Remember when you first visited me for a few months in another country back when we met? Remember how you cried on my shoulder the first day? Remember how you felt? Remember the loneliness? But you had a way out, a flight back to your family, and I did everything I could to give you a way out. Remember how you were homesick? I may be homesick, too, at times, but you seem to have forgotten how it feels to be alone in a foreign country, culture, without friends or family. You make fun of me when I think about home and leaving this country. You make fun of my accent and certain words I use.

You often said I have not gotten over you. You even laugh at me when you say that. In a very strange way, you seem to need that persuasion that I am still hanging on to you. A lot of people also said I am not over you and it may take years until I could.

I don’t have that much time.

If I think about your motivation to cheat, I wonder how little our children mean to you and how much did you mean to yourself at the time you cheated? How little did we mean to you when you can tell me that you ‘consciously’ cheated? You never felt guilty that you cheated and I think that is wrong in any way you look at it. You never apologized.

I remember what you wrote to your guy in one chat. When you and I were intimate with each other, just days before you cheated, you told him that you imagined that I was him, and how much that turned you on.

You often say I sound like a broken record when I repeat things that have been said in the past. You even laugh at me when you say this. I don’t want to repeat myself now, but it seems that every spark of common sense has been extinguished.

Why does this have to be so hard? Why can’t we just take apart what we built and save what can be saved? Why can’t we go on with our lives? Why can’t we do this? What is the sense of this destruction? Why do we do this to our children? Why do they deserve this? Why? Can you answer this question if you look inside your heart without feeling any guilt?

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.

I believe this is a time of uncertainty for both of us, a time of change, hardship, pain, compromise and a time of very difficult decisions that, right or wrong, will impact both of us for a long, long time. When I found out earlier this year that you cheated on me several times with a coworker, it took me some time to realize that, while we both should try to become happy again, there is nothing more important than to be the best parents we can be, no matter what we feel or not feel for each other.

I do not think that we are the best parents we can be these days.

I am not sure what these pages will mean to you. Since I am writing these lines after I already have typed tens of thousands of words in this letter, I know that I will talk on the following pages about many things I repeatedly told you over the past few months, but many other [...]

Never would I have expected that I might be caught up in the middle of a divorce. In fact, until the beginning this year I believed that I was happily married, settled for life and creating an environment for three young children in which they can thrive and simply enjoy to grow up.

I was wrong, terribly wrong, as I found out a little over nine months ago that my wife had cheated multiple times while I was on a business trip earlier this year.