True to his word, here is my husband's first entry. My chest did start to tighten in the last paragraph, but I so appreciate him, his willing nature, & his honesty. Please post any comments or questions you'd like him to address/answer, and I'm sure you'll see it examined by him in the future.
To say that my life has changed radically since the affair would be a complete understatement. In the course of two weeks the affair started, my wife found out and I lost her trust, and my employer found out and I lost my job. In the subsequent weeks after the affair was made "public" I found out what kind of woman my wife is and I found out who my friends really are.
It's really something to watch your life fall apart. Everything I counted on as solid was stripped away, and my pride with it. In the past five years I have traveled a lot. Another understatement. Because I was a temporary and arbitrary member of our family I developed two worlds. One was at home, where I tried to be a good father despite being gone 4 months out of each year. My marriage? Well, I tried to do the "right" things, but everything was falling apart before my eyes. If you ask my wife, we were both at fault for what happened to our marriage, and I believe that. I had my 50% and she had hers. But, because I was never around for long, we fell into a dangerous rut, and I look back on it now knowing just how dangerous it was. Neither of us were getting what we wanted from each other, so the possibility of self-destruction was high.
My second life was with the many people I was friends with all over the place that my wife never even met. And it was satisfying. Yes, it was very difficult being away from home, but when you are traveling and working all of the time, all of the truly important things become very distant, and the focus becomes on the immediate--the here and now.
The woman I had the affair with had been a friend of mine for several years. She lived in a different part of the country, and we would talk and email sporadically, since my organization did business with hers.
