# My married journey includes H's 3 affairs...



## MarieG (Aug 23, 2013)

I’m new here. Married 27 years, 2 adult children, 2 grandchildren. H has cheated 3 times with long breaks between each A. One affair was a long distance EA and PA, one was a PA and one was a cyber-affair with no physical contact due to the long distance (OW lives in a different continent). Here is my married life journey. I will break it down in a few posts as it is lengthy… I apologize for this in advance.

2 March 1992: DDay #1. H had just returned from a 2 week business trip. While there, he met OW. They spent a lot of time together during the last week of his trip. They had sex and spent the night together on his last night there. He said he had fought off her advances the night prior but on his last night there, succumbed to her. H is not a drinker but while on this business trip, he drank a lot every night and said that his inhibitions were low and he that lacked good judgement and liked the attention that she paid to him. When he returned from his business trip, I sensed that something was off. I confronted him with my suspicions 2 days after his return and he admitted that he had “screwed up” and made a mistake and had sex one time, in a car in a parking lot, with a woman that he met in a bar. He said that he was sorry. Little did I know that they would continue calling and talking for hours on end for the next 3 months. H was in the military and worked shifts so it was easy for them to talk often. I was a SAHM at the time with 2 young children and looked after other children in our home for extra income. H became very distant from me and our children. He went from being a loving husband and doting father to being cold and distant with me and not wanting to spend any time with the children. During that time, we began fighting regularly. He also hit me quite a few times and I hit him also. I suspected that he was still in touch with OW but he kept denying it to the point where he had me convinced that I was crazy. I went through the days like a robot. I still managed to look after and keep the children safe but was an emotional mess. I brought up the “D” word a few times but each and every time, he would say that he didn’t want to lose me and the kids, that he loved and needed me, that he would be better. I loved him and stayed. Things would get better for a bit then get bad again. It was like riding a rollercoaster. Eventually a few months later, he said that he needed time to himself and planned to go on a “fishing” trip alone. I suspected that this was a ruse to spend time with OW, that they had planned for her to come and be with him but he of course denied it. Turns out I was right. He and the OW spent a week in our little family camper in a city 3 hours south of where we lived. He took the only vehicle that we had with him, leaving me without transportation. Everything “exploded” after she visited him and her H called me and asked that I tell my H to stop calling his W. This was pretty much the end of their A. I found out a lot about the OW during that time, such as how he was her 4th or 5th affair and how her and her H had 5 children and she didn’t know who the fathers of at least 3 of them were etc. After much talk, we decided that we should really give our marriage a good try before parting ways and seeked counselling. Individually at first and then we went to couple counselling. It was brought to light that as a young mother, I may have paid so much attention to our children that H had begun to feel neglected. This did not excuse his behaviour but helped me understand why he had done what he did. We worked hard on ourselves and it brought us closer than before. We became happy again.

As happy as we were, the person that I was ``before`` that faithful DDay, no longer existed. The bright eyed, happy wife that I had once been was gone. I now felt cold, insecure, jealous and cynical on the inside. To this day, I still miss that person.


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## MarieG (Aug 23, 2013)

continued.... 


