timj said 10 years, 5 months ago:

The details that identify everyone in this story have been changed. I’m sorry, I can’t be 100% honest about that, but I want to save my marriage, not destroy it. My name is fake. Everything connected to that name is fake. Hell, I almost put on IP blocking before posting this as I really do not want to be identified even by the owners of the website. Everything else I am writing is 100% true.

This is my story. It is rather long, more like a novel. I am writing this because it helps me to talk about it. I also have to provide background so that you can understand my story. At the end I will talk about what is going on that I have to stop myself from doing. You will see I need help.

I grew up as an abused child. I am not going to relive all the details here, but I can share one story so you can see what my childhood was like. I was playing baseball with a couple of neighbor boys. I was maybe 13-years old. One of them kept throwing at my head trying to hurt me. I warned him to stop, he threw at me again so I charged him, knocked him down and held him down and told him to stop or I was going to really kick his ass. He father came outside, told me to get off his son, so I did, and I ran home. I did NOT hurt him. I could of beaten the crap out of him. I didn’t hit him, I just held him down and told him to stop trying to hurt me. My neighbor’s father called my father that night and told him I was beating the crap out of his son. This is false, but I can now see how he felt that way. My father took a leather dog leash with metal buckles, took me to the garage and started beating me. I was cut all over and bleeding from more than a score or wounds covering my body. My mother eventually turned up and grabbed my father and screamed at him that he was killing me and he stopped. Being hit was the norm in my childhood. It taught me to avoid people and to feel like everyone just wants to hurt you. So, I tried very hard to hide every emotion and protect myself from getting close to anyone.

Eventually in my senior year of high school I found a girl friend, or she found me or we found each other. I felt she was very cute, but I think she was a bit insecure. I fell completely in love with her. Everything that I had repressed seemed to fade away, but really it didn’t. She went to a different college freshman year than I did, because I chose to switch to a higher quality university before our freshman year started. This caused some stress in our relationship, but we stayed together and would visit about one weekend a month, I convinced her to transfer to my school her sophomore year, but we did have a bit of a falling out during the summer between our freshman and sophomore years. I had given her a pre-engagement ring and of all stupid things I took it back as she had started occasionally going out with other guys. Just as friends she said, but I didn’t trust her. How could I trust anyone? I had closed off all emotions in my heart; I needed to protect myself.

Our sophomore year we stayed together. I spent tons of time with her, helping her especially with calculus because the school she transferred from was so lame that her first year calculus course only covered half the material of the one at my school, but they placed her in second year calculus when she transferred. She had a lot to learn to survive the course. We had survived the summer, remained together and to my knowledge she had stopped going out with anyone else. I felt we were regaining the closeness that we had lost the previous summer and had started talking about our future together occasionally. We were not committed or engaged, but I felt we were and I was trying to work up the courage to ask her to marry me and return the ring as a real engagement ring, not a pre-engagement one.

I was working late. I worked at the McDonald’s on weekend evenings to make money for college. (With the relationship I described above with my family, I think you can realize that I didn’t want a cent from my family so I vowed to pay for my education myself and I had cut myself off from contact with my parents.) My girlfriend’s apartment was one street away, through a parking structure. It was late, like 1 AM as we had just finished up closing and I thought I’d walk over to her place and see if her light was on. I saw her through the parking structure, she was holding hands with some guy walking toward her apartment. I froze, sort of hid behind a pillar and watched them. They walked up to the porch, kissed, and went inside. The lights went on, the lights went out, he didn’t leave. Now things start to get hard to remember. I am not sure if I rang the doorbell and waited for her to come to the door (if this is what happened, she didn’t) or I didn’t ring, all I know is that I waited for a while, maybe 10 minutes getting more and more upset and trying to figure out what to do as I saw in my mind the woman I loved and cared for more than anyone in the world “F-ing someone”. I lost control. I climbed up the porch, her apartment was on the second floor, it was summer and hot and her living room window was open, I climbed in. They we naked and on the living room floor “F-ing”. I started screaming, I have no idea what I was saying but I imagine it was about how I was going to kill them both. I had completely lost control. They were grabbing clothes and trying to get dressed and I am sure they were screaming at me to get the “F” out and that they were going to call the police. I was temporarily mentally ill and out of control. I really don’t remember what was said. I left the way I entered back out the window without touching anyone and literally jumped off the porch roof 12-feet to the ground and ran home so out of control I had no idea how I was going to deal with this. When I got there I took a hammer, took the ring outside and started hitting it over and over into the concrete. I broke the tubular steel hammer. That’s when I stopped.

