…………..I walked in the door and the flowers I saw the day before were still there on the table. I put my duffle bag in the bedroom and put the dog’s bed where it belonged in the living room. Summer was in the laundry room (if memory serves correct this was a few months ago. Some details are a little hazy, others are clear as a bell). I then went to the computer to look at the checking account. I just looked blankly at the screen not really seeing it. I was flooding with emotions being home. Anger, confusion, sickness, sadness, confusion, love, hate, I think if there was an emotion to feel I was feeling it.
She came out and the dog was super excited to see her. She said her hellos to our dog and came to the computer desk. She asked me if I was going to even say hello to her. I responded that I was doing as directed and staying out of her way. She then hugged me and started crying. She said that she missed me. I hugged her back and holding her again felt so good. As hurt and betrayed I felt I still loved her.
I don’t know how it happened, but we ended up in the bedroom and just sat on the bed talking. Apparently, the flowers came from our neighbor. She had texted him a few days ago and asked if she could pick some of his roses from the yard. The next day he bought her the flowers the next day. (I know this because later I looked at her phone.) She said that he got them for her because she was smiling more than he had ever seen her smile since we moved in 3 years ago and wanted to keep her smiling.
She was shocked to see me with no hair on my head and all my facial hair gone too. She asked why I did it. I told her why I did it and when. We talked about Mother Hen and the incident with our older niece and my dad. We talked about what was going on. Taking turns crying, being mad, hurting, etc. I kept asking for details about her relationship with Douchebag and she kept lying to me. (I just didn’t realize how much was lie and how much was truth for quite some time.)
At some point we ended up naked and we fucked each other for the first time in a few weeks. When we finished again, we sat there and talked. Finally, we realized we had been in bed from about 1:30 to 8:00. We threw on some clothes, got in the van and drove to Sonic for a late dinner. We came home about 9:00 or so and went back to bed. We stayed up talking some more, we fucked again and went to sleep around 1:30 or 2:00. We got up the next morning (Halloween) talked a bit and she made me breakfast. After breakfast we went to Walmart and Costco to do our shopping. Came home and talked some more.
The next day Summer went to work, and I was left alone in the house. I tried to get into her iPad, but she changed the passcode. I cleaned the bedroom and did laundry. Pretty much I just tried to do the best I could to keep my mind from thinking about Summer sending naked pictures of herself to another man.
That is about the time that my ED started up. That was in the first days of Nov. We are now in the last days of Feb. and it is still here. Not as bad now as it was back then though. I just have a difficult time staying hard. I want to have sex with Summer. I can be hard if she is sucking me or playing with me, but as soon as I go for penetration it would just go dead. My brain would just instantly shut things down and they wouldn’t work. During the first month and a half or so I was back Summer’s appetite for me was really increased and I just couldn’t perform. If I could manage to stay hard enough for penetration I couldn’t finish. I was only able to finish once out of every 4-5 times of trying. When I was able to finish it wasn’t like it was before. There was barely anything there.
I just kept reading the words she wrote douchebag in her messages over and over again in my head “he doesn’t last long enough. He doesn’t satisfy me in bed”. It hurt. It fucked up my self-confidence big time. Still does, but not as much now. At least now I can at least remain semi hard enough to stay penetrated. I still have issues finishing though. Which I guess is making Summer happier because I am lasting longer now.
In our discussions the following week I told her that I was not going to force her to stop communicating with douchebag because that was a decision that she needed to make on her own. She informed me that she had no intentions of stopping her communications with him. She “loved” him, and she wasn’t sure if she wanted to stay married anymore. She had been unhappy in our marriage for the last 3 years even before we bought our house. She didn’t know if she loved me anymore. She wanted to “take it one day at a time”. I thought that was a crock of shit. Here she was the one who cheated on me and now she thinks that she’s the one that gets to call the fucking shots? She’s lucky I didn’t kick her ass out on the streets (this is my thinking at the time this was happening not my feelings now).
She didn’t know if she still wanted to be married to me, if she loved me or not, but she still wanted me to take her out duck hunting every weekend. She still wanted to go shopping with me every payday. She was still communicating with him but not as much.
