To Delete or Not Delete? That is the Question

I haven’t written for quite some time.  I have continued to read (AOW, 2P, RBM, SS, Morgan, etc.)  I have been most taken by the comments and blogs that relive the affair, d-day, no-contact, recovery, failure, and on the cycle goes.  The ‘aha’ moment came for me when someone wrote that the writing causes us to continually relive the pain and prevents us from moving on and away.  Likewise, in order to get past the pain, we need to relive it and all of the unanswered and unanswerable questions that we have.

Unlike so many of my blogging friends, I have been unable to delete the old emails or shut down the pseudonym accounts.  I have not been able to delete the ‘saved chats’ that Google stores up.  I have not been able to throw away the hand written, but unsent, letters to MM during the period of no-contact.  I never shut down my blog and on occasion, I read my old posts.

Unlike so many of my blogging friends, my MM and his w are divorced and he and I are a “couple.”  It has been almost 2 years (22 days shy of the full 2 years) since that D-Day, December 9, 2009 – since I got the email from MM’s W saying “Hi – I know about you and my husband.”  It has been a long road.  MM and I talked at length, about my need to get past the pain of no-contact, about his efforts to “work on his marriage” during that time, taking his w to mexico for her birthday, to his company’s holiday party, to posting pictures of her on his Facebook page while telling me he loved me, needed me, wanted to be with me but that I should be patient.  There are times when my anger, to this day, is larger than life, and all I want to do is beat him up – so I yell, storm off, get sullen.  And he lets me.  He says he understands. 

What I have learned from MM is that when caught between a rock and a hard place, most MM will retreat into the familiar, the comfort zone rather than jump off a cliff.  The fear that no one will be standing there waiting to catch them is paralyzing.  When I asked my ex-H for a divorce, I came to the realization that I would rather be alone and poor for the rest of my life than spend one more minute with him.  And mind you, we had a perfectly comfortable life – 2 homes, 2 beautiful children in private school, 3 cars, luxurious vacations several times a year, savings accounts, material objects galore.  Yet I wasn’t happy.  It didn’t make me happy.  It was financially comfortable, but ever day I woke up I felt like I had sold my soul.  I wasn’t happy.  I wasn’t getting any younger.  I wasn’t setting a good example for my children.  I was a lousy role model.  The discomfort had to end.  And so I ended it.  MM could have stayed in his loveless, sexless, miserable marriage forever.  It was comfortable.  (Sound familiar 2P?)  As a funny anecdote, MM, a/k/a my boyfriend and I were having a silly disagreement and I offhandedly told him that if he continued what he was doing there would be no sex.  To which he replied that was no threat, in fact he could go years without it and had the history to prove it.  While that was funny, it was also quite telling and ultimately very sad.  Why would anyone want to live like that?

I have a dear friend who is dying of cancer.  It is heartbreaking to watch the disease eat this vibrant, beautiful woman up leaving little more than a shell.  We were out to lunch and she was telling me about what a burden her husband has become and how incapable he is of taking care of her, helping her, supporting her.  He doesn’t even go with her to doctor appointments.  He’s not working.  He has locked himself in the master bedroom; she sleeps downstairs.  He wont cook, clean or help with the household.  She spends as much time out of the house as possible – going to the gym, out to the lunch, to the movies, out of town, with friends.  I asked her why she doesn’t tell her H to get out.  The fire burned in her eyes when she told me that she has told him to get out, that she filed for divorce 2 times, but didn’t follow through, and as she looked at me across the table told me she would rather be alone than have him in her home but is now too weak to move him out.  Of course I offered to pack his shit and throw him out for her.  She laughed and said he was too heavy for me.  I told her to come to me and my older kid offered to give up her room for her.  She’s not going to leave now.  But how sad for her.  She doesn’t get a do-over at the end, to be happy.

BF (f/k/a MM) and I were having dinner a couple of weeks ago.  We were talking about his kids, his ex-w and a problem at school.  He stopped and said that most people refer to the “fog of the affair” yet when he reviews his life to date, he feels that the fog was his marriage – his self-deception was his life with his ex-W.  It is difficult for him to come these realizations; the musings frighten him.  He punishes himself for losing those years and wonders what he was thinking.  His ex-W has been wonderfully obliging – consistently proving him right.  She has trespassed on his property (having his landlord open the door to his house so she could find “some papers”); she forged his name on legal documents; she refuses to take her kids to therapist appointments, help them with their homework, encourage attendance at school.  She has proved him right at every turn.  He has told me horrible stories of her past behavior when they were married.  – She was fired from a job when she was pregnant, yet never revealed the reason.  Imagine how egregious her actions must have been that a company believed they had a stronger case in firing her, than a pregnant woman would have against her former employers.  (Needless to say she never sued them.) – She changed a neighbor’s home listing on-line, never telling them, giving her an ‘edge’ in the marketplace.  The stories are incredible.  Yet, if it weren’t for me, for our ‘affair’, he would have done nothing.  He just simply shut himself down.

We had dinner with some of his college friend his past summer.  They live in Germany now.  The wife said some very interesting things.  She said that no one liked MM’s ex-W yet didn’t want to say anything to him – after all, it was his choice, they were his friends and they would support him (or not).  The second thing was that when she heard he had an affair she thought – good for him and that he’s really not capable of having an affair, whoever the AP is, means more than that to him.  MM/BF was stunned.  Everyone but him knew about his ex-W, but no one told him; everyone knew that he wasn’t capable of having affair yet he believes that he was wrong.  Worse, was that he was weak and would have done nothing to extricate himself from a life in which he was simply going through the motions.

So, almost 2 years after d-day, BF and his kids are coming to my town to celebrate Thanksgiving with me and my kids. 

Now, if only I could hit that stupid delete button.

Tags: adultery, affair, anger, angry, bullshit, divorce, ex-husband, ex-wife, holiday, husband, infidelity, lover, married man, mistress, MM, other woman, OW, sex, unfaithful, whore, wife