Oscar Wilde once said “a true friend stabs you in the front.” As a gal who isn’t afraid of a little honesty and confrontation, I have loved this quote since I first heard it c. 1998. I won’t lie and say that I was running around quoting Oscar Wilde at 18 ….. I picked up this little gem of wisdom, a mantra if you will, from the movie Can’t Hardly Wait (and now I have Smashmouth’s Walking in the Sun stuck in my head….better than affair triggers I suppose).
This was a quote that was so applicable to the life of an 18 year old who was about to graduate from her sheltered all-girls private school and venture off to college. Essentially I was leaving my tiny bubble of gossiping bitches at the lunch court to trade up to a new quasi-adult world of gossiping bitches in the dorms. And soon I would break free from communal dorm shower gossip in favor of gossip in the “real” world…… where hot adult gossip is shared in the office kitchen, via social media, over drinks, with your lying cheating husband, etc. Jennifer Love Hewitt and pookah shell necklaces may have gone out of style since 1998, but the basic human instinct to shit talk and judge our “friends” behind their backs is like an LBD that is always in fashion.
I won’t place myself on some pedestal in my ivory tower pretending that I am above judging others. I do it…. we all do it. I do, however, pride myself on being brutally honest 99.9999% of the time. My motto has long been “If I will say it behind your back, I will say it to your face.” Admittedly, as noble as it may seem in theory, this brutally honest approach has also led to the perception by some that I am ‘cold’, ‘brutal’, ‘non-empathic’…..basically a ‘bitch.’ Well at least I am not a bitch who stabs you in the back.
Fortunately, all this babble does not segue into some diatribe about all my friends being catty unsupportive bitches. Given that I have only told ONE person about my husband’s indiscretions, there really has not even been the opportunity for my friends to stab me in the back, front or side. Ironically, this post is actually about my husband’s ‘friends’ who have deemed themselves to be what Linda J MacDonald aptly describes as “enemies of the marriage.” (By the way…. if you have not shoved this book down your husband’s throat by now, please do so. It’s perfectly geared towards husbands – 18 point font and 80 pages – and is essentially a cheat sheet of what they should and shouldn’t do post DD).
One of the most foolish things I probably said to the C U Next Tuesday ‘main event’ whore during our one and only conversation was something to the effect of “if he was really in some awful marriage that was ending why were you never brought into his REAL life.” While there was a LOT of truth in that loaded statement, unbeknownst to me there was also information my amateur sleuthing had yet to uncover which now has me dining on some humble pie….and my size 7 foot that I had inadvertently just put in my big (unfiltered) mouth.
Granted, she never saw OUR home and she never met his family. She only had a creepy periphery voyeuristic view into my husband’s life, our life. She knew the version of him from the office solely because she also worked there (in a position that is probably lower in stature and pay scale than the janitorial staff). She didn’t know his favorite color, what foods he likes, how he got the barely-there scar on his ear. She didn’t have our inside jokes, our memories or a life that was built over a decade spent together. Nearly everything she “knew” was a lie and nearly everything she experienced with my husband was scandalous, seedy and fake …… NEARLY EVERYTHING.
Without going into the excruciating details, or the transcripts, let’s just say that among the many fun facts that my sleuthing through all those disgusting Viber text messages uncovered (sidebar – I curse you developers of Viber and all other apps which seem to exist solely for the act of betrayal), I learned that my idiot husband was not only shitting where he eats by banging some whores (yes several) at work….. yes it gets worse ….. he was by parading his whore around to a select group of his (I won’t even bother referring to them as ‘our’) friends.
Here I was thinking that my husband, at the very least, had the good sense to hide his disgusting behavior (and his disgusting whore) in the shadows like any respectable cheater would…. but not this guy. I won’t even attempt to understand his thought process when he made the decision to introduce his “girlfriend” to friends who clearly know that he was (and is) 100% married. Was he that infatuated? Was he that stupid? Or worse…. is it all a lie when he tells me that he NEVER planned to leave me (his rationale is “if I wanted to leave, why didn’t I?”)? And if he was working towards leaving me and our marriage for good, was he just transitioning her in as the replacement? I have racked my brain trying to decipher the why’s and how’s of this particular component of my husband’s insane infidelity behavior and I haven’t a clue what he was thinking. The best I can come up with is that he was desperately trying to make fantasy and reality one in the same. Maybe that eased the guilt. Maybe he loved the whore. Maybe he is a moron who was thinking with his less attractive head … to the point of utter insanity.
