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Alone and hurting….
26 Jan 2008 by Rod Smith in Affairs, Anger, Attraction, Betrayal, Boundaries, Victims, Voice / 9 Comments
“I am in an affair with a married man. Although it is a year it seems like a lifetime. I was married when we began our relationship. My husband moved away and I thought he was going to make the break with his wife. One day he tells me not to give up on him. The next day he tells me he never said such a thing. He talks about ‘boundaries’ and how he ‘chooses not to leave’ his wife. I’m miserable. I go to bed alone every night. Every day I help him with his work while mine falls further behind. I would love some pearls of wisdom. I need to end this: but how?” (Edited)
The pearl of wisdom – “I need to end this” – is in your letter. Until you sever this destructive alliance (it’s not a “relationship”) you will have no joy. Until you have extended time alone (without a man in your life) you will not re-establish your integrity.
How do you end it? There is no easy way out! Resign. Disappear. Move to a new city. Change your phone numbers. You owe him no “closure” or explanation. Of course this is tough but the sooner you act, the sooner you will find relief from your misery.
About the Author: Rod Smith
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Verbal log-jam
When I was a boy I’d endlessly practice the fluent delivery of my name but it seldom flowed easily from my lips. As if it was new news to me, adults pointed out my stutter. Perhaps they thought I was beginning, at that precise moment, for the first time in my life to spit from the mouth, twist at the neck, jig my head back and forth trying to expel some inane statement log-jammed between my gut and my throat.
Idiots – always adults, children were surprisingly patient, – would make me repeat sentences as if a repeat performance of the humiliating uncoordinated gesticulations, my arms and legs flying in all directions, would make for an easier delivery the second time. That I’d just spent every ounce of energy trying to cough it up was lost on them. That I was already thoroughly humiliated was something to which they were blind.“Practice, practice,” they’d say as if stutterers simply didn’t speak enough. “Think before you speak. Now – try that again,” they would declare slowly and loudly as if I was stupid and deaf. These thoughtless people were ignorant of just how much stutterers do think. Too much – which is central to the issue!
If I’d known at twelve or thirteen that the day would come when I’d make a career of public speaking I might have strolled off a high-rise building.
Now it is quite easy to hide. I am very comfortable with crowds.
It’s asking driving directions or ordering food at a drive through where it gets tricky. Sitting in a cozy circle waiting for my turn to introduce myself sends my blood-pressure through the roof. The ticket attendant on the London underground can render me dumb after I’ve just spent days addressing a room full of graduate level adults about Family Systems Theory. I know. It sounds ridiculous.
I was almost immobilized the first time I saw Thulani put himself “on duty” in the event he needed to be my mouthpiece. He did it. No one asked him or appointed him. He just did it.
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Life in our beloved 122
If the inside of a house (outside, too, I suppose) is a metaphor of the lives of the people who live in it – which is something I once read somewhere – gosh, are we in trouble. Our house is a mess.
I consistently clean it room by room, thinking often of the legend that the Golden Gate Bridge that says there’s some guy constantly painting it. I feel for him. While I am sure the view is wonderful I must believe that the poor guy whose doing it daily from one end to the other must find the wind and the weather quite a challenge.
Our house is the same, but instead of painting from end to end and back again, I am the guy constantly cleaning, – and, it’s hard to tell.
Where I cleaned and swept and dusted and vacuumed and sponged and sterilized yesterday there are scooters and bicycles (boys), mail in piles (me), books (boys and me), newspapers (me), magazines (me), and socks (boys and Max, the Chihuahua).
Turn my back and the boys and Max are at it again – enjoying life as boys (and a dog) while I find being a cleaning lady quite an exhausting challenge.
There is a point of no return, I’ve noticed, or at least a point of the chaos where I feel compelled to let it all go for a while and I throw up my hands and join in the fun of trashing the place.
But when I clean I like to think I’m just like the guy painting the Bridge, which I can only imagine must be a slow and methodical task.
I do it room by room, starting at one end, the front, in the event that I soon lose interest – then, at least, the front room is somewhat in order. I push it (trash, magazines, books, socks, clothes) all back from the living room, through the piano room, then into the TV room until everything lands up in the kitchen.
Once it hits the kitchen I separate out what’s Max’s – he’s has his own set of toys with which he ruins the house – what’s Nate’s, what’s Thulani’s, and what can be recycled, dumped, restacked on bookshelves, placed in drawers, hung on a hanger, or filed in the “important documents” file I keep losing.
