My Ex-Affair Partner and His Wife Have Been Married Over Forty Years

How has it all shaken out?

Photo by Keith Tanner on Unsplash

Ten years ago this person moved out of their house with the intent to be with me.

This didn’t last, of course. (When does it ever?) After he moved out, his very emotionally distant wife, once she was done crying, went around telling everyone he was “depressed” and “crazy,” yet insisted on marriage counseling.

I heard from him once again about two and a half years later. Counseling had ended about a year before that. He said she “sort of slept through it” and “acted like she didn’t want to be there.” Sex had dwindled from maybe four times a year to zero, and everything was sliding back into the way it used to be, fast. Now they had separate bedrooms. Partially due to his snoring, but still.

I discovered astrology during all this, and learned so much I put up a website. Ever since, this guy has lurked and lurked around. I put my site on Google Analytics, and this person has a view pattern that is unmistakable.

I’ve never actually heard from him again, although I’ve posted that he is welcome to speak to me if he pleases.

That doesn’t mean I’d resume a relationship with him again. It doesn’t mean I wouldn’t, either. If he ever got divorced.

Seven years later, I’m a very different person. I fear that they are not, however, and that thought is a very sad one.

If you asked me seven years ago how I’d feel today, I would have told you through tears that it was a tragedy of no uncertain magnitude. I would have told you we’d lost our only chance at happiness, and that I was so devastated we would never happen that I could never be happy again.

I would have told you that he was miserable because she was treating him so badly in a way he did not deserve. That I would have treated him so much better. I would have told you how much we would have missed out on.

Times Have Changed, and So Have I.

I have no idea whether the fact that he went home and stayed is actually a tragedy or not. To know that, we’d have to know certain facts.

My ex-affair partner is, or at least, was, a very low self-esteem adult child of an alcoholic. He was very resistant to confronting his ACoA issues and doing any kind of work on them. From what he told me, I don’t believe their marriage counselor was aware of this. I don’t even know if his personal therapist was aware of this!

If these therapists didn’t ask enough questions and find the fuck out, they need to be kicked all over town. This marriage was screaming, “Childhood issues need to be healed!!”

If he’s managed to grow a bit in self-esteem, if he no longer believes he is “repulsive,” “unlovable,” and a worm, and he’s still there and she hasn’t changed, well, that could be a tragedy.

Some people just decide to write off what they wanted in an intimate relationship.

They have the fortitude to say, “Self, I’m staying because I don’t want my adult children and wife to be upset. In order to do that, I’m going to give up hope of what I had wished my one intimate love relationship in this life would be like and feel like. But I’ve decided I can do this. I will just appreciate my wife the way she is, give up on that dream ever happening, and I will be okay with that. I’m happy with the kids and grandkids, and I give up the want and need for more.”

People do. There are folks who do this.

The key words here are, I will be okay with that. And that’s a very personal thing.

If you’re really okay giving up sex, if you’re really okay not having an intimate friendship with the only female partner you have decided you will ever have, then you can stay for the wife who doesn’t want to work on herself or the marriage, and for the adult kids.

That’s a big one.

A huge sacrifice to make, and some would say, an unfair one. If you love the people and your life enough the way it is, and you can do this and not be bitter, focusing on the good that you do have, then it isn’t a tragedy. But if you can’t, you are not a bad person. You are a human person.

(Your call. I wouldn’t blame anybody either way, personally.)

If he’s made absolutely no progress with his ACoA issues at all, and still believes he’s a repulsive unlovable worm, well, that’s a tragedy. Kids learn to think this about themselves from parents who put the bottle and how the family looked to others above their own children.

It isn’t the children’s fault. If one of his grandchildren’s parents suddenly started drinking, would it be because the grandchildren weren’t good enough to be loved?

People have to reach the stage where they see this.

If they don’t, and they just can’t bring themselves to leave a distant marriage where the spouse doesn’t want to look at things and doesn’t want to change, because other people’s disapproval over a divorce is going to make them feel even, even worse, then it’s probably best they stay.

To leave a marriage like that and claim better for oneself requires that a person be able to put their feelings and those of others in perspective.

Yes, family will be shocked, because the marriage looks good from the outside. Adult children will go through a rough period when they’re forced to confront the fact that what they thought was a “normal” and happy home, wasn’t.

But, you know what? They will be seeing truth. Before, they were not seeing truth.

Either way, they will meet it again, when midlife comes up and they start experiencing stagnation in their own marriages.

