He came home with the breads just a few days after I told him to stop accepting her gifts. A variety of homemade breads, fresh from her kitchen, meant for him. For our family, supposedly. I’d been watching it happen for a year.
When my husband first hired a woman in her mid-twenties to work under him, I noticed the way he talked about her. A little too brightly, a little too often. I told myself it was natural, that with so few women in his company, an innocent crush was bound to happen. I didn’t feel threatened.
Then the baked goods started. Cupcakes, cakes, breads. She made them for him, not the office. I told myself she was just being nice, that it was smart to befriend the boss.
Then he bought her a birthday present and took her out to lunch alone. Then she bought him clothes, for no occasion at all. I told myself not to make accusations without proof. Then his boss pulled him aside and told him there were rumors of an affair.
My husband repeated this to me like he genuinely couldn’t see anything inappropriate about the presents, the lunches, the constant attention. I told him to stop accepting things from her. He agreed. Days later, he came home with more breads.
I was pregnant. Due any day, actually. I’d left that detail out of my original post, but it made everything worse. A few days later, I went through his laptop bag.
I found things I never wanted to see, obvious items, things people use for sex. My suspicions were confirmed. I confronted him the moment he got home. They’d been having an affair for two months.
I kicked him out. He wanted to talk, so we did. We talked for half a day, and it was brutal. He told me he wasn’t happy.
I admitted I wasn’t either. We’d grown apart, become comfortable, made each other the last priority. We’d been functioning like roommates, not partners. No sex since the baby was conceived, and barely anything before that.
He played video games and ignored us while I became a supermom, and neither of us felt appreciated. Honestly, I’d been planning to file for divorce after the birth anyway. He had been too. But when I kicked him out, we both got a glimpse of what our lives would become, and it looked lonely.
He moved back home. We had the baby. We started marriage counseling, trying to rebuild a commitment, which is exhausting. Some days I questioned why I didn’t throw him out for good.
But we had kids, and we owed it to them to see if we could be happy together before breaking it all apart. He started helping with the kids, making dinner, doing chores. We made each other a priority instead of the kids or work or hobbies. We talked about everything, the affair, the things the other person did that we didn’t like, anything.
We got up together and went to bed together. We spent an hour every morning just talking, trying to reconnect. I contacted the girl to tell her how her actions affected my family. She didn’t accept any responsibility.
She blamed my husband completely, even though she knew he was married. She was looking for a new job, so for two weeks, they were still stuck working next to each other. He blocked her on Facebook, she blocked him. They weren’t allowed to be alone together, and any communication would be strictly about business.
Then he went back to work after paternity leave, and the emotional side of the affair came back. It was hard for him to sit ten feet away from her every day. I started stopping by the office for lunch a couple of times a week, which we’d never done before, just to spend time together. The day after Christmas, he was laid off.
Budget reasons, supposedly, but we both assumed there was more to it. And then he showed me the texts. From the day he returned from paternity leave until the day he was let go, she had been insisting that he leave me and the kids to be with her. She called me a name, said I didn’t deserve him, said she was way better than me.
She told him she’d make him a pot roast wearing nothing but an apron and stripper shoes. On his last day, she told him she looked forward to seeing him again, that his new life was going to suck, and that she’d be waiting. He told her they would never speak or see each other again. On Monday, he had to go back to the office to drop off materials.
He asked me to go with him. In front of me, HR, and his manager, he confessed to the affair. His status was changed to terminated for violating a sexual harassment policy. He was out of a job, but he was marketable, and offers came in fast.
We weren’t a single-income family, so it was okay. It was for the best. He was finally seeing the consequences, how his actions affected not just him, me, or her, but a whole host of other people. We kept going to therapy.
We read a book called Not Just Friends. He started to understand how inappropriate his relationship with her was from the very beginning, before anything physical even happened. We made boundaries: no lunch with the opposite sex unless it’s a group, no using another person as a soundboard for problems without talking to each other first. He gave me the nitty-gritty details of the affair, hoping it would stop the movies playing in my head.
He told me that the night I kicked him out, she showed up at his crappy motel with bags of clothes, shoes, and toiletries, ready to move in. She had a delusion that she was going to move into my house and take care of my kids. She hated me and thought he could do better. He returned every gift she ever gave him.
He had a lot of time to reflect. He saw that she used him to get ahead at work, that she manipulated situations to keep the affair going. He admitted he was more responsible than she was, but she had her share of blame too. I found out she’d slept with two managers, had inappropriate contact with two more, slept with a vendor, and two peers, all within a company of thirty people.
I was trying to forgive. Trying to learn to live with it. It was a long process, but we were focused on making our relationship stronger and healthier. He started taking over parenting duties I’d done alone, cooking, laundry, daycare drop-off.
He told me a few times how unfair it was that I did all that alone. He told me the other day that he never realized what he had, an awesome wife, until he almost lost her. I think he meant it. We were both working so hard to be better spouses, better parents.
Some days sucked. Some days were great. We were working through it one day at a time. Around May, nine months after I found out, I realized how truly unhappy I was.
I realized I would never bounce back from the affair. I’m just not built that way. It was like the wool was pulled from my eyes. For five months after I found out, he lied to me every time he opened his mouth.
He used our child as a tool to continue the affair outside of work, pretending to take our son to the park while he was texting her the whole time, paying more attention to her than to his own kid. He brought our children into a grown-up situation without any regard for their feelings. He introduced our son to a woman he barely knew. It was all about him.
He felt entitled to have an affair. I asked him to move out. He moved out last Saturday. It’s just me and my two kids now.
Between the day I asked him to leave and the day he left, he blamed me for everything. He said he did his best to rebuild, to help, but it wasn’t good enough for me. I tried to explain that folding laundry and hanging out with the kids doesn’t erase what he did, but I wasn’t getting anywhere. He manipulated me, tried to get me to ask him to stay, told me our son would suffer for my decision.
He’d ignore me, walk out of the room, then come back an hour later and demand to know why I was ignoring him. That had been our relationship for years. He manipulates me, gaslights me, says something mean and then denies it. He blames me for almost everything, criticizes how I load the dishwasher, how I cook.
He has a terrible temper, and he started projecting it onto the kids, yelling at them, stomping on toys, kicking them, threatening them over stupid stuff like spilling milk. On Friday, while I was feeding the baby, I left the room for a few minutes. I came back to him telling our four-year-old that Mommy wants him to move out of the house, that Mommy doesn’t like him anymore. My son cried and screamed at me, “Why do you not like Daddy anymore?
”
I smoothed it over with my son. He’s completely fine now, hasn’t asked about my husband since he left Saturday morning. And here’s what I found in his web history: he was looking at escort sites. He was stalking a friend he’d wanted to have sex with a couple of years ago.
He told me he’d solicited her and she said no because he was married. I told him he wasn’t to have anything to do with her anymore. But there he was, jerking off to her pictures on Facebook and Tumblr. He also had a Tinder account.
Our relationship didn’t fail because of the affair. It failed because we lacked communication. A lot of our issues could have been resolved if we’d just talked. By the time we both realized how bad things were, the affair had already happened.
The affair was the final straw. I tried. We both did, right after I found out. But the changes weren’t sustainable.
Now I’m doing renovations on the house. I’m finding a therapist for myself. I have an appointment with an attorney for a support order and a parenting plan. I feel good about this.
Since Saturday, I can finally breathe.
