Adultery, Cheating and Infidelity

[Barry]

Why Did I Stay With My Wife? 5809



I saw John Edwards’ wife on NBC News last night. She was asked point-blank why she stayed with her husband after he cheated on her.
I ask myself the same question all the time.
Why did I stay with my wife?
While no one else has ever asked me the question, I want to answer it, if only for myself.

In January, 1999, my wife and I started swinging. It was not an impulsive thing. We’d talked about it for years. We joined a local on-premises swing club. On-premises means people have sex there, on the premises, as opposed to an off-premises club, where people just go to hook up, then go have sex somewhere else. Already my wife had expressed some bi-curiousness, probably as a result of our getting our first computer in December, 1997, and her explorations through internet chat rooms on AOL. We swung for five or six months, attending weekend club functions once or twice a month. It was, for me, not all I had hoped for or expected, but it wasn’t bad. It was okay. My wife and I talked about finding a woman to “complete our union,” someone we both would love and who would love us both. We weren’t looking for a couple or group of couples to simply play with. We were looking for a single woman to live with us.

In late spring of 1999, my wife’s mother’s best friend burst an aneurism in her brain and was admitted to the hospital in a coma. The daughter of this woman was known to my wife to be bisexual. What relationship they had up to then was peripheral at best. They knew of each other, had intermittent social contact over the years, and that was it. My wife spent some days at the hospital with her mother while her mother’s friend lay comatose. One day she came home and said she had “met someone.” She thought she might be the one, the one we had been looking for, and then she told me all she knew of ______, her mother’s friend’s daughter. Something didn’t seem right to me, some vibe that felt sticky. It seemed my wife described a woman who’d gone from straight through bi to gay. A gay woman, by definition, could not be who we were looking for. My wife, visibly uncertain herself, nonetheless maintained she thought ______ was still bi, and not gay. She wanted to meet with her outside the hospital. There had been some spark, she said, both literal and figurative (static electricity), which had passed between them when they hugged in the hall outside the hospital room door. She wanted to investigate this, see if there was anything there to cultivate. Because our relationship at that time was ostensibly an open one, I felt compelled to let this go on. This was in May or early June. The next couple months were rough. We stopped swinging, mainly because I had become unable to perform physically with women I really felt no chemistry with. I couldn’t just jump in the sack with a woman merely because she wanted me to. I had to have an emotional component to go along with the physical, not to mention the intellectual. By the beginning of August things were a little panicky. I knew – I felt – things were fraying around me, around us. My wife by now was all ga-ga, still maintaining that ______ could be the one, that she wasn’t gay, when I already knew without even meeting the woman that she was gay, that she could never be the one.

On August 14th, 1999, the sixth anniversary of our first date, my wife and I went over to ______’s house for dinner. The idea was to talk about what all was going on, sort of an ease-Barry’s-mind kind of effort. That was certainly the format for the evening as far as ______ was concerned. I had to work that Saturday, so my wife drove up there first, in the afternoon, and I came up later. When I got there, when we hugged, her hair felt damp and smelled of chlorine. I asked her about it, suspicious at once. She looked first guilty then perturbed, saying her hair was not wet. I let it go. ______ showed me around the house and grounds. Out back was a hot tub with a cover on it. I got her to open the cover somehow. Steam escaped. ______ looked guilty, too.

We had a nice candlelit dinner of barbecued steaks out on the deck, drinking beer and wine and talking long after sunset. ______ assured me that the “woman thing” was in her experience fast and furious, nothing for me to worry about. She was just out of a long-term relationship, not looking to get back into another one. She needed the comfort my wife offered, having just lost her mom. (My mother-in-law’s friend had passed peacefully in her coma, never waking up.) I suggested we all take a soak in the hot tub. ______ looked suspicious. Had we brought our suits? No, I responded. We all got in the tub. Naked. I remember being not at all surprised to see ______ was shaved. Just like my wife. The garden hose was brought out. We played together, all three of us, in the tub. It was glorious. There was no sex. We were all just like innocent children, simply having fun for the sheer joy of it. It was everything I ever thought sharing water should be. Except that at one point I laid my head back on the edge of the tub and thought, “I’m naked in a hot tub with two beautiful women, also naked, and both of them would be having a better time if I wasn’t here.” I couldn’t help it. It was a shining fact. And I knew it.

