Reconciliation Story

I wasn’t sure where to share as I’ve been trolling this site for years! Thanks to this community, I had the insight to make the right choices for myself and I am beyond grateful.

My Story:

I have been with my husband for 29 years. We have two adult children who live on their own. My husbands first affair was in 2010. He claimed it was a one night stand with a single mom, who was also our neighbor. She was about 10 years his senior at that time. I found out 6 months after we moved thousands of miles away but he continued communicating/sexting and was planning to meet up with her again. I saw the messages on his phone and I confronted him. He admitted to cheating and immediately went to counseling but didn’t put much effort into fixing himself and we should have done marriage counseling but didn’t.

Flash forward to 2018. I find emails to an ex-girlfriend from high school and confront him. He admits to having an "emotional affair" and apologizes profusely. She is married with three kids. I let it go because seriously? I didn’t even know there was such a thing as an emotional affair and didn’t understand it. Then two years later I’m looking at phone bills and see some crazy long calls. I confront him and then realize they were calls one of my kids made. He was angry and told me to check my stuff before accusing him of things he didn’t do. That was the trigger that told me to look deeper. Sure enough I found the old ex-girlfriends phone number in droves. I confronted him in April 2020 and he said it was still an emotional affair. I reached out to her husband and told him. My husband said he would end it but by June 2020 he still hadn’t. The other woman was getting frustrated my husband wasn’t there for her while her marriage was imploding. They had planned to run away together but that wasn’t working out for them. She went into meltdown mode and called me. She confessed everything, they had been talking for four years, it was a "relationship" in her eyes, when we visited family where she lived, he would go see/sleep with her, so it was also a physical affair. These trips were over my birthday and Christmas so those memories were basically ruined. She told me she was sorry and wouldn’t contact him again and she didn’t know what I was going to do with him. She told me her husband kicked her out and he was devastated. Her husband told me he was planning to divorce her. I have no idea if that happened or not, nor do I care. I just know that 4 years is a long time to lie to someone you love. Just like the 4 years of marriage counseling and individual counseling afterward was also a long time to heal. We just ended counseling 2024.

We are finally in good place now and I can recognize that we really do love each other. It’s crazy, I know but I do feel it. We communicate everything and nothing gets rugswept and I am not gaslit. I do get triggered but he has learned how to support me when I need him, even if it’s just holding my hand. He tends to occasionally shut down and there is still defensiveness from time to time but we will ALWAYS talk about it later and address EVERY disagreement even if it’s not in that moment.

Reconciling is hard and reminders and triggers are lifelong. I do, however, forgive him because I recognize he is a flawed human being and that is the story of all of us. He knows he messed up and was consumed by fantasy until he had to face the reality he created. He made poor choices that had consequences and hurt a lot of people. Anyone with a conscience will attempt to atone for that, even if they make more poor choices along the way out of guilt and fear. It seems very contrary but it’s very human. This is the only way I have learned to accept what he did and it’s what works to keep us together.

0 comment posted: Wednesday, May 20th, 2026