There's Something About Harry

Over the last few days, I’ve written about the pain and hurt I’ve experienced as I was surprised with the knowledge that Becky, my wife of 16 years, had developed a ‘relationship’ with another man she met on our anniversary. 

She met this man, whom I will call Hobie, when Becky and I were celebrating our anniversary on Halloween. We were out to have a good time, drinking at Howl at the Moon, a dueling piano bar in Charlotte.  It was our first time there, and it was part of our regular date night efforts to get out and away from the kids about once a month.

I met Hobie first as Becky and I sat at a bar that faced the live music.  He was sitting on my right, and Becky was on my left.  I said hello, introduced myself and Becky and figured we might be there for several hours, might as well get to know our neighbors.

Howl at the Moon is a dueling piano bar where the audience typically gets involved and sings along all night long.  No place for a cold fish to sit next to a stranger.

After a couple drinks, Becky began to get more comfortable in the place.  It was her first dueling piano bar experience, my third.  During one of my trips to the restroom, she swapped seats with me and sat next to Hobie.  I didn’t think much of it and sat in her seat when I came back.

As the night progressed, she began flirting with Hobie and he flirted right back.  It was a physical kind of flirting probably initiated by Becky, because she is a flirt.  It probably started with her brushing up against him, or putting her hand on his knee or thigh or something.

Eventually he reciprocated and that led to hands on backs, and when I wasn’t present during other trips to the restroom, out right groping, maybe a snuggle or hug or something.

Hobie wasn’t the only guy that night.

There was another guy dressed up as a large Charlie Brown and there with a lady dressed as Lucy.  They had sat on my new left side.  Apparently, Charlie Brown was feeling my wife a bit as well as she told me later.

That’s a bit ironic because Charlie Brown and Lucy both seemed very offended that Hobie was ‘flirting’ with my wife when I wasn’t present.  When I was present, I didn’t mind.  Becky is beautiful but doesn’t get out a lot.  I think it is healthy for her to feel beautiful and be adored by other people, men and women.

She has fought very very hard to control her weight over the years, especially after 3 kids.  Her appearance is something that she isn’t terribly confident about her looks.  So when a guy or multiple guys or people engage her, tell her she’s beautiful, flirt with her etc it really helps her feel better, feel good about herself. 

I think she is beautiful anyway, but she completely lights up when she feels good about herself. 

She comes out of a bit of a shell that working as a school teacher and coming home to a house of 3 kids, sometimes locks her up in. Its great to see her receive this positive feedback.  I welcomed it then and I still do now.

When a Physical Meeting turns into an Online Relationship

I’m not going to completely rehash the ensuing developments after that point.  I’ve written about it already to deal with my own emotions about what happened after that night.

1. Things that completely Derail your Week: Server problems, Noisy Neighbors Construction and Your Wife’s boyfriend
2. Recovering After the Date with My Wife’s Boyfriend
3. Until Un-Happiness Do Us Part – The Perceived Risk of my Wife’s ‘Friend’
4. Surprise! Your Wife Has Mail (from Him)

Here are some of the things I know now, some things that have changed even since I wrote the previous articles.

I seem to have developed a temporary need to identify what I know.  This is partly because my world was turned upside down last week and stating what I know helps me get a grip on the new reality that still has some ripples running through it.

• Becky friended Hobie on Facebook 3 days after our anniversary
• They began texting each other a lot (a lot defined in terms of multiple times a day)
• They talked on the phone
• They exchanged emails through her personal email account
• They exchanged emails through her work email account
• I think they chatted on Facebook
• They chatted on Yahoo! Messenger
• Hey asked her out (with a group) and I was invited to go along as the designated driver for her
• He talked with her about a girl he wanted to date (coincidentally had the same name as my wife, she does exist, I met her when we all went out last Friday) – My wife probably counseled him about this other girl
• In her words, she flirted with him when they talked online
• He lives a few miles away, his address is on his facebook profile, my wife’s is not, but I’m not hard to find.
• He’s recently divorced and older than my wife.