This one event combined with my childhood scarred me in rather deep and profound ways that until recently (recent in this context is about 30 years later than the event described above) I haven’t dealt with. It convinced me that everyone I get close to just wants to hurt me. They really do not care for me at all. They just want to abuse me. They might pretend to care to get something they want, but really I meant nothing to them. This is so painful.

Time passes, a couple of years, I meet the woman that will become my wife of more than 20 years. She has her own demons. She is the daughter of an immigrant family. Both her parents were Holocost survivors and I cannot pretend to understand how this affected her childhood and development. Recently we have talked a lot about both of our childhoods, but I still do not understand it very well. We sort of fell in bed together one night during a party at the place we lived at in college. We started sleeping together fairly often, but I would not openly acknowledge the relationship. In essence, I treated her like dirt. I was a bastard. Who wants to feel that your lover is embarrassed to be seen with you as a boy friend? I know that is how she felt. I felt completely different. I was trying to protect myself from getting too close and getting hurt again. Any time I started feeling close to her, I’d break up. I couldn’t let her break up with me and hurt me. I was a terrible, terrible person. Please forgive me.

This went on for years till we got married. She stayed with me because she lacked self-confidence. Everyone, her mother included and all her friends thought she was crazy. Well, they were probably right, but I am glad she didn’t listen to them regardless of the heartache we have both caused each other. I think she never felt attractive. My wife is and always was incredibly beautiful.

Our marriage has been rocky to say the least. It didn’t start out that badly, but she always knew there were events in my life that I barely talked about that had damaged me emotionally. We had several children, I had a career I was trying to bury myself in, to find some success in something in my life. I failed. I was a university professor and I failed to get tenure. I wanted to try and maintain my research career somehow and a colleague offered me a place in his lab a couple of hours away. Rather than talk to my wife about this, I engineered that I couldn’t find a job locally, and more or less announced that my only option was to work in my friend’s lab 2.5 hours away. I worked there 4 days a week and was home 3 days a week. My wife refused to move so the job ended. There was a risk in moving as the funding was not guaranteed so she was probably wiser than I was. This was a huge breach in trust in our relationship. I had been telling my wife I couldn’t find a job locally. I was lying. I tried to only find a local position where I could maintain my research career. I did not try and find another job locally and stopped all together once I had arranged to continue my research career in my colleague’s lab. I am not trying to make myself look good at all here. I was a bastard and not much of a husband.

As a failed research scientist, I started bouncing between jobs with various biotech companies. I eventually became a high school teacher, which I found enjoyment and fulfillment in, but it is not a prestigious job. My wife never avoided a chance to tell me what a failure and disappointment I was. I found something outside my marriage where there was fulfillment. I started playing online games, primarily one particular online role playing game. There I was successful, there I was respected, and in real-life I was increasingly becoming a failure. My wife became an angry, frustrated nag and took this out on everyone around her. She screamed at me, she screamed at our children. Our sex life went to zero. She felt her life was passing by without any fulfillment. She was reaching a mid-life crisis.

In early August she found an outlet. My wife is a tutor and she told me she was part of a tutor chat group. She started spending a lot of time with her iPad mini. During the day and in the evening she found something to chat about. On October 3rd my wife said she was reaching a crisis and hinted that she was finding online companionship. I was so repressed and unhappy with our marriage I acted stonefaced and chose not to confront this. She left angry. On 4 Oct. I came home from work and I tried to act like nothing happened. After all, if you act like nothing matters, it won’t hurt you right? My wife freaked out. She told me she was having sex online and implied it was just 2 guys, one from overseas and one from a northeastern state. I still thought they were from an online tutoring group and that things took an unexpected turn to sex chat. She wanted to force a crisis and finally decide whether there was anything in this marriage to save.

