Is my husband having another affair?

DEAR BEL,

I MET my husband in our teens. We had two lovely daughters and a lot of hard-up times.

He worked long hours, while I worked part time. Fast-forward 40 years. We’re close to retiring — with our eldest daughter, her husband and three grandchildren all living in our house split into a lower and upper villa.

I’m not sure for how much longer, as my daughter and son-in-law are now able to buy a house after living abroad. This will really change things; I’m expecting the empty nest to be hard.

Ten years ago, I discovered my husband had had a seven-year affair. He’d ended it before I knew, but I couldn’t believe it, so even met his lover for her side of things. I’ve never felt hurt like that.

Things were never the same, but I carried on, no one knowing apart from my youngest daughter, still at home. After that, we both lost our parents and I find this very hard — as well as coping with the menopause for which (at last) I take HRT.

We don’t socialise much and most of the time do our own things.

A year ago, I read text messages between him and another woman. It may not have got as far as sex, but (from the texts) was building up to an affair. I’m still with him, though I always thought I’d leave with no explanations allowed.

I don’t want my eldest daughter to know, as she’d never speak to her dad again. I’d find it too hard to walk out and start over on my own but also can’t be false and make out we’re a happy couple.

I just don’t know what’s best for me.

JOSEPHINE

ThIS is one of the hardest tests of any marriage, so it’s easy to understand why you feel so confused. Your email laid out your life in stages: courtship, marriage and children, work, close adult children, husband’s first affair, menopausal middle age, bereavement — and now the double whammy of discovering your husband is at it again as well as the sudden dread of an empty nest. What is the next stage?

Will or will he not still be sitting in that nest, like a great cuckoo who doesn’t have the right (any more) to be there? That’s the question you can’t resolve. I don’t mean you are unable to, but that I believe it’s too early even to try.

You are still tortured by the memory of his sevenyear affair, because such a hurt can never go away. It can be processed and lived with, but it does change things for ever.

You always believed such a shock would end the marriage. But it didn’t. Why?

You might answer that you were cowardly; too afraid of throwing everything away. But perhaps you were/are much too strong to let a middleaged man’s predictable lust/need for adventure destroy what the pair of you have built since first love. A life of hard work and family love — until ten years ago.

You haven’t said whether you have confronted him over the texts. What has happened in the intervening year to make you write now? I wish I knew whether you and he have talked about the latest betrayal and its implications.

To your closing sentence...I suggest you won’t be able to know what’s ‘best’ for you until you’ve faced the next stage.

If/when your elder daughter and her family move, it will be very hard. But do you know for sure they intend to?

If they’re comfortable where they are, it could be wise to buy a place, renovate it and rent it out. They have a lot to think about and I imagine they’ll talk it through with you, too.

Meanwhile, keep on with the hRT, but I also suggest some counselling, whether on your own or with your husband. Relate is an obvious choice, but there are many forms of therapy — and I think it will help you to talk to a professional about all these issues.

You don’t want to pretend to be ‘a happy couple’.

Oh, what does that mean? If you talk through his midlife crises, reminisce about your shared past, ask what future he imagines, perhaps find something new and fun you could enjoy together, discuss selling the property if your elder daughter does move... all this may in time lead you to the solution to the dilemma you express today.

In my heart, I’m not convinced you want to end the marriage. In a year it might seem better to stay with a bloody fool (so many of ’em about) than set off alone.