After nonstop reading, researching, doom-scrolling, and journaling, I've decided it's time I join the conversation with my story, with the hopes that even just a few other perspectives might give me peace in the decisions I'm leaning toward.
I'll start with the background of our relationship, because frankly, I think it's necessary to understanding some of the confusing factors. Every relationship is unique, and I'm not trying to somehow claim "...but we're special/different!", but hopefully just to fill in some of the emotional gaps and rationale behind how I'm processing things.
We met and started dating at 17 years old - I was her first "real" boyfriend (apart from a few small encounters with other boys and girls she had throughout her high school years, none of them more sexual than "2nd base"), and her first and only sexual partner, in terms of actual intercourse.
I was blessed to come from a stable, loving family and solid emotional background.
She, however, was not blessed with the same. Her parents were divorced when she was only a few years old. Her mother was downright neglectful and an alcoholic, and her father SA'd and manipulated her, slept in bed with her since the basement apartment with no windows, a pest problem, and the bathroom in the kitchen, only had one bed, which they shared until she was a teen.
Both parents were emotionally abusive, to extreme degrees. This lead to "wires being crossed" when it comes to physical touch being registered as "love", among a slew of other issues that only increased as our relationship progressed, and her parent's abuses not only resurfaced as she faced those past truths, but grew substantially as those parents only continued to deepen the emotional abuse and neglect throughout our time together.
During this time, me and my family welcomed her into our home. She watched my brother enter high school, graduate, go to college, then graduate college - she was an older sister to him. My father helped her navigate college finances. My mother provided her the support she never received from her own. Our lives became absolutely enmeshed - because quite frankly, the situation she would've otherwise been in would've been (and was) both unhealthy physically, and emotionally. Hardly conducive to growing up, let alone showing up in a healthy way in a relationship.
We navigated ups and downs as we grew up. College and shortly after was difficult - she had some behind my back flirting with other guys, but never acted on any of them. And, bluntly, my behavior toward her back then absolutely did play a part in pushing her to at least look outside the relationship. I was controlling, paranoid, and angry at the world. That caused her to develop resentment toward me, which, while her method of reacting to it was also inappropriate in pursuing other men while remaining in the relationship, was certainly contributed to by my own poor behavior in not treating her right.
After we left college and began our young adult lives, I very seriously reexamined the type of relationship I wanted, and the way I wanted to show up in it for the person I loved. I had the hard conversations, did the work, and our entire relationship dynamic changed for the better. COVID lockdown hit, and we not only survived being stuck in a 1 bedroom apartment together, we thrived! Our time together had never been better, and we both to this day look back on that time fondly. Since the beginning, we've always been able to share time together in silence, share music, art, food, etc, and converse endlessly without ever running out of things to say. Without sounding overly sappy, we truly felt like each others' soulmates. With every passing year we never became less interesting to one another, or felt less strongly - in fact, the opposite happened. We grew closer, and closer.
After COVID, her half-sister (both parents were married and divorced twice, so she has half-siblings on both sides she grew up with, but is technically an "only child" of her parents, who subsequently separated when she was extremely young also) was diagnosed with stage 4 colorectal cancer. This is the only other female sibling she has, and specifically the only other female child of her father's. After her diagnosis, her doctor had told her to "go be with family", because the outlook was that dire. She took the advice and moved to be closer to the father, despite him also being abusive toward her (though in a far less severe way than toward my wife). Her father advocated for her sister to choose death rather than life-saving surgery that would've left her with an ostomy bag, because "it would make her hideous". My wife needed to call her and be the only person to convince her to pick the surgery, and that life is worth living. My wife and her half-sister weren't particularly close given the gigantic age gap, but she saw it as an almost "self-insert" way to address her trauma of her father, and potentially bond with the only other woman in her life she felt she might be able to look up to and bond with. She had never told anyone other than me the story of her father's abuse, and wanted to connect with the sister to try to give her the confidence to leave the father's control to feel happy choosing life, and potentially form a familial bond between the two of them through that vulnerability.
