Ack. Why are Sundays so difficult for me? Maybe it is because I dread getting back into the weekly routine and I know Monday is right around the corner. Maybe I just hate the fact that we never get enough sleep because Blue Eyes’ has a 12-step meeting at 7:00am on Monday mornings and he gets up at 6:00, and we never get to bed before midnight, which adds to the daunting task of facing a whole new week. The last two nights I have fallen asleep before 10:30pm, I hope that will continue tonight. Still not sure if it is the Whole30, or jet lag. I have tried so many nightly routines to help get myself to sleep earlier, and to get to sleep consistently at the same time each night, but the routines don’t always work. My doc does not like to prescribe sleeping pills. She says even when they say they are not addictive, they can hinder sleep on the nights you don’t take them, she considers that a bad side effect, and she doesn’t think they should be taken every night. She says I just need to go to bed every night at the same time and get up every morning at the same time, regardless of whether I need to get up, or not. If I get up at 6:00am on the weekdays, I should get up at 6:00am on the weekends too (which actually makes me want to get up at 9:00am on the weekdays…). That creates a consistency and a sleep rhythm that our bodies thrive on. Also, no electronics for at least an hour before bedtime, and the bed is for sleeping (and sex). I have not been successful at changing my habits. Sleep is one of those things that I desperately need a lot of. I need to try to do better, for my own sanity!
This morning when we woke up, I wasn’t in a great mood. Blue Eyes wanted to be intimate, because Blue Eyes always wants to be intimate. He knows I am basically a morning person. It’s not that I don’t like having sex every day, on principle, or all throughout the day, I do. In reality though, sometimes I just don’t feel like it. This morning was one of those mornings. I had had a nightmare and a rough night’s sleep and I wanted to get up and get on with the day. I knew I needed to eat, but instead we started talking and it was not a pleasant or helpful conversation other than the fact that I am beginning to realize (and I have written about this in the past), that I am the one that needs to change my way of thinking. Blue Eyes is who he is. He is not acting out. He is working his recovery (ever so slowly). He cannot take away any of the things he did. Most likely he cannot change who he is deep down. He is broken. He can work on making better choices, but he will never truly understand the pain he has put me through because he was (is) self-absorbed. He may not be a diagnosed narcissist, but he is completely self involved. The decisions he made throughout the past 30 years, were selfish ones. The choices he made while in his addiction were driven by his own selfish needs/wants/desires. He wanted his drug and he gave in to his addiction and led a secret destructive life, because that is what he chose to do. He did not think about the consequences to me and his children. He thought about himself. He blocked us out. He rationalized. I told him that for me, the most destructive of all the decisions he made, was to lie about me to another woman. He didn’t really have to lie. He could have avoided her questions, or if he thought avoiding would end a relationship he did not want to end, he could have told the truth… he could have told her he desired secret sexual liaisons and he didn’t know why. But instead, he told her that I was a bad wife and that she fulfilled his needs. He felt like telling her that she was effectively replacing me in some way was the right thing to do under the circumstances because it met her needs, which in turn met his, and that is hateful. How can a person flat out lie about another person that they have promised their life to? Especially when the person they are lying about has done nothing wrong. It doesn’t make any sense, because it is not right.
So, I laid some things out on the table, some things I needed Blue Eyes to know. I told him I have always known that if something happened to me, or if we divorced, his family would not care . They would never need or have the desire to speak with me again. They don’t like me, they never have. But more than anything, I don’t think they have the capacity to truly love me or anyone else. I fear they raised their children to be like them and that Blue Eyes is unable to truly love at a deeper level. I am being a bit selfish here, actually. What I mean is, I do not believe Blue Eyes, or anyone in his family has the ability to love me or anyone else in the way I love people, in the way I was nurtured to be loving, and the way I expected to be loved. My love is not conditional. My love is honest and I would not lie about him to anyone in order to get something I wanted, no matter what that something is. But I am not an addict.
I am now at the point where if I want to stay with Blue Eyes (and I do ask myself this question–not as often as I used to, but still often), I have to abandon my way of thinking. I have to abandon my definition of marriage, of how life partners should behave, of what love looks like. Blue Eyes will never be able to take back or make up for what he has done, basically for who he is. I have been lied to. I was promised my version of happiness, marriage, partnership, and love, but what I got was Blue Eyes’ version. I was duped. I will never be able to have my version of all those things with him, he has made sure of that. If my definition of marriage is trust and love and fidelity, I can now only hope to get some form of trust back towards Blue Eyes. I can now only hope that Blue Eyes has some capacity to love me that is somehow better than the broken and shattered love he has pretended in the past. I can only hope that Blue Eyes can now remain faithful, because nightmares of his infidelity haunt me nearly every night, and every day. I am pretty certain that I will never have a day, for the rest of my life, that I do not think about how deeply I was lied to by the man I chose to spend the rest of my life with.