We moved into “122” (creatively named for its street number and which has had very few updates since it was built in 1886) when Thulani was about two – and I have been getting it in order ever since. Nate joined us in 2002. Max, in 2009. The house- attachment, at least for the boys and Max, is strong. When I talk of selling Thulani reminds me that Rhino, the husky that was on the run for nine months and returned to die within a few weeks after we reconnected, is buried in an Air France first class cabin blanket just outside of the kitchen door. Nate reminds me of where the fat goldfish is buried and Thulani ends the litany with his inability to think of living in a house without the large tree in the front yard where he has his brother (and Max) have “peed like boys” (and a dog) for the past several years.
So. I’ll go on painting and, before you send me letters about giving the boys chores and responsibilities and assigning daily tasks and getting on top of it before it gets on top of me let me advise that you are barking up the wrong tree (sorry, Max for the dog metaphor) because we do have all that in place and it does work here and there and off and on.
I know, I know. Consistency is the name of the game for parenting and let me tell you, the ONLY thing that is consistent here is the need to keep going room by room with or without the boys (and Max) to get this little bridge painted one stretch at a time so the world can see just how organized and decent our lives are here at our beloved “122.”
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Being a white South African can come with complications
Being a white South African reared under Apartheid is no simple matter. It permeated everything for me. While I do not pretend to have been a political activist, I was always cognizant that my privileges, simply a result of being born white, were unmerited, and most unfair especially when enjoyed at the expense of others who were not. I think this unsettling truth (for I took advantage of my station in life) was somewhat of a companion to me from the age of about six or seven.
I am regularly aware that:- I was discouraged from playing soccer in the “front” yard (in view of the neighbors) with the servant’s children. While this may seem insignificant in the light of other much more severe problems rising from racism, it was huge for me as a child on several fronts. I loved the children and I loved soccer even more. They were excellent soccer players.
- I did attend a segregated school as did almost all white South Africans while there did exist some church schools that were integrated even under Apartheid. I vividly recall my school principal scolding the entire student body (over a thousand white boys) because a domestic worker (a black adult man) was seen walking in the neighborhood wearing a school blazer.
- Although, by no means wealthy, I was waited on hand and foot by a full-time servant.
- In the late 80s I was warned not to pray publicly for Prisoner “Nelson” Mandela from my church pulpit.
- A member of my family did balk at my request that I bring black children to his home-swimming pool to swim.
- Even as late as 1987 I was embarrassed that a young black boy whom I’d “helped” in his squatter camp had shown up at my door unannounced. I recall wondering what the neighbors would think seeing a child arriving at the home for a social visit and not to work in the yard.While I am aware that these are piddly problems in the light of what millions faced under the Apartheid regime, I am also aware that these factors in my immediate environment “shaped” me into believing perverse things (like in my own superiority and in “their” inferiority) about persons of other race groups. More significantly, I am frequently reminded that my children and I could not have shared life as we now do if we were still living in the era of Apartheid.
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Location, location – remembering winter in August
We live very close to our school and church, so close we can hear the school bell from our kitchen and the church bells in my bedroom.
Sometimes we walk to both and we don’t see the car for days.
I like it. I like not having to get in and out of the car. I like not having to negotiate traffic, something as synonymous with life in the USA as Disney, Fast Food, and the Fourth of July.
That’s the upside.
We are a 10-hour-drive to the nearest coast – and, most of the east coast beaches are not worth the drive. The west coast, which has many wonderful beaches comparable to where I was reared, takes three full days of driving to reach.
Being landlocked is one thing but another is the weather. Indiana weather is erratic, neurotic, and downright psychotic.
Days ago I could’ve (but I didn’t) ice-skated across the street. Now, as I write, there’s a small lake in the street next to the sidewalk from last night’s rain. The weather is so brutal and extreme (it is as hot as blazes in the summers) that when we do drive anywhere (there are no grocery stores in walking distance) the streets are often full of potholes making some of America’s finest suburban streets resemble stretches of road you’d find in a rural stretch of South Africa’s Wild Coast. So, I am exaggerating but really not too much. Washington Boulevard is a challenge to drive right now, you have got to dodge potholes and loose pavement or, unless you drive a tank, you stand to severely damage your suspension.
But I do love living here. My neighbors are some of my best friends. My children are free and safe in the neighborhood and everyone knows everyone’s children. Even as I write Joseph (born a week or so before Thulani) from down the street has wondered into the house and it is quite likely he will eat with us, stay the night, and then wander down back down the street to his home sometime in the morning. His mom and I will talk sometime between now and nightfall unless he of course chooses to wonder off home and be gone just as quickly as he showed up.
Potholes and crazy weather won’t send us running, although we will drive to church in the morning – even though it is really close. I’m not sure I want to brave the elements which could be a snow-storm, an ice storm, the threat of a tornado – or a little or a lot of each. What else could you expect during March in Indiana?