Unfortunately, this was met with more abuse - this time, at the hands of the very person she was pouring her soul out to take care of. The sister never even gave the opportunity for connection, and both during and after her treatment/surgery, did nothing but scream, abuse, and degrade my wife - despite her travelling across the country to care for her post-surgery, because the rest of the family refused. And instead of crediting the call my wife made to convince her to get the surgery (which was weeks of emotional turmoil on her end to even formulate), she credited a discovery channel documentary with her inspiration to choose life... I'm significantly truncating this section, but I witnessed a lot of it firsthand since I travelled there as well, and believe me when I say, even I was traumatized by the abuse and treatment I witnessed happening to her from everyone involved. Throughout this entire period, my wife was horrible to me, though. Mean, cruel, frequent insults, criticisms, etc - but I accepted them as the venting of a person who's entire life is crumbling in a truly traumatic way. She couldn't push back against the way they were treating her, so she pushed back against the one person she knew would take it: me. It hurt, but I didn't want to hold the behavior completely against her, as frankly, I truly don't know how I would've acted in the scenario she was faced with.
Following this extremely traumatic familial experience, my wife elected to cut ties with them. Shortly after, we took a month-long vacation.
I'll digress momentarily to explain that throughout this, and across our entire relationship, we had been exploring sexuality. By this, I mean she's an extremely sexual individual - wants to try everything, experience everything, and has a drive that's borderline insatiable. Which sounds amazing, and to a high school boy, sure was, over time it become an extreme challenge to both keep up with, and satisfy - a challenge I simply wasn't able to meet to the extent she had hoped for. Our dynamic is as Dom/sub, with me being the former. I'm a cisgendered hetrosexual man, who would identify as monogamous* (with some unique exceptions I'll get into). She would describe herself as cisgendered but pansexual, and would describe herself as a "switch" outside of our relationship (in which she's only submissive). This is a large aspect of our sexual life, though not the entirety - and we are not / were not in a "24/7" dynamic at all, nor did either of us want that. Simply put, we wanted to explore novel experiences. However, since we began dating, she expressed frustration over my monogamy, and even at one point expressed frustration over feeling like polyamory is the only "ethical" choice, and anyone monogamous is only doing it out of a societal/religious rationale rather than a "human" one. We discussed this extensively - though she had always made it clear she was sacrificing a "part of herself" to remain in a relationship with me.
Back to the vacation. With the context above being known, and with her fresh off of her talking about how she had been stripped of agency and a feeling of selfhood from her trip to support her half-sister, I decided to ask her whether or not a consensual experience with another person (and me) would be something that would make her feel respected, "seen", and "alive again" - she expressed that it would, and told me this was one of the most meaningful things I could've done for her. This person we both knew, lived in the city we were vacationing to, and at this point we had established ourselves in a "scene" as creators, so this other photographer we both conversed with and respected was open to collaborating with us. This had previously been a boundary of mine, but after a lot of soul searching, I realized it wasn't in the way I had thought. Provided there were a lot of other conditions/factors pertaining to the "scene" and dynamic, I was comfortable with the encounter - it was something we could do together, but with another involved. Basically, I was able to compartmentalize our BDSM/"scene" play from that of our intimate emotional relationship (something she had, since day one, expressed was how she operated - and that this sort of engagement would in no way impact our relationship, as she explained it was a physical thrill for her in that context, not an emotional one).
We went, actually did have a good time, then walked home together, with her "...feeling closer to me than ever before". The next day, we bonded even more deeply as we reflected on the experience, which ended in an overwhelming experience for her sobbing and professing that how close she felt to me legitimately hurt and scared her.
The next day, she woke up, sent the other guy a message to coordinate an affair, then promptly deleted it, woke me up, and told me right away. This was crushing for me, as she proceeded to calmly tell me she wanted to exit the relationship and pursue a life like the one this other guy had. This passed after a day or two, and she "snapped back" into what she was like before, wanted to stay in the relationship. She fully expressed that this urge was one of self-destruction, and of feeling so helpless to help her sister that she was a "failure" who deserved to feel badly, and pursue a life of hedonism that she knew would end in an abrupt but romantic metaphorical car crash.
