The Part of My Story I Don’t Talk About
I’ve written before about being stuck in a marriage that was abusive and controlling. That part, I’ve made peace with putting on the internet. What I haven’t shared widely, until now, is what happened in the last six months of it. I had an emotional affair. Not a kiss. Not a hotel room. Not a single secret coffee, because it was the middle of the pandemic and we couldn’t have had a secret coffee if we’d tried. Just thousands of text messages, and yes, eventually some of those messages got spicy, with a man who already knew me before I knew my husband, who was drowning in his own miserable marriage, and who somehow became the only person on earth who could see me.
I am not proud of it. Let me say that first, because I’m not interested in dressing this up with a bow and calling it growth. I made vows. I broke them, even if I never broke them physically. But here is the part nobody wants to hear. My husband had decided, somewhere along the way, that personal hygiene was optional. We’re talking days without showering. Teeth that had given up. Coercion in the bedroom that I was too tired and too brainwashed to name properly at the time. Meanwhile, there was a man on my phone telling me I was beautiful, asking what I was thinking about, treating me like a person with a body that was allowed to want things. Reader, you can guess which one I wanted to text back.
So yes, the sexting happened. I’m not going to pretend it didn’t, because pretending is the whole reason most of us end up in messes like this in the first place. He saved my life. I think I might have saved a little bit of his too. We were both being slowly erased by people who were supposed to love us, and we found each other in the rubble, and we kept each other breathing. The affair was wrong. The affair was also, genuinely, the thing that got me out. Both can be true. Both are true. And learning how to hold those two facts in the same hand has been the actual work of moving on.
Why It Happened, and Why I’m Not Going to Pretend It Was Random
I want to be clear about something, because the internet loves a tidy narrative. I did not stumble into an emotional affair because I was bored. I was not chasing dopamine. I was not having a midlife crisis with a side of selfishness. I was being slowly, quietly, methodically dismantled in my own home during a global pandemic, which meant I couldn’t even leave the house to remember I was a person. My nervous system did what nervous systems do when they’re starving. It reached for warmth. It reached for the first man who treated me like a human being instead of a household appliance with opinions.
He was someone I’d known for years, since long before my marriage, and he was in a mirror image of my situation. Emotionally abused. Isolated. Lonely in the specific way that married people get lonely, which is the worst kind of lonely because you’re surrounded by evidence that you chose this. We started out venting. Then we started laughing. Then we started telling each other the truth. Then, eventually, we started telling each other other things. And once you have a person you can be fully honest with, after years of editing yourself into something palatable for a man who wouldn’t brush his teeth for you, you do not let them go easily.
So no, I’m not going to call it a mistake in the way people want me to. It was a coping mechanism. A messy, ethically tangled, deeply flawed, occasionally horny coping mechanism, but a coping mechanism nonetheless. The affair didn’t cause my marriage to end. My marriage was already a corpse. He was just the person who held my hand, metaphorically, through a screen, while I worked up the nerve to admit it. If you’re reading this and you’ve done something similar, I’m not going to tell you it was fine. It wasn’t fine. But I’m also not going to let you flagellate yourself into oblivion. Survival is rarely tidy. Pandemic survival is even less so.
The Guilt Was Real, But Not About What You’d Think
Here’s the thing about my guilt, which I’ve thought about a lot, and which therapy has helped me understand. I never felt guilty that the affair was happening behind my husband’s back. Genuinely, not once. I felt guilty because I didn’t think I was the kind of woman who did this. I had opinions about women who did this, and they were not generous ones. Past me would have judged present me into the next postcode. So the guilt wasn’t about him. It was about the version of myself I’d quietly built in my head, who would never have been weak enough or stupid enough or messy enough to end up here.
The other thing I felt guilty about was that I wasn’t strong enough to walk away. Because here’s the inconvenient bit. This was during covid. Walking away from a marriage during a pandemic, when borders were closed and lockdowns were rolling and everyone was trapped in their houses listening to their husbands not flush the toilet, was not a simple matter of packing a bag. There was nowhere to go. There was no friend’s couch. There was no breezy sea change. There was just the same four walls, the same broken man, and the same phone that lit up with someone who reminded me I was alive.
So I stayed. And while I stayed, I texted. And the guilt that accumulated wasn’t about the texting, it was about the staying. About the fact that I knew the marriage was over and I was choosing, every day, not to leave it yet. Emotional affairs are complicated and that’s okay. Anyone telling you otherwise has either never been in one or is lying to themselves. The morality is not clean. The timeline is not clean. None of it is clean. You can hold yourself accountable without flattening the whole thing into a Lifetime movie plot.
The Strange Grief of Coming Out the Other Side
Nobody warns you about this part. When you finally leave, when the divorce papers are signed and your name is your own again and you’re sleeping diagonally across the whole bed like the goblin queen you were always meant to be, you expect to feel free. And you do. But you also feel something else, and it took me a while to figure out what it was, because it wasn’t grief for the marriage. I never grieved the marriage. The marriage was the steamroller scene from Austin Powers. You know the one. The slowest possible vehicle bearing down on a man who had several years to simply step out of the way and chose, instead, to scream.
What I actually grieved was the time. Years of it. Years I gave to a man who tried, every single day, to kill my dreams and my hope and my sense of myself as someone with a future. Meanwhile, the man on my phone was reminding me I was worthy of love, that my ambitions were beautiful, that I was funny and clever and worth wanting. The contrast was brutal. The maths of it was brutal. How much of my one and only life had I handed over to someone who wanted me smaller, while the proof that I deserved better was sitting right there in my notifications?
That’s the grief. Not for him. Not for what we had. For her. For the woman I was before, who walked into that marriage believing the best of someone who hadn’t earned it, and for every year she lost trying to make it work. I still mourn her sometimes. Not because I want her back, but because I wish I could go to her, somewhere around year three, and tell her to run. She wouldn’t have listened. She wasn’t ready. But the wishing remains, and the wishing is the grief, and the grief is the price of admission.
What I’d Tell You, If You’re In It
If you’re sitting in the wreckage of an emotional affair right now, I see you. I don’t care which side of it you’re on. Whether you’re the one in a bad relationship reaching for someone else, or the one watching your own marriage fossilise, or the one trying to figure out what your friendship with that person can survive as. I’m not going to lecture you. The internet has plenty of people willing to do that for free, usually in the comments under any post that even hints at moral nuance.
But I will tell you this. You are allowed to be honest about why it happened, without using the honesty as a get out of jail free card. Both of those things can coexist. You can say, I was starving, and that’s why I ate, and also, I shouldn’t have eaten from that particular plate. You can take responsibility for the choice and still understand the conditions that made the choice feel inevitable. Self-awareness is not self-justification. They look similar from a distance. They are not the same. One is a mirror. The other is a hall pass.
And you are allowed to come out the other side without it being a redemption arc. You don’t have to publicly atone. You don’t have to perform contrition for an audience that wasn’t there. You just have to do the actual, boring, unphotogenic work of becoming someone who doesn’t need an emotional affair to survive a Tuesday. That’s the thing nobody tells you. The real moving on isn’t about him, or her, or them. It’s about building a life where you would never need that exit again, because the door isn’t locked anymore. You are. And babe, you’ve already got the key.
We Need to Stop Clapping for Basic Decency – Chaos, Crumbs and Clarity
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