My Story (Sorry for a long read)
BACKGROUND
Where do I start. A little background on the both of us. My wife and I met in 1998 in high school. We both never had any serious relationships yet since we were only 15. Like any high school relationship there were ups and downs due to hormones and jealousy but it never led to cheating on each other. We were each other's first sexual partner. I was one year ahead of her so when it came to graduate, I went off to college 4 hours away. Long distance was challenging but we made it work by her taking the train down most weekends to be with me. By the end of my 1st year of college and her Senior year, we found out she was pregnant. Initially I freaked out like any teenage boy would do since I thought we had everything going for us. She however did not hesitate with her decision to want to continue with pregnancy. We both were raised Catholic and attending Catholic HS together. So I made the decision to transfer to a college near our hometown so that I could stay with my girlfriend(now wife) and support my new child.
The rest of our college experience was not that of your average college kid. There were no parties, not random hookups. My girlfriend also attended college until her due date as we were both focused on finishing our degrees. She eventually took on semester off before returning. We were both focused on school, working part time, and raising our newborn daughter. By the time my senior year came around (2005), our daughter was 2 and my girlfriend and I decided to go a spring break trip to Miami. We loved it so much since we had never been before that we said what if we moved here after college. My girlfriend said she always dreamed of going to college in Florida, so I drove her to that University to pickup a transfer application and told her to apply. She was hesitant but I encouraged her that she had perfect grades in college and that all they could do is tell you No. She eventually gets accepted but her parents say that she can't move unless I have a job, so we go down to Florida for a week to job hunt. On the last day I get an offer but says I have to start the next day.
Here we were, a family of 3 (not married yet) starting from scratch in a new area with just our suitcases filled with 1 week of clothes and an air mattress just got approved for a brand new apartment. My first job out of college was the night shift repairing electronics from 3PM to 12AM (at 10 dollars an hour) so it worked perfect that I could be home with our daughter while she attended her college courses. This job didn't last long since I was thought an Engineering degree was worth more that my current salary. I found a job that allowed me normal hours but offered double pay for hours of 40 and did not limit the amount of overtime. Being young and wanting to provide for my family, I jumped at the opportunity to put in as much time as possible.
PROBLEMS START
After starting the new job, my weekly hours quickly go from 45 hrs a week to 60 hrs a week as I see the drastic difference in the paycheck. I want to provide a certain lifestyle to my daughter and girlfriend given that we lived in a young city with so much nightlife. I routinely would work long hours and still go out Friday nights until early morning (and still report to work every weekend) when we had family come to visit and babysit. The summer of 2006 is when we had a new neighbor move in the apartment below us. It was a younger couple than us and the woman looked about 7 months pregnant. Shortly after is when I noticed my girlfriend starting to go on longer walks with the dog or deciding to go for a drive after returning our Hollywood video DVDs. She mentioned that she needed time to herself since she always was either in class, at home studying while watching our daughter while I was at work. Even though this may seem valid I questioned why drives ended up taking hours and she would come back around 12AM - 1AM while I was home with our daughter. Her response would be that she just needed to clear her head/relax etc or that I was overreacting. After a date night out, my girlfriend had drank too much and when she got out of the car she proceeded to sit on the ground next to the apartment of this new couple. I told her to get up so we dont disturb people but all of a sudden some guy comes out and hands me a bottle of water to give her. I found this extremely coincidental and awkward. My wife didnt say anything but just took the water bottle drank it and we went upstairs. At this point I start to get anxious since I had a gut feeling that maybe something is going on but I had no proof.
As time goes on I start to notice that we are starting to have sex less often not sure if its due to the amount of hours I am working, our schedules due to her class/study schedule on top of taking care of our daughter. I start to monitor her social media networks for messages or new friends that are added (Facebook and Myspace). The frequency of her long drives start to get more frequent and I mention my concern about them and flat out ask if she is by herself during these drives and she responds with yes. I do watch her leave the apartment out the window and get in the car and drive away alone. She continues to say that my jealousy issues is not a good look and that I should stop being so controlling. Was I jealous...Maybe, but probably more self-conscious only because 1) my girlfriend(wife) is 5'9 and I am 5'3 and this guy was about 6'2 and 2) we both have only sexually been with each other so the thought of being cheated on caused me an enormous amount of stress. She just reiterated that she loved me and not to worry.
