We Were Going to Buy a Couch

We were going to buy a couch.

After Mardi Gras, we thought we would be financially sound enough to start replacing some furniture that had worn out over the years. The couch we have now I had bought second hand fifteen years ago. It held up surprisingly well,  but now the middle part had no support and Mark couldn’t even sit on it without sending his back into spasms. The girls and I could sit together, but Mark would have to sit elsewhere.

There’s a metaphor in there somewhere.

So were going to buy a new couch, I had picked one out, Mark checked the measurements and said it worked for him. We were going to buy it as soon as taxes came in.

But instead, Mark left me.

He just fucking left me.

It was completely out of nowhere. We were not fighting, in fact we rarely ever fought at all. Nothing had changed or soured between us; we were still talking and making each other laugh like we always had, our texts were playful and he would still message things like, “Goodnight my love” when I would head to sleep in the weeks leading up to him dropping this bomb on my life.

It didn’t make sense.

When he told me this, he acknowledged that this was blindsiding me, but that he was leaving anyway. He said that this was temporary, that he was leaving to get some perspective so we could work on rebuilding our marriage that, as he was informing me just then, was very broken. He said a lot of things that did not add up.

AS recently as December he was talking about how glad he was to have me. I had comforted him through a difficult time. We worked on his boss’s eulogy together.  We had taken the girls to the Quarter and had a fun night together doing some last minute shopping. We had another nice Christmas as a family. Nothing had been amiss.

I tried telling him that when you realize you’re unhappy with an element of your marriage- you work on it. If as a couple you have trouble overcoming it, then you try counseling, but you don’t just skip to leaving. We have children. I pleaded with him- please think about what you are doing, we have a family. We have a family.

But it was like throwing words at a statue.

He just walked out.

My husband and best friend of twelve years left me alone. With the girls to care for. During a pandemic.

I do not have health insurance. He bought, with my good credit, what we had jokingly called his mid-life crisis mobile- A 2019 Jeep I  named Hubris, that we could barely afford, so we did not have any extra funds to go help me out of the sudden mental health crisis he’d tossed me into.

He left like this knowing I had no support system.

I am not doing well. I told him that first week.  It’s too much and I need help.  He looked at me, this man that had been my rock for 12 years, who I had been there for through everything- every medical emergency and sickness, every life event, joy and sorrow, and he shrugged.

He shrugged and told me it wasn’t his fault I didn’t have friends. It’s true I guess. He worked so often that I made sure that his days off were family days. Those were the days we all got to be together. I didn’t nurture my social connections and kept my energy focused mostly on my family. He was my best friend and that was enough for me.

I held it together for the girls as best I could- trying to homeschool them even though I couldn’t eat because of the knot in my stomach. Sleep was a gamble. He came over to visit the girls and I had to act normal. I had to swallow down all of the fear and grief and anger I woke up with like a poison every day so I could act ‘normal’. I wanted him to remember that this, here with us, was his home. I was even still cooking him dinner every night even though he would always leave at bedtime.

I did not understand where my best friend had gone. I was so alone and I did not understand how this was all of a sudden my life. He wouldn’t talk to me about this  unless I more or less made an appointment for him to hang around after the girls were in bed. I did that twice. And the heart of those talks was my telling him to please think of the girls, that we can work on anything he needs to work on, but he can’t just quit. We have a family. How could he leave without even trying to fix anything that was bothering him about us when we have a family?

It didn’t make sense.

He listened, stoically, as though it were his penance to do so. but didn’t say much. What he did say was consistent, but I had a hard time buying it. Of course I couldn’t have known he was unhappy for years, he explained,  because HE didn’t know he was unhappy. He sure seemed happy, but that was just becasue he didn’t know he was unhappy. He had just figured out, through a few sessions of the therapy he had just started a month before- that he had actually been lying to himself the whole time.  It didn’t add up.

Yet he had thrown me into a position where I had no choice but to trust in him while simultaneously ripping away all the years of trust between us.

He’d say he wasn’t ready to talk about what he’d discovered to be the problems in our marriage because he wasn’t at a place in his mind to start rebuilding things. Maybe he would be open to couples therapy at some point, but not now. For now, I was to sit and wait and take what he was doing and try to keep from drowning while clinging to the thinning hope he dangled in front of me that he just needed time, but then we could work the things out he suddenly said were so wrong.

I was devastated. This was like living in a slow motion trauma that I couldn’t even begin to heal from. It was the confusion that I needed to get ahead of before I could get my head around all of the rest of it. Why was this happening? How can he do this to me? To our family?  How do I fix it? It had to be fixed, we have built a good life together and had beautiful, happy children, how is that not worth fighting for to him?