16 January 2004: DDay #2. 12 years had passed since H`s first A. Things were going well in our marriage so I thought. 2003 had been a trying year for our family. I experienced some health issues, my father became gravely ill and eventually passed away in the fall and our youngest child, a teenager at the time had fallen into the wrong crowd and she was giving us a hard time. I was very stressed that year and had very little interest in having sex during that time. H did not pressure me about sex and I really appreciated that he respected me and recognized that I had a lot to worry about. The night before DDay, I was making dinner & H was in the family room on the computer. At one point our eyes crossed and I knew right away that something was not right. I stepped close to the computer quickly but he minimized the screen right away. I only had time to catch a name (OW has a unisex first name). I didn`t say anything until we went to bed that evening and I asked him who so-and-so was and he answered that it was just a buddy from work. Well my gut was telling me otherwise. The next evening, while he was at work, I spent time searching things. I was not computer savvy and it took me a while but eventually, I came across some IM conversations with the OW that he had saved. There was no denying it, something was definitely going on. The messages were very explicit and sexual in nature. I managed to locate the OW`s phone number and called her. I read passages of their conversations to her and asked her to explain what was going on…. She denied that anything was going on that they were just joking around. Of course that did not make any sense to my so I hung up and called my H. He left work immediately to come home. Unfortunately, while I was on the phone with the OW briefly, our teenage daughter who had come home from work and was in another part of the house had picked up the phone and spied on the conversation from another room. It haunts me to this day that she heard that. It turns out that the OW was a single military woman. H & her had started to email each other sex jokes, which lead to sexual conversations and eventually turned into physical sexual contact. During their 2-week affair, they had oral sex in H`s truck, a quickie in an abandoned hangar and sex at her house one afternoon. After much tears and much talk, I believed my H when he said that it was purely sexual, nothing more. I believed him because in the conversations that I read, he said that he liked what she did to him and let him do to her and that he just wanted to do it one last time before they went back to just being friends… I decided to give him another chance and we stayed together. H did not want to go to counselling this time, so we didn`t go. 

He became an open book and gave me all of his passwords etc. At first, I checked up on him constantly, multiple times a day at times. It drove me crazy and made me sick to feel the need to do so. I never found anything inappropriate. The only thing that upset me was how he had this habit of calling other women by pet names: girl, baby, baby girl etc. Every time I talked to him about it, he would just shrug it off and say that it was no big deal and didn`t mean anything. It hurt how he would just dismiss my feelings. Over the year and not finding anything inappropriate, I checked up on him less and less. Big mistake…


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## MarieG (Aug 23, 2013)

continued...