Fast-forward to Valentine's Day 2007, I decide to go to a local florist on my lunch break and pick out a very nice flower arrangement despite our periodic arguments. I normally didnt go home for lunch but this time i decided to head home and drop off the arrangement before she got home from her high school student teaching rotation. I so happened to notice that she was behind me at the light turning into our apartment. I could tell because i could see her face but nothing else since we had the car tinted pretty dark. So i proceed to park in our spot but notice she was no longer behind me as i expected her not be too far behind. I take the arrangement out and head upstairs to the apartment. A couple minutes later I see her car pull up next to mine from the window and see her get out alone. She asked me what I was doing home to which i pointed at the arrangement. I asked her what took so long because I saw her behind me and she said she didnt see me and said she was stuck at the light. Distraught, I just said Happy Valentine's day and I walked out and back to work despite her asking me to stay. The next few weeks were tough for me since I was assuming she had someone in her car and she dropped them off at a different portion of the parking lot.
DISCOVERY
After going through and clicking on every profile of her friendlist on MySpace, I found a person which looked like our neighbor downstairs. His profile says that he is 19 (we are 24 and she routinely teaches 17-18yr olds in HS). So at this point I am furious, depressed, upset, everything emotion that comes with finding out. I start going through all his pictures, and 1 picture stands out. It was a selfie of him and after zooming in, I see my daughter's car seat in the background. It appeared that the picture may have been taken inside my girlfriend's car. Now I had something to approach my girlfriend after she got home from school. As soon as I showed her the picture in question, she broke down and admitted to everything. All the drives were with him and included blowjobs and fingering her to orgasm. After weeks of constant pressing for more information even though knowing every detail caused more pain, I needed to know, she admitted that they fucked in the car a couple times (unprotected) and that they had sec once in his place. At the time i felt so betrayed, stupid, emasculated, foolish and depressed. I now understood why at some point in the last couple months she wanted me to start wearing condoms (she initially said she just didnt want to get pregnant again but we never used condoms as she was on birth control). I asked if things were still going on in February when I dropped the flower off. She responded with No that is when she told the OM she wanted to stop. She mentioned that he started getting to emotional talking about leaving his girlfriend and newborn for her. She told him she wasnt looking for a relationship and that the hookups had to stop. I was never able to confront the OBS because they moved out pretty quickly after my girlfriend told me.
Processing the affair was the hardest thing (still continues to this day) that I have experienced. I questioned my WW moral values since the OM was soo close in age to the kids she was teaching. I even asked her how she could do that to another pregnant woman. I started to question what kind of woman will my daughter look up to if she has no mutual respect for other women's households. Maybe I was being naive in my young age that I looked at the woman I love with such high standards and that she was incapable of such betrayal. I wish I knew about this site or that it existed when I was going through this is 2007. I might have changed the way I approached our reconciliation. After my WW told me the full story and repeated details for the next 3-4 months, she kept on telling me that bringing up and talking about the details wasnt going to help our relationship since it was so negative. She said that if I was unsure if I wanted to be with her to just leave. I told her its not that easy and that not its all that I think about and that stuff constantly reminds me of the affair. I asked her why she did it. She said that it was nice to feel wanted by someone else since I was the only one she had been with. I said well I have never had that either and I did kind of understand that feeling as I myself did wonder what it would feel like to be sexually wanted by another woman. She did also say that because I worked such long hours that made her feel lonely and this is what opened the door to the affair. She wasnt trying to blame me (even thought it felt that way). She did say she knows those were not excuses for her to cheat but was just telling me her state of mind during the period of time.
Reconciliation 1
After about 4 months (August 2007) of talking it through and me spending time on friends couches, we decide to make an attempt at trying to work things out. She finishes her last semester at college and graduates. We buy a townhouse (still not married) in March of 2008 and we continue to work on our relationship. There are times where songs, movies, etc trigger my thoughts and memories and I immediately go back to interrogating her to see if the information is the same or there are more details. This continues to happen until early 2009. I see a voicemail on her phone from a number I dont recognize. I listen to it and it just says Why dont you pick up the phone. I ask her who this is and she confirms that the OM was trying to contact her and she was ignoring him. She immediately says lets go get my phone number changed which we do. As you can imagine, all the original pain comes back and I lose it on her and go into a depression. After a couple days she approaches me and says that these periodic episodes are taking a toll on her and its affecting our daughter because of how depressed and angry I get when I get triggered. She just wants to move forward with our lives.