I know more than that but I’m not trying to break confidences, just trying to understand things in my own head.

That said here are some things I don’t know.  I do not know if

• they ever met when I wasn’t present
• I don’t know if she talked to him about our kids.  She knows a bit about his kids
• I don’t know what he wants from her, but I think he is lonely and sex is probably one of the things he’s interested in, but conquering the loneliness is probably high on his list too
• I don’t know what he thinks of his relationship with my wife
• I know she doesn’t know what to think of her relationship with him, she calls him a friend, but short of a female friend at work, I think she talks to him more than any other friend online.

I read a few articles today that all were written from the perspective of ‘what is an online affair’.  I was trying to understand just what my wife has with this other man.  If he were gay, I think this would all make sense.  He’d be her very close gay friend, whom she confides in heavily and flirts with casually knowing that he is gay and nothing will ever come of it.

I’m pretty sure that Hobie is not gay and more sure that my wife knows this too.

The articles all had a common and severe flaw, which I will call the Cosmopolitan Flaw.

They are all written in a way that helps you identify what an Online Affair is.  They attempt to define an online affair, but they do it in a gypsy fortune telling kind of way, listing out things that are characteristic of an online affair, but don’t really spell it out.

They leave everything to the interpretation of the person that reads them and they read like a Cosmo questionnaire

‘10 ways to tell if your boyfriend thinks that you think that he thinks that you feel that his feelings are something that you should consider talking about with his mother when he’s present but only if he’s paying attention to you and you are not half crazed!”

Examples

10 Clues of an Online Affair

Know if you are Having an Online Affair

How to Respond to Your Spouse’s Affair

Top 6 Reasons People Cheat

How Has the Internet Changed the Way People Chat (on a site called Online Affairs – Truth About Deception)

These articles proved to be terrible. 

They were written well.  They follow all the rules of a good online Linkbait, an article designed to rank well in search engines and bring people in to read them when they do a Google search on a topic such as ‘online affairs’ which is what I did, hook set.

They were terrible because I feel like they missed the mark.  They were also very dated.  More fitting for the online environment before unlimited texting and social networking tools like Facebook. 

My wife does not feel that she is having an affair with Hobie.  I don’t feel like she is having an affair with Hobie either.

That doesn’t make her relationship with Hobie make me feel any better.  This was the only element in these articles that really resonated with me.

Your spouse doesn’t necessarily have to sleep with someone for their relationship with another person of the opposite sex to have an impact on you, to hurt you or make you feel bad.

Social networking sites are designed to make it easy for people to come together, to talk, to get to know each other, to develop a friendly ‘relationship’, to become friends, and yes to become something more than friends.

The thing is they are all very very new.  We are still learning how to relate with each other on Facebook.  Yes it is easy, its very cool to catch up and get to know long lost friends all over again.

But it is also far far easier for a healthy relationship with a new or old friend to grow very fast.  The velocity of that growth can happen quickly and when you are in the heat of the moment, this great new conversation you are having, a terrific back and forth, something that begins to spread from Facebook to email as you get a message from facebook via email that someone responded to you and before you know it, you are skipping facebook and sending an email.  Then your signature gets sent to this person and you are talking on the phone or texting back and forth on cell phones all day and night.

Suddenly this Facebook friendship is not just on Facebook, you are connected to this other person in a half dozen ways, and the conversation is great.

I think that is the relationship my wife has with Hobie. 

I do not begrudge the relationship, I have not asked her to stop. (I want to ask her to stop, but I can’t.  It doesn’t feel appropriate.  I want her to be satisfied with me.  I don’t want to artificially influence her holding the marriage thing over her head.  If I have to do that, I’ve lost her.)

