The Unexpected Discoveries About Myself I Should Have Known Decades Ago.
In the eight months since D-Day, I have dived deep into affair recovery materials. Books, YouTube videos, Reddit, and other affair support websites. I spent eight to ten hours a day immersed in it. As my mind sometimes does, one day I idly reviewed my family's history through the lens of this new information, and it set off a nuclear bomb in my head.
For whatever reason, blind trust in adults, my autism, who knows, I believed them when they told me that my father was a philanderer and was kicked out of the family, that my mother was an innocent victim of his infidelity, that when my drunk father phoned the house that day 50 years ago and thought I was my older brother and said I was no son of his after identifying myself, I dismissed his ravings as drunk words rather than truth. I had learned to gaslight myself. I was naive and believed all of that bullshit well into late adulthood, as in until a little over a month ago, but there were problems with the narrative.
When he left, my mother scrambled to get his next paycheck before he did. Somehow, she managed to get it. She took me with her (I was six years old) to pick up his check and to cash it at the bank. She didn't even know how to drive a car, but managed to do it that day without incident. Mom had to scramble to get a license to drive. She scrambled to find a job. We had to sell our house because we had no money for the mortgage. I was to believe that, with no plan at all, my mother kicked him out of the house without a fight and put the entire family in danger of homelessness. That seemed odd to me.
He moved to an apartment about three miles from where we lived and had almost no contact with me until the drunk phone call when I was about 15. There were three instances of contact with him after he moved out. The first was when the younger of my two older brothers and I visited him on a Saturday. He got drunk and verbally abusive toward me, but not my brother, and with no provocation. We left and walked home at that point. The next was a fishing trip he wanted to take my brother on. My mom insisted I go along as well. My father was verbally abusive toward me the whole day. After that there were no more visits and no more contact until his drunk phone call.
I wondered why my oldest brother was not named after our father, but his next son was, and I reasoned that if he knew she was sleeping with other men, he wouldn't want to give his name to her "love child". I know I wouldn't. That was in 1951. In 1958, she got pregnant with me, and all seemed normal for a few years. I have a picture taken in 1961 of him holding me and smiling at me while on a family vacation, clearly unaware that I wasn't his. That all changed by 1965, a year after buying a new house in a new neighborhood. By then I was no son of his, either because he found evidence of it or because she confessed. I will never know, as everyone who could confirm any of this is either dead, or because we no longer have a relationship.
My relationship with my mother was always strained. She didn't show me affection. When she said "I love you" to me, it always felt forced. She lived the rest of her life in unexplained shame. She never felt like she deserved happiness or success. Mom ran her own business and never celebrated that as a success, but rather treated it like penance. The rest of the family cut me out of their lives one by one, quietly ghosting me after I became an adult. I had to chase my relationships with them with no reciprocation on their end, until I had had enough of the one-sided nature of those relationships. Letters that were never answered. Emails that were ignored. Not being told when siblings flew into town for family visits. Being asked for my phone number repeatedly when it hadn't changed, and never receiving any phone calls from them anyway.
The identity I carried my whole life was a fabrication. I wasn't who I thought I was, and this is added to the false image I had of the woman who cheated on me, who I called my wife. My marriage is a sham, as is my life as a whole. I'm tired. I've been trying to hold the debris of my marriage together. It looks more and more like it will fail, as she has little interest in working on anything other than her job.
Before her affair(s), I carried a lot of resentment and anger over the trajectory of my life and the relationships that turned out to be fictitious. Strangely, when I looked at all of it from this new perspective, my rage and anger disappeared. I'm alone in all of this, and it sucks, but at least I feel like now I have something real to hold on to.
4 comments posted: Saturday, October 18th, 2025
Heard From Her Affair Partner's Wife Today
I got a text message from my wife's AP's wife. She confirms that they are in an open marriage and that she knew her husband and my wife were chatting online and that she has no problem with it. That's why I'm not calling her OBS. She sent me an email as well just wanting answers to some questions. She wanted to know why I was only writing to her and not also to the other husbands my wife was in contact with. She wanted to know if I was chatting with women online (nope). She also wanted to know exactly what my wife told me. Honestly, she sounded more like someone wanting to cover tracks than someone wanting to help.
13 comments posted: Wednesday, April 16th, 2025
Treading Water
Since DDay (February 5, 2025) I feel like I've been treading water. I started counseling, but the therapist thinks I should start couples counseling before individual therapy, which seems backward to me. Whatever. My WW has done nothing of the sort for herself. She blames me for her affair. I have serious doubts about her. She refuses to cut contact with her affair partner.
I originally characterized the affair as emotional, but it was really an online sexual affair. I have no proof they had physical sex, but she got a job lead from him at his work place and she got the job. That was over a year ago. Now he is her supervisor. How nice. She conveniently forgot to tell me he was her affair partner for five years and lied to me until recently about it. So for the first year of her job she pretended to me that she never met him prior to working there.
I found his address and sent his wife a letter informing her of his infidelity. When she got it she took a picture of it and sent it to her husband, who sent it to my wife, who then called me saying, "Do you have anything you want to tell me?" as though I were in trouble. She tried to shame me about it. Sorry, not sorry. Apparently his wife doesn't speak to him except through text and is looking for an apartment for herself. My wife acts entitled. Fucking narcissist.
The story he told her (as recounted by my wife) is that he had an emotional affair with my wife. I rolled my eyes when she told me this because that is how I characterized it at first. To me it was clear from that that she told him about our situation and he used that for his own explanation to his wife about what happened. That's how I know she still talks to him about our relationship. They have no boundaries and she refuses to set any with him.
As her job is a career change for her (car sales and she's really good at it) I gave her one year to prove herself. Then I am sending a detailed letter to the general manager of the dealership exposing both of them making sure to tell him that they are jeopardizing the dealer's reputation. I'll send that letter regardless of what she does.
This is my life now. My days are filled with endless reading, watching videos, and journal writing about the affair. I feel like shit most of the time. My resting emotional state is always elevated. Even my resting heart rate has increased by 20-30 bpm. I have stooped to planting a VAR to catch her, but she knows I have it, so it will probably be fruitless. But who knows. Maybe she will slip up.
6 comments posted: Tuesday, April 8th, 2025
Just Friends
My WW minimizes her affair as not really being an affair. She claims there was no physical intimacy, but their relationship began as sexual video chats and moved into the real world as co-workers with a shared sexual history and a secret "just friends" relationship. The fact that she kept it all hidden for five years tells me everything I need to know about the character of their relationship.
10 comments posted: Thursday, February 13th, 2025
D-Day, I Knew Before She Said It
When my wife sat me down to tell me something and said I should hold her feet in my lap so I might not be so mad, I knew what she was going to say. And when she said it, I was not surprised. I was shocked, angered, saddened, but not surprised. I had no evidence of her affairs, just my gut feeling in certain situations. I've had that same gut feeling in various situations with her going back more than twenty years. D-Day confirmed that those feelings were not my imagination running wild. They were alarms.
8 comments posted: Thursday, February 13th, 2025
The Cognitive Dissonance is Real
My WW confessed to me a week ago today. Before she was done confessing she gave me the line "We're just friends". She started an online relationship with him 5 years ago. Then a year ago she found a job online, applied for it, interviewed for it, and got the job. It turns out her online partner gave her the job lead and became her boss. So for a year she also lied to me about how she got the job. They regularly text each other on Whatsapp outside of work. I think she convinced herself that I would be okay with it if she confessed. Now he's been trying to coach her on how to handle me. It's so twisted.
4 comments posted: Wednesday, February 12th, 2025
