I hate my lying, cheating wife for stealing the best years of my life

By Bel Mooney for the Daily Mail

Published: 19:59 EDT, 13 September 2013 | Updated: 20:12 EDT, 13 September 2013

DEAR BEL
To go back to the beginning — after five years, my girlfriend dumped me after cheating on me for two weeks with someone ‘better for her’. Shocked, I grieved and self-harmed.

Ten weeks later, we got back together as if nothing happened.

I did not challenge her, and she did not explain. We married and had a happy marriage at first, apart from numerous external difficulties my wife got herself into.

'I have always supported her, been loyal, resolved issues and taken flak intended for her'

I have always supported her, been loyal, resolved issues and taken flak intended for her.

Outside of her successful career, she is spineless, won’t stand up for herself, won’t make decisions, and has little grasp of her family responsibilities.

She is still compliant to her parents and authority figures. I became the decision maker. When her mother caused an awful row and lied, my wife took her side without wishing to hear the truth from me. I have been isolated by my wife and mother-in-law for 33 years.

Treated with contempt and feeling dejected, I should have divorced her at the time. The harm of her cheating came back in a flash but I still loved her and was never going to abandon my baby.

I lived in hope that she’d realise what she was doing. We had another child. I worked hard to keep the family together but my wife would not sit down and talk or go to Relate.

I have been the sole driver of this relationship. In 39 years, she never instigated love-making.

I recently found out that she had actually cheated me for five-and-a-half months, not two weeks!

She had sex with us both until she dumped me. This disgusts me on many levels, as does her deceit, for had I known the truth, I’d never have had her back.

Now my daughters are successful and married, I am divorcing my wife at 65. She betrayed and deceived me and chose others over me. I think she only married me out of fear for her own security. She loved her ex, never me.

Did I do right to stay with my daughters?

I became a doormat to keep the family together.

I would do so again for my daughters, but feel conned out of an honourable life with another woman who loved and was committed to me. A life never lived.
MARK

The first thing I need to tell readers is that your initial email was the longest I have ever received, coming in at a massive 4,250 words — which would fill two-and-a-half double page spreads of this newspaper.

I asked you to cut it because I thought it would help you to focus — but here we are, with me knowing much more than I can even process, so impossibly sad and complicated is this story.

But in your brave edit you omitted important facts: you have cancer, you and she have been living separated under one roof for 12 years and you’ve had nine months of counselling, which has helped you decide to divorce, after 42 years of marriage.

The central question is interesting: would it have been better to have ended the marriage rather than tolerate a very unhappy situation for the sake of the family?

Had you done so you might have found the hypothetical ‘woman who truly loved and was committed to me’.

This is The Road Not Taken (to quote the title of that great poem by Robert Frost) which bothers many people, when they think of the might-have-beens in their lives.

And surely the key question takes you back further to when you re-started the relationship with your then-girlfriend.

You self-harmed when she dumped you, which suggests an almost pathological dependency on the relationship which left you permanently vulnerable to your wife’s personality.

You never forgave her, did you? And now you’re consumed with bitterness because you discovered (which took quite some doing on your part and a revealing obsession) that she’d lied about the extent of her infidelity.

Bitterness is destructive; it corrodes the spirit.

So, in the end, I can’t help feeling that — yes, it would have been healthier had you parted years ago, because it seems obvious that your two beloved daughters grew up in a toxic environment anyway.

You maintain that you still love your wife and yet you are horribly critical of her personality and have felt shackled to an unloving woman who refuses to talk to you and sides with her mother.

What on earth is the point? No wonder I suspect it would have been preferable had both of you taken the painful decision to release each other into a new start in life.

I know we all regret the divorce figures and especially the effects of divorce on children — but living in an atmosphere of recrimination and family conflict (including the grandmother in this) must have been very damaging to those girls.

As a great believer in the institution of marriage, I will not opine that older people ought to stay together no matter what. At 65, you feel you sacrificed your whole life and (even though this is only one side of the story) I cannot find it in my heart to say that was the right thing to do.

All I can do now is to wish you the best of luck with your health, congratulate you on your courage and urge you not to give up.

I hope and pray there is plenty of life left, for you — and there are many women out there, believe me.

Why can't I get over Grandad's death?

DEAR BEL
Thirty-three years old, single, with no children and not many friends, I am very close to my family, who are everything to me.

Recently my Grandad died and I just cannot move on. I constantly feel sick and the hurt is with me all the time.

Sometimes I have a few moments of forgetting, but then the feelings come back twice as strong. I love your column and your wise words, but even I know you cannot help me with this, as nobody can answer the questions I have about death.

We are born, the majority of us work really hard, there’s a lot of suffering (you just need to look at the news) and then we die.

So what is the point of life? To procreate another life? Well I haven’t and it looks unlikely, as no guys are ever interested in me.

I have listened to atheists who say there’s nothing afterwards — so that’s it for Grandad.

