Much Ado About Nothing

My husband is in my office right now, killing time before he goes to the airport to catch a flight back home. His interviews went well, and he is cautiously optimistic that the days of our distance relationship are numbered. Part of me hopes he's right, but I'd be lying if I said I won't miss the "absence makes the heart grow fonder" spark that the miles have rekindled.

I remember what it felt like to look for a job in a new city, and how disorienting it is to start over without a network to fall back on. When I was job hunting in the small town, my husband's affair was at its most intense. After a slow start -- it took him a few weeks after the first time to decide whether he wanted a one-night stand or a full-blown affair -- he went off and left me in the dust.

About this time two years ago, in between holiday parties, I polished my resume and cold-called my way into a bunch of informational interviews. As I was getting a sense of the local job market, my husband started spending a lot more time with the other woman. She was always around, he said, because his business was about to open, and she -- as his first hire -- was a key part of the team. As far as I can tell, she didn't do anything constructive, unless you count chasing my husband around the water cooler. Her first project -- drafting the company policies and procedures manual -- was so poorly written that he had to throw it out and start from scratch. She was equally clueless about ordering supplies and organizing the work space. He told me that even though he had to re-do all her work, it was worth it to help her make the leap from customer service into management.

As I started spending more time in the small town, making follow up phone calls and going to real interviews, my husband's business had its grand opening. He was so consumed with work that he never had time to help me strategize or even to debrief me after each meeting. He was distracted, irritable, and stressed all the time. I chalked his foul moods up to opening night jitters, without ever considering that they might have had something to do with the pressure TOW was putting on him to step up their affair.

She almost won. When it looked like one of the places I interviewed was going to make an offer, he went so far as to tell me that I shoudn't plan on living with him if I accepted. I told him if that's what he wanted, well, then I already had my own place in the big city. "I'm not going to move here just to date you," I said. When he realized I was serious, he blinked. The other woman was not happy.

Ah, but my husband got even with her for adding complications: he had a series of one-night stands with women he chose specifically because they pissed her off. One was her nemesis from their old office. One was a vendor who was helping them set up the new office. One was the down-the-hall neighbor in his building. Hell, one was even the stalker who was hounding him when we first started dating. Unlike me, he didn't care if TOW found out. In fact, from what I gather, he delighted in telling her the details because it made her more eager to please.

The one night stands stopped about the time I started my job -- I'm guessing it got too hard to juggle a live-in fiancee, an at-work mistress, and a series of lovers without getting caught. The affair continued, however, all during our bachelor pad days, through the househunting woes, and trailed off while I was doing my summertime traveling road show. It kills me to read my journals from those six months because it was one long lament about how I couldn't believe that -- despite living with this man who said he loved me -- I never felt more alone in my whole life. I thought I was crazy.

So yeah, I have a pretty good idea what he's going through, and am doing what I can to make it easier for him. In the end, when he's wondering what all the fuss was about, I'll just nod my head in agreement and secretly wish that I could have wondered the same thing two years ago.


The Wife Who Knows

Sunday Morning, Coming Down

I'm an early riser, not by choice, but because when the sun comes up, I wake up. My husband is a night owl, preferring to stay up until the wee hours because that's the time he's most creative. He gets up early during the week to make it to work on time, and uses the weekends to catch up on sleep. It's nothing for him to stay in bed til 2:00 or 3:00 in the afternoon. Sometimes I'll stay with him and read. Other times -- like today -- I'll get up and putter around the house.

There are many days when I wish my husband were more of a morning person, but usually not on Sunday. This has become my favorite time of the week. It's quiet out on the street, the newspapers are twice as big as usual, people don't think you're a lush if you have champagne before noon... Listen to Tift Merritt sing "Sunday," and you'll get an idea of what I'm talking about.

This morning I have a bit of a red wine hangover. We had dinner last night with a group of friends whom I haven't seen since I've been back in the big city. As we sat around laughing and talking until the wait staff started dropping serious hints that we should leave, I realized that we hadn't had a "grown up" night out in quite some time. My husband and I seem to spend all of our spare time in the small town either with his kids or in the company of a group of regulars at our favorite bar. While it's done wonders for my knowledge of sports trivia, it's not the social life I'd choose if left to my own devices.

