To love is to forgive

Chapter 1

That evening, when my wife went into a hotel with her lover, I drove our child there and waited across the street.

When my wife finally walked out, she nearly collapsed when she saw the two of us standing there. She had no idea how long we'd been waiting.

But all I said was,

“I took our child out for some fresh air. I came to pick you up.”

Most people have heard countless stories of marriages falling apart because of infidelity. And when you're the one living through it, how many people could truly find it in themselves to forgive and hold on to someone who has betrayed them?

But I was different.

As a husband who had been cheated on, I should have been furious. I should have felt humiliated and betrayed. Yet I never denied what had happened, nor did I abandon the woman I had chosen as my wife.

And somehow, when the storm finally passed, the two of us became even more deeply connected than before.

At my wife's longtime encouragement, I'm sharing the story of the darkest period of our marriage—a chapter we endured together so that, as we entered our eleventh year of marriage, we could turn the page and begin again.

Like many husbands, I didn't discover that my wife had another man because I caught her in the act. I noticed it through the changes in her personality.

She could do exactly the same things she had always done, yet her attitude toward me had completely changed.

There is an old saying that when a man is having an affair, he often becomes even more attentive to his wife. Women, however, can sometimes react in the opposite way.

I was still the same husband I had always been—caring, attentive, and doing my best despite my clumsy ways. But she no longer responded to my little mistakes with the affectionate complaints she once made.

Instead, she became increasingly irritated and short-tempered.

Even when I deliberately tried to make her laugh, she wouldn't smile. She would only snap back at me in anger.

Even our married life began to change.

She became increasingly difficult, finding one reason after another to turn me down whenever I tried to get close to her.

One day, she said she was tired.

The next, she complained that her husband didn't smell “good enough.”

The day after that, she simply said she wasn't in the mood.

Then she began talking about freedom.

My wife told me that she had “sacrificed too much” for our family. She wanted to reclaim her place in society and at work, to expand her social circle and devote more energy to building her career.

I understood what she was really doing.

She was creating what sounded like a perfectly legitimate reason for the neglect of her responsibilities as a wife that was about to follow.