He looked at me and said, “You’re not like her.”

We had an argument the night before. Though calling it an argument presumes both of us were yelling, which wasn’t the case. It was an ambush. He unloaded on me while he was standing in our bedroom doorway and I was lying down, having gone to bed a bit earlier than him. He was fired up because I was not addressing one of his needs quickly enough – I wasn’t putting him at the top of my priority list. Scott had a thing about feeling unimportant. He could totally lose it if he felt he wasn’t being recognized for the “successful, interesting and attractive” guy he thought he was. You never really knew what was going to set him off. In retrospect, I can’t even remember what he felt was my particular failing that night.

That night, he exploded on me. He had a particularly creepy look on his face – one that had only been appearing recently. I wish I had taken a picture of that face!  It was NOT a face you wanted to see if you were walking down the street alone on a dark night! I was always surprised and a little alarmed when I saw it. A look, more like hatred than anger, hatred directed squarely at me. It was particularly menacing that night because I was lying down and he was standing over me.

The next day he apologized for his outburst and wanted to talk. The girls were out so we were alone. It was such a nice June summer day — warm and sunny, so we sat outside on the patio. Then he said it.

“You’re not like her.”

What an opening line! Its my fault he blasted me last night because I’m not like “her?” Who the hell is she and what was he doing with her? Imagine having the audacity to point the finger at me while he was announcing his affair! Did he really believe this crap or was he just deflecting attention away from his bad behavior?

So when he blurted this out what were my options?

Option 1: Short and to the Point
“GET OUT!”

 

Option 1a: Short and to the Point with Action
“GET OUT! Here is your bag! Anything you don’t take is going to the Goodwill. Or on the front lawn if they won’t take it!”

 

Option 2: For the Louse Who Needs a Bit More Direction
“Whoever SHE is, if she is so great, why don’t you GET OUT and STAY OUT! I am lawyering up and I am going to take you to the fucking cleaners!”

    

Option 3: The Bullhorn
“Ok – I’m announcing to the girls, your family and our friends that you can’t seem to keep your pants zipped. What are you going to do about it?”

       

 Option 4: You Mean You Found Someone Else Who Wants You?
“Who in the hell would be interested in you? Just how attractive are you to her when you are snoring like Donald Duck on steroids at night? Worse still is in the morning, when you let out a huge wet fart in the bathroom, so loud that even though you shut the door, you can still hear it halfway across the room? I am married to you and you are the father of my kids so I have to take the good with the bad, but to have an affair with a snoring wet farter? No thank you!”

Truth be told, I didn’t really think Scott was a magnet for women, whether or not they knew he was married. It wasn’t like he was the best looking guy in the world, though not the worst either. Not the best nor the worst dressed man either, as he was a fairly nondescript preppy type. His uniform of choice was khaki pants and a button down shirt of some sort. He tended to go on the cheap side of preppy, best case buying his clothes at Brooks Brothers, worst case at Jos. A. Bank. He was goofy preppy, choosing short- sleeved shirts in the summer and mixing in boring plaids in the winter with his standard blue and white button downs. His casual alternative to the button down shirt was a polo shirt, no labels visible.

In fact, if I hadn’t taken charge and helped him with his wardrobe, he would have looked much geekier. Not geeky as in “I am an internet billionaire,” more the just tacky geeky variety. I can remember telling him to get rid of pants either frayed on the bottom or WAY too short – either way, he looked like a rube. I worked on the shirts too – insisting early in our marriage that he needed to buy all cotton and he send them out to be laundered. Later, I would often buy him button down shirts in hipper fabrics. We also started going to better stores to buy the pants and polo shirts.

I hated the short-sleeved shirts. I couldn’t get him to stop wearing them, but at least convinced him to wear better looking ones (if there is such a thing as a better looking short sleeved button down shirt). Left to his own devices, I think permanent press shirts from Macy’s would have been his choice, long sleeved in the winter, short sleeved in the summer. Still, he wasn’t a pens-in-the-pocket-protector or cell-phone-in-a-holster on his belt type of nerd, but that isn’t a high bar.

A typical summer work shirt for Scott. One of the better looking ones!

 

Scott loved his casual hemp shirts. He thought wearing the marijuana made him just as hip as smoking it. According to my kids, it didn’t!!! 