At that moment something in my life changed. I couldn’t respond, I was too repressed but my wife had brought home a 6-pack of a very strong beer (she was drinking a lot these days) so I started to drink. I am NOT a big drinker, not since college. In our marriage I doubt I drank enough to get drunk more than a half-dozen times in her presence (College was a different story, I drank a lot in college both before and after I met the woman I married but stopped as I got older and would maybe have a beer or glass of wine every day or every other day). I saw that I was going to lose her. Everything I had repressed started rolling out of me as I drank more. I was crying and trying to explain to her that I loved her but couldn’t tell her and that I didn’t want to live without her. One child is off to college, one child was out and the last child was upstairs with headphones on while I cried and poured my heart out. She hugged and said she was so sorry about what she had done. I went upstairs and my wife went out to pick up the one child that was away and came back and we made love like we never had done before. There was a closeness and intimacy that was lacking for the last 20 years. The next morning she told me she was going to delete everything and never contact anyone again. She said she wanted to say goodbye to the 2 guys and ask them not to contact her again. She emailed them on the 6th, said goodbye deleted their correspondence.

That should be the end of this story, happily ever after.

That night we made love again. We were sort of like newlyweds in a way. I had trouble sleeping. My wife fell asleep. She was dreaming. She said a man’s name, not mine. I was so upset, I went downstairs. When she was pretending it was an online tutor group, she had bought an item on ebay she said was from one of them. It was an old album, I found it and looked at the band members names—one had the first name she muttered. I freaked out. I started searching online, I found him. He looked like a successful research scientist, an assistant director of a research institute, he had a Ph.D. like I do, but he was not a failure. I was afraid that the crisis she mentioned was that she was going to leave me, the failure, for this guy, the success. I was in tears. I was up for hours. I had to work, I was distraught. I tried to go to bed but I was crying and my wife heard me and woke up. She asked what was wrong and I told her. She said she was so, so sorry and I went to work.

I couldn’t focus. My wife had made one mistake about the accounts she was using for her sex emailing, at this point that’s all I thought it was. She had left the account open, nothing incriminating on screen, but I had seen the email account name. I didn’t at the time know it was her sex chat account. I went to teach, I had a free period, and I started searching. I found the email address linked to Dreambooks: Adult Pen Pals website. She had lied to me about how this started. It wasn’t a tutoring chat group that went a rye. She had posted an ad looking for someone to send erotic emails to. I sent her 2 emails accusing her of lying and going to a “F… Site” telling her I wouldn’t be home till I talked to someone. She spent the day going from website to website deleting all of her accounts, trying to permanently delete both of her sex email accounts. It wasn’t just Dreambooks, but I didn’t know this yet. Again I freaked out, made an appointment with a therapist and didn’t come home till after I had spoken with her.

When I returned home, my wife offered to come clean. She told me about Dreambooks and that she had found her email sex partners through that website. She told me that she would tell me everything if I asked. I asked a few questions and got a few answers. I knew the names of the 2 guys, she suggested there were a couple of others that didn’t matter, that it was just sex and she had never touched anyone, never met anyone, never had any interest in meeting anyone. I thought it was all being done by email. But she was hiding things.

I let it go for a few days; things settled down. My wife had to visit her father who is ill and she took her mini so I didn’t get a chance to investigate it. I confirmed that her email accounts had been disconnected and that the guy from the northeast had disconnected his email account, I didn’t yet know the email addresses of any others so I figured that was that.

But I wondered.

