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Letters To A Cheating Spouse
Chapter 1, Part 2: Cheating and Broken Promises
There is a good chance that you are already upset with me now, by having said that your actions were led by mine. I really don’t want to assume anything, especially since I have received zero answers from you to my questions so far, but I believe this was often the case, not just between the two of us. I often was amazed how easily you could be influenced by other people, how often your actions are determined what others do or have done.
Other people always seemed to matter to you. They made you upset. They made you smile. They changed your thoughts. Their actions motivated you. They made you buy things. You wanted to impress them with our money. The way you were perceived by them was always important to you. You always wanted to be much more popular than you really were. Sometimes that worked, but often it did not. If I think about the cheating, I truly believe that this may not have been just something what you wanted for yourself, it may have been something you may have wanted because you wanted the recognition from someone else.
You knew that one of your co-workers had a relationship with him. You should have known that was wrong since he was married and has two young children. But you were impressed instead. Perhaps, just perhaps, you went after him, because someone else did and you wanted to achieve the same. You needed proof that you were just as desirable as someone else. I am not sure if that was really the case, but it makes me think that both you and your co-worker had sexual encounters with him and you both knew and talked so much about each other’s experiences, even in my presence after I had found out. You talked about what kind of jerk he was. How he played you both. It sounds surreal to me today that this really happened. What kind of fool I was. I should write a soap opera.
I believe you wanted to impress your co-worker and sleeping with that medic was one way for you to do it. So many people told me in the past that they thought you lack a certain amount of self-confidence. This scenario may just be a reflection of that. Your co-worker, a tech, was way below you in the professional hierarchy in your job, and she should have been impressed by what you have accomplished. But she was able to impress you that she had slept with a medic. This still makes me think occasionally. Think, what that really means. I guess that is girl stuff and guys just don’t get it.
The fact that you were so angry after he dumped you, that you basically slandered him by saying he played you, fits the entire picture of your desire to be popular. You could not have admitted to your co-worker or anyone else that he simply dumped you. But you wanted to be popular. And someone popular simply does not get dumped, I guess. I get this one and I even feel bad for the guy who pinned you down on the family room couch. Bad, because that he fell so easily for you.
I am not sure whether you live in denial and you ended up believing yourself that he played you. He dumped you because his morals kicked in when you could not get enough and asked him to come back a second time and a third time the same day, at a time at night when the kids were sleeping in our house. It is interesting that you even considered an affair with that medic, knowing that he had a family and knowing that he had something going on with your co-worker. The fact that you were selfishly willing to destroy someone else’s family for sex, aside the fact that you easily accepted the risk of drowning your own, puts your personality in a very differently light and does not fit the word “angel” you so much enjoy to hear from your friends, most of them you only communicate with through Facebook.
I can’t deny that I hope that one day you will see what you have done, what it meant to the people around you, especially to your children.
Looking at all of this, how many promises did we break? I know I worked too much, sometimes 80 hours a week, to keep us safe from the looming recession. I know you said you lost your butterflies for me. I know you were upset that I did not take care of myself as I much as did before the marriage. I know that you sometimes must have felt like living in a golden cage, a life that may have been financially safe, but was dull and boring emotionally and physically for both of us. Even if I promised to make you the happiest woman in this world, I failed. In that way, I also broke the promise to our children to maintain a safe family environment for them. But I keep wondering if all of this justifies infidelity?
To end a marriage in this way is shameful. But it is up to us to think about our children and guide them through the next years and I am worried that selfishness, even if it is required in some way to make ourselves happy again before we can make them happy, will take over entirely and leave them behind. I hope that we soon will be able to drop all the anger and selfishness. We need to be reasonable enough to make this process as easy and smooth as possible for them.
In the end, we do not matter. They matter. Right now, I think especially you are using them as a tool to make you happy and make me angry.
We are hitting big roadblocks all the time and I do not understand why. We hardly talk and if we do, the exchange of words is filled with distrust, threats, blaming, accusations, lies. It impacts our children. Robert is becoming much more introverted than he has ever been, even if he seems to be dealing with the situation and change in life much better than Michael. Michael is changing. You know he is more aggressive and his fears are met with behavior from both of us that is not what we once promised. He walks all over you and I do not like that. He says things he has never said before. Hurtful things and surely things he regrets to have said. Please keep in mind what is important for our children, to drop selfish behavior, to return to common sense and quickly become the best parents we can be when we are separated and, hopefully, soon divorced.
When we decided to put our children into this world, we gave the promise to do all we can to bring them up as decent people of this world and to give them everything they need to be able pursue their own dreams, to allow them to change the world in their own way to make it a better place to be. We don’t do that right now and it breaks my heart that we are stalling at a phase that is so painful for them.
All three children are a symbol of, from my view, how much I loved you. Look at them, look at how they smile, how they talk, how different they are in the way they express themselves, feel the love they are willing to share when they look at you, smile at you, hug you. These are all expressions of what I once felt for you.
Every day I look at them, I try to imagine how much I must have loved you, what I was willing to do for you. Now my feelings are entirely wrapped into them. It is an amazing, breathtaking feeling. It is the single most important reason why it is worth living. Michael, Robert and Nicholas are my purpose in this world. That has always been the case, even when I worked more than what I should have and missed time to spend with them. But they always were my priority in everything I did and they will always be. They will always guide my thinking and doing.
More Lifecasts: Allison Nazarian | Shannon Ball | Letters To A Cheating Spouse
About the Author: A man sends letters to his cheating spouse. Read how teh story developed, his experiences and lessons over time.
