I just…feel dumbfounded. I almost said numb, but that’s not it. I definitely feel a lot, but am almost too stunned to know what to.
I work from home on Mondays. My husband came home at around 10:00 AM today. I was feeling pleasantly surprised. His schedule is a lot more flexible so he often gets to come home early, but this was especially early. As soon as he came in the door I could tell something was wrong and I asked him what was wrong, panicking that he’d got some sort of bad news but not thinking it had anything to do with his job. Everything’s been going great with his job.
He immediately said he was fired. I started to react, like wtf why? How? He stopped me and was like I don’t want to tell you this but I feel like you’re going to find out. He asked me if I remembered a rough patch in our relationship back in the fall. Of course I did. We came close to divorce. He dealt with it by drinking, a lot. He already had a drinking problem (that he was in denial about) prior to that. It was one of the main conflicts in our relationship and I was about done dealing with his alcohol problem. Something happened, which he never really told me about, but he told me that he just realized his drinking had gone too far. He stopped drinking 5 months ago and sought mental health help (he was self medicating, in part) and is in therapy now. We’ve done a lot of work on our relationship and I’d say this has been one of the best periods of our entire 12 year relationship. I hated him this time last year. I fell in love with him again and I like him and want to be around him again.
Going back to this morning, he asked me if I remembered one particular night that was very bad. I did. That was the night that he last drank a was sort of the turning point when he woke up the next day and decided he couldn’t live like that anymore. Well, he just confessed that he had been so mad at me and so out of his mind that he decided to go online and talk to some women. He used his company credit card. He was sure he’d get fired but he decided to not say anything at work in hopes that it wouldn’t be noticed. After a while,he figured he got away with it. Somehow they’re only catching it now, 5 months later.
My initial reaction was anger and embarrassment. Why would he do something so stupid? I said something very hurtful things and called him some bad things. He says he doesn’t know because he was so drunk he barely remembers any of it, but he wanted to hurt me. He said he was sorry and that he was really ashamed of it.
Of course I wanted to know if he’s normally talking on there and using his own money. He said of course not, but in his irrational drunk mind he just wanted somebody to talk to and to hurt me at the same time.
I told him that I just don’t really know what to say or do right now and I’m going to need some time.
He got what he wanted. I’m definitely hurt in more ways than one. I know this was in the past and he’s made major changes since then but I don’t know that I can accept that and get over it so easily. I also can’t even express the embarrassment I feel over why he got fired. I know I have no reason to feel embarrassed since it’s not something I did, but feelings aren’t always that easy to control, are they? I’m sort of stuck on the fact that if he was truly repellent about it, he would have and should have confessed this to me a long time ago.
I’m struggling with whether this is something we can work through as a stupid mistake, or if it says something bigger about his judgment and respect for our life together. At what point does a ‘stupid mistake’ stop being a mistake and start being a sign of deeper problems in a marriage? How do I move forward here?