When the surprise of their relationship hit me, I was pretty much dumbfounded.  It hurt and I didn’t know what to do.  I wanted to shout and scream but I feared that if I acted outwardly in a stupid, juvenile, immature way, it would make me less attractive and appealing and him more so. 

I didn’t want to provide the ugly contrast to the amazing conversation they were having together.

But today when I read these articles, I stepped right in it.  I left my computer open as I was going to take a shower.  My wife needed to borrow it real quick (so she could look at some pictures he had sent her via email of our recent night out).

She saw the articles and said something along the line, so you think I’m having an online affair.  She got upset and I saw the walls and barriers go up before my eyes.  She was already heading into the bedroom to take a nap.  I developed a head cold last night and slept in this morning.

She thinks that I am taking this whole thing too far, that I am making more of it than is really there.  I want to believe her as that will indicate that he is in the past.

But they still talk.  He may even become a friend for the long haul.  We talked last night when we were being much more open with each other (our conversations go through waves these days where we are communicating well and then as I relapse into a bit of pain, not so well). . . We talked about possibly setting him up on a date with a friend of ours who is a similar age and also single.

I definitely have ulterior motives.  If he had a relationship of his own, I’d be more comfortable with his friendship with my wife, but currently he doesn’t.

Plus this is the day before Thanksgiving.  He’s a recently divorced dad preparing to be alone on Thanksgiving.  Its the most natural thing in the world to reach out to anyone that will talk with him, even my wife.

So as I woke up today, I heard my wife’s text message going off one after the other.  Its probably her friend Sue, but I don’t know that.  I don’t read her text messages.  It could be Hobie flirting with her again, maybe making jokes about pumpkin pie and ice cream.

I have no fucking idea what they might be talking about, or if they are talking much at all, but this is one of the things that I’m still having a hard time coping with just 5 days after ‘the group date’.  (Ha! I found a slightly less hurtful way of talking about it.  )

A few weeks ago, I was in Illinois.  My younger brother Troy had just had his second heart attack.  I was worried for him and about him, and wound up tight as a steel trap.  Like the dumb ass I can be sometimes, I actually ended up having an argument with him (post heart attack, like he needed that) about why he should quit smoking and fight to survive.

There were things that needed to be said by me to him and by him to me, but we both did it in the completely wrong way at the wrong time and it pretty much just sucked overall.

Not always easy to communicate with family. 

One of the things he said though is resonating with me today.  It was something along the lines of

“When we talk on the phone, we talk about unimportant stuff, how work is going, how the family is, business ideas and brainstorming things.  But who do you (Brett) confide in?  Who is that you can talk to about things?”

That’s one of my problems.  I do confide in people.  I confide in my friend Joe Klein and we talk 3-4 times per week.  When I can catch up with him, I confide in my friend Bob Shipton as well, but he’s not easy to catch up with and those confidences only get shared a couple times of year these days.

Some things I confide in Becky, but those barriers I’ve thrown up to protect her from my conversations have stopped me from being able to confide in her completely.  Our discussions drive her nuts. literally.

I can look at a subject from a dozen different angles, talk about it from one, and in her words, half way through a sentence change my mind and my perspective and then explore the other line of thought.

I told her I approach sex the same way. 

With conversations (not sex) Becky likes me to get to the point. Long discussions in depth about a subject just isn’t something she enjoys like shallow flirting all day long with some guy she met at a bar. 

That was a cheap shot and I apologize.  But that would be a direct to the point statement as opposed to how I normally would look at it from a bunch of different angles to better understand her perspective. 

So My blog is my Confidant

So for me, writing in this blog, has evolved recently into something of a new type of therapy for me.  It is helping me confide and get the thoughts out of my head.

Becky reads my thoughts sometimes (I don’t think she read the whole article yesterday.  )  When she does read my blog, its finally like I am getting a chance to confide in her and we do talk afterwards.  Other people read it as well and I’m not sure how I feel about that.

I’m a blogger and I do try to be a real person.  I typically try to help people online, I don’t typically seek out help. 

