I had spent a long time trying to separate the man I thought I was from the things I was doing.<\/p>\n
I wanted to believe those were two different things.<\/p>\n
I could be a husband who had made mistakes.<\/p>\n
I could be a man who was under pressure.<\/p>\n
I could be someone who had become unhappy and didn't know how to say it.<\/p>\n
Those descriptions were easier to accept than the truth.<\/p>\n
I was choosing to deceive people because I wanted to avoid losing anything.<\/p>\n
I wanted Caroline.<\/p>\n
I wanted to keep Emma from discovering the truth.<\/p>\n
I wanted to postpone the conversation about the money.<\/p>\n
And I wanted to believe I could still leave the marriage without having to admit what I had done to it.<\/p>\n
I had made all those wishes part of the same plan.<\/p>\n
The problem was that the plan depended on other people not knowing what I was doing.<\/p>\n
That should have been enough to tell me something was wrong.<\/p>\n
Instead, I kept searching for a version of events that would let me remain comfortable with myself.<\/p>\n
I told myself I had been unhappy for a long time.<\/p>\n
I told myself the marriage had changed.<\/p>\n
I told myself that people sometimes fell out of love and that no one could be expected to remain in a relationship forever.<\/p>\n
Those things could be true.<\/p>\n
They still didn't excuse my behavior.<\/p>\n
I had treated the possibility of ending a marriage as permission to behave as though it had already ended.<\/p>\n
I had treated my unhappiness as permission to withhold the truth.<\/p>\n
I had treated uncertainty as permission to keep two people believing different things.<\/p>\n
None of those permissions had been given to me.<\/p>\n
I had simply granted them to myself.<\/p>\n
The anniversary made that harder to ignore because Emma had done something concrete.<\/p>\n
She had chosen a restaurant.<\/p>\n
She had made a reservation.<\/p>\n
She had asked me whether the time worked.<\/p>\n
She had mentioned the blue shirt.<\/p>\n
She had given me a place to be and a reason to show up.<\/p>\n
I had answered her as though I intended to do exactly that.<\/p>\n
Then I had chosen Caroline.<\/p>\n
I kept returning to that choice because there was no complicated explanation for it.<\/p>\n
I had not been forced to stay.<\/p>\n
I had not been prevented from calling Emma.<\/p>\n
I had not been confused about the date.<\/p>\n
I had simply wanted to remain where I was.<\/p>\n
And I had wanted to avoid the consequences of telling my wife why.<\/p>\n
I could explain my feelings.<\/p>\n
I could explain the problems in the marriage.<\/p>\n
I could explain why the money had become difficult to discuss.<\/p>\n
But none of those explanations changed what I had done with the evening.<\/p>\n
I had used Emma's trust to make my own life easier.<\/p>\n
I had given Caroline an incomplete picture because I wanted her to remain with me.<\/p>\n
I had kept the financial problem hidden because I didn't want to answer questions.<\/p>\n
I had tried to make Emma responsible for ending a marriage I was already damaging.<\/p>\n
There was no way to arrange those facts into a story in which I had behaved honorably.<\/p>\n
I didn't like admitting that.<\/p>\n
I had always wanted to think of myself as someone who could recognize when he had gone too far.<\/p>\n
I wanted to believe that even when I made mistakes, there was a line I wouldn't cross.<\/p>\n
But I had crossed it more than once.<\/p>\n
The difficult part was not recognizing the line.<\/p>\n
It was recognizing how often I had seen it and continued anyway.<\/p>\n
I knew the anniversary mattered.<\/p>\n
I knew Emma expected me.<\/p>\n
I knew Caroline had not been told everything.<\/p>\n
I knew the money conversation was overdue.<\/p>\n
I knew all of it before the evening began.<\/p>\n
I had not been denied the chance to do better.<\/p>\n
I had been given several chances.<\/p>\n
I had chosen the easier answer every time.<\/p>\n
That was the pattern I needed to face.<\/p>\n
Not one bad night.<\/p>\n
Not one impulsive kiss.<\/p>\n
A pattern.<\/p>\n
I had become someone who could understand the likely consequences of a decision and still make it because the immediate reward mattered more.<\/p>\n
I had learned to live with the discomfort by telling myself I would make things right later.<\/p>\n
The promise of later had become my excuse for doing nothing now.<\/p>\n
I don't remember the exact moment when I first began thinking of myself as a man who had lost his way.<\/p>\n
I remember using that idea to soften the truth.<\/p>\n
A man who had lost his way could find it again.<\/p>\n
A man who had made a mistake could apologize.<\/p>\n
A man who had been unhappy could start over.<\/p>\n
All of that was possible.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
I needed to stop asking how I could remain a decent man in my own eyes.<\/p>\n
I needed to ask what I was willing to do for the people who had trusted me.<\/p>\n
At that point, I had no answer I was prepared to act on.<\/p>\n
I only knew that the excuses were becoming harder to believe.<\/p>\n
And I kept making them anyway.<\/p>\n
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. … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":38246,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-insightdrama"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38259","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38259"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38259\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38279,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38259\/revisions\/38279"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/38246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}