Then the following Sun. I was home alone as she was at work. When I got out of bed after another sleepless night I was sitting at the computer and her iPad dings. It made the sound for Facebook Messenger going off. Then it happened again. And again. I couldn’t see what was going on, but new that she was communicating with douchebag. I walked to the counter to look at it, but the password was changed. It went on for a few minutes. I finally texted her and told her that I couldn’t stand listening to the dings. Her response you ask? “Turn it off and you won’t need to hear it”. The fucking nerve! I just connected my phone to the sound bar and blasted my music. Started working on cleaning the house for a bit and went back to my sister’s house to clean her windows for her as a thank you for letting me stay there.
That night when we were both at home, she wouldn’t answer my questions about what they were talking about. I looked at her phone and saw that she had erased all of the messages going back to Dec. 2019. This pissed me off. She had promised me that she would not erase any more messages and that she would let me look at the messages between them. What does she do? She fucking erased them! I was pissed and it started another argument that lasted quite a while. She kept giving me different excuses for why she erased the messages. I didn’t care what any of them were. They wouldn’t be good enough. They were all lies as far as I was concerned.
So now I’m going to switch gears. This is tearing me apart reliving all of these memories. I’m going to try to just give a cliff notes version of the happenings from that point to now. I’m sure that some of the stuff that I am going to list here have been said already at some point. I’m not going to take the time to re-read what I wrote though so I’m sorry of it’s a repeat.
· One Sunday I started reading her prayer journal. I was looking at the recent entries from Oct. 2020 to Nov. 2020. Almost every day she wrote to god praying for douchebag and his daughters. Thanking god for bringing douchebag into her life. I started reading more. In Sept. she was praying for god to let her out of the marriage. That was the first mention of me in her prayers since Nov. 2019. That’s the point when she reconnected with him and the messages started. In the beginning of Nov. 2019, she was praying for both of us to continue doing good and to not lose our house when she was having issues at work. Then in April 2020 she started praying for douchebag every single entry.
· After I discovered the messages on her phone, she completely stopped writing in her prayer journal. There were no entries after Oct. 24, 2020. She has started writing in it again though in last few weeks. I just haven’t looked anymore.
· For pretty much the month of Nov. my new morning routine before work would be to look at her phone while she was in the bathroom getting ready for work reading all messages she would send to her friends and him. Then when I would get home from work, I would look at her iPad (I watched her enter her passcode and memorized it).
· Summer told me that I was codependent and that was a reason that she wanted out. I was putting too much pressure on her. She wanted me to read Codependent no More. I started to read it.
· I talked to a coworker that went through this in 2015 with his wife. They divorced because she wanted to be with his at the time best friend. I asked how I was supposed to get over this. We talked for a few hours and he suggested that I read “The Love Dare”. I went home and bought it from Amazon.
· Summer saw me ordering the book and took an attitude saying “You expect me to read another book?! No way! I’m done reading books about this.”
· On one of my iPad readings, I saw that she messaged a friend about the book I had ordered. Apparently, she had told another friend about it. Her response to friend I was reading was to “let him humor himself”.
· Another one of her whore friends told her good for you for cheating on your husband if he wasn’t meeting your sexual needs.
· To this day I have never opened the book. I also said fuck it and stopped reading the codependent book. Summer on the other hand has read a bit of it, is re-reading The 5 Love Languages, and bought another book that I can’t remember the name of at this moment.
· My weight dropped rapidly. In Oct. I weighed close to 300 pounds. I am now going between 258 and 262 since about a week prior to Christmas. That’s almost 50 pounds from Oct. 24 to roughly Dec. 18.
· One of the reasons she gave for cheating was that he was more endowed than I am. She wanted someone that was bigger. So along with me taking Sildenofil (generic Viagra) she had me get a penis pump to see if it would do anything. We used it once and it now sits unused in the drawer.
· One evening in Nov. she was washing dishes and I was sitting on the counter waiting for dished to dry. We were having a good conversation and out of the blue she says “I love you. Can I love you forever?” I instantly started crying and told her not to say that. It hurt too much. The evening went down from there.
