I just feel completely humiliated...
Oh, God! This whole thing is such a sordid mess; I don't even know where to start. I guess some background is needed to even begin communicating the emotional impact and complication my WS's betrayal has created in our lives. Maybe my experience isn't that uncommon, but it sure feels that way to me.
The first thing that needs to be said is that my wife and I are deeply involved in our religious community. This is going to be a major factor in understanding the context, so please bear with me if the details seem a little strange or too familiar. I will do my absolute best to only explain the necessary details and keep from including value judgements where the religious elements are concerned.
As of today, we have been [mostly] happily married for almost 19 years. We have five kids. Our oldest is sixteen, our youngest two. She has been an amazing mother to them the whole time. We live with her parents in a house that I built with her father who is now struggling with dementia, designed to accommodate both our families, and that we helped pay for, which is going to severely complicate things once I explain how this all went down. To make sense of the current situation, though, I'm going to have to start back in 2018.
2018: My wife was a teacher at a religious private school for several years to get free tuition for our kids. For the last two years, she'd taken two students, in particular, under her wing. Both kids, a girl, and a boy, come from abusive homes, and both had experienced sexual trauma in their past from relatives outside the home. They were both falling apart and failing out. My wife decided to do what she could to help them. She tutored them, talked to their parents, and got them into counseling, and by their senior year (2018) they had both done a complete 180. By the time they graduated, they were both spending a lot of time at our home to escape the unhealthy environments they lived in.
Shortly after graduation, my wife told me she felt prompted to offer them both to come and live with us. This was also when she was let go from her teaching position for unrelated (I think) reasons. They were both eighteen and wanted to get out of their situations as fast as possible. I wasn't sure how I felt, but I wanted to support my wife in the good she was trying to do, so I agreed. They were good kids, helpful, and didn't cause any trouble for us. They quarantined with us through covid and were a huge help when we all ended up getting sick. It didn't take long for them to start calling us mom and dad, and we basically adopted them into the family.
In our faith, it's traditional for young men to serve a proselyting mission, which they pay for themselves, when they turn eighteen. Around the end of 2019, the young man left for his two-year mission, and the young woman decided to try and reconcile with her dad who had divorced from her mother while she was living with us.
At the time, I was relieved when he left. Despite him generally being polite and helpful, he had just started rubbing me the wrong way. In retrospect, I think I was unconsciously already noticing warning signs that something was wrong. In particular, he was too attached to my wife. He followed her around like a lost puppy, and constantly wanted to talk through his feelings about his family of origin, mostly just with her. I don't think they were having sex yet, but it's clear their relationship was becoming too close and intense.
Prior to them moving in and for some time after, we had a healthy and fulfilling sex-life. Consequently, my wife was pregnant with our fifth child through most of 2019 and gave birth about a month before (I'm just going to refer to him as the AP from here on out) the AP left for his mission. It was around this time that all intimacy stopped. I didn't think too much of that because her libido tanked for several months while nursing our other kids as well. The problem this time was that it never came back. Then we started having other problems; tension in the marriage that I couldn't understand. She kept criticizing me or bringing up issues but refusing to articulate what resolving those issues would look like. Finally, after several arguments, and me trying every way I could think of to resolve our conflicts, she just said "we don't have that kind of relationship" any time I mentioned our intimacy issues. I started reading relationship books, especially the Gottman books, but I couldn't get her interested in reading them with me, or in working on our relationship really at all.
At this point, AP had been gone on his mission for about a year. Missionaries are encouraged to call home once a week and since we were essentially his only family, he called us. I was kind to him, and listened, gave advice from my own mission experiences, but I never really developed a parental-style bond with him. My wife on the other hand, completely adopted the role of a mother to him. She fought for him, advocated for him when he had a spot of health problems, went to her extended family when he needed help paying for his mission, and became extremely offended when anyone suggested she was anything less than his mother. To be honest, I chalked up a lot of warning signs to her adopting a mother role for him. He'd had a deeply troubled youth and was dealing with nightmares. He probably has a bit of PTSD, so I didn't think it was all that strange when he was calling quite a bit more than once a week, or at odd hours. She was just talking him through his emotional issues.
Fast forwarding a bit; our relationship kind of normalized. I stopped trying to initiate intimacy, which reduced our conflict. I continued trying to improve our relationship, making sure to text her during the day and say, "I love you," doubling down on trying to follow through on things I agreed to take care of, taking her out on dates, all of which she tolerated but found exasperating.
