When the trouble really settled in…

We make it home from our overnight getaway and things were ok for a little while.We managed to get a week alone in late July while my son was at the beach with his grandma. Most couples would be ecstatic…we weren’t. It was business as usual…no crazy sex, no late nights out…nothing. It was the normal out to dinner, husband in bed by 10, me alone watching TV til 2am. There was the one night that we laid in bed and talked about the troubles of our marriage until the wee hours of the morning. We were both disconnecting. Then we roll around to our normal vacation week at the beach…where my husband will celebrate his 40th birthday. I noticed that during this time, a week he would normally love, he seemed sad, distracted. There were a few phone calls that he took and removed himself from the crowd to have. I didn’t think much about it at the time. He had started mentioning the OW,let’s call her Nikki, here and there, I knew he thought she was “hot”…he had told me. I was never the real jealous type, and I felt very secure in my marriage, so this didn’t bother me. Every year we would love to take late night walks on the beach and stare at the moon and stars…we had even made love on that beach under those stars some of those years. This year’s moonlight walk had a much different tone. This year we talked about being unhappy, he talked about feeling restless with his life. Now I know it was just that he wanted to fuck around a little bit. You see, after the first affair he made a promise to me. he promised that if he ever found himself being distracted by another woman, thinking about her more than me…that he would never cheat on me again, that he would leave first.He would spare me the pain of the betrayal.

So vacation is done, it was so so. The day after we get home he decides he needs to talk to me, So we sit on the floor in our home office and he begins to tell me that he needs to leave, he doesn’t know what’s wrong with himself, but he wants to leave. He tells me that he doesn’t want to be a husband, a father…anything. He says he plans on finding himself a therapist to help him figure out what’s wrong. I am stunned, shocked, angry. I tell him fine, go, leave and I pick myself up and head to the office to work for a bit. This is a Sunday I will never forget in my life. So at this point I feel charged, let the bastard leave if he wants. I have given him everything, the best of me, all of me. If that’s how he feels he doesn’t deserve me…right. Wrong, it didn’t take long for the reality of what he said to sink in, I drive home in tears and fall into our bed a complete and total mess sobbing. He wasn’t there when I got home, he had driven to his father’s grave, he was struggling. JR is a good man and this desire, this want he has is eating him alive, it is killing him. He comes home and finds me a complete wreck and he falls apart to..I remember saying to him through the sobs “So much for being strong, please don’t leave” He stays. This was early August. He finds a counselor and has 2 sessions before quitting, his reason being that he didn’t like her…the real reason is that he had told her about Nikki and about what he was contemplating with her and of course the therapist advised against that. So for the rest of August I hear about Nikki from time to time and I finally confront him and say if this girl is all that, I want to meet her. Take me with you (he had a job to do at the club) when you go tomorrow, he agrees. The next morning I start to get ready and he says we aren’t doing that, I can’t take you down there. Of course I ask why not, and he tells me he doesn’t want to hurt her feelings. WTF? Why would me coming to work with him hurt her feelings. We have a huge fight that morning and I tell him to leave..he threatens with are you sure you want me to leave. Do you know what you’re saying. Now, I realize that at this time they weren’t fucking, and that was him realizing if I made him leave there wouldn’t be anything standing in his way of taking that next step. We go the rest of the day without speaking, same thing for that night when he gets home. The next morning he heads into work before me and I decide that I am getting dressed and making him take me to meet her. So I show up at our office and tell him let’s go, he has no choice. So we head down there, he is very tense. You have to know that JR is a very affectionate man with me, always touches me, grabs my hand when we go to leave from a place, etc. When we walk in, he introduces us…nerves are running high. She is behind the bar, slicing limes…complaining about an odor coming from the drains. Our tech comes in and JR instructs him on what to do. She and I say hello, very brief. A mutual person that we all know comes in and creates a distraction. The things I did notice about her were, she has a foul mouth and a nose ring. Two things my husband has always hated. She is pretty but not drop dead gorgeous. He makes sure to keep his distance from me this whole time. He doesn’t touch me once. So we leave and I just look at him and say, “I don’t get it, she has a foul mouth, a nose ring, and she couldn’t hold a candle to me when I was her age, she was 10 years younger than me. My husband agreed with me about all of it.

You would think that my going to her work and meeting her face to face would have discouraged the affair, but it sent them running to each other. The next weekend was my sister’s baby shower at my house, Sunday. My husband knows I am extremely distracted by this and tells me that he has to go to a continuing ed class for his license and it’s on Saturday at the beach. I don’t think anything of it, he has done weekend classes there before. So he leaves at 6 am Saturday morning, he checks in with me every couple of hours like he always did when he was in class and he gets back around 7 that night. I had no clue that he had just been on his first real date with her.

We had always planned on moving to the beach when our son graduated in 6 years, we loved it there, it was special to us. It was were we escaped to when we needed to get away.

So their date went like this. He took her there, to the place we planned on moving to. He took her to the same hotel that we had escaped to one day just for sex earlier that year. He fucked her, then took her to the beach, a beach we went to, a beach my daughter and her friends went to, then he took her to our favorite restaurant, where they ate outside and watched the boats go by, like he and I had done so many times before. He says that he talked about our future there, he told her about our plans to move. I don’t know who was more twisted, him for telling her this after fucking her, or her for fucking him again later that day after hearing all of that. Later he would admit to me that they walked on the beach holding hands, kissing, enjoying each other. I hate him for that. What bothers me most is that the next day at my sister’s shower he was fine. I look back at the pictures of him laughing and smiling, he had a great time and all I can think is YOU FUCKING BASTARD, HOW CAN YOU ACT SO FUCKING HAPPY, LIKE YOU HAVE DONE NOTHING WRONG!!! I hate looking at those pictures, of course now I know he was living in the euphoria of his day with Nikki.

So that’s were it began, that was the day my husband took steps that would eventually lead me to hit rock bottom and end up in the back of an ambulance (more about that later). That was the day I truly lost my husband, the day he became a total stranger to me. He was no longer the man that I loved, that I had devoted my life to, that I shared everything with, no longer my best friend…he was no longer my husband because he was now officially Nikki’s boyfriend and lover.