· In early Nov. I went to my aunt and uncles in Oregon with my parents and my sister. Driving up there was just like being a kid. It was just the 4 of us and 4 dogs packed tight in a minivan with clothes for a few days, dog box, Costco items since they don’t live close to a Costco, and hunting supplies. My dad, uncle and I went pheasant hunting at Tule Lake for opening day of the season. That night we were talking, and I started talking about what was going on with Summer and I. My mom told me to change the subject and talk about something else. It hurt and instead of vocalizing it I shut down and just went downstairs and isolated myself.
· Before the trip Summer said that she would send me pictures and have conversation with me like she would with douchebag (sexting). It never happened. I did find out by looking at her iPad that she did message him and told him I was out of town though.
· On the last night there after stewing over what my mom said for 2 days, I started to drink heavily. I had about 7-8 Not Your Father’s Root Beer, and just about emptied a pint of Fireball. I got really drunk. Started texting Summer about being upset about not following through with what she said she’d do and told her what my mom said. She said that I have her to talk to and that she cared. I was drunk and made some petty sar4castic comments. Then I got on Facebook and posted that I was told to change the subject. It felt like no one cares. I just didn’t say who said it. A few minutes later my friend from High School messaged me and we messaged each other till 1 in the morning when my stomach decided that it had enough. The next day a different aunt sent me a message telling me that I need to tell the person who said that to me exactly how I felt. I told her that I can’t because I had to share a vehicle home with her and that I might need to stay at her place again in the future. She figured out it was mom and said it would be better to not say it then.
· During a bad day in Dec. on a Sunday while Summer was at work, I did a search for douchebag on the internet. I found out how old he was (53), where he lives and a phone number too. This was all on people finder or something like that. I found out that he lives just a few minutes from us in the same town. We drive within a few blocks of his house every time we go shopping or out to dinner. This pissed me off. It broke the rules we had together back when we were both blogging heavily back in 2005-2006. We met people here that we ended up sexting in private messages. The rules were we both need to know who the other is doing things with, we had to share what we were doing and the most important rules were it can’t become personal and the person can’t be within easy distance to get to for it to get physical. This fucker was 10 minutes from us.
· That night I confronted her about this. I asked how old he was she said same age as us. I said no he’s 53. She asked how I found out. She thought that I asked a coworker that may have known him. I just told her I had my ways. I also found out he lives on “X” road. She immediately said no he doesn’t.
Really? How would you know?
She was silent for a while.
I said there’s only one way to know that isn’t there.
She said yes.
So you lied to me and you have been to his house.
Yes but only once. We just talked that was it. It was back in Nov. last year.
BULLSHIT! How can you remember the street name like that only being there once? You can’t remember what I say 5 minutes after I say it.
I then showed her on my phone how I found out and showed her a picture of his house. She didn’t say anything for a while. I then pressed the issue. She said that yes she went to his house to have sex with him, but he messaged her as she pulled up and told her to leave because baby momma was dropping kids off and would be there anytime. I didn’t believe her but dropped it.
· One night in late Nov. early Dec. we were having a late-night conversation and we were talking about Mr. D and douchebag and her ex-boyfriend from when we met. She started to smile then stopped and smiled again. I asked what was so funny. She said she didn’t want to tell me because I would think there was another time she cheated on me.
o Apparently “a long time ago so it don’t matter”, before she was sending douchebag pictures, when she had just started her massage business, he was a client. After she gave him a massage, she gave him a handjob. During the handjob he tried to reach his hand up her shirt. She swears that at that point she packed her stuff and left. To be honest with my readers I don’t believe her.
o This was during the period of our lives that we were both blogging on here regularly, we were working through our issues with Mr. D and we were supposed to be in a good place. However, to this day I am not allowed to hug her, kiss her or touch her while I am on the massage table. She won’t even have sex with me after a massage because it cheapens the massage. But she’ll do that with him?! I mean what the FUCK! Back in the day she ripped a fellow blogger Desperate Husband because he got a happy ending after a massage.
