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 My husband wondered why I was so quiet and withdrawn.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