The night before, I had sent off one more email to ever-helpful Mr. Anonymous. I really needed to figure out who this was, even though the pool of suspects was starting to shrink considerably.
From: Penelope
Sent: Wednesday, November 18 11:11 PM
To: husbandishavinganaffair@gmail.com
Subject: Re: this is difficult to say
One more question, if you choose to answer. What was it that compelled you to contact me back in September? What were they doing then?
Again - thanks.
The response came late that night, and whoever this person was, well, they were certainly not the "helpful, altruistic" party they had wanted me to believe. I think you'll see what I mean here when I use the words "Ulterior Motive":
From: yourhubbyhavingaffair
To: Penelope
Sent: Thu Nov 19 01:33:20
Subject: RE: this is difficult to say
They were being very public among friends, and I thought it indiscrete and unkind. Wasn't sure you knew, and thought you had a right to. Glad to hear it sounds like you did know. Sorry to meddle...
May I please ask you one question? I don't mean to pry, and I will keep this completely confidential. Was he violent with you?
Seriously. Did you just really ask that in an email? Really? Talk about an out-of-left-field question. I mean, how could I even begin to formulate a response to that?
From: Penelope
To: 'husbandishavinganaffair@gmail.com'
Sent: Thu Nov 19 04:53:11
Subject: Re: this is difficult to say
First off, you're not meddling. This info may be costing me a bit of sleep in the short term, but I am glad to know it. I did not know the extent of their affair and its history until now, as he told me this would never happen. You have helped me to clarify truth from fiction!
As for your question, since I don't know who you are, all I can comfortably tell you is what is public record. In March of this year he was arrested for domestic violence. I was not injured but I was the alleged victim.
So I have to wonder, why would you ask?
Not surprisingly, the response came quickly.
From: yourhubbyhavingaffair
To: Penelope
Sent: Thu Nov 19 8:45:10
Subject: RE: this is difficult to say
I just thought that might be part of the story, and thought I would ask.
Best wishes to u and your little one.
So.
There it was. In three days, I'd gone from head-in-the-sand me, keeping my blinders on, to emailing a total stranger about the intimate components of my failing marriage and my husband's amazing attempts to keep his bellydancer girlfriend hidden. I had almost no doubt at this point that Mr. Anonymous was, in fact, Mr. Bellydancer, Sally's spurned husband. Which was odd, really, when one considered what I knew about Mr. Bellydancer:
1. He was not a bellydancer himself.
2. He was a high-tech sort of guy with a high-paying job.
3. He and Sally had "not slept together in years." (Thanks, D!)
4. He and Sally had some sort of arrangement where they would date on alternate nights. Date other people, you see.
5. He was, according to D (and please, consider the source, here), a douchebag.
He was also very, very savvy at creating fake email accounts.
Because really, who else?
Who else would care? Who else would know about Sally's two different Facebook profile names - the bellydancer one, and the personal one?
Who else could possibly gain anything from stirring the pot around Sally and D?
Who indeed. Hello, Mr. Anonymous.
Given that I was 98% sure who this was, I could draw some deductions: he was, essentially, using me to make D's life hell by way of Sally, and to, thereby, make his own wife miserable.
And you know what, folks? At this point in the story, I was more than happy to oblige him. So, I put his emails in a folder, and resolved to stop that conversation. Because it was time to start the conversation that I had been thinking about for three days (or really, for nearly eight years): D and I were about to invert the power in our relationship. Only thing was, he was coming over Thursday evening for what I had termed a "talk," and he had no idea what the talk was about.
During the day on Thursday, I met with my therapist, and readied my "talking points." He helped me pinpoint what it was that I wanted to get out of this conversation, and what it was that I wanted to focus it on.
In the meantime, I went on Facebook, and did three liberating things:
1. I changed my Facebook profile name from my married name to my maiden name.
2. I changed my status from "In a relationship" to "Single."
3. After those two items had been accomplished - and the order was key here - I unfriended my husband.
What was I looking for? Well, I wanted to get D's attention. I didn't. But what I did do was ensure that my changing of my name and my status would be located somewhere in his feed, right before I de-friended him. Later, I thought, he would be able to go back in and understand how the timeline had happened. I knew him well enough to know that, once we'd had our "talk" that evening, things were going to be very different between him and me, and that he was going to be spiraling on the experience for quite some time. Here's some fodder, I thought. Chew on this.
Well, so, that wasn't exactly all that happened before the talk. As it turned out, some people on Facebook saw my relationship status update. They also saw my name change. And, apparently, no one had actually told them about the divorce. Oops! We're talking, like, close, extended family here, aunts and uncles, cousins. After the third "WHAT?" email from some of these folks, I called my mom and asked, "Didn't you tell me you told everyone about the divorce?" As it turned out, she had not.
So my flagrant attempt to get my husband's attention backfired on me. Hard. And I felt terrible that so many people had come across my "sad news" that way.
But at least now I had started what would become, thematically speaking, the overarching raison d'etre for me the next few months:
I had started to unravel and untangle from my husband, and unfriending him was a small, but extremely significant, first step.
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