· The major turning point for both of us was Dec. 20. On that night I was drinking beers as usual. Summer had called in sick that day because our hot water heater broke and she couldn’t take a shower. We had a good day. We stayed in bed that morning and had some good adult type fun. That night as I was cooking dinner, Summer went to my parents’ house to drop off a shirt that she needed my mom to sew. While she was gone, I looked at her iPad. She had sent douchebag a message on Fri. saying that she hoped he was having a better week that her. I had thought we were having a good week together. She had actually messaged him a few times in the last 3 weeks, but he hadn’t responded to her at all. He had completely stopped communicating with her. It was about the time we found out oldest niece was pregnant. I then saw that she messaged another friend and said that I wasn’t being an adult when I posted on Facebook that she was cheating on me and that now her best friend from childhood wasn’t speaking to her.
o I lost it at that point. I went to the safe and got my jar of weed and pipe. Went outside and started smoking. I had also just taken my antidepressant and started drinking vodka along with the beer. I was on the porch punching the shed. Crying. I took a few drinks straight from the vodka bottle and took a few more hits and it really started to hit me. I sent a group message to my mom and sister saying someone needed to come to my house and pick me up asap. I didn’t get a response in what I deemed to be a soon enough time, so I walked across the street to our neighbors and knocked on his door. I said that he needed to come to my house before Summer got home and something else that I won’t repeat. What I meant to say was that he needed to keep me from going to douchebags house. That’s not what happened. I then turned around and walked back to my house. When I got to my steps, I threw my beer at the deck sat on the steps and started crying. I then sent another text message this to my mom, sister, and Summer saying if I’m not at home I’m going to be at a certain address (douchebags). I also sent Summer a picture message of both FB Messenger messages I found. A minute or two later Summer arrived at home. Neighbor walked over and started to “ignore” us by working on our water heater.
o Summer asked me what was wrong? Why was I crying on the porch? I told her to look at her messages. She looked and saw what I sent. At that time my parents arrived, and Summer ran into the house and into our bedroom. My dad stayed out on the side of the house with my neighbor “working on the water heater” and my mom came up to talk to me. I’m just talking to neighbor telling him I’m not going to do anything. I’m not stupid. That’s not what I meant to say. He just kept repeating I’m here to look at water heater.
o Mom and I talked, and I tell her about what she said in Oregon. She said what do you expect you always get mad at me when we try to talk about it. Which I found odd since I never talked to her about it since the day I stayed there after being at my sisters. She told me that if it comes to it she would give me the money to buy Summer out of the house so I don’t have to sell it.
o Neighbor leaves and dad comes up on deck and asks if I’m going to their place. I said yes but I needed to talk to Summer first. I go into the bedroom and talk to her a little loud so my parents could hear. I wasn’t yelling I just wanted them to know that I wasn’t going to do anything stupid. I kept asking her what were the rules? What did we discuss? She would say she’s not answering when my parents can hear. I said I don’t care. The rules were that you could fuck whoever you wanted as long as you let me know. I could do the same. You can continue to sext him just let me know and don’t hide it. Sex with other people on either her part or mine needed to be physical only nothing emotional.
o My parents called and said we need to go. I grabbed my pillow and the dog’s bed, and my water jug. We stayed in the kitchen for a minute to talk. I didn’t realize that my jar of weed was on the counter and my pipe was still in my hand. My dad said what’s that? I said my little bit of weed (I bought the jar in Weed Ca. on our way home from Oregon). At that point the cat was out of the bag so I grabbed it to as we walked out the door.
o On the way to their house I was babbling about don’t worry about me losing my job. My boss knows he’s the one that told me to smoke to try and get some sleep. I also dropped my commercial license when I got the last promotion. Mom didn’t have much to say. Dad asked if it was good stuff. I told him I only buy the best. Luckily, I wasn’t so gone that I outed my sister and sister-in-law.
o At their house I ate a few bites of food, went to the backyard and smoked a little more. Went to the bedroom and locked myself in there. I got out of bed to let my dads’ dog in and my jar of weed fell out of my pocket and landed on the tile floor. It broke on the inside and around the seal.
o The next morning Summer started texting me around 6:30. She called in sick to work the night before. Apparently, I texted my boss the night before and took the day off too. We texted until about 8:30 and then it went dark on her end. About 30 minutes later she rang the doorbell. My mom let her in and she came to the room I was in. She closed the door and got in bed with me. We talked and she was crying and showed me that she had blocked douchebag from contacting her. She wanted nothing to do with him anymore. We talked more and cried together. She talked to me and responded to what I said without going silent for long periods. She then pulled my wedding ring out of her pocket and asked me to put it back on. She put her ring on as well. We both hadn’t worn them since I left for my sisters. Around 11:00 we left for home and spent the day in bed just holding each other not talking much.