Today, we're going to catch up with some other friends -- new parents with their beautiful, much anticipated high tech baby -- for brunch at a trendy downtown cafe. After that, we're driving out to our new house with a tape measure and a sketch pad to figure out where the movers should put our things when they arrive in a few weeks. Then we'll find a dive bar and catch up on football highlights before the late game comes on.

I'm a little more stream of conscience than usual, but I'm feeling very content today. Life is good.


The Wife Who Knows

Forgiveness

When I found out that my husband had an affair for eight months during the time we were engaged and living together, it had been over for almost exactly a year. Even so, it shocked me to the core -- first, that he could have lied to me so easily; and second, that I believed him.

I spent the end of summer trying to assemble the missing pieces so I could make sense of everything that had shattered. I scoured phone bills, e-mail messages, credit card receipts, and bank statements trying to figure out how bad it had been. I pulled my calendar and plugged this information into a timeline, overlaying his activities on my schedule to find patterns. When I was finished, I re-read my journal to remind myself of what I was thinking when all this happened.

As the full picture emerged, I got sick, literally. I couldn't eat. I couldn't sleep. I had trouble concentrating at work. My husband wondered why I was so quiet and withdrawn. I don't know how many times I opened my mouth and then stopped before I blurted out, "How could you?" I must have picked up the phone a dozen times or more to call my best friend, but I never quite dialed her number. I couldn't talk about it to my sister, who visited us a couple weeks after I finished compiling my dossier. Hell, I couldn't even tell a bartender in a strange city who wondered what I was writing so furiously about! I finally confessed everything to one of my friends who went through something similar this summer. Saying it out loud wasn't as cathartic as I thought it might be -- it was just sad.

Since then, I've been thinking a lot about forgiveness. And as much as I need to forgive him if this marriage is going to amount to anything, I really need to stop beating myself up. There are times when I am more mad at myself for NOT KNOWING than I am at him for having the affair. I replay my behavior, and catch myself wondering if there was anything *I* did to push him over the edge. I play the "what if" game -- as in, what if I'd come home early from a trip, or what if I'd dropped in to surprise him at his office, or what if I'd just asked a few more questions -- til my head spins. It's so crazy that I'm often more bothered by the things I DIDN'T do, than I am by the things he did.

I think my New Years Resolution this year will be to lighten up on the blame game. Perhaps once I stop being so hard on myself, I can resolve my feelings about his infidelity and maybe even forgive him. That would really be something.


The Wife Who Knows

Sharing Space

I was watching reruns of Sex and the City last night with my gay boyfriend -- the man who has graciously let me crash in his spare room for the past six weeks while I turned my life upside down -- and we were laughing at similarities in the plot line to our relationship. Aiden had just moved in with Carrie, and she was having trouble adjusting to being in close quarters with a guy and all his stuff. She chose a night out with her gay boyfriend as an antidote to her troubles at home.

While my GB was reminiscing about all the times we've been each other's safety valve, I was struck more by Carrie's trouble adjusting to sharing her space with the man she loved. It brought back stark memories of when I moved into the bachelor pad. Though we didn't have boxes littering the floor -- I put my things in a storage unit -- we did have serious space issues. I thought they would go away when we moved into our big house, with its four bedrooms and three bathrooms and big kitchen and separate dining room. No such luck.

Even if my husband hadn't been carrying on with the other woman and had been perfectly attentive and in tune with my distress, I was still SO unprepared to live with someone. It had been a long time since I'd had a roommate -- let alone three roommates (if you count his kids, who might as well have been living with us) -- and had gotten used to living in perfect order. It drove me crazy that no one seemed capable of putting anything back where he found it. Though my husband was bad, his eldest -- the child who looked at me like I was talking in Mandarin when I suggested that he clean up the kitchen -- was far worse.

My home had always been my sanctuary, and my husband and his kids turned mine into a place I dreaded going. He sabotaged all my efforts to establish house rules. He wanted to be the cool dad, the parent with whom his kids liked hanging out. Chores, it seems, are terribly uncool. What happened, I wondered, to the man who had been borderline OCD in the bachelor pad?