Afterward, ______ insisted we watch a movie. It starred Holly Hunter and Danny DeVito. I think it was titled Living Out Loud or something like that. It was about a woman in the process of finding herself, a metaphor for coming out, one might say, which was how ______ envisioned my wife. See, ______ had made it clear in her dinner conversation that she didn’t believe in bisexuality as anything more than a transitional state, something people went through on their way to gay. That’s how she saw my wife: poised to come out. And she was going to help her do that. ______could not accept that someone could be bi and not be on their way to being gay. For her such a person was just fooling themselves.

Thus started the affair my wife had with ______ for, on and off, five long years. My wife now describes it as a spell, being under a spell. It was hell for me. ______ used to get pissed when my wife referred to herself as bi. Really pissed. She actually asked my wife not to sleep with me, something my wife did not acquiesce to. She just lied to ______ like she lied to me. That whole time our lovemaking never fell below once a week, unfathomable as that may seem. I used to break a lot of ______’s plans because I’m sensitive, I know things. I would call my wife up at work and insist that she not “go out with the girls” or whatever the cover story was. I’d make it plain that I knew, that I wasn’t buying the cover story, and that if she went anyway, she’d be doing it knowing I knew. So she’d break her plans and come home. This used to piss ______ off to no end, but it gave me no pleasure. It hurt. It was just what I felt I had to do. Eventually, however, I had to just give it up. I had to just let my wife do whatever she was going to do. That almost hurt worse. That’s when I really started to lose myself entirely. I felt like the roles were reversed here, the gender roles, and so I was unprepared, had not the skills to deal with the situation. Then it hit me. What does the woman do in this situation? She knows her husband is cheating on her. She doesn’t want to leave him, feels she can’t, maybe because of the children. So what does she do? She goes inward. She turns into herself and goes inside. So that’s what I did. I followed the example of the woman in my situation. I went inward. I got lost.

My wife used to tell me it was all in my head. All my suspicion, paranoia, insecurity, it was all in my head, she would say as cover. This is what she had to do. This is why it feels to her now like it was a spell, because she is not like that. Cognitive dissonance theory applies.

In late March of 2004 my wife came to me and told me it wasn’t all in my head. It was on, the affair. It had been on since before the previous Christmas. The kicker was that ______ had decided it just wasn’t working the way things were. Not for any of the three of us. She wanted us all to get together again at her house and talk. Words cannot convey what all went through my head in that moment. It was too much. She decided? She wants to talk now? It was all too much. But then a calm seized me. Wait. Watch. Listen. Gather more data. Okay, I said. I would go with my wife to ______’s house to talk. It was some kind of ploy, I knew. It always was with ______. But if I flipped out now, any chance to learn what was really going on would be lost. So I went along.

______ wanted us to have a three-way relationship now, she said. What she envisioned followed the polyamorous model of the Vee: two different people in love with the same third person who loves both of them as well, but not in love with each other. At least not physically. That could maybe come later. I had researched polyamory on the web myself. I said, no, I didn’t see that for me. What I saw was the Triad: three people who all mutually love each other physically, emotionally and intellectually. This did not make ______ happy. She digressed into a story of another three-way relationship she’d had in the past, with another couple. While it was clear from her words and body language that she’d only had interest in the woman, she repeatedly maintained that she’d loved the man. Yet they were not still all together, neither she and the woman or the woman and the man. This was all too telling. I stuck to my guns. She said give it a month. See what happens. I refused. The evening ended at an impasse, ______ making a veiled threat by pointing out that things could just go back to the way they had been.

The truth, though, was that when my wife approached me with this news a dramatic transformation had taken place in our relationship. All subterfuge between us died. Honesty was reborn. Now it was back to her and me again. ______ was where she always was and rightfully should have been: outside our circle. My wife and I were reunited. The spell was broken.

What I found out later was that the whole thing was a scheme conjured up by ______ because she wanted to take my wife to Mexico for a week in May of that year. They both knew no cover story would ever suffice. I would know. I would not be fooled. ______ understood that she had to somehow bring me into their circle, under her own terms, in order to be able to take my wife on the trip.

It was all a ploy, a ploy to relax my senses enough to allow my wife to go on the trip to Mexico with ______, nothing more. There was never any plan to establish a Vee relationship, much less a Triad. That was all a lie.