23 December 2012: DDay #3. Almost 9 years had passed since H`s 2nd affair. Things are going extremely well in our marriage. Our grown up children are somewhat settled in their lives and we are grandparents to 2 adorable grandchildren. My H had left the military 5 years earlier and we moved to another city where we both settled into new jobs. Our sex life is very fulfilling and we have a lot of fun together and enjoying our lives as emptynesters. One of my only complaints was that for at least a month before DDay #3, husband was constantly on his cell phone. The damn thing had practically become an extension of himself, but, my husband is an avid hockey fan and with the hockey strike, I assumed that he was engaged in heavy debates with all of his friends who are big hockey fans. I never suspected anything… I don`t know why but this particular morning, I woke up early with this tightness in my chess and this urgent need to check up on H. I had not checked up on him for months at least. After years of not finding anything suspicious, I was not checking up on him very often. It felt weird to feel this urgent need to check on him like that. This was the 1st day of a 2 week XMas Holiday so that should have been the last thing on my mind… So I got up early, brewed myself a cup of coffee, sat at the kitchen table with the lap top and logged into his facebook account. My heart dropped when I read 3 private messages to him from another woman. I remember reading how she had woken up dreaming about him, asking how they found themselves in that situation, in love with each other etc. Other than that, there were no other messages from her and none from him to her. I barged into our bedroom and woke him up by demanding to know what was going on with this woman. Again, he denied that anything was going on, said that the month prior they had started exchanging emails and messages after she left her boyfriend which lead to her sharing about her past, including her having a few affairs while married etc. (*I should add here that she used to be married to one of my H`s friends many years ago and that she was an acquaintance of both he and I way back). H shared about his affairs too etc. He said that eventually she had started sending him intimate pictures of herself and had asked him for much the same (he told me that he had never sent her pictures of him naked etc.) He said that he was done with it. We had family stay with us during the Holidays so it was pretty much impossible for him and I to discuss this. To be honest, I just wanted to enjoy a nice, peaceful Holiday Season with family and was not prepared to deal with this at the time. I also wanted to step back and try to figure out if I wanted to stay in this marriage or end it. On the few occasions that the subject would come up, usually late at night when we went to bed, he would always say that nothing had really happened and that he was sorry for everything, that he loved me and did not want to loose me etc. I told him that no matter what, whether we decided to stay together or part ways, that I felt that he should seek professional help as I felt that it was not normal for a man in his early 50`s to still be doing this. During the Holidays, H went the extra mile to do things for me and to make me feel love but, to be honest, I was numb on the inside. A few weeks later, when I returned to work and was away from family and the normal Holiday chaos, I just knew that he had again lied and that there was more to this than he said. I downloaded software to restore deleted pictures from his cell phone. There were very explicit pictures of the OW and one of my husband`s privates. I confronted him with the evidence. He said that the pictures of her were pictures that she had sent him before the Holidays and that he had deleted. He said that the one of him, he had actually wanted to send to me but had chickened out. I didn`t believe him. The next day, he told me that the OW was still emailing him at work. That evening, I emailed her and asked her to stop contacting my husband. She lives in another continent and is in a different time zone altogether so I didn`t hear from her until the next morning, when I got an email from her while at work. She proceeded to inform me that her and my H had continued to be in contact throughout the Holidays, pretty much every day. H & I ended up both leaving work that morning to get together and talk. H had informed her the day before that he was ending this thing between them as he had decided to seek counselling and work on our marriage. Her and I remained in contact that day. She was more than willing to provide me with details on what had happened. My H on the other hand, was very unwilling and uncomfortable in sharing stuff. Because of her, I found out that H had created a private facebook account where the two of them would meet and chat all day while he was at work. They had many graphic sexual conversations. His routine was that he would get to work around 7:15 AM, login that facebook account right away and leave it open on his computer. She would meet him there and throughout the entire work day, they would chat and have sex. They could not skype. On a few occasions, he hid in the restroom at work to masturbate to pictures that she sent him at his request. The company where he works did not have strict use of computer guidelines at the time. It disgusted and infuriated me to find out about that. Had he been caught, he most likely would have been fired. But he didn`t care at the time, it gave him a high. He felt that he was in control of everything… At the end of the day, he would log off his computer, leave work and come and pick me up on his way home as we commuted together at that time. He was a good actor because I never suspected anything before that 3rd DDay. The OW, sent me a lot of stuff such as emails and messages that they had exchanged, a picture of him that he sent her and she also shared the contents of a Xmas card that he had sent her. That was hard to read… In the card he wrote that ever since he first met her 30 years ago, he had thought about her over the years and often wondered what had happened to her, that he had often hoped for the chance to have her come in his life again and now that she was back in his life, he was thankful as the gift had been given. He told me that this card meant nothing that it was all a part of luring her in and having her do what he wanted her to (send him dirty pictures of herself and have cybersex with him). I read how he told her many times that he loved her. Again, he said that it meant nothing, that it was all part of his game. He said that he was actually getting bored with it but couldn`t bring himself to stop because it gave him a high…. 

After ending it with OW, H began individual counselling. We eventually began couple counselling and are currently still going to it. Two sessions ago, after I tried to explain how little things will trigger something in me out of nowhere and described my reactions to those triggers, the counsellor explained to me that although he had not fully diagnosed me, based on what I was telling him, it appears to him that I may be suffering from post traumatic stress disorder as a result of what I have lived through because of my husband`s affair. I never really thought that this could be happening as I never felt that I had been put in a situation where I feared for my life. This is all very confusing to me and I am trying to find out more information about people who have gone or are going through the same thing. My H has also recently revealed for the first time in his life that he had been sexually molested as a 10 year old boy by a couple of boys a little older than him at the time and whom he thought were his friends. He first shared this with me and then with the counsellor. This was a big reveal and something that he will need to get help for.

So… this has been my married journey so far. It might be hard for some of you to understand but, I can honestly say that for the most part, it has been a good marriage. From the outside, people would not suspect that this has happened. I also want to stress that despite what he has done, I love my H. Having said that, I do find myself wondering if I shouldn`t just leave and have a shot at either being happy on my own or finding a man to love me and be faithful. If my H had had 3 back to back affairs, I`m pretty sure that I would have left him as it would have been crystal clear to me that he did not want to be in this marriage however, all the good years between each affair has made it confusing… Thankfully, as a result of this last cyber affair, I know for sure that there weren`t any other undisclosed affairs as he spilled his guts about this to the OW. I would love to hear about others who may have gone through something similar. I think that it would really help me to know that I am not alone.