It took a while to adjust, but over time, we've made our peace at home. When I started traveling and stopped cleaning up after his kids, he realized what slobs they are and started helping me enforce the rules. When I stopped picking his clothes up off the TV room floor, he started realizing how lazy he'd become. When I couldn't help people find things in the house because I didn't know where they were, they started realizing that there was a REASON everything had its place. It's not perfect harmony, but it's better. I still have my moments -- like the last time I was home, I hadn't been there in two weeks, and he didn't seem to notice that the place was a god-awful mess -- but they're fewer and farther between.

Needless to say, I'm grasping at the silver linings that come with setting up a new household. Depending on when the movers come and when my husband finds a job (two more interviews on Monday!), I could be there for a few weeks by myself. Enough time, I hope, to impose my order on things before I start sharing again. Yippee!



The Wife Who Knows

Christmas Plans

The holidays are here with a vengeance. My husband keeps thanking me for changing jobs, moving, and doing everything I can to create a distraction so he won't notice how much he hates this time of year.

Last weekend, instead of going to his office Christmas party, he came to the big city to help me find a place to live. Despite finding the perfect house in my old neighborhood, I agreed, for the sake of his sanity, to live outside of the city, on the water. We found a wonderful house, one that I hope we can talk the owners into selling if we like the community. Though I'm not crazy about the prospect of a commute that involves sitting in traffic for more than one cycle of Morning Edition, I figure that the trade offs are worth it.

Next weekend, instead of going to his favorite aunt's for a family celebration, he's coming back to the big city to explore our new neighborhood, and maybe start looking for a boat. I have graciously accepted the task of buying, boxing, and mailing gifts to all the people he will disappoint by his absence. I'm even letting him blame the fact that we're not going to be there -- even though we don't have a good excuse -- on me.

The following weekend -- Christmas -- we will be in the small town, at our house. I've told his immediate family -- siblings, not kids -- not to count on us at any time during that weekend because we'll be getting ready to move. What I didn't tell them is that my company has hired movers to do all the packing, loading, and heavy work for us. I don't mind spending the day with my in-laws, but I let my husband make the call. He may cave in to their peer pressure, but I'm not going to make him go. I am, however, going to buy, pack, and ship presents for everyone we'll miss.

I convinced him to go to my parents' house for a couple days between Christmas and New Years. My Mom and Dad live in the snow belt, and even though he likes them very much, he really likes riding their snowmobiles. Winter sports aside, I think the reason he agreed to go north with me is that he doesn't feel any pressure or expectations from my family. We're a much smaller and quieter bunch than his clan. No one minds if you disengage from the group by curling up with a book or going out to explore the woods or taking a nap. In contrast, his family is all stimulation, all the time.

We haven't decided what we're going to do for New Year's, but I'm sure we'll find a way to ignore that holiday too. It's worth missing all the celebrations to keep him -- us -- on an even keel during the transition. Next year, I can have my Christmas tree and he'll be ready to face his family because they'll know that the world didn't come to an end with him in the big city.

"Long December" by Counting Crows has become my theme song this season. "It's all a lot of oysters but no pearls..." It's a good thing I love oysters.


The Wife Who Knows

The Five People You Meet in Heaven

My husband and I were sitting in an airport bar, waiting for a plane, when we started discussing "The Five People You Meet in Heaven," the bestseller by Mitch Albom. Neither of us had read the book, but we were fascinated by the concept. We started talking about who the five most influential people in our lives were.

His list was pretty straightforward: his dad, his favorite aunt, his best friend, his ex-wife, and an old boss. My list was a little more esoteric, but I included my graduate school boyfriend. He was the first person whom I dated who was smarter than me. Nobody -- teachers, bosses, mentors -- has ever challenged me intellectually the way he did. He was a master at the Socratic method, and could tie me in knots if I wasn't careful. He didn't want a patsy -- he would get mad if I backed down and told him "You're right. You win." He wanted to earn his victories, and pushed me to argue logically, consistently, passionately, and persuasively. The highest compliment he ever paid me was, "Good comeback."

