Twenty Minutes in the Aftermath of Infidelity

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Twenty minutes. That was what the nurse told me before she left the room. Twenty minutes to sit and stew in my emotions, a victim of forces outside of my control. Twenty minutes before she would return with the results of my test. Twenty minutes to find out if I had HIV.

I would say that this story started six months earlier, but it goes back even further than that. Back in 2008, I graduated college and lined up a job across the country. My former wife, who always gave lip service to supporting me, moved along with me, kicking and screaming. My new job was in the middle of the Mojave Desert, where it was at least 100 degrees during the day from May to October. It had well over 300 days of sunshine every year, which is great for someone who suffers from Seasonal Affective Disorder like me. My ex-wife, though, hated it. She worked retail back in our hometown, but it still took her a long time to find a job in our new town, and it was menial at that. Still, I thought this was the beginning of a new chapter in our lives and after some adjustment, things would get better.

They didn’t. She said she was getting depressed being so far away from friends, family, and familiar scenery, and it ended up getting me depressed too. I had busted my ass for 6 years to get my degree after dropping out of high school, and this was my first good job with benefits I had ever had. I couldn’t help but feel that she was sabotaging my success. Still, after less than a year out there, I agreed to let her move back home with her parents to get her old job back while I searched for a job closer to our hometown.

We were apart for 6 months or so until I was able to find a place I could transfer to. She lined up the housing and I moved back out to her, but I didn’t really like the job I had transferred to. There was something even worse than that, though. After moving back across the country for her, and being shoved aside into some cubicle at my new job for weeks, she decided to drop a bomb in my lap. She had feelings for somebody else.

Yes, you see, while I was being the dutiful husband and depositing my paychecks into our joint account, she had gotten in touch with an old flame from Middle School. She didn’t give me details, only “kissing and touching”, but I was devastated. I had disowned both of my parents a decade before, was alienated from most of my family, and she was the only person I had in this world, so I clung to her for dear life. I asked her what she wanted to do, and she said she wanted to stay with me. Shortly thereafter, we conceived our only child, bought a house, and did the whole typical family thing.

Except things weren’t typical. We found out when our son was two that he was Autistic. We had a house out in the country, so to be closer to services for him we looked for a house in town. We had two mortgages for the time it took us to sell the old house. Luckily, our son was high functioning. In the meantime, we still tried to enjoy ourselves. A year before we bought the new house, we had gone on a themed cruise and loved it. Another cruise was coming up, and since we had finally sold the old house we bought tickets for it. We bought well in advance, giving us about 6 months to plan things for our January departure.

As the winter came and dragged on, I noticed something change in my ex-wife. She was more distant than normal. With this distance came my own depression again. I thought it was my SAD coming back and/or a lack of exercise, so I started going to the gym, but I also brought up to my ex that I was feeling depressed, hoping to open up some dialog with her. “Maybe you should go see somebody,” was her cold reply.

During the holiday season, she had been spending weekends seeing bands or hanging out with friends, while I stayed home with our son. I didn’t mind at all, as I’m a shut-in as it is, and I love being a dad. I still couldn’t help but think that she would rather be doing that than building memories with her family. Still, I didn’t want to be “that guy”, so I didn’t say anything to her when she stayed out late. I would let her sleep in the next day and cook her breakfast when she woke up. Basically, I was being a sucker.

The marinade. That fucking marinade. The cruise came and we flew out to Florida and embark. We got to our tropical island stop and looked around. “Gee, she’s spending a shit-ton of money,” I thought to myself. Again, I didn’t want to be “that guy”, and I justified it by telling myself we were on vacation. One of the items she bought, though, was the catalyst for conflict. Some exotic marinade, in a jar. She expressed interest in it, but I told her that since we didn’t check any bags on the plane, and only had carry-ons, the airport security people wouldn’t let us on with it. She argued with me until I gave in. It was only $5 or $6 dollars. It’s just marinade. No big deal if we made it a donation to the TSA.

Apparently, it wasn’t ‘just marinade’. As we were going through security, just as I told her, they said we couldn’t bring it through. “Oh well, it was only $5 or $6,” I told my ex-wife. She lit into me, telling me that I never cared about her feelings and that this marinade was sentimental as she wanted to give it to her parents. She made it sound like some long lost family heirloom I was throwing away. In the 12 years we had been married, she had never done something like that before.

Her parents came to town to watch our son while we were away, so when we got back, she left immediately to take them back home. It was only a couple of hours to drive to get them there, but she wanted to stay the night to visit her best friend who still lived there too. The next day she got back, and after tucking our son into bed, she dropped another bomb. The “I love you, but I’m not in love with you” nuke.

