The Affair That Ended My 18-Year Marriage — 'It Cost Me My Husband, But I'd Do It Again'
At 50, I knowingly chose to kiss a man who was not my husband.
Dean Drobot | Canva “Are you sure?” he asked without breaking eye contact.
“Yes,” I said and leaned in to kiss him. This wasn’t my first kiss or my first love. This wasn’t some hormone-fueled teenager experimenting under the bleachers. This was me, at 50, deciding to kiss a man who was not my husband.
Looking back on my 18-year-long marriage, I was privileged. We lived in an upper-middle-class neighborhood with two newish cars in the garage. Our teenage son and daughter went to a good school, my husband was a lawyer, and I worked part-time at a yoga studio. Our lawn was groomed, our dog was walked, and there was a basketball hoop in the front driveway and a trampoline in the backyard.
But walk through the front door, and the cookie-cutter image of the happy suburban marriage showed cracks.
It didn’t happen all at once. If there existed an apparatus for measuring the flow of my love for my husband, it’d look like an ECG printout of a dying heart. Where did it go? I often wondered.
Was there a moment I could point to and say, There, this is where our love first sprung a leak. Here’s the slash to our relationship we both turned our backs on. And over there is the puncture wound I tried to fill with self-improvement workshops and counseling sessions to find out why our relationship had no pulse.
When we got married, a year after we first met, I was starry-eyed with dreams of happily ever after. This was my second marriage. I was in my early thirties with a seven-year-old daughter from a previous marriage, and he was 42 with a nine-year-old son. I wanted stability, security, and more children.
He seemed to be everything I wanted in a man. Professional, spiritual, and a runner like me. He was thoughtful and generous, owned his home, and worked as a corporate lawyer for a private land developer.
My job as an independent insurance adjuster was solid, and my daughter and I lived in a two-bedroom apartment. Our kids hit it off. They spent hours playing with each other while Rob and I marveled at how easily our lives fell into the same stride.
We talked for hours about metaphysics, current events, past relationships, parenting, and our dreams for the future. I desperately wanted to get married again, and after six months together, he proposed.
It was on our honeymoon when I first felt his temper flare. It singed me, but I waved it off. I had no clue it was my introduction to his unhealthy relationship with anger.
He said yes to children, and a year later, our daughter was born. Nineteen months after that, our son. We agreed I’d shelve my career and stay home to raise them. There were months when I’d be juggling a toddler, a baby, and two pre-teens. I did all I could to be a good mom and wife. Not perfectly, not all the time, but I tried.
At night, when I groaned with fatigue and gratitude that the day was over and I could surrender to sleep, I had no energy to make love to my husband. My well was dry. There was nothing left.
Cracks in the relationship began to show. He pushed, and I resisted. And still, I believed this marriage would last. Regardless of the silence, the lack of open communication, or his face hidden behind the newspaper, I wanted to make it work.
When anyone saw my husband and me together, they thought we had a good relationship. “You and your husband are so cute,” a mother of one of our son’s classmates commented once. She saw us holding hands while walking down the sidewalk and thought we looked like a couple of kids in love. We fooled everyone, even ourselves.
When the children were older, I went back to school. I wanted to be an early childhood educator and enrolled in a program at a local college. He told me that working in a daycare was beneath me and that I should return to my insurance career. “Do what you know,” he said.
I wanted to home-school our children. It was a no to that idea, too. “They’ll lack socialization,” he said.
“Yes. Yes, of course,” I capitulated, crying bitter tears in the bathroom, away from his cold stare. Year after year rolled by, and I couldn’t make love to him. It was my reaction to feeling oppressed and not knowing what to do about it. I wasn’t able to give him the very thing he wanted most from me.
During the last limping years of our marriage, the few times we attended couples therapy, the conversation would always lead to sex and how, if only I’d be receptive to it, our relationship would return to normal, and our love would thrive.
“It’s not about the sex!” I once screamed. “Don’t you see?” Research has indicated that married men and women tend to believe that sex is integral to a good marriage and that men are more sexual than women. Moreover, husbands and wives commonly experience conflict around sex and undertake emotional work to manage their own and their spouse’s feelings about sex. Many wives find it difficult to fit sex into their day not simply because of the prevailing cultural discourse of women as less sexual than men but also because of the gendered realities of their lives.
In 2016, I got the okay from him and our children to attend a 26-day-long personal development retreat on Gabriola Island in British Columbia. I felt as excited as a kid going to Disneyland.
Maybe I’d finally unearth what was wrong with me. I’d find the answer to what was ailing us. I’d single-handedly resurrect our dying marriage.
I didn’t plan or wish to cheat on my husband while away. Something happened to me that, to this day, I still have trouble putting into words. It was as if some long-ago-imprisoned part of me got a hall pass and began to dance. It felt as if the life I had back home, as a mother and wife, belonged to another woman.
At the retreat center, while breathing the ocean-scented air and daring to be vulnerable, I peeled back the protective layers I had so painstakingly glued over my heart throughout my marriage. An inferno roared inside me.
The affair was the result of the ‘silenced me’ waking up and finding her voice.
It was a desperate cry to resuscitate my creativity, my vibrancy, my love for life, and, yes, my sexuality. Don’t misunderstand. I knew what I was doing would have consequences. I cried, knowing my actions would end up causing deep pain to my loved ones. I knew all this and yet could not stop myself from continuing the experience. (According to The Journal of Couple and Relationship Therapy, nearly 50 percent of married women and 60 percent of married men will have an extramarital affair at some point in their marriage.)
Even though I had let myself fantasize about what it would be like to leave my marriage during its lowest points, I couldn’t do it. I loved my children more than I loved myself. No way could I do that to them.
As it turned out, it was my 15-year-old daughter who found out about the affair. She called me on it, and I didn’t deny it. My marriage had run its course, and I was finally willing to see the singular truth of it. It had once been a vibrant and fragrant cherry tree that was now devoid of life. It was dead. There was no way to bring it back. No amount of water or sunshine would revive it.
Two months later, I left my marriage, found a full-time job, and moved into a tiny, one-bedroom apartment for a year.
I saw my kids a few times a week at the marital dwelling. It was the most painful experience of my existence, but if anyone ever asked me if I’d do it again, knowing what I know today, I’d say yes without hesitation.
On reflection, I see my behavior as nothing more than an act of desperation to save myself. I was repeating an old, worn-out pattern I had used half a dozen times in the past to get myself out of relationships. Betrayal of the other was a guaranteed way out.
To stay in a rotting marriage is a death sentence to the human spirit. People who do this have a certain vacancy in their eyes. They get sick, have affairs, go through the motions of living, and end up blaming each other for their unhappiness.
We all make our own choices. The hard part is living with them. Had my daughter not found out I’d cheated and confronted me, I may have slipped into the trance again, talked myself into staying for the sake of the children, for the sake of how long we’d already been married. The guilt and the secret of having betrayed my husband would have eaten me from the inside out.
But nothing happens in a vacuum. Whether you believe it or not, we are always given a choice to be true to ourselves. I chose another life. It's not easier, just different. I showed my children that no one has to endure a loveless relationship. We can all do hard things.
It’s been seven years since I left. I found my love muscle again. Love for me. Love for my partner. Love for my children and, most importantly, love for my life.
Judy Walker writes about the gritty, lovely, naughty, and joyful bits of humanhood. She has written extensively for Medium and Elephant Journal.