When graduate school boyfriend moved to the big city -- he was ahead of me in the program -- we kept up a long distance relationship of sorts. We were not exclusive, but agreed to a "don't ask, don't tell" policy when we were together. Most of the time it worked, though the summer I took an internship in the big city, it was clear that we had different definitions of what constituted "together." After graduation, I moved to the big city with his encouragement. We kept up a pretense of exclusivity, but had both gotten in the habit of seeing other people. The parameters of our "don't ask, don't tell" policy were the source of some spectacular knock-down, drag-out fights. I got tired of fighting, and told him it had to be all or nothing. He chose nothing.

About six months went by before he called. He was changing jobs, and taking six weeks off to travel to Australia, New Zealand, and the South Pacific. He told me that he didn't want to leave without settling things between us. He asked me to pick him up when he got back so we could have a big discussion about the future -- our future. Our time apart made him realize he wanted to marry me, and asked me to think about it while he was gone. Wow. Some going away present...

While I was away, I thought about his parting words. Had they come a few months earlier, I would have said yes without hesitation. I had never met anyone like this man before -- in many ways, he was Henry Huggins to my Eliza Doolittle. He, more than anyone, showed me how to exist in polite society. Though I missed him desperately at first, I came to realize that I could make my way in the world without him. There were plenty of smart men in the big city -- men who didn't know me before, who didn't automatically assume that I was clueless, who didn't feel the need to make every conversation a graduate seminar for my benefit, who were not threatened by my newfound social graces. I liked the woman I was becoming -- and though I owed my boyfriend a huge debt of gratitude for pointing the way, I did not owe him my life.

I was late to pick him up -- traffic was bad and his flight got in early. He was ready to jump in the taxi line when I pulled up to the curb. On the ride back to his house, he talked non-stop about his vacation, about the people he met, about taking a train across Australia, about bungee jumping in New Zealand, about the beaches in Bali. I let him go on, because I had nothing to say.

When we got to his house, he asked me to come in. I told him I didn't think it would be a good idea. "What about all the things we have to talk about?"

"We really don't have anything to talk about," I said. "My answer will be no."

"But..."

"No," I said. "If I marry you, I will always be in your shadow. You never stopped seeing me as that unformed, timid graduate student. I can't live like that."

"But..."

"No."

"I never thought I could ever do anything so bad that it would make you stop loving me," was the last thing he said as I drove away. In that moment, I knew with crystal clarity that I'd made the right decision. He still didn't get it: it wasn't about him, it was about me.

When I told my husband this story, he shook his head in disbelief. "You just drove away?"

"Yeah," I said, "Once I made my decision, I never looked back. Not once."

I'm not sure what the moral of this story is, or what parallels it has to my life now. But it makes me feel better to remember that moment when I realized that I could take care of myself.


The Wife Who Knows

Unconditional Love

When I met my husband, he was a hot property in the small town. He was playing several women off each other, using "the other woman" -- his self-described "best friend" -- as ballast, while he learned how much fun it was to be single again. He told me he was miserable. He hated being alone, but he didn't like any one of the women in his life enough to rule anything out with any of the others. There were women with whom he would have dinner, spend quality time, and then deposit at their doorsteps with good night kisses. And then there were women whom he'd call on his way home, asking if they could meet him for a night cap and, well, more. If only, he said, he could find ONE PERSON who blended the best of both worlds.

One of his late night women desperately wanted to be that person. She was a single mom who won a college education in her divorce settlement. She was in her final year of school when he met her, well along the path, she said, to her new life. Still, she was weighed down by so many things from her old life, that she was always lurching from crisis to crisis. This woman was not dumb, but she had a history of making dumb choices. As a consequence, even as she did all the right things to make a better life for herself and her kids, she never stopped believing that all she really needed was a knight in shining armor to bail her out. If I had met her under different circumstances, I'm sure I would have tried to help her succeed in spite of herself.

She fell for my husband hard. And why not? He was smart, successful, good looking, talented, single, straight -- from all appearances, an amazing catch. It didn't seem to bother her that he was only available late at night or at the last minute. Between school and her dysfunctional family, her life was so chaotic that his odd hours didn't seem strange to her. It was enough that he paid for her drinks and treated her like a grown up when they were together. She dropped a lot of hints about her precarious situation -- always on the edge of eviction, barely one step ahead of the bill collectors, constantly fighting with her ex for overdue child support -- but he never offered to step in and save her.