I was shattered. I thought we had a great time on the cruise. She claimed that she was hoping “the spark” was still there. Apparently, our spark had gone away, but this was news to me. It would have been nice to know in advance, as it takes work to make a spark. I thought things were still doing ok with us. I mean, I never yelled at or hit her, and I busted my ass to get her out of the ghetto trailer park she grew up in. Was I really that deficient of a person to be discarded for no reason? I asked her if there was someone else, and she looked me in the eye and told me no. Even after her cheating five years before, I gave her the benefit of the doubt.
The next night we put our son to bed and had another talk. I asked her to give us 60 days to work on our marriage, which she agreed to. I tried my best to create a spark that night. “Hysterical bonding” is what they call it, apparently. It was some of the best sex we had had in a long time. The next day at work, though, I thought about things. I thought about her cheating on me when I was trying to move FOR HER. Now, she apparently fakes her way through a cruise only to dump be the fucking day after. Everything was pointing to one thing: she didn’t respect me. I couldn’t be in a marriage without respect.

I decided that I didn’t have anything to work with, so when I got home, I told her my decision. She was upset since I had just asked for 60 days, yet here it was a day after that and I wanted out. I asked her again if there was someone else, and again, she told me that there wasn’t. Fast forward five months. I assumed that men get screwed in divorces, so I moved out of the house and rented a shitty apartment, while she was still living in the house. I still had a key to the house, though, and my gut was screaming at me that she was lying. In April, two days before we were supposed to go to mediation with a lawyer, and after verbally agreeing to split custody of our son, she asks me how I feel about her moving 3.5 hours away. I told her to kindly go fuck herself, and to not bother coming to mediation, as I was retaining the lawyer myself. Naturally, she was defensive, saying that she was “just asking”, even though I asked her how joint custody was supposed to work with her being that far away. Of course, she didn’t have an answer for that.

However, one of the “friends” she had been hanging out with was someone we had both known for years. A musician in a band, we had seen him play a dozen times. He lived 3.5 hours away, and that was my lightbulb moment. One day, when she was at work, I went back to the house and opened up her laptop. Well, on advice from my lawyer, let me rephrase that. I got on to a laptop that was common marital property and used the password I had put on it when I first set it up to get access to it. She had set her browser to auto-logon all of her e-mail and social media accounts. I got on her Facebook and boom, there it was, in her chat history. The musician. It all started to make sense.

I also looked at an old e-mail account she had. I searched for the name of the guy from 5 years before, and while she had deleted the e-mails he had sent her, she forgot to delete the e-mails she sent to him. I read through them. While we were conceiving our son and buying our house, they were telling each other that they loved each other. And she also had an e-mail in which she sent him nude pictures of herself. She had always been the shy, modest type, and had never done anything like that with me. Apparently, things slowly started tapering off between them, but with my ex-wife leaving the door open. “I think we should be working on our marriages. But maybe in the future?” That was the last e-mail I read.

Back to the musician. He had a reputation for being bisexual and promiscuous, unashamedly posting his escapades on the internet. He has a flattering video online showing him standing, drunk as a skunk, throwing up while wobbling all over the place. Yes, apparently I was replaced by this winner. When I confronted my ex-wife about everything, of course, she minimized. It wasn’t that she cheated, it was my response to her cheating because apparently, getting into her e-mails has the same moral equivalence as blowing her family up and devastating the father of her child. But cheating with THIS guy? I told her I needed to get an STD test, and she assured me that she was clean. Needless to say, after what I had just found out about her, I didn’t trust her any further than I could throw her.

So that’s how I ended up in the STD clinic getting tested. The HIV test takes twenty minutes to get results, and they were the longest twenty minutes of my life. It was a clusterfuck of events that led me to this point, and I was feeling everything at once. Shame. Anger. Sorrow. I was mad at her. I was made at her (at least) two affair partners. But in those twenty minutes, I was mostly mad at myself. Why had I been so co-dependent? Why did I tolerate such disrespect for so long? Why had I been so powerless to do anything about it? It was a shit tsunami, and I was hanging 10.

Society today tends to shrug their shoulders when it comes to infidelity. “It’s none of my business,” they stay, not wanting to rock the boat or speak out. Fucked up, narcissistic drivel like “Eat, Pray, Love” has enabled behavior such as this, because Elizabeth Gilbert was just looking for her “happiness”, just like my ex-wife claimed that it wasn’t about me, it was about being unhappy. I guess cheating makes them happy? At what cost should we tolerate people finding their happiness? Is it worth the cost of our families, our bank accounts, our reputations? The STD’s our cheaters give us? I was lucky that the HIV test came back negative. I have heard many, many stories of people getting HIV, herpes, even cervical cancer from cancerous strains of HPV that were given to unsuspecting, faithful spouses.

When we are robbed and sickened by strangers, we can take them to court for damages or send them to jail. In today’s “no-fault” divorce, someone can unilaterally take you to the cleaners and give you a deadly STD, and “nothing we can do about it, he/she was just trying to be happy.” Some of us have to share our children and give child support to these monsters. Some of us have to start our lives over in middle age, with no hope of a comfortable retirement. I think that is bullshit, and things need to change.

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Photo credit: Getty Images
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