How I Survived His Affair

Divorce seemed like a no-brainer...
By Kate Seamons,  Newser Staff
Posted Sep 26, 2010 6:30 PM CDT
How I Survived His Affair
Clark / Stacy Wedding   (©seanosh)

Clare Hunter and her husband had just left a marriage counseling session when he confessed he had been sleeping with someone else. "But he wears that old scruffy underwear to work," she thought. The reality didn't sync up with what she imagined an affair was supposed to be, "a heated tryst on high-thread-count sheets. Here was my husband banging his vet tech in the front seat of his truck on a country road." What happened next didn't exactly match her expectations either, she writes for Salon: Divorce was a no-brainer; he didn't want to split. She asked him to move out; he borrowed a camp trailer and slept in the back alley.

Hunter goes on to describe a anguish-filled journey that, five years later, she still takes one day at a time: sobbing while meeting with a divorce mediator; dealing with the fallout a small-town affair can have (her parents live four houses down, so there was no hiding that trailer); and, ultimately, laboring to make changes. Her husband started seeing an individual counselor and made good on a decade-old promise to convert to Catholicism; Clare learned to better express her needs. "The reconciliation hasn't come without costs. I started having panic attacks after Rob's affair that I've tried to manage with counseling and medication. If I couldn't trust my partner to be faithful, how could I expect a bridge to hold me up, or a plane to stay in the sky?" But ultimately, "the hurricane didn't tear us apart. Improbably, it made us stronger." Click here for more.
(More divorce stories.)

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