I Didn't Choose This and I'm Better For It

TW: divorce, affair, mental health

“You wouldn’t even care if I died!” I shouted to my husband. Should I even call him that? He was at the other woman’s house, just outside of it with me in the parking lot. He barely looked at me as I shouted like a maniac to my betraying husband. He sat in his car. All he said was “I have to go to work,” which only made me feel as though he wouldn’t care if I died. I felt like the crazy person people would call the cops on, but if only they knew how I was hurting.

***

~A few weeks earlier~

The whirlwind I was living for the first, fresh weeks of finding out was the most surreal and poignant time I’ve ever experienced - and in the worst way. Before I discovered the shameful secret, I simply observed my husband overworking, isolating, and not dealing with some recent trauma. At work as a security guard, he was looking for some squatters in a neighborhood. He was with another guard who got hasty and shot at him thinking my husband was a squatter. My husband didn’t get hit, but he suffered for a while in other ways. I gave him so much grace and space.

I still didn’t fathom he was with someone else. 

After many weeks of barely seeing him, getting vague texts about when he’d be home, and eating dinner alone in our house, I vented to my parents about it. “He’s definitely dealing with something…” I explained to them, noting the traumatic shooting scenario. “I’m sure it’s just a season. You’re doing the right thing giving him some space,” they assured me. It actually helped. 

We discussed this heaviness in the apartment pool, but nobody else was around. When they went home and I went inside to make lunch, my heart felt light and lifted. It was like a dark cloud had disappeared only for a hailstorm to roll in. I saw a letter on the island in our kitchen. It was half a page handwritten, with “I don’t want to drag you into my crap” and “my desire to be married to a wonderful woman is gone” and “I’ll file for divorce soon” in it. My brain tried to imagine why “wonderful woman” and “divorce” somehow sat on the same page. My world seemed to actually be spinning. I lost my appetite.

Our marriage wasn’t spectacular lately, but divorce never even crossed my mind! I was all in, and now I was having the rug pulled out from under me.

It was the longest few hours of crying on my couch with a dear girlfriend who drove an hour to comfort me. I vented and tried to grapple with what life would be like unmarried. Could I refuse? What’s even the first step in a divorce? Will people judge me if I didn’t even have a say in this?

I had a headache from crying and not eating or hydrating for way too long, and I ended up barely eating for a couple days after. 

Later in the day I got that letter, when my husband finally called me back, he explained that he left the letter, stayed away from the house, and was only just about to go into work for a night shift. But he stayed on long enough for me to get half the picture. “I can’t imagine why you’d want to divorce. I wouldn’t even consider it unless there was an affair. None of us have been unfaithful, right?” I asked, genuinely not expecting him to admit there was a chance of that. “Well… I have been having feelings for another woman.” he explained. I knew it wasn’t the whole truth, but it was enough. 

I wasn’t perfect, but I still gave him so much grace as I said “I can understand that happens. People have eyes. But divorce?” 

I can’t recall much of how that call ended, only that he left for work, as I left some random store parking lot to go to our empty house, heart and home emptier than ever. 

It was the next day when he told me more. He showed me an image on Amazon of a necklace with something like “angel baby” on it that he bought. He explained that his other woman was pregnant but miscarried his child recently. The timeline around which he supposedly started his affair didn’t seem to line up with her conceiving and miscarrying, but he definitely believed the baby was his and was grieving that. 

You know what I did? I slapped him, told him to leave, and said I’d divorce him first.

Actually, no. I comforted him with “I’m so sorry you’re grieving that,” and “it might be a sign… stop this affair, move forward with me, and we’ll figure out how to fix us.” Compassion. I showed my cheating husband compassion. Maybe it came from the place within me that never so far has conceived and could understand how hard achieving pregnancy could be.

