There's Something About Harry

Its been over a week since I went out with my wife and what I thought at the time was her online boyfriend, whom she had met first in real life while we were out celebrating our wedding anniversary.

I’ve taken the last two days off from talking or writing about this topic.  When all of this first happened, I was definitely having a difficult time trying to understand, decipher, cope, be supportive, not get mad, not drop into a massive depression, etc. 

Ultimately, writing about it, helped me immensely.  I just didn’t have anyone else to turn to in order to dig through all the facts and information.  I didn’t have anyone else to talk to about what I was feeling or what I should be feeling, if it was even appropriate or not.

I wrote quite a bit, probably something close to 20,000 words.  If this were NaNoWriMo, I’d be two thirds done with a novel. 

• Things that completely Derail your Week: Server problems, Noisy Neighbors Construction and Your Wife’s boyfriend
• Recovering After the Date with My Wife’s Boyfriend
• Until Un-Happiness Do Us Part – The Perceived Risk of my Wife’s ‘Friend’
• Surprise! Your Wife Has Mail (from Him)
• How Do I Compete for my Wife’s Attention When He has as much Access to her as I do through Social Networks and Text Messages?

I was not writing for volume by any means. Just trying to get through things.  By the time I finished the fifth one, ergo my fifth day of therapy, my therapy was starting to hurt my wife. 

I did not want to turn this in to a zero sum game, where she hurts me, so I hurt her back.  I didn’t want to go out and find some other woman to turn things on my wife just to see how she would like it.  I did not want to harm her with my words either.  We have always had a difficult time talking about these things, which was why I wrote in the first place.

But early on, she started reading what I was writing (not always finishing for obviously long winded reasons) and she was starting to feel that my writing painted her too negatively, painted her actions too negatively, and she felt that this was putting her on the defensive.  Long story short, I don’t think Becky really thinks she did anything wrong.  She says she did not intend to hurt me.  She says that she didn’t realize that I didn’t know about her online relationship with Hobie.  Since I have never really gotten ‘jealous’ in the past, it was a surprise when all of this hurt me.

A New Kind of Jealousy

So in person, I am not the type of person that gets jealous.  Becky can flirt with someone all she likes and I will not really blink an eye.  I won’t really compete either.  If she wants to flirt she can, but I don’t play gladiator games with other guys to win her attention.  Its just not my way, never has been.  The lack of games like that is one of the reasons why I fell in love with Becky in the first place.

Years ago when I was single, I learned how to play those games.  I was very adept at it.  For the most part, I thought they were kind of stupid, and they usually torpedoed any chance at a better relationship with someone.  When I met Becky, we didn’t play any of those stupid games, and I think that is one of the reasons why our relationship lasted this long (16 years) already.

Fast forward to the present, and I don’t mind, never have if she flirts with another guy, but I’m not going to regress to the point where I have to play games to keep her love or attention.  I think she knows that and I think that when she flirts, she does so not to hook up with someone, not to fall in love with someone, she just does it because she likes the repartee’ or something.  I do too for that matter, and its something that is difficult to engage in with someone you’ve been married to for so long, because you know that just around the corner all flirting pretenses can evaporate in a minute or two.  With a stranger, the boundaries can remain up indefinitely.

But I’ve learned that I can be jealous of my wife when she has a constant and regular electronic relationship with another man via text messages, phone calls, chat messages, email and facebook.  I can be even more jealous when she doesn’t even let me know that this is going on.  It may not be in secret, it may not be hidden but its not in the light of day either.

Flirting in person, rarely lasts day after day, night after night for several weeks.  Meet a stranger in a club, bar, anywhere and you might have a few minutes, maybe time through out the evening to chat back and forth, but that is unlikely to turn into repeat sessions.

Meet a person online and you are connected, possibly forever.

They can see what you are thinking, what you are doing, who you are talking to, what you are talking about, they can see pictures of you regularly, your kids and family and more.