When she started using the "L" word, he told her that he didn't believe in love. Every time he thought he'd been in love, he'd been burned. All he wanted this time around was amiable companionship, a little physical chemistry, and no entangling complications. Fine, she said; she figured that if she stuck around long enough, he'd realize before long that he was in love with her too. Poor girl, she never stood a chance.

About five minutes after we met, my husband decided that I was his ONE PERSON. When he returned from our first date, he vowed to make changes in his life. He promised to cut off all the women he was seeing and devote himself only to me. He did, after a fashion -- mostly, he just stopped calling. When they called or e-mailed, he'd find some gentle excuse to put them off. Nearly all took the hint and bowed out gracefully. Not this woman.

She started stalking him. She called at all hours of the day and night, and always from different numbers so he wouldn't automatically know it was her. She spammed him with pleading e-mails. She showed up at places where she knew he (or his friends) were likely to be. The final straw came one night when she talked her way into his building and convinced the maintenance man to let her into his apartment. I know this, because he was laying in bed talking to me on the phone when it happened.

An hour later, he called back. "She's gone."

The next day, he forwarded me an e-mail she sent at 4:00 in the morning. In it, she told him that she forgave him for falling in love with me, and made a long list of reasons why he should keep seeing her on the side. Her number one reason: she would love him unconditionally. When I wrote back, I told him I couldn't make that same promise. Because, I said, there would always be a line that, once he crossed it, would betray everything that was good between us. And up to that point, I could promise that I would give him everything I had. But once he crossed it, I would be done. No man -- not even you -- is worth losing my soul, I told him.

I didn't define that line. I still haven't. But I know it's there, and I know that he's been teetering on the edge of it for a long time.


The Wife Who Knows

Late Night Grand Hotel

My husband and I have a long distance relationship again. It's almost like when we were dating, except that we're married now. It's amazing how easily we've reverted to old patterns: weekend travel, e-mail chatter throughout the day, text messages at odd moments, and long late night telephone conversations. Those conversations were a staple of our courtship. God knows what we talked about every night, but the phone would ring between 10:30 and 11:00, and we'd spend an hour, sometimes two, just talking.

When I moved to the small town and began traveling for my job, we never talked for more than a few minutes at a time. We always touched base at the end of the day, but our good night calls were routine -- how did your day go, what do you have on tap tomorrow, what are you doing tonight, I miss you... and that was about it. We seldom talked about big things when I was on the road, since everything could wait a couple days until I got home. Of course, for the first six months after I moved, he used my absence as an excuse to see the other woman -- it was sort of hard to have a big conversation with her in the room. But even after he broke it off, we never resumed our late night ramblings.

So it came as quite a surprise when I realized that we've been talking for an hour or more each night. Yeah, we still talk about the rudimentary things in our lives, but we also talk about intangibles like our hopes and dreams for this new place. He's looking at the move as an adventure, and he's sharing every bit of it with me. I know that there are things that scare him, but he's made it clear that he's not following me, that this was his choice. He appreciates it that I'm doing everything I know how to ease his transition. Still, no matter how much he says otherwise, I know it'll be rough when that moving van pulls away.

But we're talking. Every night, and into the wee hours. This is progress.


The Wife Who Knows

The Other Woman

I haven’t said anything about the other woman – actually, there were more than one, but only one who was important – because she’s not really relevant. When I discovered my husband’s affair, I wanted to blame her. I wanted it to be all her fault, I wanted him to be as much a victim as I was.

But no matter how I turned it around in my mind, how I tried to justify it, how much I wanted it to be otherwise, the fact remained: he did it. This is not to say that she didn’t encourage him, but in the end, it was his choice to cheat. She might have made herself available, but she couldn’t make him do anything he didn’t want to.

When I met my husband, he told me that he didn’t believe that men and women could be friends without sex in the mix. All of my male friends – ex-lovers, classmates, platonic friends, professional contacts, gay guys – were suspect. The one exception to his rule, however, was a woman with whom he used to work. He described her to me as everything from his best friend, to his confidante, co-conspirator, and biggest fan. I’ve heard from people who used to work in that office that she was the ultimate sycophant, following him around like an eager puppy, grateful for any attention he threw her way.

