Well, icytoes, I thank you, and yet... as these things often go, some of the issues either become obviated or decrease in saliency with each passing day and new revelation. I will say that the lack of empathy, it's fairly clear to me as I type this, is not a lack as much as it was being severely blocked in some cases. By deep shame.
Trying to focus on the most important shift... after a series of conversations, it became clear to WH that the marriage we had was over. Whether we could possibly have a new relationship involving marriage might be an open (though narrowing) question, but what we had was fully dead. We shook on that. I basically (again) demanded the entire truth, if he had any care at all for me. He made a choice then (Weds, it's Sat today) to do give me everything. This was following a better conversation Weds, but during which I'd had to pull out some investigative tricks and a "wayward interview" that revealed I had information he did not know I had. (He has never stopped inappropriately texting many of his female friends-- stopping well short of affairs, but "keeping doors open" IMO.)
He said it was a combination of a few things that made him resolve to give me the whole truth:
-Our marriage, as we knew it, was over.
-I had scared him a bit with my investigative skills. He had also (I believe sincerely) not realized how creepy and inappropriate he was being with some of his female friends.
-Most of all, he saw that-- in his words-- he had already killed me, and withholding ANY PART of the truth would only kill me again.
-He really understood when I told him the truth (even generally) was my only priority, it was the only thing I wanted anymore in life. I had made it a part-time, even a full-time job, to get the truth by any means necessary, and he didn't want that for me.
-He knew that nothing in his life would ever go right, nothing would ever be worthwhile, if he couldn't at least attempt to free me from his burdens.
He knew what he needed to tell me and had a mild panic attack that night. He said he empathized a tiny bit with me, and people like me, who get them. He never does.
He told me the truth Thursday.
He said, "There are two people I need to tell you about."
(Don't you just feel that terrible sinking pit when you hear that? Even if you know it's coming.)
Folks, they're each terrible and freeing in their own way.
One was that he did have a PA with a woman ("four separate occasions") 16-18 years ago.
You might remember this from my OP:
Four people/occasions popped up pretty quickly, at least one surprising me, that it even popped into my mind. But next to two of the four I wrote, in parentheses, something like: "ehhhhh I don’t think so."
And later, I said
this one person from my original list of four just checks alllllll the boxes. I still don’t have a gut suspicion about her… yet she did make my top four brainstorm, so maybe there’s a gut suspicion there somewhere. But when I made a list of points in favor of some sort of affair and points against, there was a long, smart and highly-specific list of reasons in the "he did it" column and only maybe two items in the "he didn’t" column. One is "not his type" (LMAO, pretty weak) and the other is "I don’t have any sort of smoking gun" (of course absence of evidence is not evidence of absence— but I did search her name when I was looking into old emails and messages, and there was nothing suspicious— not that those couldn’t have been deleted).
It was that woman. And it was all so very deeply stupid.
The other was before we were together at all, but devastating on many levels, in many ways. It also provided incredible clarity. It made my world make sense.
He had/has a very good friend from college who was a part of our wedding. We'll call her Anita. Anita and her husband and son were a big part of our lives, though we moved away and grew apart somewhat, and then in the past 10-15 years, they got divorced and I hadn't personally seen her in some time. She came to visit finally, about 3-4 years ago, and WH hung out with her-- but without going into it, kind of ran off before I could see her and she could finally meet our kid in person. In the past 5-10 years, she's struggled with drug addiction, even being arrested. She had grown up poor, but married a wonderful man who ended up becoming wealthy, and yet all of this... sort of left her in the gutter. Her most recent boyfriend, at that time, was 28 to her 54 years old... and had been her boyfriend for 6 years. For what that tells you.
When WH was in college, and 20 years old, he met Anita, who was 26. She had been married 2-4 years already to her husband, John, who was 34. Though WH was an adult, I would say that he had just essentially been abandoned then, by his parents, who moved halfway around the world for his father's job. The kids were all raised in the USA-- WH's parents moved 8000 miles away. They took WH's younger brother, who was in HS. WH had two older siblings who were also left on their own-- again, adults, but 22 and 23. They had gone off to college in other states and weren't with WH either. Without arguing about his parents' right or responsibility to do this, it's also fair to say he was vulnerable and alone.
Through the years, I had often pointed this out-- that he had, for many intents and purposes, been abandoned. He came quickly to agree and to process this. I had also called Anita his "college girlfriend," but meant chastely, of course. John and Anita became surrogate family to him in many ways.
WH and I started dating about 5 years after they had met, and about 2-3 years after Anita and John had moved back to their home state, not too far away, and had their son. They were both lovely to me, and particularly John. I was always so grateful how for he treated me-- as a total peer, socially and intellectually, though we met when I was not even a legal adult, and he was almost 40. WH had always loved and admired John as well-- noting John had treated him the same way when he was 20 and John was 34.
Friends. WH admitted to me on Thursday that he had fabricated a different woman he had claimed to have lost his virginity to. Instead, he had actually lost his virginity to Anita, having an affair with her for about 1.5 years. I still don't know every detail of this, but it explains... almost everything.
