I Feel Like Everyone is Having A Affair

[0:00]I've been married about eight years, three kids. My wife was raised by a mother who was a firefighter. Dad stayed home. So, my wife grew up having, you know, her mom have 90% of her co-workers were male and most of her friends. Contrast that with my upbringing. My parents ended their marriage, got divorced because of an affair. I have seen friends have affairs, aunts, uncles, you name it. I feel like everyone and everyone, I feel like everyone's having an affair. All this is to give context of one of the biggest fights in our marriage has always been, how do you have boundaries with the opposite sex? My wife, the standpoint she has come from is she has felt controlled like I'm behaving like a father, and I have always come from the standpoint of, how do you not value our marriage enough to keep it safe? Does that make sense? 100%. So the context of this, about a year and a half ago, I found out my wife was having an emotional affair. For me, at the time, it came out of nowhere. It blindsided me. And it touched a nerve because it was in this area that we've always struggled with and I've always been very anxious about is the boundaries. For her though, she said she had felt abandoned for about a year, year and a half prior. It wasn't out of nowhere. I just didn't see it. Been working with the emotional affair for about a year. We were at the point of probably separating this last December, but also kind of getting over it at the same time. I know that probably sounds confusing, but No, not at all. I started seeing, not that I had deserved and was responsible for the actions she took, but where I had let a gap creep into our marriage. But hold on. Did she ever in that 18 months when she felt abandoned, sit down and say, I feel abandoned? She cried to me for probably a year. Okay. Where were you? I guess I had this view of, I'm doing what a man's supposed to do. I go to work, I provide, you know, I work hard, I've made a lot of money. I've given up my dreams to make sure my kids can eat, can have a roof over their head. And what she has said over and over and this is what I say, I can hear now and then I didn't, I didn't intentionally not hear it at the time. I just thought I was doing what a man's supposed to do is A man's supposed to listen to his crying wife. But, I mean, and by the way, bro, I've been there too. It was a hard lesson to learn. Now, describe this emotional affair for me because that means so many different things to so many different people. Well, last week I reached out Monday. I had been thinking about reaching out to you for probably a year, John. I mean that. And then Monday, I reached out in the morning to your show. Monday night, my wife sits me down and told me that it had not been an emotional affair, that it had been a physical affair. There you go. And that's why you haven't had a settled spirit for a year, because your body knows the air is not clean in that house. Uh, when she told me, I had two instant reactions. I started sitting there, and I started just saying no, no, no, as if me saying the words was going to make it rewind and not be true anymore. Mhm. And the second was, I knew it. I don't feel crazy anymore. I'm going to challenge what you just told me. That no, no, no, was you squashed yourself. That was you talking to you because in your guts you've known.