I am quite handy with technology. My wife went out or a couple of hours with one of our children one evening after returning from NYC and left her mini. I accessed all backup files and found a message that while deleted from the notepad, still existed in the backup. The message was to the overseas guy talking about her adventures online that day that included several men and mentioned finding them at AM. AM is Ashely Madison, it’s a “F… site” for married people looking to cheat. At this point I confronted her again and asked her why she didn’t really come clean. She said it was because she was afraid she would lose me if I knew what she had done and that she had to be able to live with herself and she was so ashamed and asked me to let it go.

I couldn’t let it go.

I knew enough at this point that I figured I could reactivate both of her gmail accounts and take control of them. I did. She had tried to delete everything. For instance Hangouts Chat can be deleted on your computer, but guess what, if someone you had chatted with tries to contact you again, the entire chat history is reloaded from their computer. 2 guys had tried to contact her and when the account was reactivated, the chats were reloaded. I had the entire chat log of the overseas guy. They were chatting and “F…ing” most days from 22 Aug to 3 Oct. They would chat after she dropped one child off to school, she would chat after she came home from tutoring, she would chat at night when I was working. The overseas guy had figured out who she was and besides “text F…ing” with her was advising her how to become a better sneak and not get caught. I read it all. There was also a chat from another guy that ended with him asking about moving to Skype. The chat ended. I am not an idiot. I found and logged into her secret Skype account. My wife isn’t very creative with passwords. He wasn’t her only Skype contact. I had her ENTIRE web history, she hadn’t deleted the log of EVERY website she went to during the 7 weeks of her sneaking around. I knew everything, had every name, just not he content. It was so hurtful. On Oct. 1st my wife and I had gone out. We had had sex in the car on the way home. The next day she was bragging to the overseas guy she had a good day, got off 4 times and he was saying how Mrs. Horny’s husband should be happy as some trickled down to him. Now when we are together and she whispers something, I see it’s something she whispered before to some fucking pixel that isn’t part of her real life. It is killing me.

I had told my wife I wouldn’t search anymore after the iPad note that mentioned AM. I lied. I am not proud. We had a big fight and I felt terrible. I thought she was going to leave me. I begged her not to. I told her I would stop.

I am happy and I really do not want to look anymore. I know it will end our marriage. I need help to stop. I have kept my promise so far.

I also know that until 7 November I can recover EVERYTHING that was “perma” deleted from her gmail accounts. You can report your account as hacked and Google can at their discretion restore the entire account contents. The accounts are currently deleted.

I can reactivate the accounts and make that request. If I do, it will destroy over 20 years of marriage and this rebirth in our relationship from the ashes our marriage had become.

Help me find the strength to let it go. She is so much more important than knowledge. I truly love her more than anyone ever in my life, but I want to know. It is so hard to let this go.

God help me.

timj said 10 years, 5 months ago:

Midnight, thank you so much for your kind words and advice and for taking the time to read my “novel”. I realize in my heart that you are right; I knew that while I was writing this and I knew it while I was posting it. It’s just hard to let things go sometimes. I am going to drop this and not act on anything and let the timer expire. It just isn’t worth risking the rebirth of our marriage which is going quite well.

My main concern now is that she is like a recovering alcoholic, off the bottle at the moment, but the moment some stress reappears she will dive back into the sex-aholic chat scene. I mean she was talking to dozens of guys each week, multiple guys each day some of which culminated, some of which fizzled, but there was a clear pattern going from occasional chat to being online every waking moment she wasn’t working or busy picking up or dropping off the kids and the chat had progressed to Skype. The original guys were far away and inaccessible, as if she had no interest in meeting them. The last guys before I found out were local including one she Skyped, as if plans were being made to meet or at least leaving open that possibility which is the opposite of what she said all along; she had no plans to meet anyone in real life.

I have talked to her about meeting with a therapist to discuss this. She says she will, but honestly I do not feel she is serious. I believe she thinks it is all water under the bridge and that it happened due to a set of stresses that simply do not exist anymore so there is nothing to worry about. I am meeting a therapist about once a week to deal with the problems in our marriage, my childhood and to deal with the online infidelity. I really hope she does see someone to help her understand what made this option so appealing and to understand why it escalated to what seems to me an alarming extent.