My Marriage Became A Dark, Sad Soap Opera
At this point, I’m honestly convinced the last two years of my life could be the script for a dark soap opera.
My wife and I have been together for 9 years. We have a 6-year-old daughter who, despite the chaos of the last year, is the happiest kid on the planet. My wife and I fell in love fast, moved in together almost immediately, and built a life that was generally steady and happy - at least until recently.. It’s wild how it only took about three weeks to completely upend a decade of history. It’s just surreal.
To be clear, I’m not claiming our marriage was "perfect." In the early days, especially before our daughter came along, we had some massive blowouts - most that stemmed from my own baggage - I had a serious gambling problem and struggled with alcohol and a lot of impulsive, toxic habits. Before we had our kid, I was burning through money and spiraling, but I got sober and walked away from that life before she was born. Through all of that, my wife stayed, and stood by me while I clawed my way out of the hole I’d dug. She was a godsend for that, and I’ll always adore her for sticking by me when the smartest move probably would have been to pack her bags and move on.
My wife is a beautiful woman. She’s never lacked for male attention, and in 9 years, she never once gave me a reason to think she’d stray. So, when I found out earlier this year that she’d been having an affair with a supervisor at her job since last autumn, I was paralyzed. The depth of the betrayal left me gutted, but it also made me turn inward, and start looking at my own faults to try figure out what I did to make her look elsewhere. Therapy has helped with that, but it didn't exactly kill my desire to go down to that store and beat the living shit out of this guy.. if not worse.
I thought about divorce, but never for very long because I don’t want to be with anyone else, and I’ll be damned if I let another man raise MY daughter - ESPECIALLY one that can't even take care of himself. We decided to try reconciliation and started the long process of trying to salvage the marriage. We’re in therapy, we’re being more transparent than we’ve ever been, though not without ALOT of growing pains in the beginning of the process.
Despite the trauma, I actually started to see the affair as this twisted, necessary evil, almost like we needed this explosion to finally become the people and couple we were meant to be.
Now this other guy - Lord no-teeth, ratty elantra bum ass loser living on his wifes dime. A 45-year-old married "man" with no drive and zero hygiene. He had four kids who basically only had him because his wife was an ACTUAL provider who worked 80+ hours to keep them afloat. He worked as a shift lead at a hardware store by choice - he had experience to get a real career and be a real man, but he told people he didn't want to because "that's what the wife is for."
He played the part of the "religious devout" while spinning these pathetic sob stories about how his wife was "abusive" and "neglected" him - which translates to she probs wouldn't give him head or some stupid bullshit.
In reality, she was a shell of a person after all the years of gaslighting and manipulation. I've personally never even seen the woman in the 6 years we've lived in the area outside of a handful of times at local gas pumps - likely because venturing elsewhere meant she would hear that he was hitting on every woman who walked into that store and was actively splitting up families like he was taking pride in it.. something that, as it turns out, she had known he was doing for years.
Since this all came out, we’ve learned that he was essentially a serial predator. No less than a dozen women have come forward with proof that he was cycling through them constantly, often on the same nights he was with my wife. He treated every one of them like disposable objects.. and left myself and other husbands with unbearable intrusive thoughts and an irreparably destroyed sense of trust and self-love.
Every woman he targeted was half his age. I even saw messages where he claimed he’d be a "better father" than me because he bought my kid a cheap little bullshit plush toy from the dollar store.. a ''better father'' coming from a guy who was WELL KNOWN to be a deadbeat fuck and utterly careless with his own children.
Yeah, the guy who sleeps around with teenagers behind his wifes back with 4 kids at home is TOTALLY the ideal father figure.. give me a fucking break.
ANYWAY.. my wife was generally cooperative with the recovery process - accountability, location sharing, all of it - except for the fact that she absolutely refused to cut him off. She started to sneak around to see him and call him from "burner" apps, claiming she just needed "closure" or to understand what their relationship was, because it couldn't be as simple as her being a simple piece of ass to him. In this way she became toxic - like it was unfathomable that ANYBODY could NOT be genuinely in love with her. It was at the heart of every fight we had, the house felt like a powder keg. It wasn't a healthy environment for our daughter, and while it wasn't "abusive," the tension was thick enough to cut with a knife and I’m not proud of that.