I do not live in an internet bubble by a long shot, but I don’t develop relationships like that with other people very often and can’t remember the last time I developed a relationship like that with another woman.

Talking and flirting electronically is essentially like passing love notes.  You may not be telling someone else that you love them like a third grader might, but passing messages back and forth with sexual overtones, double entendres, and other personal talk is essentially the stuff of love notes, maybe more at a high school level.

The electronics and the medium make it feel almost acceptable.  After all, if you can talk with your brother, your mother, your sister, your boss in that medium, then talking with a member of the opposite sex must be OK too.

If you aren’t sending dirty pictures back and forth, no phone sex or masturbation is involved, it must be all right?

Well, despite the fact that I am extremely , ummm, liberated, especially about what humans can or should be able to do, if you want to buy into the concept of monogamous relationships (which I think is stupid, but have agreed to for the happiness of Becky) then this type of activity is NOT ok. 

It seems to fall under the auspices of if you can’t do it in front of everyone else, then there must be a reason. 

If you think it would hurt your spouse, then maybe you should reconsider. 

If you think it would embarrass you or get you in trouble at work (sexual harassment or something) then maybe you should reconsider. 

If you think it would embarrass your or your family if it were done in front of them, maybe you should reconsider.

I do not think my wife was knowingly engaging in any activity meant to hurt me or destroy our relationship nor probably even build a physical relationship with Hobie. 

But I don’t think she thought through what she was doing either nor the repercussions.  That is partly because I’ve never been the jealous type before, and partly because the mediums of conversation are so easy and readily available to keep connections and conversations flowing.

She did end up hurting me because she didn’t make me aware of what she was doing with Hobie.  I wasn’t involved in the conversation.  I wasn’t privy to the conversation (not even in a voyeuristic manner).  She never really made that an option.

At one point, the height of my fear and angst, I toyed with hacking into her computer and trying to find out what she had been talking about with Hobie, but I backed away.  She might have been further down the rabbits hole than I realize, and I could be a fool, but if I had looked, it would have signaled the end of my trust of her and her trust of me. 

I would have gained everything in knowledge to lose everything in reality.

She tells me that she has backed away from her relationship with Hobie, telling him not to flirt with her and she says she is not flirting with him.  The communication has not stopped.  I can’t tell but hope it has decreased in quantity.  She’s been talking with him about his challenges dating another woman with the same name as my wife, counseling him basically.  I haven’t read these messages or conversations, but have heard second hand about them from her.

I’m more comfortable with this.  She could be pulling the wool over my eyes, but I don’t think she is.  If I’m wrong, well there’s nothing else I could do other than snoop on her in which case she might as well be lost to me anyway.  If I had to engage in an intervention to win her back or something, I’d probably consider it, but knowing her nature and her tendency to be extra stubborn when confronted I don’t think that would help.  I don’t even think she has mentioned this situation to other people in her family, even though they read my blog too.

Great Sex

The article before this one, I toyed with the notion about writing about what has essentially been great make up sex.  I backed off and instead wrote about some of the remaining aspects of things that were still troubling me. 

I should have written about sex.

Apparently, the last article really upset Becky quite a bit.  I think she was worried that no matter what she said or did, she couldn’t convince me that she wasn’t in love with Hobie and had no real intentions physically towards him.

But basically ever since this issue came up a little over a week ago, our sex life has been great.  In our relationship, sex has always been very good, and no matter what our issues were over the years, too much work, moving, school, trying to get pregnant, pregnant, weight problems, finances, health issues, moving again, Chinese mafia threatening to kill us, the sex has always been good and always something that we could both count on.

Since this situation arose, my wife has been off work mostly.  We’ve spent more time together over the last 9-10 days that we normally are, and we’ve been going at it like crazy.

I’m not going to go into all the lurid and fun details, but in addition to the writing, the sex has helped too.  Its possible for men and women to fake orgasms, but its not so easy to fake emotions, especially during the extended rounds of foreplay and sex that have kept us up late the last week.

