A Crappy Apology

After I sent the other guy a mail telling him that I discovered his porn site where he bragged to the world about all the sex he was having with my wife, he promised me a response.  I did get one from him a few days later, and I assume that he meant it as a sincere apology.

I am at a loss of word as to what to say to you that might make you feel better, or mend the rift, or bind the wounds. All I can say to you is that I am very, very sorry about my actions and what happened.

Neither of us ever knew or thought what happened would ever happen from the beginning. We were strictly friends and that’s all I’m sure we ever intended it to be. I can’t tell you what day or hour or action changed everything between us.

I can’t change the past and the actions that occurred in the past. I can only say I am sorry.

I do have one question though, why didn’t you say something if you knew?

I know my apology isn’t much to offer, but it’s all I have.

I admit that my first reaction to this was that it did sound sincere. He seemed to be honestly apologizing, and as he says, there’s really nothing more he could have offered me. But the more I thought about it and after I went back to read it again, I wasn’t impressed.  His claim of only intending to be friends was just a continuation of his inability to accept responsibility.  Apparently, he had the best of intentions, but something beyond his control turned that innocent friendship into an affair.

What really angered me though was that question that he posed to me, which I read that as him challenging my claim that I knew about the sex before I discovered his site.  Regardless of his intention with the question, I took the chance to respond.

I’m not sure what compels you to ask that question, or any question of me for that matter.  You know infinitely more than I do about what happened over the last couple of years, while I’ve had to work for almost a year just to scrape together the bits of information that I do have.  Considering that you were instrumental in actively keeping that information from me, it’s quite ironic that you would send me a message that provides me with no additional insight or personal perspective, but then ask me to satisfy your curiosity.  I hope you won’t be offended when I say that I don’t feel any obligation to answer.  Everything that I have done over the past year has been with the very specific goal of protecting my family, and [Wife] is the only person who has any right to evaluate my actions.

Still, I feel compelled to answer if for no other reason than to have you finally hear my perspective.   I’m sure that I was the topic of various discussions of yours over the past couple of years, and perhaps it’s time that you actually heard something from me instead of about me.  Giving a complete explanation would take far too long.  But this is also not an answer that I could adequately provide in just a few lines since there were multiple times where I knew more than I let on.  So, you’ll have to excuse the length of this mail.

Suffice it to say that from the time that I found out about the affair last July, I have focused on the clear goals of saving my marriage and my family and keeping as much of the drama from our children as possible.  My personal well-being, my dignity, and even my sanity have been secondary to the needs of my family.  The entire month of August, I kept quiet about what I knew because our children were home from school, and [Wife] and I had little time to be alone. I had no idea how she was going to react, and  I was determined to protect our children from such traumatic experiences as volatile arguments between their parents or one of us leaving the home unexpectedly. Those weeks waiting for school to start was the most difficult period of my entire life, but I would repeat it again a countless number of times if I thought that was in the best interest of my children.

I’ll admit to being completely naïve from September to November.  I believed that the relationship was nothing more than a friendship and was in the process of winding down.  I had to perform a significant amount of self-delusion in order to do that though and had to explicitly ignore a variety of obvious signs.  But I was so exhausted from the summer that I chose to believe what I wanted to be true.  You were able to take advantage of that and continue the relationship with little change.  Thanks to your blog, I now not only have some specific dates but even specific sex acts that were going on while I was performing such mundane acts as cooking dinner for my family or picking up my children from school.  If I didn’t already feel humiliated enough at my gullibility, then I certainly do now.

But even under my delusion, it bothered me significantly that you two were still in contact.  I had every right to demand that [Wife] cease communication with you based on nothing more than the excessive texting and the history of meetings without my knowledge.  But I was focused on the long term health of my wife and my marriage, not on my short term pride.  I needed to give [Wife] her space to work things out according to her own time schedule, and we needed to coherently make mutual decisions in the best interest of our marriage and our family.  I don’t shy away one bit from my portion of responsibility for the problems in our marriage, and I needed time to make appropriate amends there as well.  Demands and ultimatums might have given me some perceived short term power over the situation, but it would do little for the long term health of our marriage.

