My heart isn't actually broken any more, but I wanted to share my story. This one has a happy ending that I'll be posting in the Love Stories section soon. So, in the end, my real goal is to share something uplifting. But before I share how my life became better than it has ever been before, I need to start with what I was rescued from.
I was married in my early twenties to a girl that I had been dating for over 5 years. We agreed that we should wait to marry until after she graduated from college, so I proposed the day after her graduation. It was a rocky relationship, but it always had been. She had chronic depression that she was (at first) not seeking treatment for. She would stay up on her computer until 3 or 4 in the morning several nights a week and wake me up when she came to bed crying and needing to talk. I had my own anxiety problems I was dealing with at the time, and when that combined with my constant worrying over her mental health, our sex life began to seriously suffer.
Eventually, we both began seeing therapists. My condition improved in a matter of weeks, but hers continued to fluctuate. She began bringing home tips from her therapist on improving our sex life, and we slowly implemented them. It was a rocky start, but it was a start.
One night we were hanging out with another couple (I'll call them Tom and Jane) at their house. I was tired and ready to go home well before my wife was, but Tom and Jane offered to give her a ride if she wanted to stay for a while longer.
The next morning I got up early and was surprised to see that my wife got up with me. She normally liked to sleep in. She asked if we could sit down and talk. And so we did.
"I kissed Jane last night, and I think I liked it," she said. Now, I knew my wife was bi, but we had both made it clear from the beginning that we wanted something exclusive. She made it sound like it was just a peck, and I was upset, but I thought it was still something we could work through.
Over the next few days, she kept adding details to the story. It turned out it was more than just a peck. It was a make-out session that had gone on for hours. My wife even went with Jane to work at that night where things continued in a back office. Then it turned out that they were not alone. Tom was with them the whole time. At some point, Jane asked both of them, "What about Ferg?"
My wife replied, "I'll talk to him about it in the morning." And they continued.
She said everyone's clothes stayed on the entire time, but who knows? If I had let her stay at the house, I might have found out something different over the next few days.
I eventually decided to end things. She had been my girlfriend for five years and my wife for another year after that. Tom had been my best friend for even longer than that, and Jane and I had been almost as close.
Tom told me he had this fantasy in his head that the four of us were going to be one big happy polyamorous family and said he was convinced that I had been "giving [him] clues" that this would all be okay. He even had the nerve to accuse me of cheating on my wife with another one of our friends.
He got even crazier when my wife cut off contact with him; he started stalking both of us.
At the time, I not only hated the dead-end job that I was in, but my wife and I were working at the same place. So, in a rash move, I quit. I had several promising job leads and a few thousand in savings, but I was still a scrawny, long-haired, scraggly-bearded, unemployed bachelor paying both halves of the rent by myself. My wife and two of my best friends had betrayed me, and I had no idea if I could ever get my life back on track.