A Marriage From Ashes

Unconditional Love

After almost three years, one of those years living apart, my affair was over. My husband knew the whole story. He knew the depth of my emotional and physical involvement. He knew the frequencies of my visits and the lies I told to cover them. I told him about the cocaine use, which he had no idea about.

What kind of man finds all of this out and doesn’t consider divorce an option? Most people would leave a cheating partner. And I would have deserved that. He must be a loser or a total chump. Probably has low self-esteem. But none of that is really true. I would have cheated on anyone I would have been with.

It wasn’t personal to him, I was fighting my own demons. He’s not stupid or naïve. He knew something was going on long before he confronted me. I was good at lying until by insides broke apart. It takes a high level of emotional intelligence to see beyond that amount of anger and hurt. Yes, most people would leave a cheating partner, but he’s not most people and that is why we’re still happily together, 10 years later.

So, what kind of man finds all of this out and doesn’t consider divorce an option? A man that stands by his word.

He told me he made a promise and intends to keep it. He said if I wanted to file for divorce, he wouldn’t stop me. He’d make it as easy as possible, but he wasn’t going to do it. He told me, “When I promised unconditional love, I meant it. I am very hurt, but I love you. I am angry, but I love you.” He went on, “But you know we can’t live like this. I only want to try to work this out if your heart is in it. I can give you unconditional love, but can you give me your commitment?”

Unconditional love. Unconditional love is next level thinking. Something unable to be felt or provided by most. You need high self-esteem and ingrained confidence to truly give unconditional love to a romantic partner. If your first reaction is to leave, you are not wrong. You are like 98%¹ of the population protecting your own emotions for self-preservation. Most of us can only grow emotionally to a certain point, myself included. Some people can go beyond that, look beyond themselves and their own emotions. His hurt and his anger were not tied to loving me. He could separate the two.

He made a promise. He made it to me, my family, his family and God. It’s rare today for anyone to stand by their word, I certainly did not, but he always will in any situation. He’s never broken a promise to me or anyone. He saw the damaged person I was, regardless of the actions that got me there. He saw the demons I was fighting. He would not abandon me…for better or for worse…in sickness and in health. Unconditional love.

Did I have this affair to test him? Was I broken beyond repair? If other romantic partners abandoned me so easily, wouldn’t he? Was I trying to give him a reason? When your emotions are caught up in an affair, it is really easy to lose sight of the reasons you got married, the reasons you love the person you married.

My husband feels guilty because he moved fast with our relationship and engagement. We were married exactly 1 year after our first official date. I was 23 and he was 30. He feels he rushed me, maybe even pushed me. Everyone knew this was too fast and I was too young. My own mother warned me to wait…

By moving out, he reset our relationship back to the dating phase. I felt more comfortable and it was allowing me to see again why I wanted marriage. I grew a lot during that time. I wasn’t using drugs beyond occasional marijuana. I was only drinking on the weekends and only a couple glasses of wine. I could finally picture my future instead of just tomorrow. My future included my husband. He had confidence I would come to that conclusion if he gave me the time and space to get there.

What happened next still floors me and makes me suspicious that my husband might actually be Buddha reincarnated. He was still living with his parents, but after I called him and said “it’s over” he came to our house. He hugged me, held me, and comforted me. He wiped away my tears. He acknowledge I was hurting. He said confusing things like he was sorry I was going through this. He wasn’t sorry I had ended it, he was genuinely upset to see me upset. That is a complete mind fuck. That is complete love. Unconditional love.

My husband is comforting me for ending a relationship with a guy I was fucking behind his back. A guy I admitted to being in love with. How easy would it have been for him to dismiss me? For him to say this is what I deserve, deal with it. It was what I deserved. To think this was my problem only. He didn’t though. He knew I needed support then more than ever, but it was still hard to accept. I didn’t deserve that, but for my husband, it wasn’t about what I did. It was about him raising above it and me realizing that he actually loved me enough to comfort me. Unconditional love.

He stayed with me that night, back in the town home we shared. We spent the weekend together. During times of emotional stress, my biggest coping mechanism is to stay busy, preferably with something physical. We played 96 holes of mini golf that weekend. My husband made me laugh a hundred times. Mini golf is oddly symbolic in our life now.

