Wife had a meeting at a hotel and lied and now I've lost the moral high ground!
OK, I don't really like sharing this type of information, but this has really been bothering me so I feel I need to reach out and perhaps get a bit of a fresh perspective.
Basically my wife had a tryst in a hotel while on a business trip. What happened on this tryst is unclear, and the odds are I will never know for sure what happened. My wife says that it was only a talk with an old friend, then during an emotional part of her confession she said that there may have been some touching and kissing, but she doesn't remember, she then later recanted and said that she was sure that they didn't kiss. There damn sure was a hell of a lot of planning and dirty emailing going on before this meeting though.
What precipitated all this you ask? Well, that will require a little perspective...
My wife and I have been married for five years. She is my first wife, I am her fourth husband. She is older than I by a few years. I worked abroad for many years. I brought no children into the marriage and she brought two, we have since adopted one more. My wife is a well respected Professor in her field, first female at her university to have tenure in her department and best published. My wife is a very smart and accomplished woman, and has never been particularly happy with my education, she considers me an intellectual equal but my BS has never stood up to her PhD, but our salaries are commensurate, so that is the source of some consternation on her part. She thinks I can do more, and should do more and that has caused some friction in our marriage over the years. I work a nine to ten hour a day job and she is on campus 12+ hours a day and goes out of town to conferences and speaking engagements at least once a month for days at a time and she still wants me to go back to school. She seems to have no realization of how my going back to school would impact our schedule at home with the children. Besides, what she wants, isn't what I want. This is, of course, entirely beside the point as far as she is concerned. And it really is beside the point for the purposes of this discussion. But this should give you a little background into our problems, a context so-to-speak.
Now, about 8 months ago my wife went to a writing retreat in Chicago. Her and about six other colleague from around the country gathered at another colleague's home in Chicago to write for a week. Normally she is very good about keeping in contact during her time away from home, but this time she did not. She was very hard to get in touch with, claiming that cellular phone reception was bad. I accepted this. When she returned from her trip she made a very big deal out of telling me that all of the men on the trip were “a bunch of 60 year old guys”. This too was strange, because she normally didn't discuss her colleague age or gender. You see, I am not a jealous person by nature. I have a strict don't pry policy, because I have been with VERY possessive women in the past. Not fun and it can kill whatever love you have for a person, so I have never required that sort of reassurance in the past, but she felt it necessary to reassure me now. I figured it was due to the strange communal arrangement of the writing retreat and just wrote it off again.
Then at a get together with some friends, and she brings out her phone to show some pictures of how nice the writing retreat house was, and as she is flipping though the photos she happens across a photograph of a man lounging on this plush sofa with shorts and tee-shirt and a laptop on his lap, and he was very much not in his 60s, he was about half that. She very rapidly skipped by the photo and moved on. I didn't say anything at the time, but for the first time, my radar pinged. She had lied. And she had skipped by the photo where she had taken time with the others to show us things. She didn't want me to see this one. She also became nervous, perhaps even agitated. She tried to play it off, but I know her, and could tell. That wasn't supposed to happen.
I found out later that they had been emailing every since that trip. Not a lot, but some. And there had been a lot of talk about her “slip” and her “nighty” and what she looked like under it. How they can't stop thinking of each other. I won't go into to much detail but it's clear that something happened at the “retreat”.
Now, you may be asking yourself, how did I get these emails? Well I can tell you, the worst, most dishonest way imaginable. I knew something was up the moment she got back from the tryst tip I talk about in the first paragraph. Her behavior screamed guilt. Everything she did said something was going on. She missed her flight home, and didn't care. Had to reschedule. Didn't care about the money it costs us to reschedule the return flight, didn't care. This has never happened before in the 5 years we've been together. Then when she got home she went directly to her girlfriends house, not home and stayed out until three in the morning, also a first. And when she did get home she was drunk. The list goes on and on. A litany of guilt behavior as long as my arm. Sex was strange and she insisted that I compliment her incessantly. So I did it. The unthinkable, I hacked. Was it wrong, absolutely, and now I am paying the price...
Because when I confronted her about her odd behavior and the missed flight she told me about the meeting. And here I was, with all the printed email ready to bust her ass when she denied it, but she didn't. However, she never confessed to the business at the retreat. All she was willing to admit was to lying about meeting him. She will admit to the fact that she wanted to be adored and the she felt adored by him, and that it is that which attracted her to him. But she won't quite admit to any physical foul play. Aside from her little bobble where she said that they kissed and may have touch then recanted later... I don't know what to believe. Except I know that she's lied.
So here I am with evidence of more than she admits to, so evidence of more lies, but not evidence of physical foul play, but it is evidence of the lowest moral point in my marriage personally, I intruded in my wife's email.
A true moral dilemma. And I am morally compromised. I've lost the moral high ground. What do I do folks...??