When he didn’t jump at the chance to stay with me, I reeled. He said, “I don’t know…she needs me.” Like, are you seriously on the fence?! I thought to myself, though I know I said it aloud many times later. I was basically giving him an out to stay in. But he had to “weigh his options.” I learned she was pregnant again (timing still seemed off, but this one was definitely his). I also discovered she was the woman I caught him texting around 10pm weeks ago. She apparently had a stalker situation, and he met her earlier in the year at the apartment complex he was a guard for. That night weeks ago with the text hurt since I was in the same room with him, begging for him to pray with me, enjoy me, but his attention was given elsewhere.

***

~About a week later~

For myself alone, I wrote a letter to the other woman. I wasn’t going to give her the letter. It was going to be one of those “write a letter then burn it” situations. I wrote 3 or more pages of how our marriage wasn’t great, but it wasn’t as bad as my husband felt it was, and I pasted images of us from a trip we took a couple months back to Alaska to see some of my cousins. He was active in his affair then, but I hadn’t a clue. He pretended well, other than being somewhat distant since the work incident. At the time, the Alaska trip felt like a needed solace for us both. Little did I know he was putting on a good show for me. If she didn’t know he was married, she would soon, because I decided I would actually give her this letter after all. I had to be tactful. I half didn’t want to see her face but half wanted to confront her - I would’ve been calm, I think. 

My first attempt to give the letter ended in me shouting at my husband. I was too angry to confront her, let alone my own husband, but the latter had to happen. If I had seen her, I probably wouldn’t have been a great communicator. My letter would’ve been tossed or disregarded since I felt and looked like a mad woman. I only knew generally about where she lived because of the apartment he worked at. I found his car conveniently right outside her place. This attempt was very odd. I texted him a sweaty picture of me standing outside his car in the July-in-Arizona heat. He responded with “don’t ruin this. She doesn’t know. We’re happy.” He hid inside until my outburst when he exited the apartment to drive to work. Still, I couldn’t figure out how this was my life now. After my practically suicidal outburst toward him, I drove home sobbing in despair. I felt like God was saying “let him make his choices.” In the earlier days of the shock, I felt God was telling me to “stand firm, keep the faith, you’ll get the reward.” I was determined to overcome his nasty affair and reconcile into a better version of us. But the reward wasn’t a redeemed marriage; instead, it was being freed from it, as he eventually did fulfill his promise to divorce me.

Not long before the divorce papers were finalized, I was resolved to drop the letter successfully to her. By then I had zero desire to see her face and thus give me a permanent person in my mind’s horrible imaginative replays of what’s gone on between them.

It was easy to find her exact door since his car from the last time showed me.

My letter ended with me telling her I don’t want him to remain my husband, but she had to know the truth if she didn’t already. That first attempt confirmed she didn’t know (per his words), and I was glad the letter was already written.

It was a day of relief as I dropped off the letter at her doorstep without seeing any form of her or my husband, and I zipped off to a well-timed getaway with friends to beautiful Payson, Arizona for a week. Between leaving the letter and departing for Payson, my still-husband called me saying “she’s upset to find out I was married.”

“She should’ve known all along, but soon it won’t matter.” I truly felt like my ties were broken. My desire to remain married to him fell off. It took months of tears, counseling, prayer, and figuring out the foreclosing house and moving before I was healed of the trauma. The divorce finalized the day before our 5th anniversary, and it felt like my white flag moment, like a book closing, not just a chapter.

The divorce papers made me feel no different, because he’d been long divorced from me in every practical way except legally until that point.

It’s only years later I see that the “reward” of standing firm in that whole mess was getting to marry my now-husband who I knew before I was engaged the first time. We are more compatible, and I wish I could tell younger me that there were some red flags in the engaged stage that I shouldn’t ignore. I could’ve set some boundaries and standards better if I had known about what that even meant at 18 when I married the first time.

***

This was written from my own experience. Unfortunately, none of it was fabricated or exaggerated. It’s simply a condensed retelling of a true story. 2018 was my dark year. It almost feels like I’m telling someone else’s story by how far removed I am from all of it. I wrote about this in a more story-like way here also, only it has some details changed: https://blog.reedsy.com/short-story/1bn558/