Watching him be here with the girls and how he was to me was like knowing my husband was dead and the man who killed him was wearing his face.

****

Around night number 40, bones showing along my chest and another night of waking up so angry I woke up punching the mattress behind me, another day of crying on the floor of my bedroom while the children ate dinner down, I logged into his google account.

I looked at his phone’s location history.

And finally it all made horrible sense.

He started seeing her at the start of January.

He started giving her a ride a home one night and from there he dove straight into a sort of double life. He would leave work early to take her to dinner or for drinks in the Garden District- always coming home at his regular time, so I wouldn’t  suspect anything. He would go to work late and really be hanging out at her place or going for lunch- being sure to leave the house at his usual time, so I wouldn’t suspect anything.

When I confronted him on this, he denied it. However, when I showed him the evidence, all of a sudden now he wanted to try therapy. Now he wanted to save his family. The girl, whom I’ll just refer to as “St Mary” because that’s the street she lived on, was a friend and someone he had gotten close to. But he wasn’t sleeping with her. He swore it.

Sometimes during  the two weeks I actually bought into this, the facts tapped me on the shoulder to remind me: there were nights where he would sit for an hour or two in a parking lot with her. He would leave our house, too tired to talk to me about how to start reconciling, and go pick her up, heading back to his pal Joey’s where he was staying. (She had friends in the Quarter she stayed with, he said, she didn’t sleep where he was) He would bring her back to her place on the way back here to see the girls the next day. He did this on my birthday. He had stopped at the store- likely with St Mary, to pick out my birthday card before dropping her off.

One night, I’d pleaded with him to  just tell me if there was something else going on because it just felt like I was missing a big piece of the puzzle. He told me that he’d thought he’d been “pretty clear.” He hadn’t been “clear” about anything. But I was handling him like he was broken glass because at this point I thought he’d suffered some sort of  mental break and I didn’t want to him to scurry away from me further.

I’d asked apologetically, “I don’t mean to insult you with this question again but I just need to know,  are you seeing someone else?”

He said no, emphatically. No.

I’d asked him several times, including the night he left if there was someone else and he’d consistently denied it. I’d asked if he had left because he wanted to date other people or something, he’d said of course not. I told him that since he is living apart for a while that I was worried he would meet someone shiny and new and easy- easier than trying to fix whatever he thought was wrong at home. If that happened, I told him,  if he started a relationship of any kind with another woman without lifting a finger to try to fix our relationship, that would send a pretty clear message.

He said, “That’s a fair assumption, yeah.”

I asked him to promise to be upfront and honest with me going forward, for the sake of our relationship, our girls, and my own mental health, and he did.

He promised.

After that conversation, he left saying he was too tired to talk more…..and drove straight to her house.

He continued to lie to me even while he said he was going to try to work on this while we waited for lockdown to end to start couples therapy. I was calling around to be put on waiting lists for an appointment, but he was doing nothing to make me feel safe in trying to trust him again. He said he broke things off with her, but wouldn’t tell me her name. He wouldn’t tell me where she worked, only that once the city opened back up, seeing her would be unavoidable- which makes me suspect she’s  a co-worker.

He would not let me look at his phone to prove to me that he wasn’t still in contact with her. He erased his location history and locked me out of his account. There was no transparency and he was showing her more integrity  by not telling me about her then he had shown me.

I’m sure it was apparent to anyone reading this by a dozen paragraphs in that he was lying from the start. I finally got him to admit that he had been sleeping with her (“Of course I was sleeping with her.” he’d said almost casually) since before he left me, and he then he got mad at me.  because I wouldn’t let it alone. I needed the dignity of the truth so I could move forward. He didn’t want me to have even that, and he yelled at me for it.

He had been trying to gaslight me from the beginning .

And I trusted him. I’ve trusted him for over a decade, even with all of the damage he was inflicting on me daily, I still trusted him. I had to.

That was one of the most unnerving things about all of this; he would look me in the eyes and lie with such sincerity that it makes me question what else he had been lying about in our years together. The way he has treated me has been almost sociopathic.

He’s tried to tell me that she had nothing to do with why he left, but that is a way I think he is really  lying to himself. He started seeing St Mary in January,  he left me out of the blue on March 8th, that is not a coincidence.

And look at the way he left-he pulled the world out from under me, leaving me cold, confused, suffering and in the dark all because he was in a hurry. Joey had offered him a room with a bed for him to take his new girlfriend and  he didn’t want to pass that up. And I think he thought that if he left me, he might feel like he wasn’t doing anything wrong, despite all the lying and what all of this was doing to me, he could tell himself he wasn’t really doing anything wrong.