The first time he had sex, the first time he fell in love, he was absolutely, entirely filled with shame. He genuinely loved John.
WH didn't stand a chance. We never stood a chance. This was the base from which he began, as an adult. From which he considered sex, love and the institute of marriage.
I'm not taking any responsibility from WH here. Young and abandoned as he was, he was an adult. I also see that he was, at least in part, predated upon. I still don't have all the details (only because we discussed other things first, I will get them). But he did say that he was not even Anita's first affair, and that the man she had cheated with previously was also younger. Of that affair, she had told John, and John had forgiven her (so you also see, as I am realizing as I type, how this also informed how he thought of infidelity and about people who forgive it). And you do see her pattern.
My therapist says "shame is the ultimate hot potato." It is such an intolerable feeling that we try to get rid of it-- and many do so by passing it along to others. I have already been aware of this, and thought how I carried and ate WH's shame from his first infidelity in the 90s, before we were married. But I also see how Anita passed hers to him, and he passed his to me. AND IT STOPS WITH ME, by the way. I release it. I rebuke it.
When WH told me all of this, he was bawling. He was broken. He was...
I don't know how to say this.
The thing about our relationship is that it was actually based on incredible openness and vulnerability. Mine, for sure, but in many ways, also WH's.
Yet.
There was always something.
Something I tried to explain without seeing the full picture. And then I used those faulty explanations to explain the world around me.
Now that is lifted, I have so much work to do, to consider how the world truly is. Who I am. Including all of the good. I can say that my intuition is good, and I'm sad I was made to largely ignore it for my entire adult life. I am leaning into it now, which is why I believe I do have, essentially, the whole truth now, about his infidelity.
The truth is this:
-He was a very, very sensitive child, treated cruelly by his father, and alternately shamed and enabled in an unhealthy way by his mother.
-He lost his virginity to a married woman, whose husband was also his friend. And he continued to be friends with them.
-He met me and revealed so many deep, previously well-defended truths about himself. He deeply desired connection with me. And yet, he was so full of deep, deep shame, that could never bring himself to give himself fully to me. But I did. I was all-in with him. This was the theme of our entire relationship-- I had just thought that he was giving more truth and when he would be cruel to me to whatever degree, I never understood how deep the well of shame was, and how this was the cause, and not something I did, nor simply "his childhood."
-He cheated on me a year into our relationship, for which I attempted forgiveness, with some rugsweeping, and also some genuine, but not full, reconciliation work.
-He continued to harbor a bottomless pit of shame and an insatiable need for validation.
-A half dozen years into our marriage, in the early 2000s, at a low point in his career, he started a months-long online affair with a woman who worked at a cam site. He called that off after some months, but introduced her to me (without my understanding the affair). He continued to "stay friends" with her until weeks ago.
-Around the same time, he gambled away a significant amount of money. He also met and hooked up with this other woman I mentioned, four times, in person, before calling it off, over the course of a few months or a year or so (they lived far apart and met up via work conferences). It was opportunistic and lame. He continued to "stay friends" with her, and she stayed with us on a visit after the PA ended.
-He apparently was highly inappropriate with many-- though importantly and clearly not all of-- his female friends, in conversation at minimum, opening doors to possible affairs and keeping doors open as much as possible. This continued at the very least through 5-ish years ago, but perhaps to present day.
-Even the day before he gave me the whole truth, he admitted, by way of example, having been open to cheating physically again, had a particular friend made any active move towards him. This was only one example, but it was from just 4 years ago.
-So I understand-- between the way he lost his virginity, the incredibly, painfully, bafflingly banal circumstances of PA many years ago, and the through-line of inappropriate validation-seeking-- that for him, there never really existed any real barrier to infidelity. In conversation, it has become clear that he often (I suppose the vast majority of the time) chose not to act on his thoughts, but the question, "Why didn't he sleep with (nearly) all of his female friends and coworkers?" is best answered with these truths: "He could have, at any time," and "In most cases, he would have, had the women themselves been more assertive." I think, too... and I'm only connecting these two dots now... that I understand why he said, "I guess on some level, I think sex is the only thing I have to offer of value." But... did he not learn that from Anita?
I do think I have the truth right now, the basics of it, anyway, because I'm listening to my intuition. The truth does just sound different.
I reserve the right to change my mind about that.
I am in terrible pain, and yet it's familiar, since I went through this ~24 years ago after DD#1. But the familiarity makes it so much more painful, even as it gives me hope I can survive it.
He is completely broken, and I mean that in all ways. But particularly, I meant that he is no longer harboring these secrets. He is an open gaping wound right now. He is also, just so clearly, different. For now. I mean that only as an apparent fact, not as praise, not giving me hope. But something has changed. He's not acting like a shamed puppy, though he is in severe pain and is expressing absolute remorse and a flood of genuine-- and finally, FULL-- empathy.
All of those things, inexplicable barriers to communication, that weird exchange about WS and BS I detailed to icytoes... that's all gone for now.
And I am so, so free, and yet in so much pain.
I always saw there was a vein of something terrible running through a relationship that was actually extraordinary, in many ways. Now I know what it is. And for the first time in closing in on 30 years, I KNOW I am not crazy.