The next few months, she sought therapy from a psychiatrist. Received a diagnosis of CPTSD, major depressive disorder, and anxiety. Also, suspected ASD, but she can't afford the adult test (10k) for a formal diagnosis. Then, my father was diagnosed with stage 4 lymphoma shortly after. We had barely gotten past the trauma of her sister, this sexual experience, and her diagnoses, when the hardest call of my entire life hit. I hoped she would support me similarly to how I did with her and her sister - however, this was also when her depression and CPTSD was still unmanaged, and she struggled to even be kind/nice to me throughout the process of my dad's chemo treatments, as I was struggling with the emotional weight of possibly coming to terms with losing my dad within the year. After months of misery for us both (for different reasons), she had a psychotic breakdown where she experienced an intense paranoid delusion that I was manipulating and harming her, resulting in another split and a text-based pursuit of another guy who was promising her a 24/7 thing. We spent weeks apart, and she realized during that time and through therapy that she didn't want that or him, that it was an escapist fantasy, and we reconciled. Her psychiatrist also diagnosed her following this episode with paranoid personality disorder, which, compounded with CPTSD, contributes greatly to these moments of extreme self-doubt, escapism, and a complete lack of "knowing who she is".
My dad thankfully recovered - though she felt immense guilt over not being able to support me (or him) throughout the process, which has only further deepened the lack of sense of self, and self esteem. I also lost a close friend in this time, of whom I had not been there for as much as I should've due to the emotional weight of everything happening to me at the time. She also was aware that at some level, she contributed to this - which yet again, lowered an already impossibly low self esteem.
However, despite all this, the past year has been that of some of the most meaningful growth of our entire 14 years together. Instead of wallowing in self-pity and giving into codependence, she got a new job, made new friends, developed healthier habits, and began showing up for us both in a more meaningful way. We connected more, and while there were still ups and downs, the trajectory of managing her CPTSD and other mental illnesses were clearly improving. Our lives were improving - more than at any point ever before.
We went on vacation to the same city again, this time with the hope to reengage with the same guy mentioned earlier and his now-wife. My wife was excited, but nervous, because while she desperately wanted these experiences to 'feel alive' and have some of her more "difficult for one person to satisfy" needs met again, was still paranoid over the mistrust in whether or not "she" really wanted it, or if there were outside factors pushing her into it (there were not). We had those experiences, and she absolutely loved them - much more so than I did.
In fact, upon returning, I mentioned I felt the relationship maybe should be reexamined, as I was feeling sidelined and increasingly invisible as she developed more confidence and enthusiasm for everything outside of me, both on a sexual and interpersonal front. She passionately argued me back into the relationship, expressing a desire to make me feel "seen" and have my needs met, and provided meaningful solutions that addressed my concerns head-on.
Two days later, she kisses me, tells me she loves me, and goes to meet with a trans-woman friend she made before we left on this vacation. I know this person, and we all have gotten drinks together before, and while this person had expressed an interest in the BDSM side of our relationship, I trusted my wife to speak open and honestly with me about any feelings or interests, as that's been how we've operated and how we're able to navigate the things we partake in on vacation. Which, again, we had only flown home from two days prior.
After coming home a few hours later, she tells me "I need to tell you something. I kissed (AP/transwoman friend)". I was shocked. I asked for some more details and she started explaining that it was just a kiss and she hoped we could "talk about it and work it out", but this was a boundary for me, and I couldn't believe the betrayal. I could tell she was still a little drunk and a little high. I told her to pack and leave, that we couldn't cohabitate. I also didn't ask for much elaboration, but she also didn't offer any, as she immediately fell to her knees and started sobbing once she understood what she threw away.
The next day, she gave me more details when I said I didn't believe it was only a small goodbye smooch - she immediately told me more.
