What would you do?

Has anyone seen Camille recently?

Camille I hope you are still here reading. I have had to do a lot of searching my conscience to finally post this. It's taken me a long time to get to this point and it has not come easy.

You have spent 20 years together beating all the odds. It is not over. The last chapter does not have to have been written. Don't believe for a minute that your guy doesn't love you. Don't believe for a minute that he wanted your relationship to be over. Don't believe for a minute that he loves his wife. How do I know? I could be the wife you write about.

My husband met someone many years ago and started an "affair", at least that's what I wanted to believe. An affair doesn't mean the end of a marriage. It doesn't mean the spouse doesn't still love the marriage partner. An affair means something is being satisfied that cannot be satisfied within the marriage. An affair is never worth risking your family or marriage.

In my husband's case it wasn't an affair at all. It was a long term emotional relationship for 25 years based on love and friendship. I hated her. I wanted her dead. I wanted her to get out of my life so we could be happy as a family again.

When he left me for her the first time I did everything the books and magazines tell you to do. I colored my hair, lost weight, avoided his phone calls and tried to make myself more attractive to him. It was my attempt to make him realize what he was throwing away. It didn't work. We had one child still at home with me. I started making up excuses to call him about some "crisis" involving our child. I managed to get him to come back home to me several times. It was always short term. Within a few months he would leave again.

When I think back to that time I remember being more concerned about him not being with her than anything else. I was sure if she wasn't around we could recapture our past and keep our marriage together. It was all about her. It was all her fault. She was the only reason my marriage was in trouble.

I prayed a lot. I read books like "The Power of the Praying Wife". I believed what God had joined together no mortal could separate. I believed God would keep us together and punish that horrid evil woman. My in-laws were a great help to me in providing guilt and pushing their morals on him.

My husband was an emotional wreck. He loved her so much and wanted a life with her. He also loved his son and wanted to be with him. When he would come to a point where he would want to leave and pursue happiness with her the whole family would participate in the guilt fest.

What neither of us realized was our son knew how bad our marriage was but he played along with his assigned part in the drama of the wounded son. Five years ago our son went out with a family friend and spent the night talking, crying and drinking. He told his friend about how many years he spent watching our marriage disintegrate, how many times he wished we would split up and be happy apart, but he kept holding out hope against hope that we would stay together and be a happy family again. As he got older and watched the games and guilt that kept bringing his father home he started to feel guilty himself for being part of keeping his father from being happy. He started to see that our marriage was not based on trust, friendship and love but obligation and guilt.

He wanted to do something to free us from the prison we had built in our family. So he got drunk, got behind the wheel of his car and drove into an overhead embankment on the interstate.
A suicide note was found in the car that said it was his fault we didn't split up and find happiness with others. If it wasn't for him there wouldn't have been crisis after crisis that caused his father grief and guilt and brought him home. If it wasn't for him, there wouldn't be any obligation to stay together. He wrote that he couldn't live with himself anymore that he was the reason his father was not with someone he loved and that neither of us were happy, or ever would be.

My son didn't die. He was paralyzed and had massive internal injuries. He could not speak or communicate. Most of the time there were tears in his eyes.

My husband and I were pulled together in grief over our son. We saw caring sides of each other we had not seen in years as we cared for our son together. We thought it was love that had never died and went back together again. My husband ended his relationship with her. I don't know what made me happier. Was it that he was coming back to our marriage or that he ended things with her? She continued to contact him but he wouldn't respond. He kept telling me it was really over with her. I didn't care. I had him back and she was finally gone.

A few months later my son died from complications of his internal injuries. My husband and I held each other in our grief during the funeral and the months that followed taking care of closure of accounts, going through possessions. Nothing can hurt more than losing your child.

My husband went into a deep depression. He wanted nothing to do with life. Life had taken all that was precious to him. He became bitter and hard. He felt trapped in a life he didn't want to be living. During an argument months later it came out that he still loved HER, still missed HER, still wanted HER.

I did what I always did. Nothing. I kept hoping it would go away. I kept hoping it was just his grief talking and not really what he felt in his heart. He didn't leave and didn't mention it again. We went through the motions with other family members. They all thought we had gotten beyond the "affair", our son's death and our marriage was better than ever. Looking back, they thought what they wanted it to be, not what it really was. We lived in the same house but were like strangers. Without our son there was nothing left to keep us together. It had always been about our child.