Thank you for taking the time to read me.


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## betrayed2013 (Feb 5, 2013)

i kno u think that this was a good marriage, but this was far from it. 3 affairs? Come on....i think u were probably a good wife, but it takes two to make things work as a good marriage and thats certainly wat u didnt have. Who knows wat he was up to in those "breaks" where u thot nothing was goin on. Surely tht had to cross ur mind all these years. I know ur thinking why start over and divorce.....but ur never going to trust this man and for good reason. He is a serial cheat and willl continue to do so because it seems there are no consequences for his actions. You take him back everytime. And dont think marriage counselling will solve all problems. I 've read hundreds of threads on here that had the spouse committing adultry while in counselling. I really think u have good years left to live and i dont think ur goin to enjoy them with this man who has betrayed u for sex over and over again. Im sorry for wat ur goin thru


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## ubercoolpanda (Sep 11, 2012)

Please please divorce. He hasn't learnt a thing!!! He's going to keep doing it because he knows you're not going to leave him.
_Posted via Mobile Device_


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## alte Dame (Aug 7, 2012)

You know about 3 affairs. I would bet my life on it just being the tip of the iceberg. Your H is adept at creating other accounts and hiding things. I think you're probably married to a serial cheater. You should insist on a polygraph and then see what happens. I'll bet that a lot more will come out.

Are you posting your story here to convince yourself that these three affairs are really manageable given the long-term marriage? Or are you finally, finally fed up?

I would file divorce papers if I were you. Life is far too short.


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## MarieG (Aug 23, 2013)

I have often thought about the possibility that there have been more affairs than just the 3 that I discovered. I have asked myself in the past what were the odds that I happened to discover all 3 affairs and that there weren't any others? 

I guess when the OW from his last affair said that he had told her about only 2 other affairs (before her), I believed that there had not been any others....

Although we are going to counselling right now, I don't know for sure if this means that we will say together. I love him but I have also told him that I know that love is not enough to keep a marriage going. I have brought up that I would like to go see a lawyer and have a post-nuptial agreement put in place to protect me in the event that he cheats again. He said that he would sign it in a heartbeat but to be honest, I don't know much about post-nupts and have been feeling so overwhelmed with things that I haven't begun searching the matter in depth.

In answer to your question alte Dame, my reasons to post my story were:

1) to get it off my chest and it felt very good to do so.... 
2) I am hoping to hear from others who have experienced something similar.

All of your responses and advise made me realize that I have a lot to ponder.


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## Coffee Amore (Dec 15, 2011)

I don't think the fact he told the cyber OW that he had only two previous affairs proves much.. 
He might be trying to keep his cheating incidents consistent with what he knows you know. He's proven himself to be a liar, so why would he tell the truth to some OW? 

I don't have any direct personal experience with this issue, and hope never to, but one of my closest friends for the past 15 years went through something similar. She was called by a much younger OW who brazenly revealed herself as the husband's mistress. My friend divorced him, but in the process of divorce, she discovered through her own research there were about 4 other women with whom he had affairs and there was one other woman, the wife of a male colleague of her husband's, who had written to him expressing interest in him. And those are just the ones she was able to uncover. He traveled quite a bit for personal reasons, so it's possible he had more affairs than she knew about. 

I think when you deal with a serial cheater you just have to acknowledge that you don't know all the affairs they could have had. My gut feeling is your husband has had more than three affairs. But without any consequences for his actions, he knows eventually, after a period of crying and arguing, you will forgive him and he can stay in the marriage. In a way, one could say you have a one-sided open marriage.


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## Mavash. (Jan 26, 2012)

I'd bet the farm there are more women than this.

My ex BIL was a serial cheater and he took no breaks between affairs he just hid them better.


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## LongWalk (Apr 4, 2013)

The trickle truthing is the worst part.

