I cheated on my husband. There I said it. Well he must be a terrible husband right? He must not pay you any attention right? He must be selfish and never spend time at home right? He must not help our around the house right? He must be unappreciative right? He must have let himself go physically right? He must never give you compliments right? NO. A resounding no to all of these reasons. My husband is an attentive, romantic, selfless, gorgeous, well dressed, helpful, appreciative, complimentary, amazing father figure. Yes, of course like everyone he has his flaws, but he is a great man. Maybe not always a great husband, but always a great man. We have a wonderful blended family with 5 children ranging in age from 20 to 2, a beautiful home, and a pretty comfortable life. So why did I cheat? It is a question I am still working to figure out. In everything I read about cheaters, one of the first things they say to do is to figure out why. Why you strayed, why you were looking elsewhere, why you made this choice. And make no mistake, I know this was my choice. That I made a conscience decision to cheat on my husband. I have ran around my head with many scenarios that make an attempt to justify what I have done with past behaviors of my husband and none of them make sense because none of them are why. The why resides in me.

I love my husband dearly and that has never been in question for me. I have never doubted my love and affection for my husband which makes figuring out why I cheated even harder. I do not want to imagine my life without my husband in it. I do not want to see a future without him. So the question remains, why? Why would I risk throwing all of this away? Why would I disrupt my family? Why would I go to another man for any reason? Well, there isn’t one glaring reason. There are many things that play into why I cheated. My father cheated on my mother from the time I was quite young. I grew up in a very religious household so when this happened it shook me to my core. I vividly remember having a doll and naming her Cathy. My mom came to me in tears, and my mom has never been one to cry or show weakness, and asked me to choose another name for my doll. I don’t remember exactly what age I was, but the fact that I was young enough to have a doll lets me know I was too young to deal with the fact my father was cheating on my mother with a woman named Cathy. But I knew. I realized this was the reason why. Whether it was at that moment or later, I knew. I remember arguments and yelling when my parents thought my brother and sister and I were asleep. I remember my mother trying to never let us see any effects of this. I also remember it wasn’t one time. My parents later divorced, but not until I was a junior in high school. I do not doubt there were numerous conversations about “I won’t do this again” and “Please forgive me” and clearly my mom took him back time and time again until something, perhaps our house being foreclosed on, caused her to finally leave. Growing up extremely religious confused this situation even more in my mind because I knew adultery was wrong, but what of forgiveness and how much forgiveness can one give out before you are just a door mat? I saw my mother work her ass off for years after the divorce to support my siblings and myself and saw her strong and amazing sense of self return. I knew I would never cheat on my future husband. I mean how could I? I saw and felt firsthand what it did to my family. Yet here I am. An already once divorced woman, who has cheated on her husband.

Our marriage of five years was overall happy and adventurous. Adventurous in many ways others would view as unconventional. Since dating we explored sexually together with others. It heightened our private intimate times and we agreed on most things. If I didn’t agree I was too shy and not assertive enough to speak up. So I just went along with it. Nothing was ever done to physically hurt me, nor was I ever in danger of any sort. There was never any crazy dominatrix going on and often times my husband just watched. My self esteem was sometimes heightened and sometimes damaged. Again, I had every opportunity to speak up, but while dating my husband I was afraid I would lose him. That if I didn’t do these adventurous things, he would find someone who would. My husband is quite the catch. He is amazingly attractive physically and his mind is even more so. He is from a large family and his unwaivering love and adoration for them is simply admirable. His willingness to become involved with me, a single mother of 4 at the time, is something most people would question, but he has always been open and honest about becoming involved in their lives (which took over a year) and about treating them as his own flesh and blood. He is superbly educated and loves to read. He is a sports junky and his passion for sports and reading has bled over to our 11 year old son and it warms my heart to see their bond over sports and books. He is passionate about nearly everything he does and does not appreciate things being done “half ass.” Had I stood up more times than I fell down perhaps I wouldn’t be in this predicament. But none the less I do not blame anyone but myself for my sin against my husband. And we had both made bad choices throughout our marriage when under the influence of alcohol and had hurt each other. Soon after our son was born he was out with friends and came home with a few of them and a lot of drinking had gone on and while I was in our bedroom feeding the baby he was on our back porch getting a blow job from a woman. I saw this with my own eyes and was stunned, hurt, sickened, rocked to my core, and contemplated leaving him at that moment. I went as far as to pack a bag and put the baby in the car seat. But I instead went in to full crazy person mode and confronted the two of them while still in the act and started screaming and kicked the woman out of our house all the while my drunk husband defending her and calling me “crazy lady.” But through all of this we found our way back to each other. We realized our love was stronger than the hurt. We wanted to make our marriage work. We knew we were worth the work.

