I saw this text when I checked his phone after Scott went to bed on a Friday night in August, a full 14 months after his initial admission and promise he would stop seeing her.

It wasn’t like we didn’t work on our marriage over the 14-month time period. We started couples’ therapy right away. Scott made the initial connection with our therapist, Howard. He explained our situation as a “plain vanilla” kind of marital problem. What an odd way to describe why we needed a couples’ therapist! Apparently he thought infidelity happened to all couples in a long marriage and it really wasn’t a big deal. You had to wonder how he came by such a jaded opinion. Maybe it helped him feel okay about what he had done.

I was surprised Scott even wanted to go to therapy. I had always assumed he thought it was bullshit. He had been so dismissive of it when his sister Chris went. He maintained she only went to therapists who would agree with her version of her emotional messes including three marriages, her relationship with her parents and how she dealt with her kids. Now he was all for us going and was doing most of the work to find a therapist himself? I assumed he really wanted to make some changes in our relationship.

Scott enjoyed the sessions, in what seemed a perverse way. It was for him a new “foremost authority” topic. He now added therapist to his impressive list of skills. He had always claimed to have all the training and experience of a lawyer. He felt he was more knowledgeable than most lawyers because both of his parents were lawyers and his mother had been a judge and a law professor. According to him, he absorbed it from them instead of going to law school and taking the bar exam. Scott thought himself the ultimate renaissance man: knowledgeable and opinionated about almost any subject, a successful consultant, skills as good as a lawyer and now a great therapist too!

The distinct focal point of our sessions was “why did Gail stop paying attention to Scott? What was wrong with her that resulted in behaviors leading to Scott feeling unloved and unappreciated?” I told him and the therapist I felt like a guinea pig with the two of them doing a personality dissection on me….with no anesthetic!

Since both he and the therapist found my issues most interesting, what we DIDN’T focus on was why Scott had strayed in the first place. What did his emotional affair really mean about him and what he did he need to work on to be a better person? I guess he had learned from Chris’s experience to make sure the therapist agreed with his version of the issues. To be truthful, I didn’t really fight back in our therapy sessions.

Things did get better between us though. I cut back on activities, especially my horseback riding. I blocked out nearly all of the weekend when he was home so we could spend time together. We started dancing lessons, exercised together, bicycled and went out on lots of dates. We scheduled fun vacations including skiing and a trip to Tucson with the kids. The two of us also spent a few days in New York with Erik and Lena, close friends from Sweden we hadn’t seen in a number of years.

Because he complained about my lack of interest, I also plugged my nose and paid more attention to his political diatribes. Like his family, Scott had no shortage of conservative opinions, though he was far more liberal (or in his words libertarian) on social issues. Engaging in discussions of different viewpoints might have made good conversation, but he was never interested in a different perspective. Instead, it was a one-way fire hose of conservative blather, his “evidence” coming from a plethora of conservative blogs and websites. Reading them, he claimed, was his hobby. When it was just the two of us, I learned to convincingly act like I was listening, though I was more likely building my mental grocery list. In social situations, I stopped my subtle attempts at shutting him up when he was monopolizing the conversational air time with one of his rants. If he wanted to embarrass himself by preaching conservative policy at a cocktail party, I wasn’t going to stop him.

As for his complaint about our sex life, it improved, at least the quantity of it. Scott once suggested we should take up sex as a hobby. I thought it a weird thing to say but interpreted it as meaning more sex, with more variety. He emailed books I should read including 100 Great Sex Games for Couples, Blow by Blow, and Stroke by Stroke. Who finds books on how to give a blow job and a hand job?

I was uncomfortable reading them, but made an effort to incorporate what was least offensive to me. In trying to meet Scott’s growing list of “how he wanted it, ” sex was just another of the boxes I had to check to meet his needs. Took all the fun out of it but I hoped it was improving our marriage.

It did seem like our marriage was improving, at least during the six months, from July through January of that year. We were spending much more time together, much of it just the two of us. The dancing lessons were an especially fun way for us to have a “date” once or twice a week.

 

Scott even surprised me before Christmas by giving me an “upgrade” on my engagement/wedding rings, buying a $25K set of rings. He made a big point of grabbing my left hand to show them off to friends and family. I found it embarrassing because it felt showy, especially since I felt we had more work to do as a couple.

 

By spring, the cracks were starting to show again. Scott attributed his bad moods and more frequent outbursts to workplace stress. His medium-sized consulting firm was in acquisition discussions with a much larger one. The negotiations were intense. Though it wasn’t unbearable all of the time, the girls and I realized he had a particularly short fuse. I was also busy with work by summer, with travel in June to Hong Kong, a new account in July and other work as well. Both girls had busy schedules, which made organizing the household difficult. This compounded the tension between us.

I also started to notice him being more and more secretive about his phone. Its funny about iPhones. They do so much that borrowing them to get information of one sort or another has become a common thing to do. Scott adamantly wouldn’t let any of us borrow his phone, telling us, for example, “use your phone to get the map” or doing it himself on his phone. It was suspicious.