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Ready to adopt?
If you wait until you are ready to adopt a child you never will because you will never be ready. The baby, and only the baby, will make you ready. Reading the right books will be helpful, but “ready” magically comes upon you when a real baby is sleeping in your arms or crying in the middle of the night. If you are not ready to change diapers – and I always am amused at the big deal about this non-issue – being unprepared will last only as long as a clean diaper. Of course you can go baby-stuff-shopping, get a room painted, stencil yellow ducks on the wall – if you know long enough in advance your child is coming. But painting a bedroom with ducks and rainbows and a pot of gold, and getting a truck load of stuff from your local one-stop baby emporium will only fill your home with a lot of weird and wonderful, and mostly unnecessary, equipment.
Children interrupt everything. It is the child who is really ready to teach you, whether you are or not. Once he arrives he will become the hub of all your scheduling. You will be fine with this because the child is not an interruption to your life but rather, from this point on, central to it.
The baby will make you ready and you can’t really prepare for the baby until he is breathing in the crib right next to your bed.
Life inside the Smith household
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9 Comments
lisamm
There’s no magic to it, you just have to stop seeing him. He is not going to change. He is not going to leave his wife. It doesn’t matter what he says. You need to have some self respect and remove yourself from the situation.
27 Jan 2008 11:01 am
peggym
get out. It ges worse and your not number one ever. I too am in love with a married man whom has 3 childredn and they always promise you the world when all they want you to do is fill the voids in there lives. Your missing out on life and a chance for real happiness, is he jealous? Dont get that confused with love he just does not want to let the “side dish” go. Take a step back and look in and ahead. Good luck.
27 Jan 2008 03:01 pm
peggym
why do we even fall for the married man? We have intamacy problems of our own. They always tell you how different you are of course thats why he wanted you you must be very different physically. This truely is what he wants. Lust passion attention. Men cheat for sex NOT love but the head games are good. Mine twisted everything around and was very jealous and demanding and very spiteful when he didnt get what he wanted…..a big spoiled baby. his wife is very nice and lets him do whatever he wants whenever he power trips loss of control makes him uneasy. he wants you and her dont think he would give up his wife so easy he wont.
27 Jan 2008 03:01 pm
Just
“How do you end it? There is no easy way out! Resign. Disappear. Move to a new city. Change your phone numbers. You owe him no “closure” or explanation. Of course this is tough but the sooner you act, the sooner you will find relief from your misery.”
That is exactly an advise I’ve been looking for! In my case, there is no married man, but a man who doesn’t want to commit, yet he doesn’t want to let me go… This is so confusing me. But it’s so right, we owe him no closure or explanation, but sometime I feel like it was me who actually need it.
Thanks for letting me leave a comment here.
29 Jan 2008 04:01 am
Tim
About this very topic, a good friend of mine (a pastor and counselor) once said, “No matter what happens, there is going to be pain involved.” Those are wise words.
Based on what I’ve witnessed, trying to move slowly out of such a relationship is similar to losing an arm or leg by slowly applying a tourniquet, instead of just having the limb amputated. The pain may be less intense at each step, but the process takes so long, and you’re emotionally crippled the entire time. Amputation, in contrast, accepts that pain and loss is inevitable, and severs the connection forever. The intensity of the pain and loss is immediate and horrific, but two important things happen.
First, the wound begins to heal, almost immediately. In that sense, healing doesn’t mean restoration of what was there before–it just means the bleeding stops. I have seen people go through this experience and never feel a sense of complete restoration. I suppose that has something to do with whether the “amputation” was the emotional equivalent to losing the tip of a finger versus an arm. The former is something you never forget, but may not change your life in any appreciable way over the long term. The latter will change your life forever.