From what I have pieced together, I know that he took her to at least one backyard bbq hosted by one of his close friends from childhood and he took her to OUR favorite beach with the best man from our wedding (ironically I was supposed to accompany that day but was disinvited at the last minute because it was suddenly branded a “guy’s” day). I have no idea how many of our (former) friends were in attendance as my husband paraded his whore (“girlfriend” as he introduced her) around at the bbq(s) and the thought of his best friend (and the legal witness to our marriage) playing third wheel as my husband and his whore strolled hand in hand down the pier (where was a tsunami when I needed one?) makes me SICK.
The unknowns in this aspect of the affair(s) saga really gut me to the core. Who knew? How long did they know? Did their wives and girlfriends know? Were these same wives whom I socialize with regularly indoctrinating this whore into the circle? Am I so easily replaced by a skank piece of trash like this whore? Was my husband’s blatant disregard for our marriage the hot topic at multiple dinner tables? What was being said about me? What did they think of her? How was my husband explaining her presence? The list goes on and on and on…. so much so that I regularly stay up all night plagued with anxiety attacks caused by these intrusive thoughts and worry (last night being one of those nights).
I am not ignorant to the fact that these alleged “friends” were initially his friends prior to our relationship. I do not expect any sort of loyalty towards me from any of them nor do I feel that they had some obligation to tell me what my husband was up to. Their wives are just appendages of them and, while I have formed surface level quasi-friendships with these women to varying degrees, they are not MY friends. I get that there is a ‘bro code’ that must never be violated so it does not surprise me one bit that these idiots seemingly welcomed this whore with open arms and turned a blind eye to my husband’s disgusting behavior. After all, I am fairly certain my husband’s fictional history of our marriage was being shared amongst his social circle. When you are constantly reminding your whores (and yourself) about your “horrible life/wife” to justify your behavior, why not tell your friends as well? If all your friends hate your “evil” wife based on your lies, then they will happily condone your infidelity and be more receptive when you begin trotting your fat stripper girlfriend around …. sound logic in the mind of a cheater.
And to shed a little light on these upstanding pillars of the community my husband was sharing his dirty little secrets with….. The two idiots that I know FOR SURE have some sort of bystander involvement (F and J), they are not exactly the poster children for fidelity either.
Case in point — At my husband’s bachelor party in Vegas, F was aggressively hitting on a girl at a club (and by aggressive I mean trying to get her back to his hotel room) whose friends later recognized him from Facebook….as they were acquaintances of his wife. Not to mention, prior to marrying his now wife, F also had a whore of his own whom he paraded around to our pool parties and bbqs. J is no better. He regularly has cheated on the mother of his children since they began dating back in high school. And when he isn’t cheating on her, he is treating her like the hired help. I suppose it’s not all that shocking that my husband chose this path so easily when he is surrounded by such shining examples of fidelity. Betraying one’s spouse is just par for the course within this band of misfits.
The major difference between me (as a bystander to infidelity) and my husband’s good pals is that I do not condone this type of behavior. While I know it’s not my place to be the one to tell some woman who is only my acquaintance by way of our husbands that her spouse is cheating, I don’t want to be around people who behave that way. As such, I have long kept these specific friends at arm’s distance and have regularly shied away from spending much time with them. I attended events here and there out of obligation to my husband, but I have always been vocal that I do not support infidelity and I don’t want to be around it, even by proxy. I suppose my silent protest has been my way of stabbing these non-friends in the front. Perhaps it’s my views on lying, cheating assholes that made me public enemy #1 within my husband’s social circle?