Six months later he told me he was leaving for good and wanted a divorce. He said he didn't want to live a lie for the rest of his life. He was going to see if he could find her and if there was any chance for them to be together again. I was sure he would be back home again. He always came back.

The separation papers arrived within weeks. I wasn't surprised. We'd been here before too. He'd be back. I knew he would. Our families played their assigned roles in the drama of guilt. This time he wasn't playing his role. He didn't come back. He found her again. She had never gotten involved with anyone else. She still loved him but she wouldn't take him back unless he was really through with me. When the divorce was final, they finally got together and married a few months later. I haven't seen him so happy in over 35 years, when we were first married.

I expected to grieve hard. I expected to be angry. I expected to feel alone. Instead I felt relief. We weren't playing the dysfunctional drama we had played for years and years. I started to realize I never did "have him", even when he returned home to me. His heart had never left her. I started to realize that it had become more important to me that she not get him than whether or not he loved me. She gave him something I stopped giving him . She gave him the mature love between a man and a woman that endures with or without children. She had nothing to use to make him feel guilty, no obligations to hold him. She only had her love for him to offer and their hearts were held together closer than any marriage vows, guilt or obligation ever held him to me after she came into his life.

It wasn't until he left and remarried that I really looked at my part in the breakdown of our marriage. It was easy to blame her. It was easy to make him responsible. It wasn't so easy to see my own responsibility. I stopped treating him like a lover. I treated him like a father, a provider, a handyman, a companion, maybe a friend but not a husband. We taught our son that marriage was about guilt and obligation. We taught him no matter how unhappy you were you didn't leave.

That love I thought had rekindled was nothing but the mutual love, caring and grief for our son as he was dying. Those feelings overwhelmed any rational thoughts or feelings. When he died the final chapter was written in our marriage.

It's been 5 years now since they married. I've met someone that I share a deep and loving relationship with. In many ways it is better than my marriage ever was. I pray a lot now but my prayers are different than before. I pray with gratitude for what was, for our son. I pray for acceptance of what is. I pray for his happiness. Through God I found forgiveness for him, for her, but even more important, for me. I had to forgive myself for keeping them apart all those years and in doing so, destroying all of our lives.

Are there regrets? Oh yes. There are many. My biggest regret? I didn't let my husband leave the first time he tried. You can't force love to return or a marriage to be revived because of shared tragedy after so many years of love with another. My son might still be alive if we had faced the reality that our marriage was over and my husband loved another. You can't go back, you can only go forward. We never lose the love we shared with anyone, but sometimes love isn't meant to be shared for a lifetime. Sometimes part of God's bigger plan is for love to leave so an even greater love can come into your life.
I don't want to give you false hope, but I hope your fellow realizes this sooner rather than later. I know you feel you drove him away with your fears the last months since both his children got sick. Those were natural fears. You could never compete with dying children. The emotions that come with losing your child are so overwhelming you don't see anything else and you want to escape to a time when everyone was happy and safe. As grief subsides true feelings come to the surface again. Life goes on. Your love has withstood the test of time, against all odds. You are the love, support and strength he has come to rely on. You are the one he will always love. If he loved his wife, you wouldn't have been in his life for 20 years.

Give the process some time Camille. Take care of yourself and finding you again. Trust God has a bigger plan and be open to letting go and letting God be in control. If you do trust God, no matter what happens, you'll be in good hands.

...reading all the responses is like seeing people who were kind to me turning into different people.

This is the man I knew was "the one" and at 52 I don't want to start over.

I also wouldn't worry about the age thing. I'm 54.

I almost had his child about 4 years ago but nature had other plans after just 2 months.

I really don't have anyone local to be with.

I just want to fill the lonely hours and find a few good friends.

The phone never rings at home. The cell phone may as well be dead. It's like I've been buried alive.

There really isn't anyone local to just spend time with, talking or getting out and keeping busy. I know I need more local friends but I'm just not up to developing them right now and you can't base a new friendship on my misery and heartbreak. But for now, I'm alone,

There is nobody that can help at this point. My best friend is 3,000 miles away.

Little by little I'm trying to sort through things and start concentrating on the necessities of life- i.e.- supporting myself financially and developing some local friends.

It's been a really bad week with the sudden death of yet another close friend

When I started this thread, we were still together but had just found out about his daughter and her asking him to "come home".