Most Days

Most Days, I'm good. Most Days, my marriage is very happy. Most Days, I wonder what all the fuss was about. And then something happens to remind me.

One night last week, my husband I were winding down our day, talking about the next time we're going to bring his kids up for a visit. We took off on a tangent about our long-distance courtship, and marveled at how highly motivated we were to see each other every weekend for those first six months. Until the first time he told me not to come. I remembered the conversation -- he told me that he was going to be busy with some pre-opening work at his office. Not to bother Pricelining a flight, because it was a lot of money just to sit around at a construction sight for a couple days. That he would see me the next weekend and we'd make up for lost time.

And in the middle of our conversation, it hit me like a bolt from the blue. That weekend was the first time he was with The Other Woman. "Oh my God," I thought, as I was making a point about airfares, "He planned it. That's why he was so damned adamant that I NOT come that weekend."

My voice trailed off and I didn't finish my sentence. I had to look away, or otherwise betray emotions I wasn't sure I could control. It took a minute to shake those images from my head, but I'm not sure my husband noticed my distraction, as his end of the conversation moved on to other end-of-the-day subjects without pause.

It was just for a moment, but for that moment, it didn't feel like Most Days.


The Wife Who Knows

What Difference Does A Ring Make?

My father was horrified that his middle daughter was openly "living in sin" with her fiance. Forget the fact that my baby sister -- the one who eloped because she was pregnant -- did the same thing. It's just that she was smart enough to tell my parents that she was "renting a room" from her boyfriend. She neglected to tell them that it was his room too, but they never asked, so why should she tell? No wonder she's the golden child!

I suppose I could have gone through the motions of getting my own place -- we knew we weren't going to stay in the bachelor pad any longer than we had to -- but it seemed like a wildly impractical thing to do just to save a little face. At 40, I figured I was too old to maintain a fiction for the sake of appearances. And so for the first time in my life, I openly defied my parents on something that really mattered to them. For my trouble, I got nothing but eight months of serious grief -- not just the usual passive-aggressive disapproval of my life -- from dear old dad.

After my husband and I made the decision to spend the rest of our lives together, saying the vows didn't seem so important in the grand scheme of things. Sure, I wanted to set a date because it seemed pointless to leave things so open-ended, but by the same token, I never would have moved to the small town just to test the waters. I moved because we made a commitment to be with each other. Though it mattered greatly to my father, it didn't make one bit of difference to me that we were not legally married when we set up housekeeping. I was willing to risk the wrath of God for those few months of premarital cohabitation.

When asked why I make such a big deal about an affair that happened before we were married, I am stuck on the fact that he didn't start cheating until AFTER he made the commitment. The proposal was barely out of his mouth when he started having giant second thoughts. Those second thoughts manifested themselves in an eight-month affair with The Other Woman, basically rendering every one of his promises meaningless. I just didn't know it at the time. I do know that if I had caught him in the act, I would not have married him. So while it's probably best I didn't find out until a year after the fact, it is insane to imply that his betrayal means something less because it happened before we invited a bunch of people to watch a 20-minute ceremony.


The Wife Who Knows

"But I Love Him...."

.... said my friend the Beauty Queen when telling me why she didn't leave her abusive boyfriend. As far as I know, he never hit her, but given his exceptional talent in the art of public humiliation, I can only speculate as to what went on behind closed doors. During the course of their relationship, I watched a vivacious woman with a sparkling personality -- a woman who won over Atlantic City judges in a swimsuit and high heels, a woman who could convince a crowd who came for dinner to stay for the second show, a woman who sold leather jackets to vegans -- transformed into a tentative, insecure shadow of herself. She believed him when he told her that she was ugly and talentless. She didn't protest when he isolated her from her friends. She quit her day job selling custom clothes and her night gig as a lounge singer because he hated her being around so many men.

Every time she got the courage to leave, he'd turn on the charm to win her back. And no matter what anyone said, she always went. One time when things were particularly bad -- he called her a slut at top volume in the middle of a crowded holiday party at their club -- I told her to program my number into her phone and call me anytime, day or night, when she thought about calling him. Like an AA sponsor, I said, I'd help her get through whatever it was that possessed her to keep going back. "Okay," she said as I dropped her off back at her place, "I promise." I waited outside her house to make sure she got in safely. It wasn't but a minute before she came running back out, in such a hurry to leave that she didn't notice me still sitting there. We didn't talk for a while after that night.

The Beauty Queen's story has a happy ending, but it took her a long time to get there.

I thought about her not long ago, when I was having drinks with the only person whom I've told about my husband's affair. We were comparing notes about our similar situations -- he left, I stayed -- when I caught myself echoing the Beauty Queen's signature excuse. And though "But I love him" in the context of MY situation seems perfectly reasonable, I wondered later if I sounded as pathetic to my friend as the Beauty Queen sounded to me all those years ago.

The Wife Who Knows

Backward Glances

I ran across a box of old journals the other night and stopped for a few minutes to re-live my life as I saw it 15, 10, 5 years ago. When I came across the two volumes I filled during my move to the small town, I started reading more closely. After a few pages, I was stunned that I didn't catch my husband with The Other Woman. Those journals were riddled with descriptions of the bright red flags they were waving, and I never once questioned their relationship beyond what he told me.

I knew from the beginning that something was off with The Other Woman. She didn't want to meet me, though my husband often reminded me that she was the biggest champion of our long distance relationship. I don't recall her ever being particularly supportive, but I do remember that she was fond of pulling stunts to get his attention when she felt neglected. She always seemed to call in a panic when he was on his way to the big city, with a crisis that only he could fix. Every time he described another episode of her diva-like behavior, I'd ask, "What's up with her? When do I get to meet this woman?"

More often than not, he'd answer with words like "crazy," "unbalanced," "delusional," "insane," and "absolutely nuts" to describe her attachment to him. What I didn't realize until far too late was that her attachment was not healthy, nor was it one-sided. I have tried to get my head around what he found so compelling about her, and I've toyed with the term "addiction." But I don't want to let him off the hook that easy by categorizing his affair in a way that implies he had no control over his actions.

Because no matter how close to forgiveness I get, I still can't get past the fact that everything he did with her was deliberate, intentional, calculated, and dishonest. And the hardest part to reconcile, the reason I don't just let it go, is the realization that, every time he was with The Other Woman, there was no way he could not have realized how much this would hurt me.

And still, he did it.


The Wife Who Knows