My wife doesn’t seem to have a Confidant however.  I don’t think she is confiding in me, I don’t think she is necessarily confiding in him either.  She might be confiding a bit in her friend Sue, but I’m not sure.

When I read the stupid quiz that helps a person get past their denial and figure out if they are having an affair, “Know if you are Having an Online Affair”

Here are the questions (there’s more written with them on the article, but I want to focus on a couple that actually seem relevant)

1. How much time do you spend online?

2. Do you look forward to spending time with your online “friend?”

3. Is your online friend a secret?

   Have you shared the fact that you have an online friend with your spouse? Do you keep it to yourself because you know your spouse would react negatively? Maybe you don’t tell because the idea of having a friend your spouse doesn’t know about is exciting to you.

4. Do you share relationship issues with your online friend?

5. Is your online friend a better listener than your spouse?

   When you share person details and problems, does your online friend always respond in the way you need? Do you find yourself wishing your spouse cared as much as your online friend seems to?

6. Are you beginning to recent your spouse?

7. Do you have less interest in sex with your spouse?

8. Do you exchange photos with your online friend?

9. Have you suggested a “real life” meeting with your online friend?

   Meeting for lunch or coffee will soon become a topic of discussion. Online affairs almost always lead to a desire to meet each other in real life. That is when something you think is harmless becomes destructive.

   Don’t be fooled by the denial and rationalizations you have made about your online friend. Keeping it online may be something you can live with. It may, in your mind be OK since the two of you are not having sex. Whatever you are telling yourself about it, it will eventually turn into more than you went looking for in the first place.

http://divorcesupport.about.com/od/infidelity/ht/online_affair.htm

The tips section actually seemed a little more useful than the Cosmo-esque, read this and you will probably find something in it that you can use to pigeonhole yourself one way or the other.  How about a horoscope to while you are at it?

Tips:

1. Get rid of your denial. Be honest with yourself and what you are doing. Being honest about your behavior is the only way to determine if what you are doing is worth the pain it will cause your spouse and family.

2. If you decide to end the online affair expect to be emotionally uncomfortable. You’ve formed a bond with another human being. Breaking that bond is going to take will-power.

3. Spend less time online and more time doing things that will impact your life positively. Exchange your negative behavior for one that will enrich your marriage and family.

4. If you find it impossible to break off the affair get help. You don’t have to do it alone. See a therapist or talk to trusted friend. Share what you are going through with someone willing to help you handle the negative emotions you are feeling.

All that said, I don’t think any of those tips will help my wife Becky.    They just don’t seem to completely fit (possibly a little denial there on her part).

I think we are living in something that is an evolution or two past the old generic ‘online affair’ notion.

Hers is currently more of a relationship.  Bill Clinton may not have had a relationship with Monica Lewinsky, but he did pretty much have sex with her.

My wife has a relationship with Hobie, but so far no sex.  Sex is probably not in the cards for their relationship, but just like a sexual relationship I still see his ghost hovering when she is on her computer, I hear the chains of his ghost rattling every time she gets a text message. 

I’m not so much jealous as envious that he has a relationship with her that I don’t.  He has something that I wanted, have wanted for years.

So that’s how I’m screwed up today.  I’m a little better than I was when this started, still coping, still trying to deal with this, somewhat better for making the effort, but I’ve got too many nooks and crannies in my brain to shake out and clean of the bile that is this issue with Becky’s male friend.  My big challenge at the moment is balancing my own needs to confide in someone or something (this blog) and not drive her away from me.

When she sees me writing this blog, I think its starting to hurt her.  That’s not what I want.  She’s been very supportive, but I think if I cross a line that it will bring my worst fears into reality, I might lose her, or shut her real feelings off from me forever.  But at the same time, I’m a little too screwed up to keep this crap bottled up inside of me.

One more day past, until tomorrow, or maybe if I can tough it out and not have a relapse, maybe sometime later . . .