Divorce him and tell him that if he still loves you, you will take him back but he must wear a GPS tracker on his penis at all times.


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## BetrayedAgain7 (Apr 27, 2013)

I have been through it. 

Been married twice.

First marriage DH had 4 affairs. 2 were PA's and 2 EA's. 

In my current marriage DH has had 2. Both affairs were EA's. 

So, you are not alone.

It's a long hard road. 

Finally after much pain and anguish, I caught on to what I needed to do. And I have now done it.  

I'm still giving my all to this relationship and am very committed to him, but there are very definite boundaries around our relationship from which I will never waiver and more importantly, he is fully cognizant of. 

I wish someone had told me years ago what I had needed to do, it would have saved so much heartache and suffering.

I know exactly what you are going through and my heart goes out to you.


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## Omego (Apr 17, 2013)

I admire what you've accomplished. You've taken it upon yourself to keep your family together and raise the children in the most stable way possible. From what I understand they are grown and doing fine now.

The question is what do you want to do now? How would you feel separating from your WH and living your own life?


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## MarieG (Aug 23, 2013)

Omego said:


> I admire what you've accomplished. You've taken it upon yourself to keep your family together and raise the children in the most stable way possible. From what I understand they are grown and doing fine now.
> 
> The question is what do you want to do now? How would you feel separating from your WH and living your own life?




Although my decision not to end the marriage most likely helped keep the family together, I did not parent alone. My husband has always been a very involved father. The only time that he wasn’t was while in the midst of his first affair, when he did not appear to want to spend any time and do anything with the children. Other than that, he has been a great father.

Right now, I want to keep working on the marriage. I need to know for myself that I have tried everything in my power before ending it. I have invested more than half of my life in this marriage and I just cannot walk away from it like that. I love my husband and would love to grow old with him. The biggest thing for me is trying to learn how to trust him again…I’m not anywhere near there yet…


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## alte Dame (Aug 7, 2012)

Another poster here suffered from debilitating PTSD after her H's long-term A. She was falling apart years later because she never believed that she had the truth from him and he wasn't supportive in reconciliation. She finally insisted on a polygraph in order to move forward in their marriage. This actually has worked for her because she now believes she can trust what he has told her.

(I still think you only know part of what your H has done over the years.)


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## thatbpguy (Dec 24, 2012)

MarieG said:


> As happy as we were, the person that I was ``before`` that faithful DDay, no longer existed. The bright eyed, happy wife that I had once been was gone. I now felt cold, insecure, jealous and cynical on the inside. To this day, I still miss that person.


This probably becasue you stuck with him. Had you stood up for you and the kids after dday #1 you would probably have found a real man and be much happier.

I do not say this against you, but as an example to others.


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## MarieG (Aug 23, 2013)

BetrayedAgain7 said:


> I have been through it.
> 
> Been married twice.
> 
> ...




There appear to be a lot of similarities with what we have experienced. I read your thread and my heart goes out to you too.

I think that what hurts me the most is all the lying and deceiving… My H was supposedly an open book after his 2nd affair however, he had conveniently created a secret private facebook account for just him and the OW. Really, what is the point in constantly checking up on him if he may have secret accounts or email addresses on the side, that I know nothing about? It actually kills me to check up on him. It's exhausting to do... I want him to be faithful and be with me because he wants to, not because it’s the right thing to do. I don’t want to be his warden. Right now I check up on him periodically - he never knows when I do and what I check.

I’ve been through his cheating in my 20’s, my 30’s and now my 40’s and it’s enough!… It’s too much already… I will start looking at what I can do to protect myself financially (and hurt him financially in the process) should he cheat again.

Thank you for your post BetrayedAgain. It helps to see that I am not alone...


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## MarieG (Aug 23, 2013)

thatbpguy said:


> This probably becasue you stuck with him. Had you stood up for you and the kids after dday #1 you would probably have found a real man and be much happier.
> 
> I do not say this against you, but as an example to others.