As AP's homecoming date approached, she began complaining to me increasingly about our real kids and becoming increasingly excited about AP coming home because he "is actually helpful!" and I began to dread the day he would come home. I could see signs that it would exacerbate our relationship issues, and cause problems for our kids as she showed him blatant favoritism.
2022: About six months before AP's homecoming, my wife asked me to look at an issue with her phone. While I was looking at it, I saw a text come in from him and noticed that he called her "my love," and called her beautiful. My heart dropped into my stomach and alarm bells started ringing loud and clear! Looking back; this was when I should have confronted her, but I didn't have time to look through her texts right then, and I didn't want to make unfounded accusations. For some reason it didn't even occur to me to just bring it to her and ask, "what the hell is this all about?"
I decided to wait until I could properly look at her text messages, but I didn't remember her passcode, and I didn't want to tip her off that I was suspicious. Over the next couple months, I convinced myself that I was reading too much into it. If there was one bedrock of our 18 years of marriage it was that I could trust my wife! Her whole personality is built around being trustworthy and fiercely loyal! I told myself that he was probably developing an unhealthy attachment to her because of his emotional issues, and that we would address it together when he got home.
Present: Well, he got home in the last week of October, and at first I thought my fears appeared to be unjustified. I started feeling guilty for not trusting my wife. Everything about their relationship appeared to be that of a mother and son! She scolded him for inappropriate jokes, or arguing with the other kids, we put him in the chore rotation with the other kids. When my mother-in-law expressed concern over her going places alone with him, she completely flipped her lid and expressed how entirely inappropriate that kind of concern was since he was practically our own child!
Then, in the first week of November, she asked me to look at her phone again and gave me the passcode. I looked at their most recent text messages and saw some things that hinted they might be working toward an emotional affair, but honestly, it didn't seem as bad as I was afraid it might be. It did seem strange, though, that the message history was shorter than it should be, as if she had deleted them all recently and only had a few days' worth of history.
About a week before thanksgiving, she blew up at me as we were going to bed because I had put my arm on her stomach under her shirt to snuggle the night before. She was irrationally angry about it and threatened not to let me sleep in our bed anymore if I did it again. That night I couldn't sleep. My stomach was churning, and I felt sick. Finally, around midnight, I carefully got out of bed and took her phone into the bathroom. Sure enough, now there were messages unmistakably about them having sex in the more recent text history. She didn't have Facebook messenger installed, but I saw that she had Facebook open on a tab in her browser, so I checked messenger there and they had been chatting for months before he got home about how excited they were to have sex when he got home.
And to really just drive home the weirdness, mixed in with all the sex talk are conversations about how proud of him she is for serving his mission, and following all our religious cultural norms after getting home. They even make plans to attend our Temple together right after talking about their orgasms. It's obvious they're completely blind to their own hypocrisy! They've constructed a delusional fantasy world where they are somehow able to entirely ignore the disconnect between what they're doing and what they believe! I'm not making any universal claims here about right and wrong, but it's hard to understand how they can act so inconsistently with their own professed worldview, and still think they are good pious people! It just blows my mind!
Needless to say, reading their text messages felt like my entire world was falling apart! Knowing is so much worse than suspecting. I can't eat, I can barely focus at work, I keep having panic attacks, and my blood pressure is through the roof. We've had such a busy holiday that I haven't confronted her yet, but we have a weekend to ourselves planned for this coming weekend, and I'm going to have the conversation there. Despite thinking of almost nothing else for the past two weeks, I have no idea what I will say, and no idea how it will go. Despite everything I don't hate her. I plan to offer the chance to reconcile on the condition that he leaves the house, she cuts off all contact, and we go to couples therapy, but I honestly don't feel confident she will choose that.
This is going to be such a complicated mess if we end up getting divorced!
TL;DR: So, to sum up; My wife of nineteen years is having an affair with a "man" who was practically our adopted son, and her former student. Also, he lives with us. She's been gaslighting me for at least a year, making me believe I was the cause of our intimacy issues. We already have five kids, the youngest being only two years old. We live in a house that we built and own with her parents, who live with us. And somehow despite extramarital sex being extra taboo in our faith culture, they're both convinced they are completely good, pious people despite going at it like rabbits. I'll be confronting her this weekend and I have no idea how it will go. FML!
157 comments posted: Wednesday, December 14th, 2022
