I met her 8 years ago and we are in the process of getting divorced. It makes me feel conflicted… like I am making a mistake and hurting people who love me. I also feel like I am making the right long term decision. It tears me apart.
We don’t have children. In some ways, I look at us as a glorified BF/GF relationship in the way that we behaved but we always called each other husband and wife. It makes the separation weighty to me. Like it is a major thing.
We only knew each other 6 months before we got married. She wanted to live in America and we married because we really liked each other and she wanted to get a green card. We met at a strip club where she was working over the summer. She made me feel like a really lucky person - luckiest guy in the world. She has a way about here that is very caring and thoughtful.
The reason I left my wife is that I discovered through some text messages that she was stripping at a strip club while I was out of town on business 6 years into our marriage. I discovered this, confided what had happened to a woman outside of the relationship and had an affair. The thing with the new woman was not a simmering old flame or even an old friendship. We were acquaintances from years back and I initiated the contact. I am now staying with the other woman, 1000 miles from my wife.
I am deeply conflicted at this point.
Building a relationship takes a lot of time and understanding and to throw away all those moments where we argued and made something stronger feels like I am taking away part of my heart. Being with her made me feel like I knew what it meant to be loved unconditionally. I think it is in her nature to love everyone unconditionally - it is something wonderful about her.
From the beginning of the marriage to my wife, I had a deep desire to erase her past and help her succeed. I was probably arrogant. I probably still am. I wanted to take her away from the strip club because though I met her there when she was single, I didn’t want my wife to be stripping. It creates problems for me that revolve around trust, respect, values and morals.
We come from different backgrounds. She is from Eastern Europe, was raised poor, her father was not there and her mother was an alcoholic. I am from America, had upper middle class parents, my father divorced my mother when I was 4 and my mother raised me though I am still close with my father. I didn’t think any of this mattered when we married.
Though I left my wife over the realization that she had been secretly dancing at clubs. The secret life as a dancer really was the straw that broke the camels back on a few other issues that really weren’t that bad on their own but crescendoed into the decision to leave.
When we fell in love, there was a language barrier. It was hard to understand her but I found figuring out what she was saying to be exciting - I cared what she thought. After we married, I hired a tutor to help her. She didn’t really stick with the tutor. Overtime she got better but I began to see that there was a difference in our intelligence levels and that she wasn’t really interested in learning things. I have a desire to constantly learn and it wasn’t in her but that was ok.
She also had a tendency to attract people into our marriage that I really didn’t like to hang out with - her friends. At first they were strippers but we moved and started over. Then her friends were often from her country but living in the United States and when they were over they would very often speak their language - a language I could not understand. I had a very hard time relating to them because they had different values than me.
I told her I felt that the people we were hanging out with were involved with crime in some way but my wife would brush off my concerns and continue to spend time with the friends. It later came out in the paper that the husband of the best friend she made was indeed involved in a crime ring. He is going to court later this year. I think pretty lowly of these people she brought around. They believed things that kind of scared me.
The great thing about my wife is how caring and wonderful she is to all people. She has a genuine, sincere interest in people. In return, she wants attention and she wants to be appreciated. As the years went on, I came to cherish how gifted she was in this area. I also came to see that her ability to connect with people did not have any value based / moral judgements attached to it. Anything a person did in their life was ok with her. There is something about my wife that is a little to willfully ignorant and accepting in areas where a value judgment needs to be made.
There were other friends from her home country who were more professional with college degrees but she didn’t make lasting friendships with those kinds of people. I feel maybe she threatened by college educated, alpha females. Or maybe college educated alpha females were threatened by her. Whatever the case, there weren’t many intelligent girlfriends coming over and conversations were lacking. Sometimes I felt alone in a room full of people.
One thing my wife did get the attention of was alpha males. She desires the attention of these kinds of men and she says she never strayed on me. It is only natural for a beautiful woman to want to be noticed so it never really bothered me until the end of the relationship when I found out about the dancing when I wasn’t around.
The dancing when I wasn’t home and the ability to keep the secret for 2 years made me wonder what other kind of secrets she was keeping from me. It made me doubt us. It made me resent paying bills and buying vacations for us. It made me feel like maybe I was just a big sucker - that the woman I married was really operating on an individual basis.
Over time she became more professional. She got a real estate license and started doing rentals in the city. She got away from the club because I think she realized she was getting too old for that place. I accepted a lot from her but in the end I walked away and into the arms of another woman I can’t say I really know.
When I look at what we had as a package I see a person I love but I am conflicted because this experience makes me believe that loving someone isn’t enough to make a marriage work. You need trust, respect, aligned values and two moral compasses pointing in the same direction.
When you don’t have value and moral compasses pointed in the same direction, you constantly butt heads on issues through the maturation of the relationship. One day a deeply held value is crossed and it hurts the trust and respect. From there you have to ask yourself-
Do you rebuild the trust and respect from here knowing that the person you are compromising with has a different background / value system / moral compass than you? It is real work.
Do you say thank you for the wonderful memories but I need to make a change in my life? It is real work.
If anyone read this far - thank you and if you respond, please know I will take what you say to heart.