It makes me sad to read this because I have asked myself much the same over the years. A part of me can’t help but wonder if I may have wasted precious years by staying while another part of me knows that we have shared a lot of good times…


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## alte Dame (Aug 7, 2012)

My experience with cheaters in my own relationships is that once they were caught and were contrite, swearing that it would never happen again and they loved only me, they actually believed that the clock had been reset to 'normal.' What they didn't get was that it had been reset for them, in their minds only - they thought everything reverted to what it was between us and all was now good again.

What they never understood was that I hadn't reverted. Their cheating had taken away from my feelings for them. I lost love, respect, trust, and a general sense that this would or could be for the rest of my life. Before I knew it, I was going through the motions of a relationship that was actually doomed to die.

If you feel these changes in you, OP, think hard about whether you really want to live this way. I eventually walked & the SO's in these cases were 'shocked' that my feelings were so dead at that point.


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## MarieG (Aug 23, 2013)

alte Dame said:


> Another poster here suffered from debilitating PTSD after her H's long-term A. She was falling apart years later because she never believed that she had the truth from him and he wasn't supportive in reconciliation. She finally insisted on a polygraph in order to move forward in their marriage. This actually has worked for her because she now believes she can trust what he has told her.
> 
> (I still think you only know part of what your H has done over the years.)



I actually brought up the polygraph with him this weekend and he started saying that he didn’t know for sure if these could be trusted because he knows that he would be nervous just being hooked up to the machine etc.. But now I think that like the other poster, if he was to pass a polygraph with flying colors, it would really help me learn to trust him again… I think that I will give this a lot of thought and research how to go about having a polygraph test done in our area. 

Thank you for the advice.


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## Thorburn (Nov 23, 2011)

MarieG said:


> I actually brought up the polygraph with him this weekend and he started saying that he didn’t know for sure if these could be trusted because he knows that he would be nervous just being hooked up to the machine etc.. But now I think that like the other poster, if he was to pass a polygraph with flying colors, it would really help me learn to trust him again… I think that I will give this a lot of thought and research how to go about having a polygraph test done in our area.
> 
> Thank you for the advice.


Too early to trust him at this point. If you go the poly route don't tell him until you are in the parking lot. I would not mention it to him at this point. There are some techniques to beat them and those techniques are on the internet. A good poly has more to do with the technician then anything else. 

When my wife came clean back in May I just knew she was telling the truth. My wife has had A's in 1999, 2010, then 2011 till 2013. I think she finally is straight. Don't know for sure if this will last, but I do believe it will be the last time for me if she decides to cheat again.

I do get where you are coming from and it is not fun putting up with their crap all these years.


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## thatbpguy (Dec 24, 2012)

MarieG said:


> It makes me sad to read this because I have asked myself much the same over the years. A part of me can’t help but wonder if I may have wasted precious years by staying while another part of me knows that we have shared a lot of good times…


Actually, that is sad. I feel for you, I really do. You hoped and wanted things to be better only to find out his addictions were too strong.


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## thatbpguy (Dec 24, 2012)

alte Dame said:


> My experience with cheaters in my own relationships is that once they were caught and were contrite, swearing that it would never happen again and they loved only me, they actually believed that the clock had been reset to 'normal.' What they didn't get was that it had been reset for them, in their minds only - they thought everything reverted to what it was between us and all was now good again.


That is a great way of putting it.


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## Lone Star (Feb 2, 2012)

I feel for you but I am willing to bet there have been more affairs than you know of. I spent 20 years with STBXH, there were signs early in the marriage that he was a cheater. I didn't have solid proof and really didn't want to believe it. As I have come to know him over the past two years I feel certain that he has always cheated on me. I should have left years ago, but like you I loved my H. I understand how hard it is to see yourself without him after all these years but he has disrespected you over and over with his affairs. I wish you luck but I'm afraid luck is not enough for you.


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## PeterCohen (Nov 6, 2013)

If I were you, I will opt for second alternative.

That's said, while you are thinking with your brain, give room to your heart. Listen to what your heart really wants. Life has no replay, make it a meaningful one.

Others' comments are only good for consideration but ultimately you should follow your heart and be what you want for yourself.


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