For all the people who have asked if Blue Eyes has the capacity to feel real emotion, or to love deeply, or to be truly faithful, I fucking don’t know. But the truth is, I have to be able to keep living, and keep loving, and be happy whether he does, or whether he doesn’t. I am still figuring out what my new life looks like and it is difficult. I want something I will never be able to have. I want the love, honestly, and integrity of my marriage back and knowing I cannot have it, leaves a big huge aching hole in my heart.
try not to cry on my rainbow 
Hi Kat
I’m getting through your blog day by and I hope you know that you’re a good writer and I think you are telling your story very well.
My H used to say a curious thing to me. He would say “you lie to make yourself look good.” Sometimes it was just in teasing ie I asked him to pickup something on his way from work, he forgot and didn’t and then claims I never told him, I said I did and he would say “you lie to make yourself look good” etc. But, he would also say it in more serious situations. It never made any sense to me because I knew I wasn’t lying. I just shook it off as words coming from someone who had a hard time finding the proper words to express himself. Enter the infidelity and those words finally had meaning. When he would say “I lied to make myself look good” it was his way of not being seen as the bad guy for making a mistake, for doing something wrong, FOR BEING SELFISH! When in fact it was and had been he all along who lied throughout our whole marriage to make HIMSELF look good. Not only to me but the rest of the world.
Yes he even lied to her more than he lied to me. He had more at stake with her. He HAD to keep her happy or she’d spill the beans to me. He had to lie and make up his version of our relationship so she wouldn’t think he was just another cheating husband using her. He had to lie so she could stroke her and she would continue to feed his ego and how awful was I to disrespect him so. The lies were limitless and boundless. Not only the lies, but the truths he told her about us and more specifically me. Things that were none of her business. It was malicious gossip. And she would add her own version and bring the gossip to work (which is our family business). I have a very difficult time forgiving this part of the infidelity.
I agree with letting go of the dream you thought your marriage was and learn to accept the reality of what it is and make a new life. At least you know who and what you are dealing with. Tracey Cleantis wrote a book called The Next Happy that addresses just this. It’s not only letting go of the dream but sometimes that dream is really a nightmare. We have to find a way to come to peace with ourselves. To know that we are NOT only defined by our relationship with our mates. We have many many relationships that define who we are. The marital, although probably THE most important, is only one. Maybe we need to quit making that one front and center.
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Yes, cheaters are master deflectors and sex addicts build their whole life around lying and deflecting. Thanks for your kinds words about my blog. There are pluses and minuses to the sex addiction aspect of this… you are correct, at least I know what I am dealing with, for better or worse. The recovery process is long and difficult, but at least there is a prescribed recovery process to define the madness. Now that the trauma is more manageable, I reflect back on my life and my marriage and I know I was incredibly happy. Sure there were lots of compromises because of my husband’s “workaholism,” but I really did love my life. So many people around us were divorcing and I would think.. it is really about respect. Respecting your partner and compromising where necessary. And then, WHAM, the joke’s on me. My partner was disrespecting me and putting his needs over everyone else’s, but no one knew it. What a ruse. It is easy to be cynical, but I need to look at it realistically whether I stay or not. He is sick and broken and it goes back to his childhood. Can I continue to respect and compromise even though I know he disregarded those most basic of marital requirements. I’m working on it. He’s working on himself. I believe it is going to work, now, if I can string together a bunch of days where I am confident of this, it will be great 🙂 . I agree, our lives are full of relationships and we also need to focus on self care.
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That really is it… can I live my life WITH him, knowing he isn’t capable of the love I know is possible? Can I, rather, live BESIDE him – all the while knowing that my happiness is solely up to me and that I must only take his spurts for what good they do in that moment – and deal with that… forEVER?
I’ve been doing all right with far less, for this long… and being single would offer me less (because the thought of being partners/spouses with anyone else repulses me.) But truly, CAN I accept that this will be my future, indefinitely? I don’t know. I just don’t know.
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I can relate wholeheartedly. I too think you are/were a good wife. His behavior is not your fault. I know it is easier said than believed as you can tell that just by reading my blog. He must love you as he is still there with you. It just hurts so much to see him everyday and try to believe that. I know my husband from what I’ve been told did not lie to the OW. She knew about my health issues as my husband told her. She just wanted my husband because she could and so she did. I’m so sorry to see you hurting too.