In early August we went to Aspen, Colorado with my sister, Beth and her family. We rented a great house and, as always, the girls had fun with their cousins. Scott had to work more than usual. He was so tense even Beth noticed it. He just wasn’t fun to be around. He also had to go back to Boston for a day of meetings about the buyout early in the week, leaving the night before.

At the same time, Scott went overboard in playing the “hip, young” father. He acted like one of the kids really. At the swimming hole we found he insisted on jumping from the highest part, just to show how cool he was. He looked ridiculous and sadly, old.

I suspected something was up sometime during that week. I really don’t know what triggered it. Maybe the suspicion was just building up. My concern came into sharp focus on the last night of the trip when Scott offered to go out to get some wine for dinner. He was gone for over an hour, which was much too long too drive to a nearby store and buy wine and a few groceries.

I asked him why he had been gone so long. He said he had to take a work call. It was a Saturday night and I wondered who would schedule a call then, particularly since we were in Colorado, two hours behind Boston. That evening as we were getting into bed, I looked at his cell phone and decided I would look for an opportunity to check his texts. I actually thought about trying that night but felt he would notice me doing it.

At home, a couple of weeks later, I had gone to bed early, tired from a busy week of volunteering at the girls’ summer camp on Wednesday, a trip to Atlanta for a day of work on Thursday and then volunteering again on Friday. Scott’s week had been busy too as he had been away from Monday to Thursday, traveling to both New Jersey and Orlando. We had opened a good bottle of red wine with dinner, making me even more tired. So I went to bed before he did, leaving him watching TV and looking at his IPad in his usual chair in the corner. It seemed like he was always on his IPad.

I must have woken up just after he went to bed, perhaps due to his snoring, which was so amplified by the red wine I could hear it through the earplugs. His snoring would wake me up in the middle of the night, often several times. This time I was thirsty so I went to the kitchen to get something to drink.

I saw his phone plugged into the charger, not yet locked. Still half asleep, I checked his phone and saw the message. I was so undone I didn’t even read the rest of the text chain though I noticed there were many texts between them.

I went upstairs to the guest room and sat on the bed, hysterically crying and then hyperventilating. I couldn’t breath or even see clearly and certainly couldn’t think about what I should do next. I only remember thinking I would have to pull myself together and confront him in the morning.

Scott woke up and noticed I had gone upstairs. I wasn’t up there for long before he came up, saw me hyperventilating and asked what was wrong. I responded, “I saw your texts on your phone and I know what you are doing.” Though in a blind rage, I instinctively knew enough to go downstairs instead of having the argument in the guest room where the girls certainly would hear it.

Downstairs and in our bedroom, I exploded. I am not even sure what I said. There was a point when we were standing in the bathroom and I kept asking him “why did you do it and are you going to stop seeing her?” He just stared at me like a mute. He didn’t even have the balls to come clean on what he had done. Sackless!!!

I told him to get out and threw a suitcase at him. He asked if I wanted him to call my friend Bridget to come over, as I was still hyperventilating. I probably said no but he drove over to Bridget and Jim’s to bring her back. While he was gone, I threw a bunch of his clothes in the suitcase and he left after Bridget got there.

The next day was horrible. The girls found out what had happened and I told Scott he needed to make a decision by the end of the weekend – her or me. He called up his father, who flew up and stayed at the hotel with him. One of Scott’s countless personal challenges was he had few male friends, really only my brother and our friend Erik. Even they were much closer to me than to him. His father was his only confidant, which in itself is a telling comment. A forty-eight-year-old man calling Daddy to fly up and help fix an infidelity issue is just embarrassing.

By Sunday, Scott had decided to stay with me and we went to the couples’ therapist to sort out next steps. I asked if he had ever stopped seeing her. He said he had stopped as he had promised me he would the year before but she reconnected with him some eight months later in February and they had started up again, this time getting sexually involved.

I insisted that, on Monday, he tell the woman by phone he was done with her, he do it in front of me and let me say something to her afterward. Of course she hung up but I did leave her a message asking her, as a mother, to respect my family and leave my husband alone. I let him speak with her privately before all of this. He did so for almost twenty minutes, making me realize I shouldn’t have agreed, but there wasn’t anything I could do at point.

I also demanded he block her phone numbers on his cell phone and he show me the evidence he had done so.

I hoped Scott was now sincere about wanting to work on our marriage. He certainly acted the part in our frequent therapy sessions after that. I cut back on work to spend more time with him. I even started going to New York to stay with him while he was there on business. We planned a few romantic trips to Spain and France. We were having fun.

On the other hand, he had lied repeatedly so it was difficult to trust him now. I made a practice of checking his phone traffic on the phone bills for her number and was relieved to see no evidence of additional phone contact with her.

It again felt like he was making amends.