Things kept on this broken way, one day she'd swear by me, the next she wouldn't know if she loved me, so on and so forth. We were one day away from a two-month therapeutic separation with hard rules and stipulations that I, frankly, fully expected her to fail. I never wanted the separation, but I also knew that if she couldn't stay true to our agreements throughout that time that the marriage and our life was lost. I did not WANT her to fail, but I prepared for the worst while hoping for the best, knowing that her persistence in seeing him would mean that there would be no means to come back from this, and ultimately that her failure would give me the final push I needed to cut my ties and move on.. as painful as that idea was.
But then, the morning of came, and I woke up to a text from her that could have split my sorrow in half.
Before I continue, let me just point out that I have had a pretty rough life. My father was an abusive alcoholic and my mother was mentally ill to the point of spending months in and out psych wards. I myself am a child of foster care, many of the houses I bounced between were unbearably abusive, and drove me to writing my own share of goodbye notes..
Point being that I have immense sympathy for anyone in that dark place. I feel a deep sadness when someone loses that battle.
So when her text was simply to tell me that this guy - this pathetic fuck of a man and waste of a human being - had killed himself the night before, I didn't even blink.
It took a moment for me to process the scope of what it meant, even longer to believe it was real.. but when I finally recognized the sincerity of it, I felt nothing.
I didn't care. At all.
Good Fucking Riddance.
I didn't cheer or dance, its not like I celebrated a mans suicide, but I certainly didn't feel a flicker of remorse. I made sure my wife was okay (she was a mess), and went about my day, but it was the first time since this all began that I genuinely smiled and felt to the slightest extent that things might actually be okay.
For the first time in my life, I felt zero sympathy for someone’s internal war. I feel for his kids, and I feel for my wife’s grief, but his internal war isn't even a blip on my radar. I feel worse for his dog, who now has to wonder where its owner went, or for his ratty Hyundai Elantra that he left running all night with a tube to the window. Poor car deserved SO much better.
The calm I feel knowing that pathetic excuse for a man is gone is the most refreshing thing I’ve felt in years, but honestly, I’m often more bothered by the fact that I don’t care. Almost like my lack of emotion towards him makes ME the inherent evil.
I’ve talked to people in my circle about this, and nobody disagrees. Some have even said they’re happy for us because the "problem" solved itself. I don't say this to my wife, but she knows I’m not sympathetic - I actually think she’s finally starting to realize she was being played by a master manipulator, and almost threw away a decade of marriage for a degenerate who only wanted her until the next young girl came along.
Unfortunately, none of this has helped me with feeling more ''kept'' than chosen.
I wake up often from nightmares. I feel a sense of self-hatred I've never known before. I find myself undesirable, or like I am simply disgusting and unwanted. Easily replaceable.
Many times now I have had to talk myself back from relapse - it gets so hard sometimes to see myself as anything but ''second best'', and where my wife certainly tries to comfort me and afford me the time I need to heal, she is still mourning the loss of her side piece. Her delusional fantasy of a better life with a low-life who never even knew her. That kills me in a whole different way, and I don't think she recognizes that at all, but I'm not without understanding that her process of healing will be an entirely different shape than mine. It has to be, right?
I KNOW that she DOES love me, but the mind has a way of killing you when everything else fails.. It's a shame-spiral, and I'm just here for the ride at this point.
I guess I just had to put this somewhere. This story is just too dark, complex, and painful to keep inside or between my therapist and I.
I used to think I was lucky just to have met my wife, but now I wonder if all this pain had a bigger, more substantial purpose.
Or maybe I'm just as delusional as her fantasies were, and I'm just biding time until the next one comes along.. who knows.
Right now, mentally, I'm stuck between acceptance and grief. My mood varies day to day, but I will feel better. Just wanted to share.
TLDR; Wife and I have a kid, wife had an affair, we attempted to reconcile, she kept chasing the AP, AP killed himself, I feel no sympathy for him.