Journal Entry: Wednesday, January 15, 2014

I used to think my husband was my best friend. I gave everything to our friendship. I bore my heart and soul and shared every part of my mind and body with him. For thirty years I looked at his face and felt love and contentment. When he wrapped his arms around me, I felt secure. I was confident he understood me better than anyone else ever would. But when you realize your partner, your best friend has betrayed the very ground your relationship is built on, trust, you have to question that friendship at its core. This kind of friendship cannot survive when one person is loyal and faithful and devoted to its foundation while the other is in the arms of another, fabricating a story about you that is constructed solely for the purpose of validating an affair. The fact that my husband would tell another woman, a stranger to him, lies about me to assuage his guilt and to bolster her belief that she is saving him from his own unhappiness is unforgivable. Or is it? I guess time will tell.

In the meantime, my husband is on a business trip and I am in a very vulnerable place. I am four days from discovery and I already have to relive a painful loneliness that is now exacerbated by the knowledge that while my husband traveled, he had replaced me with someone else. From 2008-2013 my husband took another woman on numerous business trips both domestic and international. My feelings of pain and sadness are excruciating. I cannot shut down the thoughts in my head.

I have obviously known since discovery that my husband would be going on a business trip this week. There is absolutely no one in my life at this point who knows the story that is playing out with me and my husband. I have a wonderful, warm-hearted, mature female friend and we have shared many happy and sad times over the course of our 20 year friendship. Sunday, in anticipation of my impending alone time, I sent a quick message to my friend letting her know I was going through a really difficult time with my husband (who she knows well, or at least as well as any of us knew him) and I needed a friend to talk to. She of course opened her schedule for me. I had not really slept more than an hour or two at a time since discovery and I had eaten almost nothing. I was exhausted and scared, and yet exhilarated at the thought of sharing this monstrous secret burden.

We met for breakfast, although I barely ate three bites of food (and I am a pretty accomplished eater). I cried through the entire meal. The only moments of levity came when my dear friend tried to cheer me up. She had known about the Craig’s List ad all those years ago, and we discussed at length this woman my husband had decided to risk everything for. We looked at her picture, again, on my iPhone. I know she felt sorry for me because one of the issues I have with my husband’s acting out partner is that she is not anyone I would ever expect my husband to look twice at, much less have sex with. I do not want to go into great detail, but suffice it to say she is NOT younger, she is NOT thinner, she IS older by nearly ten years, and according to my husband, who has really not tried to demonize her, she is an alcoholic and she is a hoarder. She is uneducated (my husband is highly educated) and she lives in a very undesirable area of the city we live in. She is divorced from an alcoholic husband, many years ago. She has not had a long term relationship since (except, apparently with my husband). She told my husband he had ruined her for other men. AND, SHE ANSWERS CRAIG’S LIST PERSONAL ADS! Guess what. That is some bat shit crazy stuff right there. My husband met with her intermittently and according to him, nearly every single time they were together he told her he could not go on with the affair. That he felt horrible. Supposedly she agreed. But he kept going back. For the past five years, he saw her 2-3 times a year… total. She paid her own way on the business trips. He spent very little time with her other than to have sex and they, of course, slept in the same bed, so that is time… If I had to put a number on the percentage of time my husband spent having sex with this woman, literally sleeping with her, and anything else he has admitted to doing with her, I might say she had his attention 2% of the year. FOR EIGHT YEARS!!!! This is what she is building a relationship on. This is what she is using to rationalize the fact that she is literally stealing something that does not belong to her, I do not care what he has been telling her. Actions speak louder than words, right? Well, his actions treated her like an unpaid whore. Sure, he told her she was great in bed, sure he told her she had gorgeous eyes, sure he told her she was beautiful… you know, huff puff, you are so beautiful, I am about to cum, kind of compliments. This leads me back to breakfast with me and my friend. I looked at my friend and said, but she is not at all attractive and my wise friend said… “It absolutely does not matter what she looks like on the outside. She is ugly on the inside because women just do not do this to other women. A truly beautiful woman does not cheat with another woman’s partner.” Which, of course, is lovely and wise and all that (I love you my friend if you ever read this), but I was still stuck on the outer beauty part, or lack thereof.

Then the conversation turned to where she lives. It was actually an absolutely beautiful morning and my friend suggested we take a little drive by her house, just to confirm what we both already knew. I was totally up for the excursion. A distraction from my pain, or so I thought. We headed to her “neighborhood,” and it was much worse than I had imagined. This woman is a part time real estate agent. She has other jobs, but she is a real estate agent as well. She is actually quite industrious. Anyway, after seeing the acting out partner’s house, my friend questioned whether she could possibly be a real estate agent, and if she was, she forgot the #1 rule of real estate: LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION! This conversation would have been quite entertaining had I not been so caught up in the utter disbelief that this is where my husband met his mistress for the first three years of their “relationship,” and then a couple times since. I thought I would vomit. I wanted to burst into tears and disappear. We have a lovely home, in a lovely neighborhood, with comfortable furnishings, the smells of home cooked meals and the laughter of our children and yet, this is where he chose to slink away to for “quickies” with what could only be a very, very broken woman.

Then as we are driving by her house, there she is. She is standing outside her house screaming at someone across the street. She looks evil. Not just unattractive, EVIL! We couldn’t get out of there fast enough. As we were driving away, my Dad called me on my mobile phone. He asked what I was doing… oh, Dad, you do NOT want to know.

I love my friend and she does bring levity and make me laugh. She is there when I need her, when I need a hug, and she does not judge nor did she give me advice on the big decision I have in front of me. She merely counseled me to not make any rash decisions. She is a smart one. In the end, I know who my best friend is. My best friend is my husband. Now we just need to figure out if my best friend can hurt me the way he did, and still be my best friend.

This evening as I was waiting for my husband to return from his business trip, the doorbell rang. Standing at the door was a pretty redhead holding the most gorgeous bouquet of flowers. She was dressed impeccably, carried herself beautifully and I looked at her and thought, this is her. This is the acting out partner. Not that other horrible woman, this is the woman my husband has been sleeping with for the past eight years. She handed me the flowers and said she was delivering them on her way home. My husband had ordered them from the plane from his favorite flower shop downtown and requested she hand deliver them to me before he got home. It was then that I realized she was not THE acting out partner, but she was definitely being groomed (as they call it) to be the NEXT acting out partner…