Letters to the Editor
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To self-deluded anonymous at 10:23 a.m.
You don't give sex that much weight because it's base and random, but you think your husband is satisfied with what you have to offer?
You better hope your husband feels the same way about sex that you do; otherwise, you are about the primest candidate for a cheating husband that I've seen in a long time.
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Well, if the cheater were a woman and you were a man ...
...your story would be one of the greatest romantic chick-flicks of the latest years: "The Bridges of Madison Country".
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He should have asked
Sexual infidelity may not be that big a deal, but betrayal and using people is. He really should have asked, it would make all the difference. Its pretty understandable really if someone handed an early death sentence wants to do some extra curricular things. There will be people who think that sounds utterly loony, to ask if you can have an affair, but thats better than betraying and using someone and not everyone would be against it. This is about what kind of person it made him to do what he did.
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Many divorced people have had to deal with almost exactly the same thing---look to them for advice and evidence that you can indeed recover from this blow.
First, LW you need to find a therapist--someone you can talk to to help you work this through.
Second, while your exact situation is indeed very uncommon, perhaps you can take some comfort and advice from the many people who have "lost" a loving spouse while he or she was still alive---through divorce.
Divorced people have often had to deal with the same things you are struggling with.
They often split from their spouse after a long marriage, often after a sudden realization of their spouse's infidelity that hit them off guard, and often after having spent most of their life and having children with their ex.
You need to come to terms with all the time and dreams you spent with a person who ultimately turned out to be a different, much less admirable, person than you originally thought they were. You are probably bitterly regretting that there are no "do-overs" in life--you can't transform yourself back into your younger self and try it again with another, better, person.
You are probably wondering, did you "waste" you life with that person? Are you children, the family you built with them, all a "waste", too?
The answer, of course, is a loud, "NO!"
Like survivors of divorce, you have to work through your feelings and figure out how to separate your feelings of disgust about your ex-spouse's actions from the good times that you did in fact really have together, the wonderful family you built, and the wonderful children that you had together.
The good things of your relationship are still and always will be real. The fact that your husband had flaws, and that you hate him for his flaws, does not negate those good things.
Good luck.
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Getting annoyed as I read these letters.
I can't believe how many posters are rationalizing away his behavior with his illness: I die of cancer, therefore I cheat.
Obviously, we don't even know the timing of his diagnosis versus his cheating. But how does unequivocal, sleazy betrayal (and leaving evidence of it for his beloved wife to find) become some kind of reasonable thing that his widow should now be okay with?
I've never seen such a bunch of spineless enablers in my life. Maybe serial killers should come to this site for a dose of hugs and understanding.
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Please buy these books
Karey43 was right. This is like a divorce. Read this extract from "Mars and Venus starting over" (I haven't found the text and I am quoting by heart):
"Mary was a widow who had remarried years after losing her first husband. When her second husband left her, she found the divorce more painful than the death of her first husband. In her widowhood, she has lost her man but the REALITY of his love for her was untouched. On the contrary, when she divorced, she was left wondering whether her second husband had once loved her" (Excuse me for my bad English and the imperfect quotation but I think you get the idea).
A year ago, my girlfriend (after six years of being together and six months before the wedding) dumped me. It was the end of the world for me (I can't count the number of times that I have cried or I have dreamt of her). Oddly, the most hurtful thing was not the end of the relationship (which was EXTREMELY hurtful) but the way she did it, which made me seriously wonder whether she had once loved me. Like LW, I am not able to know the truth. In case of LW is because his husband is dead. In my case, because my ex rejected all kind of contact with me and didn't answer my emails (I guess she feels kind of guilty).
So what do you do? These books have helped me a lot:
"Mars and Venus starting over". John Gray. (I don't like very much the Mars and Venus approach but this book is REALLY good and I think it is very useful for your case).
"Coming apart: Why relationship end and how to live through the ending of yours". Daphne Rose Kingma.
Please buy them and read them. I wish you luck.
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Men are just defective women
To be either corrected or destroyed.
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@ anon Dec13, 11:27 AM
I think the sentiment is more on the order of "don't presume to judge a man for a madness that you have never had to face." There are all kinds of life-altering events that cause people to go a little nuts, but undergoing the experience of your own death spiral is about as extreme as it gets. Until you personally have been diagnosed with a terminal illness, you have no idea how you would react. You only know how you IMAGINE you would react.
I have no idea what the timeline is for his infidelity, but I hope that it is as the commenters hypothesize. I imagine I would find it easier to cope with that explanation, should I find myself in the letter writer's position. Thus is it much less about the failure of the marriage -- the more painful alternative -- than about the failure of the spouse specifically caused by the terminal illness. The former, the survivor could and should have done more to prevent. The latter is virtually unpreventable, and thus less of a burden to the survivor, and less of a debasement of what was good about the marriage.