The Affair To Remember
 I clearly remember the night I realised I was going to become a single mother. It was July 2008 and winter in Sydney, Australia. At thirty-eight years old, I was married with two gorgeous little girls, ages eight and six. Three months earlier I discovered my husband of thirteen years had been having an affair with another woman over the previous twelve-month period.
Although my gut had told me something was going on from the time the affair started, I did not officially find out until Easter that year. Things had progressively gotten worse in our relationship, and my suspicions increased as the lies became more farfetched and my husband seemed more reckless in keeping his secret.
The week before Easter, we had a conversation where I knew he had lied. He asked me in advance if I was going to my regular girls group the following Tuesday night as I did on a fortnightly basis. He asked in a way that led me to believe he wanted to go somewhere. I said I was going out and asked if he had something going on. He brushed it off and responded that everything was fine.Â
When I went to my group that following Tuesday night, I arrived home around 9.30 p.m. and found him preparing to leave the house. His reason: going into the office to set up for a meeting he had forgotten about for the following morning. My mind flashed back to our previous conversation, and I realised he was actually having an affair. I stood there speechless, then watched him walk out the door knowing he was going to meet someone.
I have replayed that moment in my head many times, over many years, and have thought of all the things I wish I had said or done. If only I had been braver. Why had I not been more assertive? Why did I not say, “I know what you are doing, and if you walk out that door do not ever come back”? Instead, I said nothing and waited a few more days for the right moment to confront him. As much as I did not want to face it, I just needed to hear it from him. I could not take it any longer—it had been a horrible twelve months of a challenging sixteen-year relationship.Â
That following weekend, we celebrated Easter in Port Stephens with our good friends, Charlie and Alison and their children. Alison and I became friends when our eldest daughters started primary school together and we learnt that we lived near each other. We often walked the girls home from school together and spent the afternoons catching up while the kids played in the backyard.
On Easter Saturday, Alison and I walked along the beach, and I shared my suspicions with her. I told her I was convinced he did not love me anymore and was having an affair. Plus, if something bad happened to me, I didn’t believe he would care.Â
“You have to ask him. You need to know,” she insisted.
That night he and I walked along the beach. It was one of the most awkward moments we ever shared in our entire sixteen years together. He would not hold my hand, he wouldn’t talk to me. We just walked and said nothing. How did it come to this? How had our relationship gotten this bad?
I’m convinced he could sense my suspicions, but I couldn’t bring myself to say anything.
The following night after our friends had gone, we spent the night alone, and I finally worked up the courage to say something. The kids had gone to bed. I asked him to sit at the dinner table and said we needed to talk.
“Have you been having an affair for the past twelve months?” I asked.
He simply said, “Yes.”
How could I have been so stupid and gullible? Those miserable twelve months finally made sense. Deep down I had known the whole time, as he had completely pushed me away when it began. I had approached him around the time the affair started and said we seriously needed to work through our issues. Yet as always, he showed no support nor willingness to engage.
I asked him in a roundabout way at the time if something was going on, and he said no. From then on, he stopped showing any interest in me, stopped all physical affection, and cast me off as if I did not have any value. If I tried to make advances, he rejected me. He spent more time working out. He avoided being at home and went out more often, all the tell-tale signs of someone having an affair. There were so many stories that just did not add up…like friends I had never heard of in town visiting and meetings for car racing and trips to the movies.Â
In addition, there were changes in his behaviour such as terrible moodiness that sucked the life out of me, along with aggression that had gotten worse toward strangers and myself. He never hurt me physically, but nonetheless I was concerned about his impulsive behaviour.
I could tell he was relieved to get it off his chest as was I, although I was in shock. I struggled to fathom that my own husband would go to such extreme lengths to lie to the one he was supposed to love more than anyone else in the world.
That night I did not sleep, I couldn’t breathe. I felt sick to the core, like someone had taken a knife and plunged it into my gut, then twisted it. That feeling did not go away for many weeks.
Life as I knew it had changed, and things were never going to be the same. My happily-ever-after dream shattered, along with my heart—to the point I believed that no one would ever be able to hurt me like this again.Â
The next couple of weeks were a blur. I felt physically sick and could barely eat. I lost 5kg (11 pounds) within two weeks, and I have never cried so many tears in my life. I tried to hold it all together in front of my kids (who didn’t know what had happened) and then collapsed into a heap when they were not around. I sobbed on the way to work but pulled myself together when I walked in the door. I felt my world was spiralling out of control and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.
