A man recently confessed that he is now battling depression after learning that his wife of 15 years had stepped out of their marriage when things were thick. A confession that left him feeling ‘dead inside’.
“I am dead inside. My wife and I have been together for 15 years. She recently admitted to cheating on me. It was early in the relationship, maybe around the first year. We were in a rough patch. It was bad for a few weeks, but eventually we made up and everything was fine again.
We spent the next 15 years building a life together. During that time, we both went back to school and received two degrees (4 total between us). We moved in together. We got engaged. We got married. We bought a house. We had kids. And then one day, she calls me into the room. She’s sitting on the couch. She’s crying. I don’t know why. She tells me, totally out of the blue, that she cheated on me. It was during that rough patch in the first year. She just couldn’t hold it in anymore. She wanted there to be no secrets between us.
I wasn’t mad. That was a little strange. I thought I should be outraged. I figured it was because I loved her so much – love conquers all, so I thought that I forgave her. I did feel a strange, subtle sensation. I didn’t understand it at the time, so I ignored it,” he confessed on Reddit.
However, in the next few months, things took a turn for the worse.
“As the days and months went on, I started to lose interest in things that I enjoyed. I stopped doing projects around the house. I didn’t talk much to my wife. I was just going through the motions. It gets a tiny bit worse every day, almost imperceptibly so. Now I understand what that feeling was, that weird subtle twinge deep inside me. It was my heart breaking.
I am hopelessly depressed. My marriage is a sham, and my life is a lie. I’ve spent my entire adult life pouring everything I had into this relationship, only to find out that she poisoned it way back at the starting line. I don’t want much out of life. My parents split up when I was very little because one of them cheated, and I had a terrible childhood because of it. My goal in life, ever since I was a teenager, was to rebuild the life that was taken away from me so that some day I could give it to my (eventual) children.
And I had done it. I married the woman that I loved, we lived in a nice house in a good school district, and we had healthy, happy kids. Most people go through life without ever realizing their dreams. I achieved mine before I was 30. And now the dream is a nightmare. That home is a prison. I get up every morning and convince myself to live the lie for one more day. I don’t know what to do,” he added.