 

I eventually convinced him to spend enough money to get a decent haircut too. Luckily for him, he wasn’t losing his hair. Still, until I introduced him to my stylist, he favored cheap haircuts for his mousy, flat hair which further amplified his unsophisticated, “nobody special” look.

His body type fit the mid-price preppy look he chose. Not tall, though tall enough relative to my 5’5’’ height. Skinny when we met, particularly in the shoulders. He put on weight when the girls were young – it went straight to his belly. He wasn’t an attractive picture, standing there with his flat hair, skinny shoulders, somewhat swayed back and his hands folded, resting on his protruding belly. His sister, Chris, once even said he looked like his uncle Ben. She didn’t mean it as a complement!

He later lost the weight and started working out, but still had the same nondescript, boring look about him, skinny shoulders, slightly swayed back and all.

All in all, he was average in the looks department. You wouldn’t notice him on the street, either good or bad. Picture Opie Taylor from the Andy Griffith Show as a grown up. Or Clay Aiken, who, like Scott, hails from North Carolina. Or John Edwards (another North Carolinian!!) with a 5- dollar haircut and a big nose, which my liberal mom always laughed about. She would say, “Does Scott know he looks like John Edwards? I am afraid to say it to him because Edwards is a strong democrat and Scott is…. well you know SO CONSERVATIVE.” All are perfect descriptions of Scott, his hillbilly North Carolina upbringing being obvious even though he didn’t have much of an accent.

Scott in his typical “business attire.”  A John Edwards doppelganger!

Scott was friendly, but overbearing in social situations. He tended to dominate conversations, often coming off as a “foremost authority,” a favorite term my mom used which coincidentally perfectly described Scott. He would talk extensively on almost any topic, always considering himself an expert. Much of the time, however, he didn’t know what he was talking about. I was the “bullshit police,” often researching afterward statements of “fact” he had made in conversations, only to find them totally unsupported. I guess he just made stuff up to impress whomever he was with. It may have been motivated out of insecurity or just the need to always be right. Regardless, the impact of it was that many people thought of him as a blow hard. He just didn’t shut up.

So, though I loved him and felt like he was a great husband and father, it just didn’t occur to me that anyone with anything going for them would be stumbling all over themselves to be with him. I assumed that he would only be drawn to women, like me, attractive, intelligent, career minded, social and, well, interesting. Painful to admit it, but I felt like he was lucky to have gotten me. I couldn’t imagine him attracting someone else like me.

I didn’t choose Option 4 or any of the others, and maybe I should have. I didn’t even chose Option 5 which was my initial gut response.

Option 5: Evacuate the Premises
I have a history of being an evacuator when faced with a troubled romantic relationship. Under stress, I tend to skip town. In fact, while I was at Stanford, I bragged about being able to fit all of my belongings in my car so I could take off on a moments notice.

Within minutes of Scott telling me about Wendi, I experienced my instinctive flight response. I told him I was leaving and driving down to Rhode Island to Jesse’s, a best friend and someone I had known since graduate school. It somehow seemed like a safe physical and emotional place for me to get to quickly.

Of course the immediate next thought was “no I can’t do that, I can’t leave the girls.” A mother’s instinct trumps the evacuation urge! Which brings me to the option I chose:

Option 6: Assess the Situation and Try to Repair the Damage

I believe in marriage. I did love Scott and believed at the time he had been a great husband and father. Getting divorced just wasn’t in my lexicon. My parents had, as far as I know, an extremely strong, devoted and for the most part fun marriage. My dad didn’t like to be without my mother so they nearly always traveled together. My mother steadfastly nursed my father through Lou Gehrig’s disease almost up until the end. My two brothers and two sisters are all still married, though I am sure there were difficult times – and in their first marriages to boot. Scott’s parents seemed extremely happy and devoted in their marriage too. Call me hopelessly naïve, but I just didn’t see myself as a divorced mom or Scott and I as anything but a contented married couple.

So it just made sense to me to stay there, listen to what he had to say, and ask questions.

Scott cleverly played the guilt card that day, which I am sure he knew was an effective tactic given my family background. As it turns out, my mother was really good at laying on a guilt trip, it always worked on me and Scott was well aware of it.