We never went to marriage counseling even though it was something I had offered to do to get us over this. We didn’t want to analyze the whole situation and I was not ready to talk to anyone about it. He really did understand more than I thought. He didn’t need to change. The marriage only needed me to commit. He was right there, committed since day 1, just waiting for me to join him.

He moved back in, and we continued our marriage. I had my new job. It was challenging and fun. I was working normal hours, 7:30am-4pm, M-F. A normal schedule really helped my mental health. I also addressed my underlying bipolar disorder. Being bipolar did not make me have an affair. It just made it easier to make the bad decisions. It lowers your reasoning threshold. The bipolar tells you that you’re going to die anyway, maybe soon, maybe by your own hand, so just live life to the fullest. I was in control of my decisions but my bipolar disorder remained unregulated behind the scenes.

I was no longer able to dog walk and pet sit. I wasn’t in the old neighborhood at all. That was so hard. I loved the money, the people and the animals I was helping, but it was time to help myself. This new job was a stepping stone into the actual career I have now. I worked so hard to get where I am with my career and also my life. I was cooking healthy food everyday, working out, I re-joined several tennis leagues and kept life exciting by having different hobbies.

My husband and I continued to grow. It’d be easy to say, we should not have gotten married that fast, but chances are good, if we would have waited, I would not have married him. I would have spiraled into my quarter life crisis alone. It would have saved him a lot of pain but also it would have cost us both a lot of joy.

I opened up to him in ways I hadn’t before. I discussed my self-esteem. My challenges accepting my body. My emotional needs. My physical needs. My mental health. My hopes and fears. I discussed the level of freedom and independence I would need and how we could rebuild trust and maintain those important things with established boundaries.

He opened up to me about how it all affected him. Something that had taken him a while to do. I listened. No excuses. I needed to hear it all, everything he was trying to bottle up and work through alone. We had so much common ground that we didn’t even realize we had. I understood what he needed from me. I recognized that his unconditional love was not unlimited.

Even facing the pain from the lies and the loss of trust, my husband did not become controlling. He did not act like an interrogator if I came home late. He didn’t ask a million questions about who I was with or if I had communicated with so-and-so. I maintain a level of independence that most wives do not. Without this, I couldn’t be in a relationship. He knows that. It was the extreme fear that I had lost my independence that factored into me finding an exciting affair.

We didn’t work on our marriage, we worked on our partnership and that built trust. I understand partnership and teamwork more than the ambiguous idea of how to be a wife. We worked on the actions and less on the emotions. I showed him a trustworthy person, I didn’t just say I was a trustworthy person. I upheld my promises and my responsibilities because I wasn’t going to let my team down. A team that had never let me down. He also trusted that I didn’t want to go through this again. I never wanted to be broken in half again. Especially after I was finally feeling whole.

We each had to process our emotions differently. We had different areas to grow in. I just needed to grow up and realize what I had right in front of me. Without the emotional distress and indecision, I regained my confidence. Realized my worth. I was once again grounded. I was glowing. I was the person I was always meant to be. My husband never lost sight of that person even though I had. He never stopped believing in that person. He fought for that person. Unconditional love.

We faced one of the absolute worst thing that can happen during a marriage, infidelity, and we are still together. I am thankful my husband can see the good in me. His family can still see the good in me and have forgiven me. If most people would give up to protect themselves, isn’t fighting the stronger thing to do? Isn’t someone you love worth fighting for?

After you’ve gone through infidelity and rebuilt, your structure is more secure than it’s ever been. You’ve faced the storm and reinforced all the windows and doors. We also redrew the blueprint. Our marriage is stronger today because of it. We’ve been married 13 years and we’re celebrating 10 happy years together this summer. Stupid fights about doing the dishes don’t exist. We don’t fight. What would there be to fight about?

If you followed along with any or all of my story, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. This series is over. I hope you also enjoy my future posts on much different topics.

1. I made up this statistic, but it seems pretty close. Real stat according to google AI: 60-75% of couples that experience infidelity during marriage stay together.