Letters to the Editor
-
So karma's a bitch then
I guess he got what he deserved.
-
Embrace the unapproved feelings
Cary, this is not the same as being "imperfect." "Imperfect" is leaving your underwear in the middle of the bathroom floor. This is an active betrayal of a marriage and a family. LW, I think that Cary is right in that you've got a lot of feelings going on, and the grief just makes it all worse. It is hard to know what to do with grief when you are angry about having been betrayed.
The "approved" feelings we are supposed to have when a spouse dies are those of grief, love, loss. We are supposed to go about saying how much we miss our spouse, how wonderful a person they were, and how glad we were to have had them in our life.
But feelings have a nasty habit of going well past what is "approved" by society. Among the feelings that you very rightly have are anger, depression, and fear. Anger that the bastard betrayed you. Depression that you may not have known your husband as well as you thought, and fear that you many never find a man who is really true and how on earth do you go on that way? Part of you may even be relieved he's dead so that you never had to find out and have that awkward ugly scene or a divorce. None of us wants to admit to feelings like this -- respect for the dead is a bit of a sacred cow in this culture. But that never prevents us from having those feelings all the same.
Cary is right -- give yourself permission to genuinely feel everything you're feeling. You don't necessarily need to parade those feelings in front of his family or your children. They have their own grief issues without having yours foisted on them.
Know that feelings that are properly allowed to run their course do eventually resolve themselves into an understanding. Eventually you will come to a place where your feelings don't seem to pull you wildly in a dozen different directions.
Grief is a process, a journey. And the end of the journey is not getting "over" it -- it's finding a way to live each day knowing what you know and having lost what you've lost and not allowing those facts from your past to overwhelm the present business of living. You're is essentially a double grief. You are grieving the loss of the man you knew physically (because he's dead) and the marriage (because you have discovered he was not faithful.) Certainly tougher, but not insurmountable.
Don't lose faith in the fact that you will get through this. The fact that you can't see what's at the end of the journey does not mean that it isn't there. The peace and pulled-together-ness that seems impossible for you now will come. Give it a little time, and give yourself permission to go through everything you need to get through in terms of feelings.
-
Time for professional counseling
The death of a spouse is itself a trauma. The adultery of a spouse is a trauma. The death of an adulterous spouse engaged in a formerly secret affair is even greater than the sum of the two traumas because the widow cannot confront the dead spouse. And even worse than that, the widow should be able to feel the pure emotions of love and grief at the loss of the loved one, but she is denied even that. Her natural emotions of love and grief are now polluted by equally natural feelings of anger and betrayal.
Love and grief are not negative emotions, but positive, the way that in the natural order of things we work through the loss of a loved one. In a very real sense the deceased husband is not just an adulterer, but also a thief, having stolen from his wife the comfort of experiencing his death as something that is an unfortunate part of the natural order of life.
Death is a natural part of life. Adultery isn't. Cary's advice that the husband "wasn't perfect" is beside the point. Everyone is not perfect; not everyone stabs his spouse in the back.
This is one of those situations in which "words fail me." The only words that I can offer is that this will take a long time to work through, and the wife will need professional help navigating through that. A professional counselor will be of invaluable help.
-
actually proudfemme it IS about being imperfect
it's probably the equivalent, for a man, of finding out after his wife died that she had been faking her orgasms for 13 years. Just because you and probably a lot of other women wouldn't equate the two doesn't mean that your standards are "perfect". Everyone needs to deal with their feelings.
-
That sucks
Get some therapy, get the kids out of the house so you can kick and scream and cry and do whatever needs to be done to wipe the anger away, because one day, you do want to just be left with the nice memories of your marriage and you don't want to get an edge in your voice when your children ask about their dad.
I don't know, maybe it would help to yell and scream at the mistress and go well I can't yell at him, so here ya go bitch.
Here's something to start you off, damn bastard didn't even have the courtesy to hide his tracks when he knew he could be dying!
Next time you get a man, just do what I do, assume the fuck head will cheat at some point, everyone pretty much does. Hell I'm the only person I know who doesn't cheat and while I'd like to believe my husband of 10 years has never strayed, I'm almost positive an opportunity presented itself at some point and he jumped it. I figure, I'll just take a jump at my chance when it presents itself.
-
baby steps
First of all, I'm so sorry for your loss. I hope what I'm about to write will be helpful to you, but if you find it's not, please ignore it. Supposedly the death of a spouse is mentally harder to recover from than losing a parent, a child, or even a body part. So pretend for a moment that you just lost a leg. You would be in the hospital and people would take care of you. People would care for your children. People would tell you to take it easy until you recover. So take it easy until you recover, and don't be afraid to ask for the help you need.
How could someone you thought you knew have online sex and then travel to meet up with a woman to cheat on you? How can you reconcile that picture with what you knew about the man you loved, the man you're grieving, who isn't here to explain it all?
I think most affairs happen in baby steps. An overwhelming majority of men whack off to internet porn. Would you be shocked if you caught your husband surfing a porn site and jacking off? If you were, you'd be surprised about something that almost all married men do. Your husband might hide it from you if you complained, but he wouldn't stop. Because almost all men whack off to porn, even the married ones. Some study in England recently found that the average guy masturbates eight times a week. Most of them go online for porn.
From online porn, it's not a huge step to online chat rooms. And in the man's mind, it's easy to rationalize that there's not a huge difference between a picture of a lady he's never going to meet and some text from a lady he's never going to meet. He doesn't love the girl in the porn film, and he doesn't love the woman in the chat room. Both are fantasy.
The problem is that the woman in the chat room isn't really fantasy. She's a person. She has a personality of her own, and feelings, and she inspires feelings in him. It doesn't happen all at once, necessarily, and it doesn't happen on purpose. It's easy to rationalize that falling in love with some woman you're never going to meet doesn't matter. She might as well be a movie star for all the real impact she has in your life, so what's the big deal?
Only she's not a movie star. And the fantasy about how hot it would be to buy plane tickets and finally meet turns into reality because she has the money, and you have the money, so you buy plane tickets.
And then it's not a fantasy, it's you and her in a hotel room in HK cheating on your wife.
Baby steps, each one seeming inconsequential, all together covering a lot of ground. Most affairs start like that... This woman and I are work friends. We like to go out to lunch together. We have a great time laughing and talking about things we couldn't say to our spouses. We're just friends at work. It won't hurt if we have a couple of drinks at lunch and share secrets about what we like in bed. In a different world where we weren't married to other people, we would sleep together. Now we're headed to an out-of-town business conference together. We're both professionals, it will be nice to have someone fun to have dinner with. The waiter thinks we're married and we laughed and didn't correct him. Now we're headed back to our rooms with the connecting door. Oops.
One thing though, he may have met this other woman in HK, but then he came home to you.
If he were alive, you could kick his ass and make him beg for your forgiveness. If it were me, I'd want to kick his ass. But you can't even think about kicking the ass of a dead person without feeling just plain miserable. The anger has no place to go. It backs up, and makes you feel like you're going to die.
But you won't die. If you just hang in there, your own body will perform a work of mercy. Your body won't let these emotions stay this strong forever. The edge will fade, the grief will dull, the anger will seep away.
Again, take care of yourself in the days to come.