An email that rocked her world
I wish I had the guts to use my real name. Then I wouldn’t feel complicit in what my husband has done. I’ve never liked keeping secrets, but this is one I must keep. For my kids. Their happiness is more important than mine.
Maybe in time — two, three years? — I’ll be able to put this behind me. In the meantime, I pretend — in front of family, friends and my children — that life is as it always was: waving the kids off to school; writing at my desk by 9 a.m.; after school, piano and dance lessons; supper at 6; seeing friends on the weekend; lying side by side in our queen-size bed. I know it will never be the same, but I go through the motions. I check on the kids late at night, trace the innocent map of their faces, and I weep. I wash the kitchen floor, and I weep. I write this, I weep. It is the particular sorrow of a wife betrayed.
Six months ago, everything in my world shifted. It happened, as it so often does, when I read an email. An email I wasn’t supposed to see. I was putting my kids, ages 10 and six at the time, to bed while my husband worked at the computer. I drifted off and woke to the sound of him shuffling around the kitchen, making a late-night snack. I went to the computer to check my email and there it was in black and white: a few sentences carelessly left up on the screen that would change my life forever. “Hey, I’m missing you,” she wrote. Immediately my heart began to race at the casual intimacy of the words. “Can we get together this week? I can’t wait to see you.” My gut clenched and my heart beat faster when I read his reply: “I can’t wait to hold you and feel you in my arms, my love. It’s been so long.” And then: “This week is kind of crazy. How about next Wednesday?”
In an instant, my husband became a stranger to me. But that last bit was familiar — his habit of putting people off while he wrestled with his busy schedule. Apparently, he was willing to delay even his lover for a few extra days.
Looking for warning signs
When I say I never doubted for a minute of our 19-year marriage that my husband would ever stray, I mean it. He was as faithful as a puppy, home every night for dinner, playing checkers with the kids in the evenings, on the couch with the newspaper on Saturday mornings. He was reliable — and, I thought, predictable in every way: the same friends since childhood; the same brand of Scotch for 20 years; an enviable ability to see the best qualities in everyone; a sunny disposition that left no room for self-doubt; and a self-deprecating manner that endeared him to everyone he met. There wasn’t anyone I knew who didn’t enjoy my husband’s company, and that included me. We loved many of the same things: a good political argument, HBO, a long-standing and fun-loving group of mutual friends, a good bottle of Shiraz and, most of all, our son and daughter, the great joys of our lives.
Things had been good between us for many years, but lately there was a distance. We were both busier than ever with work. We had a big old house that needed constant repairs. We each had volunteer commitments in the community. Our son had some behaviour issues, and was diagnosed with a learning disability. I took it hard, agonizing over his future. My husband brushed it off, saying everything would be fine. This furthered the divide.
The kids, the house, our jobs — it took everything we had to keep it all running smoothly and there was little left over for each other. Like a lot of married couples I knew, we took each other for granted — we were quick with a sarcastic retort and often more generous with friends than with each other. We rarely went on dates like all the marriage experts suggest. There were nights when we’d lie in bed, two tired, cold backs turned against each other — a far cry from the days when we slept with legs entwined. We still said “I love you” before turning off the light, but we had lost the spirit of the thing. “It’s not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages,” Nietzsche wrote.
