—but also the weight of everything I let slide. Not because I was clueless. 
Not because I didn’t see it.
Not because I was naive.
Not because I didn’t know better.
But because I loved him. Because I believed in us. Because I desperately wanted it to be real.

Before the Collapse

Before him, I wasn’t really living — I was surviving. Filling the void with distractions, chaos, and noise.
I was guarded. Closed. Done.
And then he came along.
Tall. Nerdy. Awkward in a charming way. A little arrogant, but it made me laugh.
He kept showing up — not forcefully, but steadily. Present.

I turned him down more than once, not because I didn’t like him, but because I wasn't ready.
But he waited.
Eventually, I said yes.
And when I finally let myself fall — I fell hard.

He made me feel safe. Wanted. Seen.
He was affectionate and attentive in ways I didn’t even know I needed.
Two years later, we got married.
Was it too soon? Maybe.
But back then, it felt right. 

When the Cracks Began

In the beginning, I trusted him with everything.
Every word. Every promise. Every dream whispered in the dark about the life we’d build together.
But what I didn’t realize yet was that neither of us had done the healing we needed to do.
We both brought our pain into the relationship — but his ran deep, rooted in childhood wounds he never addressed. He buried it. Told himself it didn’t matter.
But pain doesn’t stay buried.
It leaks. It festers. It distorts the way we see and treat the people we love.

Eventually, I became the person he looked to for fixing what was broken inside him.
And when I couldn’t fill that void — because no one else ever can — he began looking elsewhere.
At the time, I blamed myself. I thought maybe I wasn’t enough.
But healing has taught me something important:
A broken relationship doesn’t cause betrayal — a person does.
It’s something I heard from Esther Perel, and it stuck with me: “Bad relationships don’t cause affairs — people do.”

That sentence shifted everything for me.
It helped me see the truth: no matter what was wrong between us, the affair was his choice.
Not mine. Not ours. His.

The Slow Erosion

It didn’t fall apart overnight.
The unraveling was slow — quiet.
Little shifts.
A fading tenderness.
Conversations that once felt intimate became avoidant or surface-level.
I started noticing things that didn’t sit right.
Small lies. Growing distance. Excuses that didn’t quite add up.
I brought things up, trying to stay connected, trying to understand.
He always had an answer.
Just believable enough to make me question my instincts.

He told me I was overthinking. That I was too sensitive. That I was jealous, insecure, or controlling.
He reminded me that he had female friends before we got married, as if that erased the hurt or the gut feeling I couldn’t shake.
And I believed him — because I wanted to.
Not because it made sense in my body, but because I was taught to keep the peace.
To love through it. To hold on.

So instead of asking what’s really going on here?, I started asking what’s wrong with me?
Was I the problem? Was I imagining it? Was I too emotional, too needy, too much?
And every time my gut whispered that something was off, I pushed it down.
Because I thought love meant sacrifice.
Because I thought preserving the relationship meant preserving us.
Because I thought if I just loved him better, it would be enough.
But in trying to save us, I was slowly losing me.

The Day Everything Changed

The affair wasn’t long — but it was devastating. Because when trust breaks, the length doesn’t lessen the pain.
It didn’t completely blindside me.
Part of me already knew.
But the confirmation? That still shattered something inside me.

When I found out, it felt like the final blow to something that had been quietly dying for years.
Like someone had finally said out loud what I had been afraid to admit: This is not okay anymore.
We had twenty-two years together. A life. A home. A family.
A shared identity, a history, a million memories.
And he chose to cross a line that couldn’t be undone.

But here’s the part I need to say honestly:
We loved each other.
Regardless of where we were at before the collapse — we loved each other.
Even through the disconnect. Even through the cracks and confusion.
There was still love.

And we loved each other enough that, after Discovery Day, neither of us walked away — not right away.
But I didn’t decide to stay right away either.
In fact, I didn’t decide anything right away.
The first year after D-Day was chaos.
Messy. Confusing. Gut-wrenching.
I was in shock, survival mode, denial, grief — all of it, all at once.
I wasn’t ready to leave.
But I also wasn’t ready to stay.

I hovered in that gray space, questioning everything.
Trying to understand. Trying to breathe.
Trying to figure out how love and betrayal could exist in the same space.
It took me a year to even begin to reflect on what had really happened — not just what he did, but what I had been doing to myself for years.
It took a year before I could even form the words: I think I’m staying. And I did stay. But not blindly. Not out of weakness. Not because I had fully forgiven him or because I was ready to move forward.
It was hope tangled with fear.
It was the impossible in-between where nothing makes sense, but your heart hasn’t caught up with your reality yet.

That day — Discovery Day — didn’t just change my marriage. It changed me. And nothing after it would ever be the same.