Turns out, she had kissed AP goodbye before we went on vacation (that she initiated), and kept it from me the whole month. That was apparently a quick goodbye kiss (not open-mouth), and she texted AP after that "she didn't want to leave" (but told me she knew then that was a lie, but didn't want to make it awkward, and wasn't sure what she was feeling at that point, and didn't want to slam the door on it yet). She said the motivation for this kiss was due to fear over what the result would be from our experiences on vacation (since last time it lead to her breaking down and losing control, as explained above).
Upon returning, she said she "needed to see if what she felt was real", and wanted to both feel "in control", and "what it was like to be on the receiving end of what I'm like with [vacation guy we engage with] - also, a chance to explore being a Dom". They went out to dinner, then to a bar, then back to AP's apartment. There, my WW asked for "discretion" (for AP not to tell me), and they started smoking weed, because my WW wanted to get in the mood, because she realized she didn't feel any of the excitement or butterflies like the did with the goodbye kiss a month earlier. Apparently, she decided "she needed to find out how she felt once and for all so she could stop putting herself through the cycle of not knowing who she is, and to see if she's the type of person who can have these interactions", since she had spent years telling me this was how she operated, and me constantly telling her not to pursue these feelings since they were incompatible with our relationship. She wanted to find out "who she really was", because she was fearful and resentful that me and our relationship formed so early on, before she had any other sexual experiences, and that clashed with who she envisioned she'd become as an adult. She knew this tug-of-war had been a near constant aspect of our relationship, and this time mustered up the determination to essentially "find out once and for all".
They initially started to make out, before my WW said she felt uncomfortable since it was in front of the windows of the apartment. The AP then suggested they go upstairs into their bedroom, where my WW took off the AP's skirt and top, down to their underwear, and my WW took off her skirt but not her top. They then got on top of the bed's covers, and cuddled/made out briefly, before my WW broke into tears and said she couldn't do it. She said it was at that point I came rushing back into her mind, and she felt horrible and realized what an awful mistake she was making. She realized that she finally had what she had been arguing for throughout our relationship, and now that it was in front of her, she didn't want it - and just wanted to "come home" to me. They then went back downstairs, where my WW tried making out again because she "was at this point panicking", didn't want the AP to feel body dysmorphia or uncomfortable since they were apparently visibly and verbally frustrated and annoyed, but my WW started crying again, then called an uber home, came through the door, and told me before she had a chance to take her shoes off or put her bag down.
I know the "it's never just a kiss" trope, but frankly, given the extreme level of detail, the fact I verified the timeline (and it stayed consistent across multiple days, after day 2 when we had a chance to talk when she wasn't still a bit drunk and high), and the fact she gave me the full timeline at a point where she didn't believe there was any chance of reconciliation, I do actually believe her that it was. From how she described it, it was an awkward experience - primarily because she couldn't be the person she thought she was all along. She also insists it didn't go past "1st base" - no touching of any genitals, or any sexual touch whatsoever. Again, while of course I'm questioning everything right now and finding it difficult to trust someone who's proven themselves untrustworthy, I do legitimately think she's telling the truth here.
From how this whole scenario was described to me by her, and from her conversation with her psychiatrist (who also is mine), this seems like it was a legitimate critical inflection point that "resolved" what had been years' worth of self-doubt, doubt toward me and the relationship, and the belief that she wasn't living the life she was "supposed" to lead, based on her childhood views of what her adult life would be like.
Here's what I'm struggling with:
Firstly, keeping the initial kiss from me for a month while we were on vacation is the only time she's ever kept something like this from me - every other time I was told day-of. I know I'll get a "that you know of!" reply, but truly, she's generally quite bad at lying and frankly hasn't even had that many opportunities within our relationship where I either don't know where she is, or if she isn't with mutual friends I trust (AP is a new friend as of only a few months - the only new friend or acquaintance of either of ours for years).
Secondly, the fact I do genuinely believe her account of the events. She's been forthcoming, hasn't one time blamed me, and has completely and totally taken accountability from the moment she told me about this scenario. She's been willing to provide a concrete list of mandatory changes, and has heard out every bit of my complaints every step along the way. She's been willing to answer any and all questions I have as well, down to embarrassing details. Given the way she communicates (see the above suspected ASD), while my trust in her is broken, I do believe she's telling me the truth, despite having good reason not to.