He played it well. There was no admission that he had done anything wrong. Quite the opposite. He told me why my inattention to him had caused him to look for companionship elsewhere. It wasn’t just that we didn’t have sex often enough, he said it was more than that. He didn’t feel I focused enough on him and his needs. He wondered why I had changed – even, had I been having an affair? As a further insult, he wanted to tell me how she was different from me as if to challenge me to work on being more like her.

Quite a skilled diversionary tactic! Even worse, perhaps he truly believed I was at fault for HIS bad behavior! Either way, in retrospect, it really pisses me off that I fell for it.

I did ask some questions about his relationship with her. How long have you been seeing her? Where does she live? Most importantly, what have you done with her? In a really spooky way, he seemed to get a charge out of the pain his admission was causing me. Like it was payback for all the wrongs he felt I had done to him.

He complained about how lousy his life was – how there wasn’t enough excitement in it, as if we were getting old before our time. Mind you, this was man who went on a week long, luxury ski trip with his family every year and took a great vacation with the family in the summer. In addition to that, he went on long weekends with me to five star hotels, both in the US and Europe. This was a man whose wife skied, bicycled, ran, hiked and worked out with him. What was he expecting for excitement, Cirque de Soleil, the X-Rated version?

He talked about having lost the connection to me and our daughters – that he often felt like he was just a paycheck to us. He said he felt guilty at times about wanting something more but that didn’t stop him from feeling despondent about what his life had become.

CAN YOU IMAGINE HOW MUCH IT TOOK FOR ME NOT TO SCREAM AT HIM – “YOU SPOILED MENOPAUSAL ASSWIPE! WHY DON’T YOU NUT UP AND ACT LIKE A REAL ADULT, NOT SOME WHINY, INSECURE, ENTITLED MIDDLE AGED LOSER!”

Instead, I responded that I felt we had a great life. We were incredibly lucky to be healthy, financially secure and have two really great kids. I said that if you looked at our lives compared to my parents’ (with my father contracting Lou Gehrig’s disease at 45 and my mother taking care of him until his death), my sister Linda dying of cancer so young and many other people we knew who faced health or financial hardships, we were really blessed. I acknowledged as well that both of us had worked hard to get to this place.

It was also clear from the conversation that I was a glass half full and Scott a glass half empty kind of person. Our families swung that way too. The typical dinner conversation at Scott’s focused on the negative – some element of how bad our society, our government, or our country had become. I really think his parents would have preferred a throwback to the 50’s – their traditional Christmas music was The Lettermen! Really depressing, ultra conservative and frankly condescending.

My family focused much more on family stories and relationships – looking for the funny in it. Or the food my mother had cooked, whose recipe it was, why we liked it and whether it was, in her words, “a best effort.” It was about entertaining each other in my family. In Scott’s, it was a depressing, “who is the smartest” discussion about the lousy state of the world.

Ours was a quiet conversation that day—no yelling on either side. Which is kind of strange given what he was telling me. Instead of going bullshit on him, I struggled to keep it together, while at the same time, not really wanting to hear it, to somehow make it go away.

It wasn’t until the end of our conversation that I asked the most important question. We were standing on the steps of the mudroom door to the backyard, me on the higher step, him one step down. I was in the power position this time! I looked him squarely in the eye and said “Did you sleep with her? If you say no and are lying about it, it will be MUCH WORSE when it comes out later on.” He said no. I believed him, though I should have done my bullshit police number on him.

With the assurance that he had only kissed her and that it hadn’t yet gone any further, I drew the inference that the attraction had scared him. I believed he had come to his senses and had communicated his unhappiness. I assumed WE (not me) could now work on improving our relationship. I also asked him to stop seeing her. He promised me he would.

I still trusted him — I thought he was an honorable man, like my father, brothers, and even his father. How could this man, who had been a loving, thoughtful and caring husband and father for the last 21 years, be having an affair? In my mind, he just wasn’t that kind of man. I assumed he behaved as I did while out of town on business trips– worked hard, got some exercise at the end of the day, had an early dinner with clients then called us and watched TV before going to bed. To me, he was a family man who loved his kids, still loved his wife and loved being with her. In retrospect, I was an idiot.

He did apologize for the outburst the night before. He admitted that he had overreacted, but that is about the only thing he apologized for.

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