I think it’s dangerously easy to romanticize a person you have never met in real life. But how would you feel if your spouse announced that they were leaving you to start a new life with a person they only know through a screen?
This 28-year-old man got married to his 27-year-old wife five years ago, and when he said goodbye to her for the very last time, she didn’t even bother looking at him.
His wife actually cheated on him with a man she met online, and when he confronted her, she twisted it around and somehow made it his fault.
His wife said that if he wanted to save their marriage, he had to be the one to fix everything. He actually did try to do that, as unfair as it was.
He bent over backward while his wife was still speaking to her affair partner. He felt lonely, angry, and frustrated, but he fixed every little thing his wife demanded that he had to.
“Then she said, ‘Too late.’ Told me she felt that she was trapped, and the relationship was the trap. My fixing things was making her feel more trapped. That she ‘couldn’t lose her AP because he meant too much to her,'” he explained.
The thing is, his wife had never even met her affair partner in real life yet. His wife said if he loved her, he would never allow her to leave.
But she also accused him of manipulating her into trying to stay and reconcile. Finally, his wife said she had made her choice, and he wasn’t it, and he had to be accepting of that.
She left him to sell their house. She quit her job, which left him without insurance. She made him inform all of their loved ones why their marriage was ending.
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But then she became furious with him for turning everyone against her. She demanded that he help her pack up her belongings. She was upset with his parents, who texted her to say they still loved her and wanted to see her.
“Then, when she did leave, I hoped we could end it on a high note. I told her how much she meant to me, how she had been the best thing to happen to me, that I loved our last 11 years together, that I still didn’t understand why she chose to abandon our marriage and our life together,” he added.
“But I hope she found the happiness she was looking for (it…broke me to be nice to her). I really hoped she would say anything, literally, to me to give me some closure. But she just got in her car and drove 1,500 miles away to start her new life.”
“I think that not understanding is the worst part of this for me. We got along great, had the 2-story house, 3 pets, both had jobs we liked, had some money in the bank, and had a vacation planned for our 5-year anniversary (this week).”
However, it vanished overnight, and he still doesn’t get why that is. He doesn’t understand why his wife didn’t even try to work things out with him.
She claimed she didn’t have the energy and didn’t want to upset him, which is why she didn’t tell him sooner that she had met someone else.
He’s left wondering what to do. If he was truly the problem, at least he could work on himself and be a better man, but his wife stated it wasn’t him. She simply felt trapped, and that’s not something he could even fix if she gave him the chance.
He’s terrified that he’s broken or unlovable. He knows he’s not the most handsome, he knows he doesn’t make great money, and he’s had awful luck with jobs.
He can admit the last six months have been harder because he lost his friend and his grandpa. But he and his wife made their vows to hang in there “for better and for worse.”
“Life gets hard, and we were supposed to be there for each other. I just wish she had loved me as I had loved her. I wish I could take the blame for this so I could fix myself,” he added.
He just hates that he couldn’t do anything to make his wife pick him. He hates that she cheated and said she could not lose her affair partner.
He desperately wants closure, because he spent 11 years by his wife’s side. He can’t figure out what made the woman he was going to spend the remainder of his life with refuse to speak to him or say sorry for ending their marriage.
He’s really hung up on something being wrong with him to cause his wife to leave in the way that she did.
“Now I feel like there has to be something wrong with me. That I’m just unlovable if she chose someone she had never even met over me,” he continued.
“That I wasn’t even worth apologizing to. That the past 11 years together didn’t even warrant a goodbye…. they were the best years of my life, and it feels like they, and I, were worth nothing to her.”
I think that closure is sometimes a myth, and not something attainable. I understand he didn’t see how he could fix his marriage, and his wife clearly didn’t either.
But at the end of the day, his wife was the problem, and her actions are not a reflection of him, so he has to disentangle himself from that.
He can’t take ownership of what his wife did, but he can figure out how to move on without her, because that’s all that’s left to do here.
What advice do you have for him?
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By Bre Avery Zacharski
Hi, I'm Bre, Chip Chick's CEO! I have a degree in Textile/Surface Design from The Fashion Institute of Technology, and... More about Bre Avery Zacharski
