Call her Joanne.
The 7 year itch is real, at least it was for the two of us. We experienced a high level of boredom and were really just done with trying to make it work. I got frustrated with the lack of personal connection, and in the bedroom in particular. She said she didn’t feel loved and respected.
It is hard to tell what came first, but we were both done. The 7 year itch became more of a scratch and a scar.
Joanne was once a very happy go luck person, beautiful by all accounts. She was tall, athletic, slender, long dark hair with ample breasts for her size and nice features. She had a lot of friends and was very close to her sister and mother. She was, what I thought, my perfect mate.
Our Progressive Relationship
We had a good relationship for several years and have a 4 year old daughter to prove it. She (my daughter) is now the true love of my life… but I digress.
Her mother went through a few changes after the pregnancy and early child rearing. Physically she kept her near perfect figure, and kept up her appearances, but traded in her friends for a whole new set. The biggest issue for me is she suddenly felt that she was a mother first and wife second.
I have to take some of the blame for sure, as I was working a lot and she was the primary parent to an infant. I think I should have been more understanding, but we were young and had a lot of energy and I not enough patience. Those of you who have been there, can probably relate, and it isn’t a new phenomenon.
Couples Therapy
We spend the last two years (years 5-7) going to couples therapy, and I tried to understand her mind shift. I definitely took a backseat to her role as a mother, despite my efforts. She no longer was the happy go lucky person that I had married.
I tried in the bedroom, but was rebuffed time and again and only occasionally did she show any interest my way. She started to come back to me after a few months of therapy and we really strengthened our relationship both in and out of the boudoir.
Again, I was working a lot, so I didn’t provide the focus that she needed either. At least this was my thinking at the time.
I know I needed to do more and put forth the effort, setting up weekly dates with my wife and turning on the romance. She was really enthused that I put forth so much effort and treated her even better than when we had first met. Giving her what she always said that she wanted out of me and our marriage.
Thing certainly got better initially, and she said that she got a lot out of the sessions. Then it started to fall off again as we approached the 7 year mark. I thought maybe it was just the typical 7 year itch that married couples go through.
The Truth Bomb
Low and behold, was I off base with her thought pattern. I ran into our neighbor Jill in the grocery store on Friday after work, as I was looking at the cheap flower selection that they had. I had started a pattern the last year and a half of regularly looking for simple gifts I could give her that just showed I was thinking about her.
Jill was a friend of hers and the four of us regularly got together with our spouses for drinks and pool parties in my back yard.
Jill shook her head as she saw me looking at the flower selection and said, “Why would you do that?”
I said “what?” “Buying flowers for my wife?”
She said yes, “why would you do that?”
I was a little confused and just thought she was playing with me for being cheap. So I said, “Too Cheap?”
She said, “What?”
I said, “The flowers, am I too cheap, for just buying them at the grocery store?”
Then she said “Oh.”
Of course I said, “oh, what?”
She then said, “Are you two getting back together?”
That was the start of a conversation that let me in on a secret that she had been holding onto for over a week. Joanne had told her that we were separated, when she had seen her at lunch the previous Wednesday. She wanted to talk with Joanne about who she had seen her with the week before. Which happened to be when I was out of town.
Joanne had been seen around town with an old flame from high school, who was Jill’s cousin. Jill confronted her and she has said that she had asked me to move out because she was moving on with her old flame.
Jill had also talked with her cousin who confirmed the affair and that they were in-love. In fact he had been in love with her since they were both, 16 or 17 years old.
She had basically led me to believe that it was me, who was inconsiderate and I was to blame for our lack of romance and chemistry since our daughter was born.
The Confrontation and the Scars
I took about a half a beat, before I took off for home, loaded for bear with this new found information.
Luckily, probably for both of us, Joanne was not at home when I got there. I’m not sure that a direct confrontation was the right approach when I was this upset. I was willing to take that risk and was ready to let go. My head was spinning and I was probably foaming at the mouth. I called her to see where she was, but she didn’t answer.
I few hours later, a day care center called me to see if someone was going to pick up our daughter. I was shocked again, as I didn’t know anything about a day care center, or that my daughter had been going there almost daily for some time. I asked the lady for the address, and she was surprised I didn’t know where it was. I picked up my daughter and brought her home. It wasn’t until late in the evening around 8:30 before Joanne arrived. I couldn’t even look at her.
She put our daughter to bed before coming downstairs. When I confronted her, she didn’t deny anything. She said I had scratched away at the surface by insisting on counseling, and it had unveiled her truth. She could no longer hide her true feelings, and she had been dishonest for a long time.
She laid out that she had loved her ex and she was devastated when he actually got engaged, and used me to show him that she didn’t need him. Our entire marriage was a sham from the beginning. She said that she loved me, but it wasn’t enough for her.
I later found out that the affair she had been having, was actually throughout the entirety of our marriage…
I didn’t know how to respond other than to ask her to leave. I didn’t want to let her know how much it had actually affected me.
Fortunately, she did leave. I was surprised that she left so easily and didn’t protest too much about not leaving with our child. BTW, at this point I was now only about 99.5 % sure that she was my daughter.
What I thought was a whole new group of friends for Joanne was only her affair. Some of her previous friends disapproved and wouldn’t lie for her. So the names she gave me saying who she was with, were made up.
I had scars from that day forward, but fortunately all of the scars were emotional and I had kept my composure.
We ended up sharing custody eventually as I had believed her to be a good mom. I had said that she changed to being a mother first and wife second. I did make her go through supervised visits at first to ensure that it was actually true that she was a good mother, since little else that I believed was true, was actually true.
The 7 year itch was not a typical for us under the standard definition, it was just the final thread in time, in a long list full of deceit and lies.
It’s hard to believe just how blind I was, and how my head was buried in the sand when it came to our relationship. I worked too much to notice the signs, which were actually there from the beginning.
…
