My husband (married 2.5 years, together for 10) recently asked for a semi-permanent separation after moving me from Chicago to L.A. and cheating on me with a friend. This is how I'm dealing. I swear it's not as depressing as it sounds!
Honesty is a funny thing. It's conceptually simple- tell the truth. Say what happened. Don't make things up. But for a lot of people, men and women alike, honesty is elusive, a quixotic goal they never pay much mind. The tricky part, the part that explodes lives and decimates marriages, is the inability to figure out who falls into that category and who does not.
I met my husband as a college freshman. Almost comically naïve and idealistic, I chose (without any encouragement from my parents), to live in a substance-free dorm. I didn't attend parties. I felt anxious, private guilt for leaving the television on while I slept. I was, generally speaking, a good kid from a good home. This is not to say that he was not- my husband was raised in an upstanding, 2-parent household nestled securely in what picturesque countryside Ohio has to offer. He got good grades and didn't drink to excess as regularly as most kids our age.
And when I call us kids, I do so based on an acute awareness that we were kids. Young and hyper aware of the wide-open world around us, we felt our freedom in ways older folks never can. He swept me off of my feet, I abruptly broke it off with my high school boyfriend in an e-mail that manages to raise ancient feelings of shame in me to this day. He, however, failed to note the presence of his high school girlfriend back home. We were broken up by Christmas, at which time he tearfully confessed his transgressions and they ended things surprisingly amicably. We continued on and off throughout college, me playing the role of ambivalent participant, returning to my high school boyfriend and then leaving again, all while keeping my future husband at arms length. Our childish behavior culminated in me cheating on him our senior year- kissing a boy from my urban politics class who had asked to borrow my book while going through a terrible break-up himself.
Of all my bad decisions, mean utterances to friends during fits of anger, a seethingly ungrateful teenage attitude toward my parents, recalling this episode brings me closest to actual self-loathing. Betraying the person I loved took me the furthest away from the person I want to be that I have ever been. My future husband found out, of course, in an awful way, walking through my unlocked apartment door as we sat holding hands on my roommate's stiff wicker-backed couch. I felt an epic sinking in my stomach; it was awful and I deserved every second of agony. He eventually managed to forgive after a brief split, and I made a silent but genuine vow to never cross that line again. I never expected to find myself on the other side of the equation. And that is probably part of the reason I ended up here.
The past few months, now a hazy blur of lies, confessions and devastation, have exploded any understanding of my life I thought I had. My husband and I had packed up our belongings in Chicago together, struggling with the sheer amount of crap we owned. Then he drove me home to Ohio to be with my family for a month before I would come to join him and all of the stuff he graciously moved across the country for us. My time with my parents was both a gift and a compromise- a way to acknowledge that while I didn't want to live that far from family, I was going to because I loved and believed in him following his dream of working in the movie industry.
After unbelievably intense nagging from my mom and sister, I extended my stay twice, each time for one more week. By the time I flew out to LA, our cat in tow, things were already bad, but I had no idea. He tried to initiate sex after I'd spent 7.5 hours flying with a cat and I was just too exhausted to go for it (it was also 1:00 am pacific time, and 4 am eastern, where I'd just come from). He got a little angry, which I thought was weird, but I let it go. From there, he became distant and kind of mean toward me. He yelled at me for crying, which felt overly callous. Our friends were really welcoming. One, A, even brought me cupcakes for my birthday. I got extremely sick the week after arriving and wasn't able to go to Disneyland with him for my birthday as he'd planned, which upset him too. By the time I heard he and A laughing in the living room after a study session (they were taking an online physics course together), I knew something wasn't right, but I couldn't quite believe it. A had stayed with us in Chicago once, along with my husband's long-time best friend, her boyfriend. She has also gotten my roommate Samantha a temp job at her weird high-end sweatpants company, and we'd worked closely for over a week, riding to work together. I even bought her some high-end snacks at Gelson's one evening as a thank-you.
I started to notice he wasn't putting his phone down face-up anymore. And he never let it out of his sight. I confronted him, he laughed it off. I couldn't sleep. I got up at 6 in the morning to make him eggs. I scoured his I-pad and found nothing. I checked out his Ipod and found her favorite band queued up. I flipped out once again after I finally grabbed his phone from the table while he smoked. It was clear something was not right. Emoticons. What the hell? He never uses those. Telling her 'good morning'. The fuck? Clearly something was up. I looked up the definition of an emotional affair and confronted him. We went to counseling. He wasn't going to see her anymore. I met with her and gently explained that we couldn't see her anymore, that she'd need to get her art supplies and go home. We went to another session. He seemed more distant. The next morning he admitted they had had sex, though he'd lied to me and the therapist repeatedly. It felt like having the wind knocked out of me did when I fell off the monkey bars as a child. After a walk around the Silverlake Reservoir, he said he'd be staying elsewhere that night. All of this in the span of a week. Finally, after one last session, he said we needed to separate for a while. That I should go home to Ohio to be with my family and so he could have some space. I cried the whole way to the airport. He said he loved me, just not that way. That he hoped I would return to LA. I said I would. By the time I met my parents in the small Ohio airport coffee shop, I couldn't hold it together, I burst into tears. My life has primarily been an effort to keep crying to a minimum and search out help in books and on the internet, not any easy task. And to breathe normally when possible.