Only a few people knew what had happened, not even my immediate family initially. Hiding my grief was unbelievably challenging. I pretended life was normal by putting on a brave face, although my heart was broken. Doing “normal life” seemed impossible. Besides, it all seemed so irrelevant dealing with school e-mails and paying bills when my world had just fallen apart. I felt heartbroken, rejected, humiliated, and angry.
Thoughts of the affair consumed me. Where did they meet? Who was she? What did she look like? Was she prettier than me? Did she have kids? I wondered what they said about me—did they laugh at me, and did she care she had torn a family apart? I had sleepless nights when I tossed and turned, often filled with dreams of unleashing my anger on my husband. I was tormented and could not get the images of him being with another woman out of my head.
I never found out who the woman was or where he met her. He refused to tell me, and I hated not knowing. One morning I meticulously went through his phone records which I had access to at work until I figured out what number was hers. I desperately wanted to call or text her, but I could not bring myself to do so.
 I wanted her to know how much heartache she had caused me and my family. I stewed on it for a while but realised that making a phone call or sending a text to make someone feel bad would never change the situation. I ended up asking a male friend to call the number. Although she didn’t answer, I found out her name and was relieved I didn’t know her. For some strange reason that gave me something I needed.
Over the next three months, I exhausted all attempts at marriage counselling with close friends who were pastors, the only people he was prepared to talk with about what had happened. I had exhausted conversations on our own where all I kept getting was, “I am confused.” There had been no remorse on his part, no begging for forgiveness, and no commitment to either stay or go. He wasn’t sorry for what he had done, he was just sorry he got caught. I could tell he wanted to continue the relationship with the woman he had been seeing but he didn’t have the guts to make the call, so I did. I was leaving.
It hadn’t been an easy decision to make even though I felt his infidelity gave me the ticket to leave the marriage without judgement. None of my friends or mentors would tell me what to do, which I totally understood; but at that moment I really needed just one person to back me. It came from a male friend I highly respected. I sought his opinion after he had attempted to speak to my ex-husband.
He said, “I don’t believe he loves you anymore, Lou, and I think you are right to leave.” His words released me. I just needed someone to support my decision.Â
You might ask why I stayed for so many months after knowing about the affair. If I had my time again and I was as emotionally strong as I am today, I would have told him to pack his bags and move out the day we returned from our Easter weekend. In shock at the time, I simply didn’t know what to do and needed time to process the whole horrible mess. I didn’t feel like I could just end a sixteen year relationship right there and then, even though I knew we had no hope of working through the infidelity based on our track record of addressing issues.
As I stood on the office building steps where my husband and I ran our business in one of the most beautiful locations in Sydney, Middle Head, I accepted my marriage was over. On that beautiful, still, but chilly night, we had our final conversation agreeing to move forward with separation.
So much had transpired over such a short period of time. The reality of what lay ahead hit me like a tonne of bricks, and I realised I was about to become a single parent. How on earth am I going to do that? I was not working full-time. Instead, I worked part-time in our business; we didn’t own a house (we rented our home as we had put all our savings into the business to keep it afloat over the past few years), and we lived on the North Shore in one of the most expensive cities in the world.Â
It was a strange feeling—I was overwhelmed yet I felt an incredible peace. Being a committed Christian, I did what I have always done when overwhelmed by a situation and I don’t know what to do. I simply prayed, “God, I have no idea how I am going to do this, but I know if you are with me, everything is going to be okay.”
Plenty of women had done it before me, and many have had to deal with a whole lot worse. I truly believed it would all be okay somehow, someway; and it did turn out to be okay, but one day in the future, not that day.
Little did I know the adventure that awaited. There would be two years of grieving which included many tears, financial pressures, physical exhaustion, and emotional strain. There would be sleepless nights, worry, stress, fear, and anxiety.
I would spend the next fourteen years raising my girls on my own without family support as all my relatives lived interstate. I would have no shared care with the children’s father and only occasional visits with him. I cared for them twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. I would stay single throughout those years and would turn fifty-two without having met another long-term partner. If you had told me at thirty-eight years old (back when my face was still beautifully young and didn’t sag, and the only muffin top I was concerned about was the one I was planning to eat) that I was going to be single for the next fourteen years, I would have been devastated.
On the other hand, there would be loads of fun, laughter, and great memories created by myself and the girls and the beautiful people in our lives. We enjoyed great holidays and little adventures that would create wonderful memories, establishing a foundation of who we would become as individuals and as a family.
