I posted this in the "General Section” but thought I would also post it here as I'm here all the time as well. Yesterday was the 6-month anniversary of the day that changed my life forever. I can’t believe I actually lived through the last 6 months and I guess I should be thankful that I’m alive. I went from thinking that I had the perfect life; two wonderful teenage boys, a successful husband who I was not only madly in love with and who loved me back, but also who provided a wonderful life for us that most people dream of, to wishing I had never met him, and wanting to end it all in a 1-week span.
It all started when I borrowed WH’s iWatch to go workout. It was no secret, as I had asked him to use it. He handed it to me and then said good-bye to go to work. As I was getting ready to go work-out, I was trying to change the iWatch profile from him to me, so that I could track my calories, a text popped up. I can still remember the EXACT words. It was written by my WH and it said, “Hi Aamira, we hooked up last month, but I can’t find your profile on Eros. Are you available to hookup?” At first, stupid me thought this was related to work and maybe it was some type of business thing, until I went to my office and googled “Eros”, only to have the shock of my life. It was an escort website. I started feeling nauseous. I then spent a few hours doing some sleuth work and after figuring out a way to recover about two years of deleted text messages, I found about 100 texts from prostitutes, and tracked his iPhone to 20 hotels during his lunch hours during the week. I called my two good friends to tell them what I had found, and that I didn’t think I could stand the pain and to come help me. I then called my WH to tell him that I knew that he had cheated on me with prostitutes and that he had to come home. He said he was in a meeting and would get out as fast as he could to come home. Before my two friends got here, I had already drank two bottles of wine, and consumed other random drinks that I could find, all of which to numb the extreme pain. I don’t really remember much of the next 48 hours, just snapshots. I remember cop cars, ambulances, fire trucks, neighbors, and EMT’s yelling things like, “her heartbeat and low and breathing is shallow”. I ended up in the hospital and my blood/alcohol level was a .45. Just to give you an idea how close I came to dying, .50 is dead. At one point, one of the doctors came in to tell me that I am lucky to be alive. I called my parents, who live 3,000 miles from me, and begged them to help me and my mom jumped on a plane 8 hours later to rescue me.
For the next 8 weeks, I was either in bed or at therapy. My mom took over my life, as I was not functioning well at all. I couldn’t get out of bed, and I couldn’t eat at all. The only thing I wanted to do was numb the pain. I was cycling through anger/rage and extreme pain/hurt every few hours! I was going to Individual therapy, couples’ therapy, and group therapy for spouses of SA, and WH was doing the same. I learned in couples’ therapy that my WH felt that he wasn’t getting enough sex, even though he NEVER said anything to me about this. He told me that he felt that he didn’t want to put any stress on our otherwise happy life, so he decided to go elsewhere to satisfy his needs. This little decision ended up turning into an addiction. We have learned a lot more, but I won’t bore you with all the details. I’m hoping that we will be able to heal, as we both really want it. We have almost 20 years together, 2 beautiful sons, and a great life…except for this one enormous and extremely painful thing.
Overall, I’ve discovered that I can never ever judge another person for a decision they make to stay with or leave a spouse due to infidelity. I always thought my WH would never do that t to me, and that was in “other peoples’ worlds, not mine”. I always said that I would leave if I was betrayed, and now that I’m in this situation, it’s easier said than done. These are the things that have learned or that I want to share:
• I never thought I had as much anger in me as I have had in the last 6 months.
• I have always been really good with computers but never thought I could learn so much about my WH in a few hours of snooping.
• We both got tested for all STI’s but the 4-month wait before the second test for HIV felt like the longest wait of our lives. I think we were very lucky, as everything was negative.
• I’ve had to go on several medicines to get through this trauma.
• I haven’t had a good night's sleep since May 9th, 2018.
• We’ve spent $30K on therapy, and probably have years more therapy to heal.
• I’ve lost 50 pounds (all of which was needed, but I don't recommend this type of diet to anyone).
• I feel like I'll never be as carefree as I was prior to May 9th.
• I’ll never fully trust another man again.
• I chose to tell several people, in the beginning stages of this, most of which I regret, as I did it to hurt my WH. The one person that was pained the most (besides me) was my dad, as he feels that he lost his second son (his other son is my brother). Although he will forgive him and support my decision to stay married, he will never fully trust him again either.
• Although the pain has gotten better, I do feel like it will never fully go away, and I will carry this the rest of my life.
• I still ask my WH about every few days, “Why did you do it?”, and he still to this day doesn’t really have an answer that I’m satisfied with.
Although I don’t post on SI very much, I probably read on this site about 1-2 times a day, and it keeps me sane. I thank all of you for your posts and wish I felt like I could write back. Frankly, I feel like I never have the right words or the time.
I, for now, am working through this with my WH by my side, but I know everyone is different, and I understand a lot of BS's decisions will be divorce/separation. For me, we married for better or for worse, and I’m just trying to give it everything I have, for what to me, is the worst time of my life.
VeryHurt2018