Five years after my wife's affair, I'm having second thoughts.

A betrayed husband wonders if his early efforts to save his marriage prevented him from recognizing deeper issues that plague him today.

Dear Lauren,

My wife cheated on me four years ago, and I have spent the time since working to reconcile… or have I? We worked through the initial shock during the early days of COVID-19 in 2020, with a few marriage counseling sessions, a lot of discussion about what happened and why, and then we were both forced to work from home.

Since I found out (D-day was Dec. 26, 2019), I have learned a great deal about her… and much of it is NOT good. She claimed that she made a mistake, loved me, wanted the marriage to work and said she would do anything “not to lose her family”. However, her affair partner was a colleague (her boss) and he moved back to the east coast at the same time of discovery and confrontation. She then proceeded to communicate with him for months, hiding DMs and texts on different technology platforms. What she wrote was intimate and longing and she even asked if they could survive the years while she “honored her children and obligations to her marriage”.

Discussions about the affair always ended up in a defensive death-loop of hyper emotional justification and the facts in her narrative shifted from conversation to conversation to the point where I just threw my hands up. Now, almost five years later, I question why I am in this marriage. We are friends and we laugh and talk — never about the affair as the conversations are exhausting and unproductive. I have instigated the conversations from the start: I found the marriage counselor, moved us from the home with the bad memories, researched, read, and listened to vital Podcasts.

But now I wonder if I was so hell-bent to fix things, that issues remain partially, or inadequately, addressed. Did Covid, a new home, a new job, sending the kids off to school, exhaust my spirit for our marriage? Or am I now recognizing the likelihood that the marriage will fail?

Sincerely,
Reconsidering

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Dear Reconsidering,

I can empathize with the idea that you went into triage to save your marriage after the revelation of your wife’s affair. Now that the dust has long settled, you have concerns, both about your wife, and about the meaning of the imbalance in those early efforts — concerns that are making you question the authenticity and durability of the reconciliation between you.