Thirdly, the degree to which she cheated is something that personally I feel I do have to be honest with myself over. We've done more physically engaging things with other people on our vacations, and kissing by comparison is rather tame. But, it is still a boundary I had, and was done behind my back.
We've spoken via phone, text, and in-person since D-Day, despite separating and living apart. She's accepted whatever decision I make, though she's been genuinely working to try to move forward with "relationship 2.0", acknowledging that the old relationship is gone, and person she used to be must die in order for that to happen. She insists she is willing to wait however long it takes for me to feel comfortable again - months, or years. In or outside of a relationship together, to earn me and my trust back.
I asked her if she felt the AP just wasn't "the right person" or not attractive enough and that's why it was awkward and she didn't go further, but she assured me it wasn't the case. Given what I know about the background of that friendship and her perspective on the AP (prior to them becoming the AP), I believe this is true.
Ultimately, I have to admit there was a small part of me that thought something like this might eventually happen. The CPTSD, the complete and total lack of self-esteem, and desire for escapism seemed to be omnipresent, even if the past year was good. In fact, the better our relationship and lives seemed to get, the more prone to self-sabotage she became - it always correlated with these sorts of "boil over" events. But, never close to this scale, and nothing resulting in the separation and turmoil that's been the last few weeks.
I don't want to be a fool in thinking "...but this time it will be different!" - but, it already is different, simply due to the facts of the scenario we're in. Her accountability, genuine, heartfelt remorse, transparency, and our 14-year history of a relationship that persisted from our teenage years, leads me to still believe that while I might not have seen THIS coming, I do still know her well enough to tell when she's not telling the full truth. I legitimately do believe, even if I might be a poor fool in doing so, that it really stopped at kissing. It might've brought her peace in knowing that our relationship WAS real, and wasn't either a fabrication, something she was groomed into (by basically being with me since 17 and being raised to a degree by me and my family), or something I stayed in because she provided certain sexual fantasies (another fear of hers, feeling like someone "as good as me" would never be in a relationship with someone "as difficult and with as much baggage as her") - but it did so at my expense, and our relationship's expense.
I've taken countless days and nights to think about all this - spoken with friends, family, and numerous sessions with my therapist. But ultimately, the more I read from folks here, on Reddit, and across Instagram comments on Gottman institute reels and whatnot, the consensus is overwhelmingly "you're a fool if you think it's just kissing, you're a fool if you get back together, you're weak, you're an embarrassment to yourself, you're devaluing yourself/disrespecting yourself and your boundaries, it will happen again because now you've allowed the behavior, they just get better at lying, they'll only escalate further now that they know you accepted this, etc".
I don't think I'm "special", I know everyone here's relationships were sacred and meant the world to them, but I do think our relationship has aspects that complicate some of these rules of thumb. Mental illness, my own poor behavior early on, past resentments, novel sexual experiences and dynamics that step outside the boundaries of normal relationships' limits, etc. I can't help but feel those aspects provide context that's crucial to understanding her mental space, and my own. And while it in no way excuses any behavior, wildly unregulated emotions coupled with intense sexual experiences, with mental illness sprinkled on top, certainly isn't conducive to decision-making that defines a person. I wouldn't want to be judged by my worst decisions, made in a moment of emotional confusion and dysregulation, amplified by a mental illness that specifically makes you doubt your sense of selfhood and the validity of reality around you. And while I won't be able to forget this transgression, I care deeply enough about her and our life together to want to try to forgive, and move forward with a healthier, happier life.
Any words of advice, encouragement, a different perspective, or honest input would be appreciated. I'm also happy to expand upon any aspects - I'm trying to distill a 14-year relationship into one post, because without it, this instance of infidelity feels massively lacking in terms of necessary context - and the context truly does inform why I feel so conflicted, and drawn to trying to reconcile instead of making the equally hard decision to walk away and begin anew.