· That was a big turning point for us. Since then we have gotten along better. We still have little spats when I start “flooding” with emotions and memories come into my head. I have not had a drink or smoked since then. And I have almost 3 cases of beer and vodka and fireball in the shed. Not because I think I have a drinking problem, but because I don’t think I should be drinking until we get this worked out. I tend to flood when I drink especially when I drink alone.
· The day after Christmas was a hard day for me. After we went hunting with my dad we came home and showered together. Then we went into bed for more adult fun. Afterwards we started talking again. That’s the day that I found out that she did go to his house more than once. She went there to have sex with him, but he couldn’t get hard enough. She sucked him, made out with him, he played with her tits and pussy, then she straddled him and grinded on him but according to her he never got hard enough to penetrate her.
o I didn’t fully believe that and still don’t. I still think that he has been to our house no matter how much she swears he hasn’t.
· I wrote about what happened the next day with my vigorous cleaning of the house.
· I was on a planned vacation for the week between Christmas and New Year. On a day I was at home and Summer was at work I stumbled across a Youtube channel. I had searched for “how to recover from an affair”. A lot of videos came up. Most were too religious for me though. Then I found Affair Recovery. I watched several of the videos before Summer got home while I was folding laundry. When she came home, I showed her some of the videos.
· From that point we started watching 1 or 2 videos a night. Then when we both had COVID we researched their website to see what programs they offer. They have a free 7-day bootcamp, an online course that meets once a week for 13 weeks and keeps you in touch with the small group of couple in your weekly meeting for a year afterwards, and they have an intensive weekend retreat. We decided that we would do the free bootcamp but needed to wait until duck season was over so we could devote our time to it.
o We started the program on Feb. 12. Unfortunately, between both of us having commutes of 1 hour for me and 2 hours for her, we don’t have a lot of time to work on it after work and dinner. We are still working on day 3.
· Not an awful lot happened in Jan. that I haven’t already talked about. We both caught that fucking Rona virus and were home for 2 weeks. After we got better, we started hunting again and even took the trailer out a few times to hunt multiple days in a row. The hunting was bad. It was way too warm for Jan. it was in the 60’s in afternoon and no clouds.
· A notable incident from Late Dec. or early Jan. (can’t remember which) I wet to my sisters to pick up our trailer from their house. We had lent it to them so nieces BF can have it to isolate in due to exposure. His family told him he needed to sleep in the garage during quarantine period even though the lease is in his name. They also told him that he needed to run their errands for him in the daytime even though he was supposed to isolate and not be in public.
Anyways, while there to get the trailer we talked about the incident at my parents’ house before Christmas with them picking me up to take me there. I told them (Sister, S-i-L and oldest niece) about my parents seeing the weed and pipe. Then my dad asking on the way his house if it was good stuff. My sister was shocked. Niece thought it was hilarious. Apparently, my sister said she new that my parents found out because mom texted her on the drive and said she don’t care if I started smoking again. Whatever it takes for me to get through this. I was shocked.
We also talked about how funny it would have been if when my jar broke if a bud got lost under my moms’ bed and it was found later.
o My sister and I have wondered since then if my dad smokes or not since he asked if it was the good stuff. Neither of us have gotten up the nerve to ask though. How adult of us right? I’m 47, she turns 45 in 2 weeks.
For now that is all I can think of for the cliff notes version of events. I’m sure that I am missing things. It is now March 1st. I started this post on Feb. 19th. It was hard to write. But it is nowhere as hard as the next post is going to be. We had a major setback on Fri. night and I’m now in a place where I don’t think I can recover from it.
I’m scared. VERY scared. This time it’s me scaring myself. He thoughts are back and worse than ever. The body pains are worse. I’ve been in my office since 6:30 this morning and it is now 1:20. I’ve been shaking most of the day and doing my best to not cry at work. My door has been closed all day so I don’t get walked in on. That happened the day I started writing this. I don’t want it to happen again. I’m struggling. I lost 7 pounds in one night. Fri. morning, I weighed 261 with no clothes on. Sun. morning, I weighed 254 with clothes on.
I gotta end this.
