Search Your Feelings Luke

Written Dec. 31, 2008

When I left Mark, I truly believed that the pain and hurt I was feeling could be overcome. I believed that it was possible for my marriage to survive the injury of Anne’s infidelity. The question left in my mind was did I want my marriage to survive. As a Christian, I know that God hates divorce, but I also know that in this case, I had His blessing to end it. Did I really want to remain in my marriage?
The woman who walked in Christmas night was the woman I loved, and as much as I found myself wishing that the news she had hit me with had changed that, it had not. I still loved her. One of the ideas that I found most troubling was the feeling that it was the things about me that had made me a good husband, that had allowed this to happen. I had sent her off with my blessing, never guessing that she might be doing anything other than what she said she was going to do. I had helped her pack for crying out loud. I had spoken to her hours before the act and encouraged her to “enjoy her evening”. This line of thought took me to dark places. Had she enjoyed her evening? The imagery this thought brought to mind was devastating. How could I do this? How could I ever get these thoughts out of my mind? The fact was that the only way for me to move forward was to get answers to these questions.
Mark had told me that if I was going to get past this, I needed to decide what I would need from her, and to let her know what those things were. I had to think about what had been lost, and what it would take to get it back. I had to think about the hurt and face it head on. One of my first rational thoughts in all of this was that no matter how angry I felt, my anger was not going to be part of any healing. Not for me, not for her, not for us. I had to set it aside, and not let it be what I was being motivated by. My grandmother had once told me there was no good excuse for bad behavior. I could not let anything my wife had done lead me to act badly. I went home and told Anne we needed to talk.
We sat down and I told her that there were some things she needed to understand and agree to if we were going to have a chance. Any sense of security I had in our marriage had been destroyed. I told her that my right to feel secure had to trump her right to privacy. I needed to be free to check her phone, e-mail, purse, or anything else if I felt the need to reassure myself that she was being honest with me. She agreed. I told her that all things she said or did would be seen in the context of her infidelity. There would be no such thing as an inconsequential promise. If she said she was going to do something, she would have to treat that as a sacred promise to be kept at all costs. She agreed. The next step was harder.
Intimacy has always been very important for Anne and I. It is how we have always communicated those things that are so hard to put into words, but any thought of sex and Anne immediately brought images to my mind that were unbearable now. If we were going to go forward, I had questions that needed to be answered, even if I didn’t like the answers. Mark had told me that nagging questions would eat me alive. They had to be asked, and they had to be answered. Anne and I sat for another talk. I told her I didn’t want or need all the gory details, but that I needed to know what had happened and what she was thinking and feeling as they happened. She cried as she told me. It was hard for her to say and hard for me to hear, but it answered my questions, and allowed me to replace some images with new ones. Knowing allowed me to begin to make peace with the images in my mind, and ultimately allowed us to take our first tentative steps towards regaining intimacy. So far, this has been the hardest part. It has also been the most fruitful. Any question unanswered, or any nagging thought unacknowledged will eat you alive and undermine your efforts to heal and move forward. No matter how scary or ugly the thought or question, it need to be shared and answered. Good moments can go bad by the strangest of triggers. A single song lyric can lead to a sleepless night. If a thought troubles me for more than an hour, I need to tell her about it. It’s not easy. Nothing is easy right now. While one person can destroy a marriage, it takes two to rebuild one, and those two people have to communicate if they hope to succeed. So far, we are talking and working together. If that fails, we will fail, but so far, so good.
Don