You’ll Miss The Best Things If You Keep Your Eyes Shut……But No One Told Me To Keep My Eyes On The Road

I have been sick recently, just a cold, but it is weird how something so simple can make a difference.  My wife was sick before I was (yes, I thanked her for giving it to me) and I  did what I always would do if she is sick.  Let her rest and pick up the slack.  Then when I went down she has done the same.  Neither of us asked to be taken care of we just did it because that is what you do when you love someone.  I just noticed it in a different way.  I am seeing all the small things we are doing for each other that make our lives easier.

Well, I will try to continue with my story.  So I had downloaded apps to get a self-esteem boost by having people find me attractive.  At the same time my wife and I were growing distant.  I look back now and think that I was probably withdrawing at the same time she was.  She had decided to change herself and make herself better.  She also over scheduled herself for the summer and was going to be gone for weeks.

As she started working on herself I started taking time by myself as well.  I would go for walks or golfing or any number of other things, but it was just painful to be home.  She started a new diet plan and I didn’t say a word.  She has gone through these phases before and I have always supported her through them but she always gives up and then feels worse in the end.  I decided not to recognize that she was doing it so she didn’t have the added pressure of thinking she failed in front of me again.  She also started working out with her male coworker a couple of times a week.  I was now deeply engrossed in the app and the multiple conversations that I had going.  One in particular was the OW.   For some reason she seemed very easy to talk to and we related on a lot of different levels.

My wife went on her first trip which was one that I was really happy she went on.  It was a week-long trip with her friends and they went to visit a friend who had moved away.  I kept everything going at home, but because it was the summer it was pretty easy.  This also gave me a lot more freedom to chat with these women.  I had moved on to giving a few of them my actual number and they were texting me.  I had no intentions of meeting them but they were very attractive women who found me interesting, funny, and attractive.  It made me feel so much better about myself.  But it also started a destructive dialog in my head.  It was something like:

“These women find you funny and attractive but your own wife doesn’t.”

“She won’t be intimate with you because she does not find you good-looking.”

“You are just the father of her children and her partner but you will never be the love of her life and you can never make her happy.”

These thoughts or ones similar would just pour through my mind.  I couldn’t get them to stop.  She didn’t text me much on her trip and when she called she mostly talked to the kids.  I wasn’t really wanting to talk to her because I had started to believe my own inner demons.  Now here is the part that threw me over the edge.

She came home from her trip and had to leave the next day.  When she pulled up and got out of her friends van I helped her get her stuff and get in the house.  But she never once said she missed me, she never gave me a hug, she never kissed me.  This just ate away at me.  She got right busy packing for the next trip which was a camp out with my daughter.  I helped and that night I stayed as far away from her as I could in the bed.  I was so angry that she didn’t care enough to even miss me.  I was really hurt.  That convinced me that she really didn’t love me.  We had slowly been growing apart but never like this, this was something different.

Now as I was stewing I was still chatting away with about 4 different women.  They were all fun and I had a great time talking to them.  I kind of gave them a back story about what had happened to me and pretended that it was in the past and not currently going on.  They gave me their opinions on it even they really had no working knowledge of my home life and marriage.  The OW as the most persistent that my wife was definitely not happy and it was a good thing that you left because now we can both find happiness.  She said this without really knowing that I was still married.  We kept up a fun level of banter and sexiness in our texts.  I really enjoyed them.  I found out things about her.  She was just getting divorced.  She decided that she couldn’t be happy with the man that she married so rather than make him miserable she left.  She found out she wasn’t happy because she had an affair with a married man and believed that she fell in love with him.  Her husband found out and they tried counseling but she just wasn’t really into the marriage anymore.

Now if I had opened my eyes for a few minutes then I would have seen the train wreck coming but I didn’t.  I kept my eyes shut and did not want to see things for what they really were and in the end it hurt my wife and I more than I thought possible.  And for that I am truly sorry.  She didn’t ask for this nor did she deserve it.  I am a horrible person….If only I had looked around.

 

You’ll miss the best things if you keep your eyes shut – Dr. Seuss