A letter from May 7th, 2021

Dear FutureMe, I love you very much. I love our house. I love this life. I am happy. yes, even with betrayal. It has been 10 months since I discovered the betrayal and it has been the most painful thing I have ever gone through in a relationship. My happiness is not centered in pain, nor in the events and facts of the betrayal. It is centered in the love that resides within me and that defines my being. Not that I'm happy I was betrayed, but I am realizing that it had nothing to do with me, with who I am. It had more to do with him and his wounds, his errors, and his failures. I am myself and I am a gift. He says he is realizing it now. I am still not 100% sure that I will stay in this relationship. I hope that I can stay. But it depends so much on whether he can heal himself, on whether he can become a safe person for me to be with, whether he can be courageous enough to transform himself into the person he wants to be. Every day he tells me how much he loves me. He's always said to me that he loves me more than I realize, even while he was being unfaithful. Maybe he wanted to love me more, but was unable to do so. I need to know that he is able to love more than he's loved before. It stings still that I was falling in love with a man who had multiple lovers and who conducted an emotional affair which turned physical while he was married to me. I told him the other night that I hate that he never gave us a chance to be only us. That there were always other people he was involved with while he has been with me, at least until the first discovery day. I hate that he was so egotistical that he didn't think of me. He said he was thinking that I didn't really love him, that I saw him only as a companion so that I wouldn't be alone. He needed more than that and he had access to physical touch, ***, admiration with his other lovers. They were like his battery chargers whenever he felt down because of his sadness or whatever conflict he was going through, he would meet them at a hotel and get energized. I told him that I was falling in love with him and that it was unfair that he didn't bring up that perception to me and work on it with me. I also told him that I was under so much stress with work, with my commute and hours, and with the place we lived in. That house was my prison and I didn't breathe more freely until we moved out of there. We rented a couple of rooms from his adoptive mom but she refused us access to the kitchen and the laundry. And the house was permeated with an unpleasant odor that never went away despite cleaning. I didn't feel welcome there and we lived there together over a year and half. I would have liked someone to take me out to hotels and restaurants! I told him if he saw me as only using him as my companion and if he needed others why didn't he leave me? Why didn't he say I need more than what you offer and be more honest and leave? He said that route would only mean more suffering for him (so he did think about it) and that it would mean more abandonment and he didn't want that. Again he was thinking more about himself. He was thinking that as long as I didn't know about them that I would not be affected. He had started with two of his lovers before he met me. They were both ex-girlfriends who made time for him when he needed it at hotels or wherever they could meet. So at first when he started with me he wasn't sure it would last between us so he didn't see the point in ending things with them. Then it was just his battery charging habit. He wanted to end things with them once he saw we were serious and that is when he started pressuring me to marry him. I wasn't sure then so it took him about 8 months to convince me to marry him and he continued with them during that time. Then things just happen to make things end momentarily with his lovers. One moves away or goes on a trip to El Salvador, and the other one finds out about me and pressures him to see her more and he refuses. So he says she ends it with him and gets another lover. This happened in April 2017. But by then he had already started an emotional affair in the last months of 2016 which turned physical with touching in February 2017 until I discovered it in July 2020. So from February to April 2017 he was touching or having *** with four women, that I know of, including me. So why did he try to end it with his two lovers but then start with a new person? Because he needed the presence of another person admiring him, touching him, loving him. During all this time from 2017 to 2020 he continued to have communication with all of them plus other women he knew and knows from work. He still communicated by phone, email and messenger with the ex-gf who traveled to El Salvador. She came back and moved to Southern California but they continued their love talk while he was married to me. She came back and visited our area in November 2018, a full year after we had been married and he had a hotel night with her while I thought he was at work. He says after that encounter he felt extremely guilty because he saw me as innocent and not deserving of betrayal. But he still continued communicating with her until June 2020 and he continued with the affair with the third woman I know about. The third woman was a woman who cooked for him at her house about twice a week while I was at work all day from 7 am to 7 pm. She sold food to provide for her family while her husband was in prison, that is when their affair started. They had an intimate emotional relationship, kind of a best friends with benefits situation. I see that he replaced her husband as her emotional support. She could call him anytime of day or night or week and he would respond to her needs via text or phone depending on whether he was with me. He confided in her intimate details of our marriage and our marriage bed. Everytime we would make love he would tell her about it and she would tell him about the intimate details of her ****** encounters. According to him they touched and kissed, caressed each other, but did not indulge in *** - no penetration of any kind happened in the three years or so of their relationship. She started the physical part of it by touching him first on their first trip to Watsonville (Feb. 2017) and then on their second trip a month or so later (April 2017) she suggested going to a hotel together, but he refused because he had to get to his evening job. But he says he refused because he did not want to have *** with her since she was having *** with a bisexual man during that time and afterwards. I think I could have gotten over more easily the betrayal with his two ex-girlfriends being his lovers and then stopping when we got married. But he continued and augmented the betrayal by the affair with the third woman and keeping it going for over three years, two of those years while we were married., and also by indulging in *** one last time with one of his exes after we were married. And truthfully I'm not sure that is all of it. I am happy because my happiness does not depend on what he has done or not done in this relationship. My happiness comes from inside myself centered in the Divine presence within. So why am I still giving it a chance? Because I don't want to regret anything at the end of my life. I want to be able to say that I loved as much as I could as long as I could. The year before the discovery I already was fully in love with him, it took me a couple of years, but I got there. Only to find out that he never waited for me even though he says he had been waiting for me all of his life. If it's all BS then he won't be able to go through the process of healing from betrayal and he will be gone. However, he has endured a lot these past ten months and he still has to endure more if he wants complete restitution of the relationship and renewal of the marriage. No matter what happens know that I love you and that you will be more than okay, you will thrive, you are thriving. This pain is temporary and you are eternal.