Posted on Reddit by username leon1638
My wife (37f) and I (37m) have been married for 17 years and have 2 children (9f)/(7m). In the beginning of September I discovered she was messaging another guy on Facebook messenger. I find out that it is a 28 year old she met at the bar a few weeks ago and the conversations were more than friendly. I left that night and have been staying at my parents house ever since. Over the next few days I went to the house and pleaded with her to not destroy our marriage and I want to work on what was broken. She was insistent that she resented me too much and that she wants a divorce.
She says I am a great dad and I help a lot around the house but I withhold attention from her. She has very extreme anger problems and can’t take any criticism. If I try to bring up any issues that I have she will blow up and when she starts yelling it doesn’t stop for a long time. A lot of the time she will yell for over an hour or two before she stops. Due to this I learned to just stop engaging with her when she is upset and I pretty much ignore her the rest of the day. It has been my coping mechanism for a while and since I feel like I can’t bring issues up we don’t ever talk about it again. The next day we just pretend that nothing happened and move on with life. I know that rugsweeping all our issues has caused the circumstance that we are in now.
Over the few days of me pleading with her she agreed that she will respect our marriage and she just needs time to see if the resentment would go away. Fast forward to 1 week later and I couldn’t get ahold of her at 10:00 p.m. and I know she has her phone on her all the time. I decided to look up her phone records and discover that she has been talking to the guy for over 4 hours every night since I had moved out. Due to footage from our doorbell cam I found out that they had been having phone sex (she was talking to her friend right outside our door about it). He doesn’t actually live in our state but is only here for 2 weeks and then leaves for 4 weeks for work. I confronted her with the information and she tells me that she feels justified for her actions and she shows no remorse for what she is doing.
Over the next few weeks she tells me that she doesn’t know what she wants. She doesn’t think that this new relationship will even last and she is upset about how her life is going to be destroyed. She tries to tell as many people as possible why she is justified in wanting a divorce and even tells them she is seeing someone else. People try to tell her that if she has any hope for our marriage that she needs to stop seeing this guy. She tells me that she knows she is going to regret her decision in a few months but she continues on seeing her AP.
She tells me the craziest stuff like we need to take a break for a year and then we can try again. Since her AP is not around most of the time she tries inviting me to the house to have dinner. She tries to call me everyday and wants to talk for hours. In the beginning I was giving in but after reading all the advice on reddit I have stopped. She is a classic cake eater. She doesn’t want to give up our stable relationship and our family but she wants attention from another guy. She was served with divorce papers this week.
I still can’t believe that she could do this. I never thought she would be a person to cheat. I don’t know how she can continue with what she is doing and destroy the life that we have built together. Now I don’t get to see my kids everyday like I had for so many years. I hate being alone. I hate that I don’t have anyone to talk to and tell stupid pointless things about my life to. I hate that my future I had dreamed of has been destroyed.