It has now been 1 year since I discovered my husband’s affair.

I decided to go back and see what was going on in e-mail conversations during that time.  Unfortunately my phone was replaced so I don’t have text messages between us from back then.

There are some specific things that stand out in my mind.  In January 2013 my husband left me, our 2 daughters and one of their friends waiting at a very busy restaurant for 45 minutes before he showed up.  My daughter had talked to him just 30 minutes before the agreed meeting time.  He failed to answer his cell phone when I was trying to find out where he was and when he did finally arrive he said, “I was out on a claim and I never said I would be here at 6:00 p.m.”  Then he shoved an onion ring in his mouth.  Maybe I was so trusting I accepted what he said; maybe I couldn’t accept another reason at that time; maybe I was too lazy to inquire further or more likely I was just too annoyed, disappointed and hurt.

When I discovered with no doubt an affair was happening, I was so shocked and disbelieving but should I have been?  I realized after the fact that there were some other things I should have questioned further.

The last e-mail where he told me loved me was September 9, 2012.  Our 18th wedding anniversary was September 10 and he joked he was spending the night with his mistress as it was their one year anniversary.  There is a gap in our email conversations from September 27 – October 16 and the emails following that date are about a fight that Dave picked with me upon his return from a couple of days away on business.  He arrived home the weekend of my first 1/2 marathon.  He complained that the house was still as messy as it was when he left and made a way bigger deal of this than seemed reasonable.  He didn’t come to support me at the 1/2 marathon and didn’t bring our girls down to cheer me on.  That was Thanksgiving weekend and when I came home from the race, as sore and tired as I was with blisters on my feet that prevented me from walking without limping, I still put the turkey in the oven and then left the house and went to the beach to get away and to rest.  I returned to put dinner on the table and my husband announced in front of the girls “the stuffing tastes like shit.”

He didn’t want to come with me to my girlfriend’s surprise 40th birthday in November but I finally convinced him that I really wanted him to be there with me.  He always seemed to pick a fight or wouldn’t come with me to meet new friends or do anything with my friends when we had plans to go out.

At his company Christmas party on December 14 he ignored me the entire time.  I noticed a couple of women hanging on to his every word but I didn’t ask about them and looking at them I didn’t see anything special that would make me think my husband was interested.  It turns out that the one woman was the “other woman”.  Something happened the night before at their client party because that date, December 13, came out in a text I found when I discovered the affair.  We left his Christmas party hand in hand.  The 2 girls who talked to him all night followed us out at the same time. I was social that night with his other coworkers and their wives but I was not enjoying myself.  He was drunk and on display so I just let him have his fun.  After all, it was his company party.  I even tried to build up his ego by commenting on the girls hanging off him.

When we went to my sister’s house in Vancouver on December 27 for our family Christmas he got very drunk and told my sister in front of her 3 girls, who are in their 20’s, my kids, and my niece’s boyfriend that if he wasn’t with me he would be with my sister.  When I told my sister about his affair she was stunned but said he was acting so inappropriately at Christmas that she and my nieces were all commenting on it afterwards.  The next day when we were travelling home he was just being mean and not wanting to do the Boxing Day shopping that me and my girls were interested in doing. He said he wasn’t hung over and was feeling well.  He definitely had started to drink a lot more since joining his new company in the summer of 2011.   He had dial-a-driver programmed into his phone.  He had been using this service quite frequently over the previous 6 months.

He told me January 24, 2014 that the guys on his hockey team were taking him out for his birthday the next night. He did have hockey scheduled on the calendar and that was usual for a Friday night.  When I asked where they were going he said to the Keg.  That is a fine dining restaurant, not a boys-going-out-for-a-beer kind of place.   The next night we went out for his birthday to a Pink in the Rink Royals hockey game.   I bought him a chuck-a-puck and he won 2 tickets to Rihanna, hotel and airfare.  When he saw the date of the concert he had a tantrum because it was the day we were to return from our Florida March break vacation.  He stomped and said childishly, “I want to go and you scheduled our trip longer than I wanted you to.”  I was dumbfounded and just looked at him.  Again, this was his behavior in front of our girls.

In February he starts to stay later at work.  I remember calling him on a February Saturday morning just after I dropped my daughter at dance on a Saturday morning reminding him to order tickets to our daughter’s dance recital.  His response was very terse and hurried telling me he had to go out on 3 claims and couldn’t talk.  Usually on Saturday mornings he takes the dog for a hike by himself.  The next Saturday morning in February he tells me he is taking the dog for a hike but not leaving at 10:30 a.m.  He always went alone.  Why was he going at a specific time?  I never questioned this.   My girlfriend invited us to a house-warming party after my daughter’s dance recital and he refused to go.  Another night in February, he wanted to have sex and is mad I don’t feel like using toys.  He turns over and decides then not to have sex with me at all.  On 2 other occasions in February it took a long time for him to get an erection.  I found a bottle of lubrication in our bathroom.  I asked him what it was doing on the counter and he tells me he was looking at the ingredients in it.  On February 14 when we last had sex it was very different; aggressive and raunchy.  I asked him afterwards who he was having sex with because it wasn’t me.  February 18 he mentions separation.  On February 26 he told me he contacted our tenants at our home in Cambridge Ontario saying we were going to sell the home.  That shocked me.  He was moving quickly to get rid of our assets.  I mentioned that our banker suggested a spousal RRSP and he said, “What if you aren’t going to continue to be my spouse?”  I remember talking to him in the kitchen and thinking that he was looking at me as though he despised me.  On the evening of February 26 I was sobbing and begging my husband to not just leave but to go to counseling to work on our marriage.  He said that I would never change.

In Brené Brown’s book, The Gifts of Imperfection, she indicates that “…psychologists believe that intuition is a rapid-fire, unconscious associating process–like a mental puzzle.  The brain makes an observation, scans its files, and matches the observation with existing memories, knowledge, and experiences.  Once it puts together a series of matches, we get a “gut” on what we’ve observed.”

On February 28 he was leaving to go to Vancouver the next morning.  We were watching t.v. together but he got up suddenly to say he was going to bed because he had to get up early in the morning.  I told him we wouldn’t see each other before he left so we should hug goodbye now.  He sighed with annoyance.  I said, “You don’t want to hug me goodbye?”  He said, “No, you can hug me.”  It was exactly at that moment that my gut finally made me check my husband’s phone.