My five stages

CW: This story contains themes or mentions of mental health issues and sex.

When I think about the hurt and suffering that I have been through recently, I don’t automatically think I have suffered a loss. It’s not like someone has died. But at the same time there has been a death. The death of trust and the death of my faith in my husband. The death of the woman I was before the infidelity and the death of who I was going to be in the future. In a way, I suppose, there was a death. The death of me. Psychology believes that when we suffer a loss, we go through five stages of grief. In a way I suppose I have battled through those stages, I have denied that it was happening, I have been angry, I bargained, slipped into a depressive state and now I just need to accept it has happened. Easier said than done, I know. 

Denial

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, I mean I knew what I was seeing, I just couldn’t believe it. How could he have done this to me? Was it even him? Maybe his email had been hacked? Yes that could have been it. He wouldn’t do this to me, not in a million years. He loved me and the kids, why would he risk losing us? No, there had to be some sort of mistake. 

I probably should have stayed with that ideology but no, I had to dig deeper. I had to go onto the messages part. This was the end of my denial stage, immediately. 

Anger

The anger didn’t actually happen after the denial stage. The anger came after the depression stage. The anger came much later, when I had compressed and began to accept the hurt and believe that things were fixable. The anger came much later when I discovered that there was more to it than he had originally told me, that there had been more messages, more personal details exchanged and intimate pictures sent by him, never by her.

Bargaining

The bargaining stage, this is a hard one to explain because did we actually bargain to give things another go? Or did we refuse to let one bad month spoil what we had built up over seven years? I’m not quite sure. Anyway, I suppose the bargain was for him to seek help from a mental health professional, a counsellor, to help him identify when he was slipping back into a depressive state of mind so this never happened again. I also bargained with him that he had to tell me the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. He said he had, as mentioned above he hadn’t due to him believing I would leave him. I never wanted our marriage to end, and after all, the man I fell in love with and married, wasn’t the man he was for that month when things went pear shaped. I still believed that I could get my husband back, the real him, not the nasty, cheating dickhead that he had turned into. 

Depression

The depression was there for three weeks after I found out about the original betrayal. I cried everyday for three weeks straight. We would be out with the kids and I would forget about things for a while then something would remind me and that is when the tears would come. I thought after the three weeks, when the tears began drying up and the hurt slowly subsided, there would be no more surprises, no more betrayals and no more hurt. How wrong was I? 

Anger (pt. 2)

Fast forward to 6 weeks after the initial find out. Something was still not ringing right with me, so I, once again, went through his phone, but decided to have a look at his recently downloaded apps. He had Google Chat installed and had also removed it, but he hadn’t removed any of the other Google apps, which I found weird. As I knew his password for his Google account I decided to have a look and see if he had used it to talk to them. In hindsight, I wish I had left it alone and not trusted my gut, I wish I had just forgotten about the whole thing. 

When I logged in there was no messages, I was about to close the app when something made me check the blocked list. There they were. SIX message feeds to women who he had met on the site he had signed up to. I felt physically sick, I was shaking and my head was swimming. I could feel my heart beating faster and faster and I was sure I was going to have a heart attack. I threw the phone on the bed and calmed my breathing. I had to know what was said to these women, so when I had calmed down and when I was sure I wasn’t going to pass out or vomit, I reached for the phone and read through the message feeds. 

I was seething. He had sent intimate pictures to one of them and just as I thought that was the worst part, I found out that he had also paid her for “services”. She was a mistress so the services were BDSM related and the messages were all about him committing to her, his marriage being stale (news to me, considering he was the one who was rejecting my sexual advances, therefore, he was the one who was making it stale, not me) and that he was able to “hook up” with her on certain days of the week “while the kids are at school”. If I thought I was seething before, it was nothing compared to the sheer rage I felt when I read that he had spoken about our kids to her. Once again I threw the phone on the bed and grabbed out wedding memory box from on top of the wardrobe. I picked up our wedding album and began tearing the pages out, the photographs were next to be ripped to shreds, as well as anthing else I could find that symbolised us being in love. It was all a lie. The messages were proof and I was clearly not what he wanted anymore so he could just fuck off as far as I was concerned.  

When I had calmed a bit and the photos lay in torn shreds around me I went downstairs. I grabbed our wedding picture from the wall and took it into the kitchen. There was a hammer in one of the drawers so I picked it up and shattered the glass of the picture, I then tore up the photograph of when we first got together. I didn’t want any reminders of ever being happy with him. 

“I thought you already knew about the messages on Google.” He said when I had confronted him about it. “Surely, me snapping out of that dark time when we moved, me getting rid of everything and not talking to them again was enough to prove that I love you and want you?” I didn’t know what to believe. I knew there had been a rough patch, for about a year we had suffered this drought in our marriage and it was like he was stuck in a hole that I couldn’t get him out of, no matter how hard I tried. I knew he was depressed but he wouldn’t believe it. Typical man mentality, not believing that mental health could ever affect him. But it had, and now I was hurting all over again. But this time it was worse because it was the original scenario, just with more truth than what he had told me the first time around. I felt like I had married a complete stranger, that the man I had fallen in love with was as dead as our marriage and I was now living with someone who I didn’t even know. It tore me apart and the daily tears began to flow again.  

Acceptance

It’s been four days since I found out about Betrayal part 2 and I am sitting in a coffee shop, having a pit of mint tea and writing this. I can’t say nothing has been done regarding my husband getting help for the depression and cheating, he had his first counselling session yesterday and said it had helped to talk to someone not connected to us. He is feeling really positive about being able to get back to how we were and I will admit, he has sort-of gone back to the man I fell in love with. But, it will take a while for me to completely accept that it happened and that it was, as he said, “not a reflection” on me. 

Last night, we were talking in bed, he cuddled me and told me he loved me. The conversation turned to our sex life and he admitted that he had rejected me time and time again because he just wasn’t feeling up to it because of his mental health decline. I understood and didn’t hold only having sex three times in eighteen months against him. The conversation turned to some of the things I had read in the messages and asked if he wanted to try those things with me. “No, I only said those things to keep the conversation going. I had no intention of meeting up with them, let alone having any sexual contact”. I nodded against his chest and he kissed me on the head. 

“I just worry that I don’t do it for you. Like I don’t turn you on or get you hard because I’m not a twenty something, skinny blonde thing” I said as the insecurities came flooding out of me.

“You do turn me on and you definitely get me hard.” He said, tilting my chin upwards so I was looking at him. He kissed me on the lips and I felt a wave of something, arousal? happiness? love? wash over me. 

“You are what I want. Hell everytime I think about you riding me I get instantly hard. I’m hard now just thinking about it.” He wasn’t lying…

The sex was amazing! The aftermath was even better. He kissed me, held me in his arms and told me “this is what we are. And this is love right here.” before kissing me again and telling me over and over that he loved me. I curled up in his arms, feeling safe like I always had before any of this had happened, and listened as his breathing softened as he fell asleep. Right at that moment I knew, he was being completely honest with me. He did truly love me. 

Me! Not those women, if they were women, who’s to know who’s really sitting behind a screen?

I was finally enough for someone to love. And I wasn’t going to throw that away over a depressive state of mind and a mistake. We were stronger than that. 

We ARE stronger than that. 

So that is my five stages of grief, I know it isn’t bereavement grief, but in a way I did die a little inside. Our marriage flatlined and it was touch and go whether I wanted to DNR it or try and breathe life back into it. But after the CPR of our words and feelings for each other, it looks like our marriage will make a full recovery, with time, love, effort from both of us and patience. Our marriage has been injured but it has also cheated death.