For his part, my husband said he took an interest in her when she showed promise at her job. She was not the typical entry-level person he saw in this position. She had a masters degree, was well-read, and had strong and often unpopular opinions. Though she was somewhat anti-social and awkward around other people, she caught his eye. To make up for her decided lack of people skills, he took her under his wing and mentored her. She took his professional interest as something more, and worked actively to undermine anyone she felt threatened her status as favored employee.

He knew this about her – she was the source of most of his personnel problems – yet he thrived on her adoration. When he was going through his divorce, she found him a place to stay while he looked for the bachelor pad. He told me that she took care of him during that time – made sure he ate, let him cry on her shoulder, listened to his tales of woe. And yes, they had sex. It was very important to my husband that I not know this fact because of the bright line he drew for me. But from what I can gather – people talk – she got a little too possessive when he started dating other people. After he found his own place and regained some confidence, he cut her off. She was bitterly disappointed – she thought of herself as his savior – but told him that their friendship was the only thing that mattered to her. She didn’t need the benefits, though she did want to hear all the juicy details about the other women in his life.

My husband told me that she encouraged him to pick up the phone and call me that first time. She thought I’d be just another in a long line of dating horror stories they could laugh about. Had she known he would fall head-over-heels, she would have done everything she could – lie, intercept phone calls, erase or alter e-mails, forge documents – to keep us apart. All things, I found out later, she had done to other people in the past.

When it became clear that I was not someone she could manipulate out of his life, she chose to hang back and wait for an opportunity. I thought it was curious that my husband’s “best friend” – the one whom he claimed was so supportive of our relationship – was always busy when I was in town. But I didn’t give it much thought at the time. Hell, I was so focused on “us” that I never considered their friendship to be a threat. Silly me….

The Wife Who Knows

Livin' Large in the Big Easy

I’ve been over this a thousand times, and it still doesn’t make sense. My husband left his wife because he caught her in an affair. He said he would have rather stayed in a loveless marriage than have it end that way. When his jealousy threatened our relationship early on, he told me that he couldn’t bear it if I cheated on him. How ironic that he was the one who did the cheating.

The turning point, as near as I can tell, was a trip to New Orleans with my best friends. They asked us to join them on a long weekend, when they visited their son at Tulane. My husband and I had been engaged for barely a month, and I had asked her to be my “best woman,” returning the favor I’d done for her more than 20 years earlier.

My husband and I were excited about the trip – he wanted me to see his favorite city through his eyes. I wanted him to get to get to know my friends better. Somewhere on the trip down, we started talking about sex. He said that he wanted me to be happy and fulfilled, and wondered if there was anything that he could do for me that he hadn’t been. “No,” I told him, “you’re perfect.”

He changed the subject to pornography, something that’s always made me uncomfortable. “No, “I said, “I don’t enjoy it. It makes me feel like a voyeur.”

Toys? Bondage? S&M? Role playing? As the list went on, I wondered what he was getting at. “Are you bored?” I asked.

“No,” he said, “But I thought it might be fun to experiment a little. Test some boundaries.”

He told me about a legendary sex shop in the French Quarter that he wanted to visit. I thought I was game until we got there. I had been in plenty of adult stores before and I’m not uptight or overly judgmental, but the people in that store – customers and staff alike – scared me. When I told him I wanted to leave, he started teasing me with an enormous dildo. When I told him it wasn’t funny, he goosed me with a vibrator. When I told him I was serious, he told me that I needed to relax.

“No,” I told him, “I need another hurricane.”

We left the store and met up with my friends at a big party bar in the Quarter. We all got trashed, and other than our raging hangovers, the rest of the weekend went without incident. He never mentioned the sex shop episode again, but something definitely changed after that.

When we got home, our sex life didn’t stop, but it tapered off noticeably. It was as if he thought his life was over, that I’d never be interested in anything new, that he’d be spending the rest of his life with a joyless prude if he married me – all because of my reaction in a skanky New Orleans adult emporium. It was barely a week later before he started his affair.

Thus began our engagement…

The Wife Who Knows