Time Apart
We decide to slow things down and I move into an apartment not too far to see if space and time to heal apart works. During this time I chose spend a lot of time on myself i.e going to the gym, riding my motorcycle with new friends, work, and weekends with my daughter. I was not interested in any sort of revenge affair as I didnt consider us to have been broken up but to try and find ourselves again. My WW spent her time during the week with my daughter and working as a teacher at a HS. She went with coworkers sometimes as a group but nothing (at least to my knowledge even to this day) ever happened with any of them. My WW would always try and convince me to stay the night when I would drop my daughter off but I would deny her (even though deep down I wanted to). After 6 months we both agreed that we would try and focus on building our life together as family. We get engaged in August 2009 and married in January 2010.
Reconciliation 2
After getting married in 2010, my WW has been the most loyal wife. It seems as if she took it very seriously that she would never cheat on me again. We had our son in December 2010 and our family life had been developing great. We both focused on our kids and I continue to thrive at work; However, the hours were still crazy. I was working 65-70 hours every week, 7 days a week. From time to time I would experience triggers and I tried to keep the smart comments or questions to myself since I already knew the answers to them and I didnt want to create negative energy. The amount of time I was away from the house was really affecting my now wife because she would say that she felt that she was raising the kids on her own sine she was doing all the housework, feeding, school work since I was at work from 6AM to 6PM. I understood and said maybe it was time to find another job. 2 years after getting married, eventually I found a job in Maryland closer to our homestate of NJ. The one problem is that there would be a 30% reduction in pay. In the end, I valued my family and took my wife's concerns seriously so we both decided that it would be best for the family to move. To my wife and I this felt like a fresh start for us.
Life after moving to Maryland has been great. Our daughter is now 20 and my son is 12. My WW and I have been together for more time in reconciliation than pre-affair. Mostly I have had very little times where I have been triggered since we have lived through raising a teenage daughter who is popular, intelligent, and a successful athlete. All of our time was now focused on our kids which to some extent slowed our sex life down even though my sex drive has been the same it seems like my wife's had slowed down tremendously. Here we are in 2023 and I dont think we have sex more than twice every three months. Our lives are totally consumed from the schedules of our 12 year old son and the stress of having a child away at college.
It has now been 16 years since the initial DDay and last week I was triggered bad. I was triggered by conversations and actions I see my college daughter taking with boys. She engages in casual partners in college (im guessing this is the new norm). The trigger is that there is this one nice kid who lives down the street and has always liked my daughter since we've moved here. She never gave him the time of day and considered him to always just be too nice or just a friend. Now he is in the Navy and is grown up and reached back out to my daughter while she was home for the summer. I told my daughter and my wife that I didnt think it was a good idea if she messes with his head and leads him on if she had not intention of being in a relationship. My wife's advice to her was as long he lets him and know she doesnt mind what she is doing because shed rather my daughter not settle since shes still in college and should just have fun. This triggered all of my negative thoughts because I couldnt help but wonder if that's what my wife was thinking the entire time she was with me during the affair. I got so bad where i started looking up the OM on social media to make sure there was no contact with my wife (which there hasnt) and where this person lives etc, phone numbers (just incase I have to block them). After internalizing it for a couple weeks, my wife asked me what I seemed depressed and I tried to hold back from telling her because it has been 16 years. I eventually told her and she was shocked and upset. She even asked why are you still thinking about this 16 years later to which I responded that it never goes away and that most of the time I'm able ignore urges by focusing on our family. She became anxious as to what was now all of a sudden causing me to cause an argument implying if I am trying to find a way out of the marriage for some reason. She kept going by saying is there someone at work you're talking to about this that it would only now come up. She only says this because she met 1 female co-worker who I said was divorced and is now questioning if I talk to her which I do not.
After finding this site, I am grateful to read about other people's experiences so I though I should share mine. It took me a couple weeks to get untriggered and to refocus on my family life but I just wanted to know if anyone out there has experience triggers like this this many years later. I am still very in love with my wife, I just wish our children's lives were so busy where we could make time for just us. On top of that my wife was diagnosed with Lupus and going through menopause so she is constantly is some sort of pain. So sex is just not her priority so I find myself just routinely masturbating to relieve stress even if its watching our own home videos.
With that said, reconciliation is still a work in progress. We have thrived but new challenges which is life arise and it is how we adapt that will determine the outcome. Has anyone experienced being triggered even after 15-16 years?