Our sex life, wasn’t really lacking before this all happened.  It wasn’t slow and it wasn’t over done.  We’re probably slightly more active than the average couple in the US, having sex 2-3 times per week, some weeks more than that, never much less.  The trickiest thing about our sex life is our mis-matched work schedules, coming and going is our biggest problem, but once we meet up there is not much of an issue at all.

Becky is not frigid nor difficult to please.  I wouldn’t say she is ‘easy to please’ but she’s definitely not impossible to please either.  Some women have difficulty having orgasms, or can only have orgasms in a limited number of ways.  Becky is lucky compared to some women and can have orgasms in several different ways and combinations.  As her husband, that makes my life relatively easy, but that doesn’t mean I don’t try regardless. 

Over the last week, we’ve been putting in the extra effort so to speak, and its been a very very pleasant week, and I guess enough said about that.

Where to Go from Here?

I now know that I AM the Jealous type when it comes to some situations, especially secretive or non-transparent ones online.  That’s not something I knew 2 weeks ago.  Even though it has been painful, I do savor the opportunity to learn something new about myself.

I have learned some new things about Becky as well and that is a good thing too.

I do not know if she has grown as much during this event as I have.  I hope so, but I am not sure.  She’s still a little closed about a lot of this so its hard for me to tell.

I dislike the fact that we may have both just gone through the crucible and possibly only one of us benefited from surviving it.  I do want Becky to know that I do not mind if she has male friends online or off.  I do not care if she flirts with guys in person, especially if I’m there.

I do mind if she maintains a regular and constant online relationship in the form of multiple conversations each day electronically and that communication includes flirting dialog.  That does bother me and does make me jealous.  I do think that can result in feelings and later temptations that she might not want to resist.  I think if she keeps these private from me, then she is essentially opening the door to meet someone, fall in love or lust with them, have an affair and I would be completely blind sided.

As a guy, who is relatively nice, kind of tall, not too fat, and doesn’t look much like a troll, I have to be careful not to let myself get into situations where physical temptations, especially if alcohol is involved, might get the better of me and I would do something that would hurt Becky.  Its not happened yet, and that is largely because I am careful not to let it happen.

I think that Becky unwittingly walked into an area where the risk of something happening eventually was there.  She was confident for several reasons that she would have said no or shut it down, but I’m not as confident largely because I was not aware of what was going on, what did go on, or just how close she actually got with Hobie.  I’ll never know if I our relationship was on a razor’s edge of a cliff or if it was ten miles back from a rolling slope of a hill.

But I do want Becky to be more aware in the future of the danger and of what she now knows hurts me, something I didn’t even know 2 weeks ago.

I can’t handle going through this on a regular basis.  Its not something I’m going to get used to, grow into, or learn to accept.  If she develops an online relationship with a man, flirts with him in person, talks with him through out the day for days on end and doesn’t tell me about it, I’m going to be hurt, and I’m going to look at it in the future like she is trying to create an opportunity for something to split us up.

I do not think she will do that, but based on what I have learned about myself and our relationship, I can’t see any other way to view that type of thing in the future.  I do not think it is unreasonable.

I do think Becky loves me, and I doubt this will come up again, until some dumb ass techy nerd develops some social network that allows people to communicate by reading each other’s minds from a distance.

Then we are all either in trouble or on a fast track to a real free love society.

Related posts:

1. How Do I Compete for my Wife’s Attention When He has as much Access to her as I do through Social Networks and Text Messages?
2. Surprise! Your Wife Has Mail (from Him)
3. Things that completely Derail your Week: Server problems, Noisy Neighbors Construction and Your Wife’s boyfriend
4. Am I Allergic to My Wife’s Male Friend’s Text Messages During Sex?
5. Recovering After the Date with My Wife’s Boyfriend