Journal Entry 

Friday July 2007

I have just cried. I know I am hormonal, so that is a contributing factor, but sometimes I still feel like crying. The biggest thing for me, the thing that is constantly in my head, is the fact that Danny had sex with ‘her’.

I think that at the beginning of this journal I said that wasn’t the main thing for me. That it was for Danny but not for me. I did mean it at the time: perhaps it was because I had so many other things in my head to deal with.

Now I don’t have as many things in my head, which is a good thing, but it has also opened the way for me to deal with what was actually the worst thing of all. And perhaps at the beginning it was just too big for me to deal with so I put it to the back of my mind. Now it is here and I know, as is my nature, I have to confront it to deal with it. But how do I do that? I am hoping that by writing this in my journal it will help me.

I know that Danny says that he thought he had lost me, and that he was only going through the motions. That he had to shut his eyes and think of me. But although I really want to believe him I can’t. I know Danny well enough and if he had something on his mind he would not be able to get an erection. – It happened often enough with us. He had sex with ‘her’ on the night he text me (supposedly because he thought he had totally lost me, that I had changed my number, because I had not text back.) How did he do that?

Danny says that if I had not text back he would have come to work and waited by my car; when: In a day, a week, a month? I don’t believe he ever would have.

I am crying now, but I know that I have to write these thoughts down to make some sense in my head. (That’s the control freak in me!)

I know that Danny had a fumbling session with ‘her’ (crap!) when were together. But if he loved me (loves me, sorry shouldn’t use past tense.) how could he have sex with ‘her’ after he left? (Which was supposedly something he regretted from the minute he shut the front door.) I want to believe so much, but can’t. I am not that type of person (sometimes I wished I was) and that undermines us.

We went to the counsellor and she said that we had an ‘inner couple’ that not everybody has. I know that Danny loves me, I know that he is so happy we are back together, I know he got caught up in something; I know his weaknesses and guilt made him run away; but how come his grief at our break up, his guilt and his love for me didn’t prevent him from being able to have sex with ‘her? ‘Something does not tie up.

I don’t feel that I can talk to Danny about this; but I fear that if I don’t it will destroy us. He thinks we are moving forward, and we are in a lot of things, but for me, right now, I feel this will always hold me back and eventually destroy us. I have found this really hard. I am hoping I can find some resolution. That I will look back in a couple of months and be able to see it has got better.

We have had lots of good points this week. But I can’t write about them right now because this overshadows them.

5.15pm

I can’t read what I have written because I have been upset all day. Spoke to Nel for an hour after writing it and we agreed that my hormones have a lot to do with how I feel, but I know, also, that this is the final and hardest hurdle.

I am going to provide a makeup party for Hannah’s daughter’s birthday, and I am looking forward to it. I promised Hannah I would be okay, and funny, like me, how I normally am!

Danny has picked up that something is wrong; but I will stick to my plan that I drew up with Nel – wait until the hormones are gone and keep writing in here. Then see how I feel.

When I spoke to Hannah she said that Danny says those things to make things better, because he is so desperate not to lose me. But I think that it is more to make Danny feel better because he does not want to lose me, and hates what he has done. I suppose that in some way that should make me feel better: that is how little he thinks of ‘her,’ or what they did. In some ways it does.

I know that it may not be all that I am making it out to be in my head. But unless Danny talks to me about it I will never know. What if it was what I think in my head? How would I deal with that? And even if Danny told me it wasn’t would I believe him?

Right now I don’t want to kiss Danny, let alone do anything else. I can use my tooth falling out as the perfect excuse.

This is going to be my hardest test. Because right now I feel that I need space from Danny; and for us to survive I have to overcome that. I have told him to have a sleep for half an hour.

How ironic that bloke from the pub called me today and left a message. I am not interested. But perhaps it now gives Danny a dose of the situation he has put himself in.

Rosie

 

Reflections Here and Now

This is the big one: I knew that I had to confront what I believed to be the most heart breaking thing of all; at least that was how I felt at the time. When I think of it now it is still something that I have to dismiss in my head the image would be too painful to contemplate; but despite that I know, now, that was not the most heart breaking thing: That was being lied to, and gas lighted and ghosted until I no-longer trusted myself and wondered about the person that I had spent so many years of my life with; because it was those things that caused the most destruction to our relationship; they caused most of the damage that took years to rebuild from.

But at the time I wrote this entry that was how I felt, and this entry shows how painful it was because I couldn’t even read it at the time; I couldn’t write about the good things, because this one thing took over.

The thought of the person I loved being intimate with someone else is the thing that churned my stomach. Thinking of Danny and ‘her’ in ‘the act’ I imagined all sorts of things: mainly how wonderful and romantic it must have been. How they must have laughed about me and compared me.

Knowing and acknowledging that Danny had been intimate with someone else, done something with someone else that was only meant for us, meant that the intimacy in our relationship was lost. It was another thing that would have to be rebuilt because what we had before was just crap.

That is why I often told Danny that a ‘shag was just a shag’. In fact that was how I coped with it: I had sex with Danny; I didn’t make love with him. I can remember on our holiday in the August of 2007 that he was so tender and loving; but it made no difference to me because I could not allow myself to give that intimacy to him. I could not allow myself to be that vulnerable again.

I was right that I had to confront it: even though I was terrified that I wouldn’t be able to move forward in my life with Danny when I had heard the details; I knew I would not be able to live my life with him at all without hearing them. But looking back now, after what we went through I can tell you these things:

More often than not the person who has committed the adultery is more afraid of this conversation than you are; often because when you ask them why, which you will, over and over again, they can’t tell you because they don’t know. Or if they do know it is, most times, that they don’t want to tell you because they don’t want to hurt you anymore than they have already; and as in Danny’s case, they are terrified that they will lose you.

Coming from the point of view of the person who has been hurt, I needed to know, had to know. But looking back now how do I know if what Danny was telling me was the truth? How will I ever know? ‘She’ could crawl back out of the woodwork and say the ‘truth’ and how would I know if that were the truth either? That is one of the joys of infidelity: you have to be strong and make your own mind up about what you think happened – and having such a strong personality I went for the worse thing, because if I could face that I could face anything.

Further entries will show that I asked about this over and over: I grilled Danny. He gave me answers, but I grilled him to such a degree that in the end he was giving me different answers: anything that he thought that I wanted to hear, and of course then I picked him up on the conflicting things he had said.

For years after we got back together I told Danny that if I ever found out that he was lying; found out that the foundation for whatever we rebuilt our relationship on was based on more lies I would leave. I continued to say that even after we renewed our vows. I was, quite literally driving myself nuts.

It has taken me years to realise that it doesn’t matter. Because what we have here and now is what’s important and shouldn’t be compromised because of something that happened in the past.

Over time I had to decide if I could live with this knowledge or not. I had to decide what was important to me: What I had in the here and now or what I had lost that had never been what I thought it was in the first place.

I did consider whether I could live a life where I would be never allowing myself to be vulnerable in bed with Danny; or whether I should leave and find someone new. But I realised that what had happened meant that I was never going to allow myself that vulnerability with anyone again. When I realised that then I decided to stay because I realised that sex was only one of the important aspects of our relationship.

 

Rosie