It was the events of late November that forced me to face reality.  When I looked at the phone bills and found that virtually nothing had changed in your relationship, it was obvious that it could no longer continue if [Wife] and I were going to retain any kind of a marriage.  I had to risk the resentment of making the demands that I had been avoiding.  During those volatile couple of weeks, it became very clear that this was a romantic relationship involving sex.  I chose to consciously overlook each of the signs pointing to that though because we had enough to focus on without having to deal with that issue.  Whether or not sex was involved, the marriage had clearly been violated, and we had significant work to do in order to restore our trust in one another and the foundation of our marriage.  Taking on every issue at once would have been more than either of us could handle.  I had every intent of addressing the issue of sex at some point, but only after I felt enough confidence that our relationship had sufficiently progressed in order to confront such a sensitive topic.

You may note that the attitude I’m describing here is the antithesis of the simplistic husband with antiquated views of marriage who wants to own and control his wife, as you portrayed me in your mail in December.  But you may be surprised that my actual views about marriage are significantly more complex than those of the caricature that you painted.  Considering the other spurious arguments in that mail though, I probably shouldn’t assume that accusation was entirely truthful.

Of course, when I discovered your blog, it was obvious that the issue had to finally be confronted.  I thought that I was prepared for the discussion, but in addition to accelerating our timeline, you added an entirely new level of ugliness to it that we’ve been forced to deal with.  It’s difficult enough to mentally process the idea of your wife having a sexual affair without your knowledge, but it is another matter entirely to see her portrayed as little more than a prop in support of someone else’s displays of sexual prowess.  I’m only glad that I didn’t stumble on your site sooner when we would have been far less prepared to deal with it.  I wonder if you ever considered the additional risk that you were putting on our already fragile marriage while you fulfilled your apparent need to publically boast about your sexual conquests.  It certainly appears that the fact that [Wife] was a married woman with two daughters and a husband at home desperately trying to work through the complexities of saving his family was secondary in your mind compared to her role as your “FWB”.

I admit that it’s not easy for me to accept your apology.  You say that you had no intention of moving beyond a friendship yet your post on [date of the post about the “session” with his “FWB”] portrays someone quite proud of their accomplishment.  You’ve had plenty of time over the last several months to consider your actions, yet the photo and posts remained on your blog for more than a year.  You only thought to remove them after I discovered the site.  It might appear to some that rather than having remorse for your actions, you simply regret your mistakes that led to me finding out about them.

Over the last several months, I’ve built up a level of animosity that I didn’t think I was capable of, only to have it increase further at this latest revelation.  But that’s something that I simply don’t want to carry any more.  My family needs me to focus on my progression of becoming a better husband and father, and I can’t do that while continuing to expend energy on all that anger.  As you stated, there is nothing else that I can reasonably ask from you, so a simple apology will have to suffice.

I doubt that my opinion carries much weight with you so I am under no false impression that it will affect your life much whether I choose to accept your apology or not.  For what it’s worth though, I do believe that you are being sincere, and I do accept it.  You could have simply chosen not to respond at all, and I respect your integrity for doing so.  It will take me time to get over that animosity, but I am committed to doing exactly that.

Assuming that there aren’t any other surprises out there waiting for me, I consider this entire drama closed and am committed to focusing my full attention on moving forward with my wife and my family.  I honestly
hope that you are well and ultimately find whatever it is that you’re looking for in life.

I actually lied in that mail. I didn’t think his apology was sincere, and I didn’t accept it. As I stated in the mail, his only real regret was over getting caught. If he had true remorse for his actions, then those posts would have been removed far sooner.  If he actually had integrity, he wouldn’t have found pleasure posting photos of a married woman along with condescending comments about her in the first place.  But I didn’t need to dwell on that anger.  I told him what I wanted to be true, that I was focusing on the positive aspects of rebuilding my marriage as opposed to clinging to the negative aspects of the affair.  I needed to put it all in the past.