But all these people have their own homes and their own happy families and their own, functional, marriages. This person doesn’t. Is it okay for this person to live their entire life with someone who isn’t committed to making the marriage they’re in a real, living partnership, complete with sex, sharing feelings, and emotional support?

Some people think it is. I consider that a tragedy.

All the same, if a person does not have enough self-esteem to be able to put his own feelings and needs on a par with everyone else’s, such that he’ll be destroyed by other’s feelings if he decides to leave to seek out a better relationship, then I guess he needs to stay. It’s a tragedy whether the person stays or goes, but staying is the lesser of two evils.

At least other people will be happy. (Until midlife, that is, when all that was wrong in their family of origin comes back to bite them. Who knows, maybe their childhood home was good enough. Maybe they won’t even notice.)

But what a way to spend your life, alone in a distant marriage the other person doesn’t want to work to fix, so that other people who don’t even live in the house anymore will be happy.

If a person can make his peace with that, it’s a beautiful thing, and if not, it is a tragedy.

Another tragedy would have been if he left before he was ready, before he really felt comfortable doing so. Our relationship would have been codependent, too, and torn by his guilty feelings over how his adult children felt and how everybody else acted. I’m sure a good bit of that would have been fueled by an angry and confused wife who hadn’t wanted to be left.

But if you don’t want to be left, then marriage counseling is not the place to “sleep through it” and act like you don’t want to be there. Marriage counseling is the place to talk and listen and repair your relationship with the person you don’t want to leave you!

I no longer think being together was the only way we could be happy, since, as you can see, a person’s decision and emotional readiness can make them able to accept other circumstances with a kind of happiness, even if it isn’t flowers and romance and hot, lusty sex. (Who’s going to have hot, lusty sex for long at our ages, anyway?)

It’s true that he was miserable because she was treating him in a way that he did not deserve, but only partially. What is really making this guy miserable is his conviction that something is wrong with him and that he deserves no better.

I grew up in a household with a mentally ill parent, and I grew up with that conviction, too.

Any child who’s raised by a parent who has something else — addiction, mental illness, whatever — robbing them of their ability to see and be patient with that child, and support that child in becoming his or her unique self, is going to grow up feeling as if something is deeply wrong with him or her, and that he or she is too flawed, in some deep, unnamable way, to be loved.

Anyone who hasn’t healed that gaping, bleeding wound inflicted by parents — and which all three people in this triangle suffered from — isn’t going to be happy, no matter what relationship is or isn’t in their life.

Relationship can’t cure that. Only the person themselves can. Therapy is usually needed, and both these people shied away from that.

Too hard, too depressing. Too painful.

Oh, well.

Who knows what we actually missed out on? If this person could have addressed his self-worth issues in therapy, we could have had a beautiful connection.

But if not, we could have had a miserable codependent mess, in which he looked to please me in order to feel okay, and then resented me for not pleasing him. Which I never could have done, because he would never have felt worthy enough to let me know what he wanted and needed. And because no one can repair the hole bad parents left in someone else’s soul but the person himself.

I may have dodged a bullet.

I’m not going to say that I can never be happy again because they’re celebrating (at least, I hope they are) their fortieth anniversary today and I am here alone.

I’ve simply changed my definition of happiness.

When I was younger, I thought happiness meant being accepted and loved in the way I saw other people being accepted and loved around me.

It meant having the body size and shape the culture values; it meant that you were “pretty.” It meant someone emotionally healthy loved you enough to choose you. It meant you had someone to have sex with, someone to share the burdens of life with and to lean on and build a home with.

And if I thought that someone was “better” in some way than other someones, I thought that made me worthy.

We children of inadequate parenting tend to do that.

But the fact is, we’re not young forever. Eventually, we pass out of that season of our lives, where being young and looking good and having sex and going around all coupled up having adventures — “Going somewhere in life!” — is what life’s about.

Being ten years younger than this man, I’m sitting on the cusp of old age, and I know that stuff doesn’t last. He’s already an old man.

What’s ahead of us is decline and health problems. Those “fun” years are already gone, anyway. The only place we’re going is the nursing home and the grave.

I expected way too much from life, anyhow. When you’re a kid who wasn’t loved by parents, who got hazed for years by cruel schoolmates, you want to make up for all that in some way and show up everyone who abused you.

I understand now that I was never going to do that.

I’m just a fat old lady. All I can do is be who I am, and that is a person who can share this knowledge with you.

That is all I ever was and all I was ever going to be, and happiness is accepting that before I die of old age like the Queen.

Wherever they are today, and I’m sure it’s at a big fortieth anniversary dinner with all their extended family, I hope they’re happy enough. I am.

It’s all we can hope for.