I made rules with my husband about our semi-open marriage. I was going on a trip, a mini high school reunion of sorts where there would be men I hadn’t seen in 20 years. There was also a man there whom I had sex with a time before when my husband and I were traveling through Atlanta. This was one of those agreed upon sexual adventures and the sex was even video taped and my husband and I watched it numerous times together. There was no relationship to speak of between this other man and I. We were old high school friends who spoke occasionally about sporting events, rival college basketball teams, and on occasion when going through Atlanta my husband, he, and I would go out for drinks. Before this trip my husband and I had discussed what could possibly happen  and I said that if anything went beyond group flirting that I would call him. Well, fast forward and things did go beyond group flirting and I did not let my husband know. I somehow thought in my head that he would think it was okay because of our past, because he liked it when I told him about being with other men, because I had done it before. But none of those reasons take in to account that I didn’t fulfill an agreement I had made to my husband to let him know before anything sexual happened. I ended up going to another man’s room (same man from Atlanta) and making out with him and giving him a blow job.  I didn’t tell my husband. Yes there was alcohol and some weed involved so much of my judgement was impaired. But my actions following were not impaired and are what has caused the hurt and brokenness in my marriage today. The next morning I contemplated telling my husband what happened, but I didn’t. I have no real reason other than fear. I feared he would be mad and hate me. I feared he wouldn’t believe that was all that happened. I feared our relationship wasn’t strong enough to withstand it. I feared myself. I feared the unknown. I feared losing him. And that fear took over. I told my husband that I had kissed this other man and that was all that happened. Lie. I told him I wasn’t keeping anything from him. Lie. I told him I would never do anything to put our relationship in jeopardy. Lie, I had just done that with those words. I have no idea why I kept lying. Why the next night I kissed another man. Maybe I felt like I had already lied, so why not? But the more telling reason is that I was a goody goody in high school. I wasn’t attractive. I didn’t go on dates. I didn’t have boyfriends. And these guys on this trip now saw me in a new light. I will say I am a late bloomer and grew into myself in my twenties. With a newfound confidence I was being sought after on this trip. I wasn’t in need of it. Or at least I didn’t think I was in need of it. But on this trip I was somehow transported back in time. I was outside of my “normal” life. I wasn’t a mom, I wasn’t a wife, I wasn’t a nanny, I was an 18 year old. I was also in a fantasy. You cannot escape real life. It is real for a reason. It is real life and it is yours whether you want it or not. Yes my life at home could be monotonous and stressful and full of car rider lines and baby puke and diaper changes and mouthy teenagers, but that was my real life. The life I loved and the life I chose to live in. None of those 5 children asked to be born. I did that. And I had choose to ignore that life and fabricate some vacation fantasy in the meantime. I choose to ignore the amazing relationship I had with my husband (not perfect, but amazing) and abuse his trust in me and his trust in us. I have no doubt at the moment of this trip he loved me better than I loved him. Were there other times that I loved him better than he loved me? Yes, but for this time, for this betrayal I acted out…he loved me better. He knew me better. He knew I needed a break and offered a break to me many times and because of my nature to control things I did not take him up on his selfless offers to send me off for a weekend. I choose to ignore his gestures for me to relax, to go out to dinner with friends, to sleep in. I choose to take things in to my own hands and not think about the consequences. To not think about the trust he placed in my hands to handle our relationship and the trust we had. Or the trust he had rather. I do trust him with my life. But I didn’t trust us. I didn’t trust that he would be okay with the “beyond group flirting.” I didn’t want to hurt him in the aftermath and so I lied. I continued to hurt him and take advantage of his trust in me and in our marriage. I did this. I have to look at us now and see the wreckage I have caused. There is mended wreckage within the pile. Wreckage from the past that we glued and taped and molded back together with each other. But this new wreckage is on me. I am to blame. I am a broken woman looking at a broken marriage and wanting so badly for it to be mended once again.

My husband is not currently speaking to me. We were trying to find our way back to each other and I was gossiping with a friend and told her something he had told me in confidence. Nothing earth shattering, nothing anyone else would see as a big deal, but our marriage is in a fragile state and I have stepped on the wreckage with this one act. It has been two days since my husband called me a liar and told me not to speak to him. In those two days I have gone through the gamut of emotions and I have finally looked within myself to find the reasons why I cheated and why I was hesitant to call it cheating and why I was defensive and wanting to make my act equal to my husband’s previous bad choices. Although I do not have answers to all of those questions, I am closer to figuring them out and closer to being sure they never happen again in any kind of relationship I may have in the future. I miss my best friend. I have so many things that happen daily that I want to share with him and he has no desire to speak to me. I miss my husband and his touch. I miss my lover. I miss watching our weekly TV shows together. I miss playing with our son together. I miss dinner together. I miss having wine in the evenings. I miss sleeping next to him. Ironically we are in the midst of a kitchen renovation. There are literally exposed beams, torn up flooring, holes in the ceiling, stove in the middle of the floor, things in disarray. We had plans to go together to pick out counter tops and paint colors for the cabinets, a new stove, a new dishwasher, etc. Much like our marriage is in disarray at this moment. We are like strangers in the same house. The older kids are soon to realize what is going on and the strain between us if they haven’t already. Construction is to start to rebuild the kitchen tomorrow. No counter tops, paint color, no dishwasher have been chosen together. I hope and pray with everything in my soul we can somehow rebuild our relationship as well. I hope the damage I have done is not too much to mend back together. I hope my past experiences have not damaged my outlook on life so much that I have managed to ruin my own marriage that I truly treasure more than anything in this life. That the wreckage is not beyond repair.