I Don't Even Know What to Say

I'm sorry I'm not really able to write anything that makes sense because I can't make sense of it in my head. But...

I've been married nearly 30 years. I knew about the flirting that would NOT stop no matter how angry, devastated, or vocal I was. I knew about the EAs with coworkers at every job. I knew about the porn addiction that stemmed from the ED that stemmed from all of the above because I couldn't trust him. We've discussed all of that so many times over the years, and I always tried to help him get himself together so we could be happy.

I DIDN'T know, until last month, that I was one of six girls that he'd been involved with the year we started dating. I know that doesn't sound like anything at all. But I was number 4 of 6. All these years, he's peddled this "thunderstruck" story about seeing me for the first time and being too shy to ask me out. The girl ahead of me was 3 weeks prior to our meeting. The girl after me was 3 weeks after we first slept together. The girl after that, number 6, showed up two weeks after I'd bought my plane ticket and was rearranging my life to be with him. I had no idea these people even existed. He'd told me he'd been in one relationship that year that she chose to end, and that I was only his second girlfriend.

I guess my problem TODAY, AT THIS MOMENT, because Lord knows it's everchanging, is that with these new revelations about my husband as a younger man, there has been no aspect of our relationship where I was ever the only girl. I don't even have "good old days" before all of the other stuff started to look back on fondly or sustain me during the tough times. This isn't a marriage problem, this is a "him" problem.

I have always been supplemented. And he can't tell me at which points in our marriage he was actually with me and when he was smitten and wrapped up in whoever the other girl was. So, for me, right now, I feel like I have been alone the whole time without being smart enough to realize it. And I feel like every adult crisis I've faced, I've faced alone. And I don't know how to handle that fact that I have been so wrong about him for so many years and that it feels like no aspect of our romantic and sexual lives, or even our "friendship," has been real.

5 comments posted: Tuesday, August 1st, 2023