Truly, if he had just had some problem with our marriage, all he had to do was talk to me about it at any point.  Just brought it up at any time so we could address it together. I was right there. He was the first person I wanted to talk to in the morning and the last one I wanted to talk to at night. I was right there. He knows he could have talked to me about anything, just like he always had.

We could’ve gone to therapy if it were to big for us to handle, and if, after all of that, separation was the only option, then at least we would know that we tried and had our family’s best interest at heart when we decided to go from there.

But not a word, not a bit of energy did he put into saving this. He decided to put his energy into another woman instead.

We could have fixed this but he didn’t want to do that. Not for me, and not for our daughters. After twelve years of love and support, he didn’t respect me and what we’ve made together enough to act with dignity and compassion. It was more important for him to go outside of our marriage and start over with someone else.

****

I know that this post is long and rambling and probably tinged with more bile than I would like. I know that people don’t tend to talk about this sort of thing and maybe that’s why I even though I know this isn’t my fault, I feel weirdly embarrassed that it happened. I was so proud of the man I thought he became, and I was so wrong about him.

Maybe someone will read this who is going through the same thing and maybe hearing what I’ve been going through can make them feel less alone. Really, this is me still struggling to accept what’s been done and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to. I certainly won’t be able understand how he’s done this to the girls

When you are unfaithful, it isn’t just a betrayal of the marriage, it’s a betrayal of the family.

I deserved better than this.

Our daughters deserved better than this.

I can’t even write about what it has been like watching my sweet and sensitive girl, who has already had such a hard, bad year, deal with this. Not yet. It guts me to even try to wrap words around it.

One of the reasons I’m posting  this at all is because I can’t talk about it. I have few friends here in New Orleans, but no one I’ve felt I could reach out to. Every time I would get the phone in my hand and go through how to say it, I’d just start crying. I know it’s real, but saying out loud  makes it feel even more so. It’s difficult to be  vulnerable to people and I always feel like doing so is placing a burden on them. And down the road ,I don’t want to answer questions about what happened for the same reasons. Nor do I want to hear the watered down and sugar coated version of events that may come from other people.

This this  is what I’ve been dealing with, and I’ve been dealing with it alone. The person I have turned to for support and comfort for twelve years, my best friend, turned on me and is the source of my greatest suffering. He has torn the heart out of my family and stolen our future. And for what?

I am terrified. I wake up everyday into a goddamn nightmare. My chest has not stopped hurting since this started and I still can’t fucking eat properly. Sometimes I get so cold even though I know the air is warm around me and I can’t stop shivering. The nights I think are the worst, but then comes the morning and I’m not sure.  I think living with all of this anger over what he’s done is eating me alive, but then it’s nudged out of the way by despair and I can’t get off of the floor. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but things look grim for me and my girls. And I’m fucking terrified.

He has said the financial support will not go away. He said this at the beginning, and he has said so many things since then that turned out to be complete lies, so I am not reassured.

I have been a stay at home mom for ten years. We could never afford childcare, but I was glad to be able to take care of our family and home so Mark could build his career. Now that he’s done that, he’s done with me. The emotional and financial stability of the future that our promises to each other should have assured are gone.

Another reason I’m putting this out there is to act as a cautionary tale. I look back at these silly ridiculous posts I made here that feature Mark and I know that my hubris was in my faith that marriage was solid. Mark and I were well matched and complimented each other well and at the heart of our marriage was mutual respect and admiration and a great sense of humor. We shared the same goals and, with each of us coming from broken homes, keeping our family happy and whole was the most important thing to us both. Then he turned on a dime.

If this can happen to my family, it can happen to any family.

I like to think that when I write things in this blog, someone might relate to them or at least be entertained a little. I’m sure this post is no different, though unfortunately my sense of humor has run out and for me that’s a dangerous place to be.

Loneliness has it’s hook in my heart. It’s horribly familiar even though it’s been twelve years since I’ve had to feel it like this. I’d forgotten how heavy it is. I have bad days and I have really, really bad days. Beyond the betrayal, the loneliness is what makes it worse. Some days, I feel like a ghost.

So I don’t know what  I need exactly, but I know I need help. I need advice. I need piles of money, therapy and fucking hug.

Oh, and I also still need a couch apparently.

*****

Updates:  (click pics for posts):

I found out all about St. Mary…

and this timeline of betrayal really paints a picture of their relationship…

….this this is who he put above me and our children?