PART 13 – I Wanted to Believe I Was Still a Decent Man, but Every Excuse Required Me to Ignore Someone I Had Hurt

I had spent a long time trying to separate the man I thought I was from the things I was doing.

I wanted to believe those were two different things.

I could be a husband who had made mistakes.

I could be a man who was under pressure.

I could be someone who had become unhappy and didn't know how to say it.

Those descriptions were easier to accept than the truth.

I was choosing to deceive people because I wanted to avoid losing anything.

I wanted Caroline.

I wanted to keep Emma from discovering the truth.

I wanted to postpone the conversation about the money.

And I wanted to believe I could still leave the marriage without having to admit what I had done to it.

I had made all those wishes part of the same plan.

The problem was that the plan depended on other people not knowing what I was doing.

That should have been enough to tell me something was wrong.

Instead, I kept searching for a version of events that would let me remain comfortable with myself.

I told myself I had been unhappy for a long time.

I told myself the marriage had changed.

I told myself that people sometimes fell out of love and that no one could be expected to remain in a relationship forever.

Those things could be true.

They still didn't excuse my behavior.

I had treated the possibility of ending a marriage as permission to behave as though it had already ended.

I had treated my unhappiness as permission to withhold the truth.

I had treated uncertainty as permission to keep two people believing different things.

None of those permissions had been given to me.

I had simply granted them to myself.

The anniversary made that harder to ignore because Emma had done something concrete.

She had chosen a restaurant.

She had made a reservation.

She had asked me whether the time worked.

She had mentioned the blue shirt.

She had given me a place to be and a reason to show up.

I had answered her as though I intended to do exactly that.

Then I had chosen Caroline.

I kept returning to that choice because there was no complicated explanation for it.

I had not been forced to stay.

I had not been prevented from calling Emma.

I had not been confused about the date.

I had simply wanted to remain where I was.

And I had wanted to avoid the consequences of telling my wife why.

I could explain my feelings.

I could explain the problems in the marriage.

I could explain why the money had become difficult to discuss.

But none of those explanations changed what I had done with the evening.

I had used Emma's trust to make my own life easier.

I had given Caroline an incomplete picture because I wanted her to remain with me.

I had kept the financial problem hidden because I didn't want to answer questions.

I had tried to make Emma responsible for ending a marriage I was already damaging.

There was no way to arrange those facts into a story in which I had behaved honorably.

I didn't like admitting that.

I had always wanted to think of myself as someone who could recognize when he had gone too far.

I wanted to believe that even when I made mistakes, there was a line I wouldn't cross.

But I had crossed it more than once.

The difficult part was not recognizing the line.

It was recognizing how often I had seen it and continued anyway.

I knew the anniversary mattered.

I knew Emma expected me.

I knew Caroline had not been told everything.

I knew the money conversation was overdue.

I knew all of it before the evening began.

I had not been denied the chance to do better.

I had been given several chances.

I had chosen the easier answer every time.

That was the pattern I needed to face.

Not one bad night.

Not one impulsive kiss.

A pattern.

I had become someone who could understand the likely consequences of a decision and still make it because the immediate reward mattered more.

I had learned to live with the discomfort by telling myself I would make things right later.

The promise of later had become my excuse for doing nothing now.

I don't remember the exact moment when I first began thinking of myself as a man who had lost his way.

I remember using that idea to soften the truth.

A man who had lost his way could find it again.

A man who had made a mistake could apologize.

A man who had been unhappy could start over.

All of that was possible.

But none of it could happen while I kept pretending that the people I had hurt were responsible for helping me feel better about what I had done.

I needed to stop asking how I could remain a decent man in my own eyes.

I needed to ask what I was willing to do for the people who had trusted me.

At that point, I had no answer I was prepared to act on.

I only knew that the excuses were becoming harder to believe.

And I kept making them anyway.

Click here to continue reading: PART 14: The Money Was Still Waiting for an Explanation, and I Had Turned a Difficult Conversation Into Another Reason to Hide