But this just makes me question the point of life. I have also looked into religious views, but thinking there’s another world after this one brings up a thousand more unanswerable questions.

I am not an unfeeling person but at the moment, I feel so bitter when I see happy people about to have a baby, get married, talk about grandparents, just getting on with things.

After the funeral everybody just expects you to get back to ‘normal’ and stops cutting you any slack. I am so scared about losing other members of my family as they are getting older.

Bel, why do good people die and others who are not pillars of society or good seem to go on and on in this world?
SOPHIE

You are asking the hardest questions ever known to humankind. For centuries men and women have surveyed the starry sky and wondered why we are here.

They have also quailed before grief and suffering or screamed rage at God or the universe because life is not fair. You may think yourself weak and foolish to ponder these things, yet any thinking person will understand — and admire you for having the courage to face the unanswerable.

But you are bowing your head in misery, defeated by the mysteries of life — and I can only suggest that you stand beside me, raise your head, and try to see the infinite mysteries in the universe as awe-inspiring, thrilling, glorious, and challenging.

Trust me, I know I’m asking what seems impossible. The recent loss of your grandfather has made you vulnerable, and you mustn’t expect feelings of bewilderment and loss to disappear quickly. I know how others can seem to expect you to ‘get over it’.

It can feel insensitive and crass, but that’s what people are like so you will (I’m afraid) have to learn to live with it. The state of your soul is your own business; it shouldn’t stop you showing a brave face to the world.
It seems to me there are two separate problems entangled within your letter.

To approach the obvious one first, your sorrow at losing your grandfather prompts those enormous questions about the point of life, and that’s an entirely understandable part of bereavement.

Reading Mitch Albom’s best-seller Tuesdays With Morrie will, I’m sure, be useful. You need to work towards an understanding that death is just another stage in our existence, but — and here is the glorious truth —  it is not the end of love.

After all, you will have Grandad within you, forever. You are a part of him, you carry his genes and loving him has helped your growth as a human being. Nothing can change that, even though the autumn leaves tumble down, and plants and animals die.

You must realise that the goodness or badness of people has nothing to do with their mortality. We will all die, and therefore our challenge is to live lives which flare like beacons in the night. How to do that?

This brings me to the second issue. You love your family, and yet above all you long for a relationship which will lead to a family of your own.

In truth, this statement — ‘at the moment I feel so bitter when I see happy people about to have a baby’ — isn’t strictly connected with your grief for your grandfather, but with a more general sense of loss about the gaps in your life.

Don’t you think I’m right? You say that ‘no guys are ever interested’ and that must make you feel very demoralised. Perhaps you can work on that.
I’m wondering if you have an older woman you can talk to?

I would like you to look beyond the safety of your family and think about the activities you do, the questions you ask people, the empathy you show, the way you dress, the face you present to those you meet.

It may seem an odd suggestion, but the excellent monthly magazine Psychologies might help and inspire you to give yourself an overhaul.

Honestly, we can all tackle that. There’s little any of us can do to change the fact that we are born and will die.

Yet if you work hard at seeing life as a precious jewel worth polishing, the light it gives off can counteract the darkness.

And finally... Oh Sarah, don't be so naive!

There’s a saying by the great English writer G.K.Chesterton (who died in 1936) which sums up a central problem in my own life. He wrote: ‘One must somehow find a way of loving the world without trusting it.’

I thought about that when I read about the resignation of the Liberal Democrat MP Sarah Teather.

Miss Teather is ‘catastrophically depressed’ by Nick Clegg and the Coalition.

‘Loving the world’ (we assume) and cherishing sincere ideals, she became an MP because she trusted her leader and her party to do the right thing. In her eyes, that is.

But surely young politicians have to grow a skin of pragmatism? If you wept each time your party let you down, you’d drown in your own tears.

Disillusioned? You shouldn’t have trusted your illusions in the first place.

You never help the world by being naïve.

These days I wear my weary pragmatism like a badge of honour. Rooted in a reluctant awareness of human nature, it no longer believes in any political party. That hard-headed realism is, in turn, partly fed by this column.

Even if you’re soft-hearted, you can’t go on cherishing the sweet ideals of youth when you know chapter and verse of what people do to each other on the home front. How can people still believe in goodies and baddies when the goodies do harm and then tell lies?

When the so-called Arab Spring happened, I was amazed to read (on social media) the genuine excitement of my Left-wing peers (‘still crazy after all these years’) who really believed that at last ‘the people’ had spoken.

Which people? Saying what? Now we are deafened by conflicting, shrieking voices all over the region, which perfectly sensible (idealistic) people would rebuke with weapons. Madness! I could murmur ‘Told you so,’ but it would be inappropriate.

I’ve never admired cynicism — hence my problem. I can’t solve Chesterton’s dilemma but then, he didn’t write in!

My experience and your letters tell me to love the potential of the human race. Yet at the same time, both advise me not to trust it.

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