______ went on the trip without my wife. We began the process of rebuilding our marriage. The affair was over for good. On the trip, ______ took some other woman. While in Mexico, she rolled a Jeep, driving drunk one night in and around Puerto Vallarta, which she called PV. Nobody died in the accident, I don’t even think anyone was seriously hurt, but it came to me later that I had saved my wife’s life by going along with the ploy, gathering more data, even though it hurt me tremendously to do so. I’ve no doubt in my mind that had my wife gone on that trip with ______ she would have been in the Jeep when it rolled. And she would have been killed.
Destiny was changed.

So why did I stay with my wife?
John Edwards’ wife said she stayed with him because he is good. That’s why I stayed with my wife: because she is good. And her life goes on.
That’s why I’m still with my wife even though she cheated on me, even though society says if someone cheats on you, you dump them, because I love her. I love her so much. I would walk into fire for her.
And I did.

Peace & Love,
Barry

[mtmynd]

An excellent write, Barry, and one that would not be easy for anyone to put into words much less even give thought to do so.

There's a lot to comment on within this as it speaks to the heart of a relationship and one that obviously is built on both friendship and love or else the relationship would've dissolved.

Thanks for the honesty and trust to post such a piece and congratulations to you and your wife for growing beyond the temporal barriers that came up 10 years ago. I'm sure your both are much better people for it in many ways.

[Barry]

Thanks, Cecil. I appreciate the flavor of your reply. It's been five long years coming back from my own season in hell, and these words have been hard in coming. You are right. She and I are both better people for it, somehow.

Peace,
Barry

[hester_prynne]

Wow that's quite a story...alot to digest.
I tend to edit it down to something like being tolerant of another's self-indulgences, as long as they are honest about it. It's the lies and deceit that destroy a bond I think, lies and deceit that bring out the worst in us.
I think you really love her and that she is lucky to have you. I can't help but wonder how it would have gone if she had taken up with a man, would that have been more difficult to tolerate?
Your story gives me lots to think about, having been betrayed myself by my daughter's father, a couple of times, lots of lies and deceit in it too.
We are really good friends now and sometimes I think he regrets that he lied to me. I think he understands that if he hadn't lied, we may have been able to muddle through it....but at least we are good friends so all was not lost.
Thanks so much for sharing this. I wish more people would share like this. It broadens the horizens of humanness. I like that.
H

[judih]

I can hear the history, the reflection, the coming to terms.

One technical wish, if i may: instead of using "___________," I wish you'd choose a name, any name - Sophie, Medusa, Melancholy, just to make the physical task of reading easier.

[constantine]

great piece of writing, barry. very compelling.

[Barry]

Hester asks:

I can't help but wonder how it would have gone if she had taken up with a man, would that have been more difficult to tolerate?

I think actually it was harder because it was a woman. If it was a man I could have at least contemplated going over there and kicking his fucking ass. This is a woman who acts like a man, a bad man. She'd make my wife dress and make herself up to look like a little girl. She was in the habit of going to pick-up bars an hour before close. She stalked my wife, just "showing up" places where she was in public. These are all bad man tactics, and there would be no question of this if she was a man. But because she's a woman, she got away with it. I always said it was because she had the appearance, if not the reality, of wealth and power, that if she was a waitress this never would have happened. A long time after it was over, when she had come back to herself enough to be able to say it, my wife admitted that, yes, to some degree, it was the money. It's not an easy thing to admit. It exposes a weakness in a person to make such an admission. But the exposure and aknowledgement of said weakness is the only first step toward overcoming it. The strength my wife showed in doing so made me love her even more. And this woman was perceptive enough to see that unexposed, unaknowledged weakness. She used that to manipulate my wife. You can't imagine how I seethe because of that, even today just thinking about it. If it was a man, I'd have known exactly how to deal with him. I just shudder to think how.
And you're right about the lies and deceipt. That's the deal-breaker. I mean, our relationship was ostensibly open when the affair began. But open means you don't lie, right? My wife for some reason wanted to be with this woman. And to be with her, she felt she had to lie. If the woman truly loved her, why would she let, much less make, her hurt herself by lying?
Thank you for thanking me for sharing. Too often the response is, "Wow, overshare," or, "too much information." I feel the opposite. I think this world suffers from a classic case of undershare.

Thanks, judih. Your heartfelt words soothe. I like the tip. Medusa is perfect. In a fiction work loosely based on this story I named her Lexie Gorgon.

Thanks, constantine. I'm glad you stuck it out through the whole read.

Peace,
Barry