The sheer fact that my husband has shared with me the intimate details of his friend’s infidelity scandals leads me to believe that these same friend’s are, in turn, sharing my husband’s scandals with their wives. And just as my husband and I have judged this despicable behavior time and time again, it’s humiliating to know that now our marriage is being discussed in the same manner.
It’s easy to say that I don’t care what they think or say. I mean, they aren’t MY friends after all. Honestly, I don’t care about them the way I care about my actual friends…..my REAL friends…. but these people (like it or not) are a part of my life and my world because of my husband and I don’t want to be constantly wondering how many daggers are being thrown into my back or into the phylisophical back of my marriage.
The most difficult thing about all of this is that, being the outspoken advocate for openness and honesty that I am, I have made it known to F & J (for now just these two – until I collect evidence that other ‘friends’ are involved) that I am not interested in playing nice and acting fake with people who seemingly condoned the demise of my marriage. I didn’t have some sort of infidelity summit with them, but let’s just say that chiming in from the peanut gallery during my husband’s phone calls and one cryptic Facebook comment definitely made my feelings known. Clearly, our phone is no longer ringing off the hook with invitations to socialize with these ‘friends’ of my husband who were witnesses to his infidelity. Which is fine by me. Working through marriage recovery is exhausting enough, I really don’t have the energy to feign interest in people I can’t even stand the sight of anyway.
I am fully aware that I have just gone on one hell of rant but this piece of the puzzle that is THE AFFAIR(s) really erks me for some reason. Maybe it’s the embarrassment that comes with knowing that this awful part of my life, something so very private that I have gone to great lengths to keep a secret, was exposed all along….. before it was even on my radar! In fact, it was widely accepted, maybe even encouraged. Sadly, there was some comfort in knowing that even while we (and our marriage) attempt to endure this nonstop rollercoaster, I still could control the image of our marriage that was portrayed to the outside world so long as no one knew it had happened. I know that sounds completely shallow and dishonest but when you are in the depths of despair, you cling to any semblance of normalcy ….. even fake and contrived normalcy will do.
At the end of the day, I don’t give a shit about these people being a friend to me but, in my opinion, they were not being good friends to my husband and they certainly are no friends of our marriage. Others may disagree with me but I think that my husband’s alleged “best friends” had an obligation to, at the very least, question his behavior or challenge the choices he was making which they could obviously see were destructive to a life he had worked so hard to build….. Just as my husband has done for them in the past when he would offer his two cents on their behavior. These people, these non-friends, are no friends of my husband, they are no friends of mine and they are no friends to our marriage. As far as I am concerned, if I never see them again it will be too soon.
Unfortunately, it’s easy for me to write off these second tier friends without a second thought but not so easy for my husband. I don’t expect him to cut all ties with lifelong friends. Contrary to popular belief among my husband’s whores and his slimy friends, I am not an evil bitch with no soul. I respect the fact that my husband considers these heathens to be “friends” ….. even if I disagree. I certainly don’t trust him when he is with them. There is no telling what they might encourage him to do. When they text or call I cringe. He sees it and claims to understand. He has now resigned himself to texting these friends in the shadows the way he once texted his whores. I know it cannot be easy on him to be torn between his friends and his wife but honestly, I don’t care. I have been the victim of selfish choices for god only knows how long at this point and I think it’s about time that I made some selfish choices of my own.
I don’t know if the day will ever come where I can muster the courage/strength/patience…. or gag-reflex to be in the same room with the people I consider to be frenemies of my marriage. Like everything else I am plagued with throughout this saga, only time will tell to what extent (if any) healing is possible.
In the past 4 months, as I have obsessively trolled the web, absorbing every bit of infidelity knowledge/wisdom there is out there, this happened to be the one topic I had trouble finding unlimited (or any) information on. There are tons of stories about husbands having affairs with their friends or their wives friends but not much attention is devoted to the pain and humiliation associated with handling those who knew about (and socialized with) the whore(s). In a sense, I’d like to provide a resource for someone out there who is looking for information on this particular topic….. But who am I kidding, seeing that I am on the selfish train today, I am really just fishing for some sage advice or someone to commiserate with.
The Affair Diary 