Today, I’d like you to meet Carolyn who blogs at Leap and the Net Will Appear. Carolyn’s story is one of the most painful, hurtful stories I’ve heard. It’s also a story of tremendous growth and transformation. Carolyn was raised overseas and moved to America, on her own, when she was 20. She started off as a live-in nanny and shortly after that position ended, she met the man who would become her husband. They’d only been dating about six weeks before they moved in together.
They lived together for two years before getting married. Three years later Carolyn moved out and left her marriage. By then, they had two children aged six months and almost three years. She’d known for about ten months that her husband had been having an affair, an affair that started just six months after they were married. They had been living with Carolyn’s best friend and it was her best friend he was cheating with. Those two are now married.
Carolyn takes the story from here.
When I first found out about the affair, they really did a number on me. We’d been watching the show, Big Love and my friend was like,
“We could just be like Big Love. I love you. I never wanted to hurt you. It’s just that I’m in love with your husband. He loves you. He doesn’t want to leave you. We all get along so well. Why can’t we just be together? Screw social constructs and rules! We all care about each other, maybe this could work.”
I wanted so badly to salvage something out of that train wreck. I thought my options were to leave my husband and lose my husband, my best friend, a home and everything I knew or to try to buy their version of the story – maybe they were right and I was wrong. Maybe I could just stop all those feelings and get over it. Maybe we could all be happy together.
It was totally delusional of me to think that I could just stuff my feelings away forever and we could be like a happy extended family. Obviously, that’s not what happened. It took me a while to realize that there was no way I was going to be able to reconcile the way they treated me with the way I wanted to believe they felt about me. There was no truth to their talk about how much they cared about me but it took me a while to get there.
The Divorce Coach Says
It’s bad enough to lose your husband, but to lose your husband to your best friend! It took Carolyn about a year to realize that she couldn’t be party to the proposed arrangement and with the help of her mother, she made her break. She had never lived on her own before. Come back Monday to read Carolyn talking about that challenge.
And … do please visit Carolyn’s blog, Leap and the Net Will Appear . She’s been separated now for about 18 months, divorced for six months and life is still a roller-coaster ride.