I've been thinking about writing something here for a while. Keep stopping myself. Not sure what that says about me. Probably that I overthink things. That's accurate.
Two years doing this. Before that, fifteen years of a marriage that, look, it's complicated. The marriage isn't over. My wife and I are for the most part fine. The specific thing that's not fine I don't want to go into in detail, except to say there's been a distance for about four years that I've tried to address and haven't managed, and at a certain point I made a decision I'm not proud of and also not torturing myself about. Both those things can be true at the same time, I think.
My first booking I booked and cancelled three times. Booked on a Tuesday, cancelled within the hour. Booked again Thursday, cancelled the next morning. Booked again the following week and actually went through with it. Then sat in my car afterwards for about twenty-five minutes.
Not because it was bad. It wasn't bad at all. Just because the reality of what I'd done had to settle somewhere and I needed a bit of time. I drove home, made dinner, watched something I don't remember on television, went to bed. Woke up the next morning and it was fine. Which wasn't the experience I'd been bracing for, based on what my brain had been telling me would happen.
I screen very carefully. More carefully than is probably necessary. I google everything. I save nothing on my phone, not the number, not the messages, nothing. I use an email address with no connection to my name. I pay cash and withdraw the cash from a machine nowhere near where I live or work. My wife uses our joint account and has for years. I developed that habit of paranoia early and kept it.
Does she know? I genuinely don't know. She hasn't said anything. There have been one or two moments where something she said landed strangely and I wondered, and then it passed. I don't push on those moments. I probably should, or probably shouldn't. I genuinely don't know which.
What I've found is that it's changed the marriage less than I expected. I don't know if that's good news or not. I thought it would feel more different. But I go home and I'm there and things are what they are. Maybe that means nothing's changed. Maybe it means I was always capable of this level of compartmentalisation and the marriage was already more separate than I realised. I turn that thought over quite a lot.
I don't know what the right thing to do is. I don't think anyone does, in my situation, despite the fact that many people would be very confident they knew. People who haven't been married fifteen years and had things go in the direction ours have tend to have very clear ideas about what they would do. That's understandable. I used to as well.