Second, the sooner there is complete and distinct separation, the sooner you start to develop the coping skills necessary for dealing with the loss. How does one learn to live without a fingertip, a finger, an arm, or a leg? The coping strategies will be different, largely based on the impact of the resulting change. Only you know how much of your heart you have committed to this man, which means that you’re the one who has to deal with the results of your choices and the current situation. (Please note that I’m not being judgmental in saying this… just pointing out that nobody forced you to make this choice, and so nobody else has to deal with the emotional debris that is now left behind.) – Tim
31 Jan 2008 03:01 pm
joanne
I have been married for 8 years, I have a husband who has always loved and provided for me. I noticed around January 2008 a change in him. I asked but as he worked away from home he was under stress. In early may I noticed a text saved but not sent ‘by the way you looked good today’ I confornted him and he swore that nothing had happened and that when he re-read it that it did not sound right so he never sent it but enforced that nothing happened. For 3 weeks things just did’nt seem to add up I was crying all the time no sleeping keeping both up at night going over things in my mind and could not let things go He had been away with work over the Easter period for 9 days with work. I noticed on his bank statement a small amount of money being taken out I confronted him and put it to him that he was out for a meal with his manager (he was at work at the time) he came home and confessed that she had stayed in the same hotel for 4 days as the trains in London were not realiable and he needed the job done, i have been in turmoil since this I can’t sleep I don’t trust him, but I love him I ask him to leave then back track he is getting angry he made a mistake by not telling he that she was staying over to protect me from any stress. He also admitted that he had had ‘busniess lunches with her not social I had asked him several times had he ever taken her out but he has started playing with words. One evening I picked him up from the airport and I could smell perfume from the shirt he told he to put in the wash that it was me making it up, it turns out that on his final day at work they had hugged. It has been weeks now and still I am not sleeping, eating and am always looking and digging I can no longer cope and do not know what direction to turn. I hope at times that he has not betrayed me in another I wish he had as I cannot deal with the descision of will I stay or go.
16 Jun 2008 02:06 am
Tina
I’ve just ended a 6 year affair with a married man. I lost my husband tragically the year before I met V. He befriended me and made me feel “whole” again and about 6 months down the line, the affair started.
I’m very angry because he lied to me all these years – there were signs of his infidelity towards me but I was so in love with him that I saw past the lies. In the beginning we had such fun, had so much to talk about, the sex was unbelievable and after a while, we became soulmates. The world couldn’t have been a better place. I was so in love with him and seemingly he was with me. He told me he never slept with his wife, that she was not “interested” and in the last year, he told me that they had separated when he bought her a home at the coast. This was a good sign, I thought, and he would be on his way to divorce his wife finally.
My pain and hurt of being betrayed and used all these years. I’m very angry with him because when it came to the crunch, when I kept on confronting him about the divorce, he kept on telling me he was on the verge of doing it. I finally ended it last week – I’m devasted but I know I did the right thing. All those years of waiting for an sms or a phone call or a visit from him – all those Saturday nights, Christmases and special holidays sitting at home tormenting myself because he was at home with his wife and family. He was a good liar – convinced me of so many things, made promises every day, told me he loved me every day of the 6 years I was in the relationship with him.
I phoned his wife eventually and told her – she was shocked to hear that her hubby would even be capable of having an affair and then I realised that all he had told me was in fact a huge lie.
If I could give anyone any advice, is stay away from married men – it only leads to huge pain for everyone involved. Whilst you are in the middle of the affair, it’s seems too good to be true, and that’s because it is!
I’m very sad about the loss of a love that I had – I was in love with someone who turned out to be a charlatan, a deceitful, compulsive liar. I’m going to get back on my feet and start to live my life, stop wasting my precious hours and days crying over a man who has hurt me so much.
16 Jun 2008 01:06 pm
lisamm
I think Tina’s advice to stay away from married men is good.. but I would add stay away from the wives of married men! Why would you phone her? Personally I think that was really wrong and self serving. You were dating a married man.. was it really such a shock to find out he was a liar? A married man having an affair is by definition a liar! He lies to his wife and children every single day! Try to remember that you are not the injured party here. I can’t understand why anyone would waste years and years of their life on someone who is unavailable to them.
16 Jun 2008 10:06 pm
Jeanne
I totally agree with Lisamm. Women who cheat with married men are (or people who cheat in general) will find it very hard to get back on track after reality stikes. Why? Because they have been punished for the wrong doing to themselves, their side of the family, and the other party.
Why are people so naive and selfish to have affairs? Hurt themselves and hurt others. What goes around does come around. If there is something missing in ones live, one must find it spiritually, not buy using SEX to past the time or fill the gap.
Again, you are being punished for doing so wrong, that is why it’s so hard to get out and cope with affair situations. Then there’s the other side of the affair. The person who will decide if she or he will forgive the stupid actions of the one they love that cheated on them. Forgiveness is a gift, a great gift and even though much hurts inside, the truth of forgiveness will learn to heal both hearts, as long as both are in not out.
Sorry for being so rough, but yes, forgiving someone who cheated on you really does hurt, but it’s because a decision was made to love the person who cheated on you, an now you must in turn learn a lesson too.
Life is tough, but turning a negative situation into a positive long lasting life would be a gift from both persons and their true desires with the help from those from the the high heavens.
Learn and be curious of how to re-live life through your own spirituality. That is when you will become more awaken to live life in a positive light.
11 Jul 2008 05:07 pm
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