Me: WH 36 Her: BW 38 (RomanticInnocenc) DS1: 7 DS2: 5 DS3: 4 DD: 2 DDay#1 08/Jan/14 DDay#2 10/Jan/14 PM's with men only pls. Love is a choice. You dont fall into love. You step into it willingly - and you PRACTISE every day!

Getting too comfortable?

More just need to get this out of my head than anything else. Haven't been here for a looooong time. Maybe there's a clue in that. It has been 7.5 years since D-Day. We had a newborn son at the time. Since then we have had three more children and finally bought our own home which we will soon be moving into. It's a pretty massive time in our lives.

Today, at a work function, I found myself in a situation where I was asked in front of a large group of colleagues if I could please give a female co-worker a lift to the venue we were all heading to for lunch. A car ride alone with a woman is not ok as per our long-time established boundaries.

In the couple seconds that followed my thought process wasn't the right one. It should have been 'BZZZT NO'... Straight away. Give the right answer first, the answer that honours my wife and the horrible mess I made of our lives, and THEN figure out how to deal with how that looked.

Instead, that few seconds sounded more like, 'If I say no to this, will it look blatantly obvious why I'm saying no, and therefore begin a string of water-cooler gossip style rumours and in so doing - inadvertently share the true nature of my marital history with a bunch of people I work with.

I panicked, not wanting information my BS has never even shared with her own family to become the topic of salacious work place banter, and said yes. And gave this lady a ride to lunch.

To be clear, I couldn't give less of a fuck whether or not these people were aware of MY history. I owned that, and the fact that if/when anyone I would rather didn't know found out - that I would have to deal with it. Whole mess is my doing after all. But in this really important moment today when I had an opportunity to make a very good choice, in an environment where my BS had absolutely no way of knowing where/what I was doing, I managed to fail to make that right choice. I managed to not click straight away that out of those two options (even if you fully accept that I was more worried about sharing my wife's secrets than I was about my own embarrassment - and I don't expect a single person on here to believe that for one second) the one I chose was by FFAAARRRR the worst. I put the stability of our marriage at risk in favour of a bunch of randoms (most of whom have never met my wife) being able to speculate about why I might not want to give a lady a ride.

I feel like this was monumentally stupid, and even more incredibly disappointing - that given where we are in life after my affairs, that I would have allowed myself to become this comfortable, that I would be able to be asked for a ride by a woman and say yes at all. I feel like these are the kinds of moments that as WS's we are basically training for and making sure we are safe for from the day we get our shit together onwards. Basically being battle ready I guess. And the idea is that whenever that scenario that could compromise us arrives, that we know exactly what to do, what to say, and we do it or say it.

I failed at that today. BS is beyond furious of course, but worse than that, there is so much good and positive stuff going on in our lives, it also throws her into a horrible familiar place full of doubt and fear and sadness - and it saps any of the good or happiness out and that's so so unfair on her.

Like I said, I think I just needed to get these thoughts out, I don't have any questions as such, I know without equivocation what happened today was unacceptable and that I need to reflect, BIG TIME, on just how comfortable I have gotten and maybe come up with some ideas as to how and why I've allowed it to happen. And in the mean time just do anything and everything BS needs to work towards feeling safe again. Not presuming for a moment that that's a foregone conclusion.

I think I chose this place to come back to for this because when I was here before there was always something I hadn't thought of and there was always an angle (or several) I was missing and so there was always an opportunity for better growth through the insights of others. I'm always open to that, even if it's a slap down. Hence the lack of stop sign.

[This message edited by theseseatsRtaken at 4:44 AM, July 7th (Wednesday)]

60 comments posted: Wednesday, July 7th, 2021