The Discovery

I don't really know the man I've chosen to spend my life with. I don't know anything about him, and never did. That's the only explanation.

It was a shit day from the beginning, for inconsequential reasons that I won't get into here. It was now 8:30 p.m., our 9-month-old daughter D. was finally asleep for the night, and H. was gone for the evening—not an uncommon occurence these days. Due to a series of computer glitches, I needed to log into my personal email account from his computer instead of my own. So I turned it on, pulled up Yahoo, and clicked on the in-box.

Although I had never entered my user name or password, it was a few seconds before I even realized the account I was logged into wasn't my own. Just as I was about to log out, two things registered at roughly the same time: 1) He was using a fake name on this email account, and 2) Every message in the in-box was from someone calling themselves "nicedream08."

As I discovered over the next half an hour, my husband and "nicedream08" had been emailing each other almost constantly for at least the past several months. Even worse, they'd been seeing each other in person as well. The most shocking revelation: He'd been with her only the night before, while he'd told me he was playing tennis. And it was clear they'd had sex, although evidently he told her afterward they had to cool it, or something like that. She seemed upset about this. She said she'd spent the rest of the evening after he left trying to compose an email to him and "sorting out her feelings." She wanted to be with him. But she "didn't want to accidentally get pregnant either." She wanted "the white picket fence" eventually, but she was willing to wait for as long as he needed. I felt pretty sure that I was going to throw up. My heart was practically beating out of my chest, and breathing had suddenly become very difficult.

With hands shaking, I read more of the emails. Most were not nearly as emotional, to say the least. Most of them were just about sex, pure and simple. When I got to the one that referenced ass-fucking, I knew I couldn't read anymore.

The next few hours passed in a blur. The first thing I did was to go into our bedroom and randomly grab some clothes out of his closet, which I threw onto the kitchen table in a big messy pile. Next I added a few toiletries: shaving cream, toothbrush, his Propecia. Then I spotted a nearly-black banana sitting on the counter, which he'd been assuring me he was planning to eat, so please don't throw it out. I hurled that onto the pile too. Stood there and stared at it for a while.

Then I decided to email this "nicedream08" piece of trash. Back to his computer I went. Of course it occurred to me that she didn't know he was married, so I composed a short-but-sweet email from his fake-named account explaining that this was his wife writing: FYI, he's married with an infant daughter. Please stay the hell away from him in the future. And by the way, fuck you, you stupid bitch. I clicked send. Felt some grim satisfaction for about 15 seconds, then promptly went back to feeling like my whole world had caved in.

After that, there was really nothing to do but pace around the house and question everything about my existence. Who was she? Was he in love with her? Were we done? How long had it been going on? How could he have lied to me? For so long, and so easily? How could I not have suspected? How could this be happening? To us? Didn't we have a good marriage? What did I do wrong? Wasn't I enough? Wasn't his beautiful infant daughter enough? How was the man I thought I knew so well capable of this? Of THIS? HE WAS HAVING SEX WITH HER, FOR GOD'S SAKE!

How does something like this happen to us? We're just nice, normal, well-educated, upper-middle-class people. We're not people who scream at each other or play mind games or appear on Dr. Phil. My husband wasn't a commitment-phobe before we got married, or a self-absorbed jerk. He was never abusive, didn't spend all his time drinking with the guys, and he doesn't particularly like stripclubs. I was never jealous or insecure in our relationship—I trusted him and he trusted me. We had it made. Or so I thought.

Okay, things had sometimes been a little weird since our daughter D. came along. I'd been busy with her. She'd had some issues with sleeping (what baby doesn't?), and that stressed us out a little. And H. doesn't like his job. It's been a constant source of struggle for him. He works long hours. He doesn't find the work interesting and often comes home miserable. This is obviously not a good thing, and we'd discussed it frequently in the last few months. I told him I'd support him in whatever he wanted to do, but he has a family to take care of now, so he needed to figure out what it is that would make him happy and have a clear plan for achieving it before he left his current position. I thought that was a pretty reasonable thing to ask of him, under the circumstances.

But as I waited for him to come home that night, nothing seemed reasonable. My life was teetering on the edge of total disaster. I'd never felt so angry at anyone in my life—his job sucking and my asking him to have a plan to remedy it hardly seemed like a reason to go out and sleep with some whore. For the first time in the eight years that I'd known him, I had no earthly idea what our future held. I was frightened, and angry, and really, really hurt.