One day you're all smiles. The biggest day of your life is here and you are a beautiful bride just waiting to see the love of your life and start your lives together. You take a romantic honeymoon, spend all day in bed, play footsie under the dinner table and then go back home to probably a tiny one bedroom apartment with a cardboard box as a dining room table. It doesn't matter. You're in love. As a couple, you work hard to spend as much time together as possible while working for peanuts at your respective jobs. You make the most of your time in the laundry mat on a Friday night because going to the movies is too expensive. You eat TV Dinners the first year and hope you don't burn them in the second hand microwave you bought at the thrift store for five dollars. It seems like nothing could tear you apart.
Years later you wake up.
That person you thought would never hurt you has done the unthinkable. They found someone else. You had suspected something for a while, but never thought it would turn out to be true. A new and exciting woman has just joined the team at your husband's job. She's got a fabulous family, kids, and she's really funny. He comes home almost every night talking about how she told the funniest joke today and how we should all get together some night for drinks. Next thing you know, he's telling you he will be running late and not to call him because he won't be at his desk. It doesn't matter that the child you share isn't feeling so well. He cannot be reached no matter what. He's having an affair and the only thing that matters is his own selfish needs. There you are nursing a sick child and trying to take care of the house while he's off enjoying himself. Still ignorant of what's REALLY happening, you are tolerating his behavior. Then one night the walls crumble on your relationship, for good. He's confessed he no longer wants to be with you. He denies the extracurricular relationship he's been keeping on the side, but he's blaming you instead and wishes you to be gone. What's left to do but to leave?
You've left him.....Now what?
After some time passes and the divorce finalizes, you see fit to get back out there. Carefully, you step out with friends and each person who approaches you is a potential lover. Things are different this time. There is a child involved. The child has been through enough so the decision to date is hard enough without bringing someone new home so quickly. Dating proves to be fun and after a while, you feel you have found "the one". He's sweet, generous, loving and he really is great with your child. He's been hurt too so he's also cautious and wants the real deal, not to be friends with benefits. (By the way, the "benefits" are FANTASTIC!!) This is the guy you should have married the first time.
I love you, but I don't trust you
As the two of you become serious, things change from a trust standpoint. What used to be unconditonal trust has manifested itself into you snooping through your new love's belongings. You seriously do not want to find the one thing to break up this happy union, but you use whatever it is that you find against him and cause a fight. He's confused. He's angry. He wants to know what came over you that made you look through old letters in a box covered in dust. What was so important that you had to use letters written 5 years ago before you met him into a big deal? Was it the fact that he still had them? The case could have been that he forgot all about those. Now he doesn't trust you. He begins to plant things all over just to see if you'll snoop....and you do.
Getting past the problem and finally moving forward
Time does pass and the obsession with the evil lying, cheating ex does go away. You can live a happy life after infidelity. No one says it is easy, but the fact that you are reading this is proof. I did it, so can you!