Is my husband having an affair?
Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
I almost divorced my husband yesterday over an affair I was quite certain he was having with a woman who was not me.
Mom: Put down the hammer and step away from the toolbox.
Now, normally, an effective writer would leave you hanging until the end of the blog about whether or not said husband was or was not stepping out on said wife. Unfortunately, my mother reads my blog every day. The headline and first sentence have probably caused her to stop reading. I’m sure she is currently in the process of turning her house upside down in search of the very dangerous instrument (Cast iron skillet? Butcher’s knife? Hammer?) she will use to render Mr. Strong and Silent into Mr. Permanently Silent.
Mom: are you still reading? Come back to the computer please. Read on. He’s really not that bad. You’ll see.
The affair began Sunday night, when my husband left me at home—so I could work—and took our 4-year-old to a holiday party. Truth be told, I despise holiday parties. I’ll bow out of a holiday party for any number of reasons—work, sickness, headache, PMS, a shower. On that night, I did work for a while. I also crafted our Holiday Letter, and I watched some TV.
He and the kidlet arrived home around 9:30 p.m., right around the time I was watching Desperate Housewives. I briefly wondered if he might be miffed to find me in front of the TV when I was supposed to be working, but the thought was so brief that I almost didn’t remember having it.
I settled our daughter into bed, checked email, and realized the house was strangely quiet. I walked around the house in search of Mr. Strong and Silent. I found him in bed, asleep.
“He didn’t even say good night,” I thought, dejected.
He was also snoring. I slept downstairs in the guest room.
The following morning was his morning to transport the kidlet to preschool. I was typing happily at my computer as I heard my growling husband ordering our daughter to get her shoes on. He’s not usually mean and grumpy in the mornings. Truth be told, I’m the household member who most resembles Hitler, especially when we’re late for preschool.
Still, I decided to help out a little by getting shoes on the kidlet’s feet. My help was thanked with a prompt hairy eyeball. If you do not know “hairy eyeball,” all I can say is this: count yourself very lucky.
They left.
My husband returned sometime later with a coffee for me. I thanked him and told him that he was the best man who ever came out of a woman’s womb. He grunted something that somewhat resembled a “thanks.”
I wondered, “Is he hung over? Or is he ticked that he found me in front of the TV?”
I make a point to never reward passive aggressive behavior, though, so I told myself, “If he’s not going to come out and tell me what’s wrong, I might as well just ignore the fact that he’s acting like something is wrong.”
I did not see Mr. Strong and Silent again until I arrived home after picking up the kidlet from preschool. He walked into the kitchen as kidlet and I were making the Bowman World Famous Hotdog Pizza. If you’ve never had hotdog pizza, all I can say is this: You’ve never lived.
Anyway, he groaned, “You are putting hot dogs on the whole pizza?!”
I said, “Yeah, you got a problem with that?” I also thought, “You and Kaarina invented this pizza! What gives? Am I not allowed to make hotdog pizza? I know you love it. You eat it all the time with her when I’m not around.”
He walked out of the kitchen.
Later, after the pizza was ready, he set a slice on the table for himself and one of the kidlet, but not one for me.
I thought that was a bit odd, but I decided to let it go.
He read a magazine as he ate. He normally does this, but his facial expression could have killed a cat.
“Um, is everything okay?” I asked in my most pleasant voice.
“Yeah, sure,” he said.
“Okay,” I said.
Later, I reminded him that we had a photo shoot the next day for a story about how we had resurrected our marriage and had found the secret to living happily ever after.
He grabbed his hair with his fingers, said something to the effect of, “Arrrugh!” and walked away from me.
Later, as I was walking by the bedroom, I saw him on top of the bed, fully clothed and motionless. A caring wife might have been tempted to walk inside such a bedroom and check to make sure her husband was okay. I just kept walking and pretended I hadn’t seen anything unusual.
And that’s about when the “he’s having an affair” notion popped into my head in a big way. I added up the following slights:
- Going to bed without saying good night
- Meany pants the following morning
- Delivers usual coffee, but grunts his thank you
- Complains about hot dog pizza
- Does not bother to put a slice of hot dog pizza on table for his beloved wife
- Has mental breakdown over photo shoot
- Is silent most of the evening
- Retires to bedroom to think about how to break news to wife about affair
I figured that someone at the party knew about the affair and that this someone told him in no uncertain terms that she was going to tell his wife. He was so cold and distant because he was trying to figure out how to tell me first.
I got that sick feeling in my stomach. My body started to shake. I thought, “This is really going to ruin Christmas.” After all, my entire family—parents, siblings, nieces, nephews—were all due to arrive at my house on Christmas Day. My husband was supposed to cook the main course. If he was indeed having an affair and we had indeed found a divorce lawyer and signed divorce papers, he surely would not be celebrating Christmas with us. What would we eat for dinner?
I kind of thought I would miss having him around, too.
“I really do love him,” I thought as my eyes welled with tears.
Oh, it was bad.
So after putting our daughter to bed that night, I sat down next to him, and I asked, “Is anything wrong?”
He looked up from his computer and asked, “No, why?”
“Well you’ve been sort of distant,” I said, fully realizing that telling Mr. Strong and Silent that he was acting distant was like telling Richard Simmons that he was acting perky.
“Oh, I’m sorry I’ve been distant,” he said.
“You’re not, um, mad at me? Because all day I’ve been thinking that you are mad at me.”
“No, why do you think that?”
I gave him the run down of all of the slights, from the going to bed without a good night to the coffee grunt to the hot dog pizza incident.
“I, um, thought you were having an affair.”
He laughed one of those deep belly laughs that cannot be faked by the best of actors and said, “Me? Me? You thought I was having an affair?”
And in that moment, I did realize how ridiculous it all was. My husband may be a lot of things, but a philanderer is not one of them. He barely has the energy needed to romance and charm his own wife. If he added another woman to the mix, it would suck him completely dry. We hugged. Then I allowed him to read the Holiday Letter that I’d written when I should have been working. I helped him post photos of our daughter and me to his Facebook page, too.
“I think you should write, ‘my beloved wife’ next to the photo of me,” I told him. He just wrote my name, though. I wasn’t miffed. He’s not the type of person who would write “beloved” next to anything. I am.
Later that night, I went to bed first. He tucked me in, kissed me on the cheek and whispered, “I’m not having an affair.”
I whispered, “I know, and I’m glad we’re still married.”
And I really am.