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Thanks for the kind words of support, bugs. I know my husband loves me in his way of loving. After 30 years, we didn’t actually have any problems in our marriage. We became empty nesters about 2 1/2 years ago (it turned out to be temporary) and things were so good. The addiction is insidious. It is hard to know how deeply he really feels because of it. My husband had an 8-year relationship, he had to tell her something to keep that secret sex life going, and I got the shaft. It doesn’t feel good. I can leave that in the past, however, it is difficult to trust a sex addict. I am trying. These women are so broken and they need to get help too and stop stealing husbands, but my husband is the only one I really care about now. Recovery takes a long time…
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You were and are a great wife, Kat. Don’t do that to your story. Perfection is impossible (and downright annoying, lol.) But I can tell you were a good wife.
Mine says (and I believe him!) that he told her he had loved me every day, very deeply and that he’d never had better sex than our deeply connected lovemaking. He just told her that we’d hit a bad patch. She would answer that with, “don’t tell me about how great you guys are/were. We’re just having FUN here.” But he is a proven liar so maybe I’m dumb and he really bagged me to her…. for me, it doesn’t matter anymore what he did or didn’t say to her. It only matters that he chose to continue to betray me and have unprotected sex with both of us – I was the only one who had no chance of protecting myself from STIs as they were both fully informed while I was ignorant and left in the dark. That still utterly disgusts me.
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Thanks for the support, Paula. I do feel very lucky that I came out of the STI situation unscathed. That is disgusting and so so unfair. The whole thing is unfair. My husband did lie about me, he has admitted that since nearly the beginning. It hurts. He always told her that he loved me, but he told her all those cliché things like, we stay together for the kids, we are a partnership now, we have a business together, I don’t think she even likes to have sex with me, she is not nurturing, we have sex maybe once a month (if that were the case, I don’t see why they weren’t doing it daily for months, but that never happened). If he was going to lie to me about something post dday (which I know he did lie and hold back for months and months) this is what I would have lied about. It is so hurtful, but nope, he told me from the get go that he told her he loved her. He told her she was beautiful, etc… etc… and that I did not fulfill his needs. When she asked to see a picture way back when (before she could follow me on my personal blog), she said well she is very pretty and then she got angry and accused him of lying to her. I think Blue Eyes was taken aback by that and so he bolstered his story with more lies. She knew what she was doing… making herself feel better about being a whore. Blech. I hate these kinds of days. I should do another Paris post soon. Those make me feel better. 🙂
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Of course they lied to the ow. Not one wayward spouse would be caught saying to a needy bitch…hey, yeah…I love my wife, we have a great
Iife and are happy and the sex is good so how about it? In my case H tells the many OW that I do not like sex. Seriously?… Lying bastard. Mind you if they were half bright they would realise that the man they are chatting who is married is nothing else but a selfish self serving liar who is after having his immediate needs gratified by some secretive sex. Of course they are going to lie. Their whole greed is based on a lie.
Reminds me too….I did not like the ending of the TV series ‘the affair’ I find it highly unlikely that they ended up together. It just did not match their character development. I did like him getting arrested tho! The only interesting things about that show were the telling of the story through his eyes and then her eyes and of course the place they were at, Montauk, looked beautiful.
I may not have been the best wife in the world….I wasn’t that bad but at least he should have given me a chance. That turning point where he crossed that line. If only he were smart enough to have thought it through but to be honest he is an emotional retard. Or maybe I can now say he was because he seems to be a lot more aware these days.
Hugs xxxx
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Hey, CF. I was wondering if you got through The Affair. Yep, I feel exactly the same way about that season finale. Wonder what they will do with that next season. I am assuming that is the only reason they ended it in such a fashion, to get people back to see what happens. I did not like it, but I did like the earlier episodes. I thought it was great that they showed how broken the couple were that were having the affair, because that is what it is usually about… being broken and self indulgent and needy. Yes, Montauk is beautiful, but insanely crowded in the summer!
And you are correct, most cheaters lie, lie, lie. It just hurts so badly when it is your husband lying about you. Hugs back. ❤
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Sorry for the horrid ache in your heart. 😔😞😢😪
Every single little thing they have done to us in their deceit is like an arrow to the heart.
Not one day, not one single fucking day goes by without a thought of one of the slutbags or a random thought about his actions , his choices, his lies, his selfishness . It is a really tough road we are on. Who knows where it will end up. That day might come where we just throw in the towel.
Whatever…but at least we gave it our best.
Hugs xxxxx
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