We've been married for four years. As a naive young man I fell in love with her, and trusted her implicitly and assumed she was as good morally as she looked. Now four years later I'm inconsolably depressed and miserable, I have no confidence and don't even feel like a man anymore. As I said in the title, she has had 2 different affairs. The first was 1.5 years into our marriage, and the second was around 6 months after that. This is really too difficult for me to think about enough to describe it in detail at the moment. But suffice it to say that I was happy to be married and thought I was a lucky man with a dream wife, and her infidelities have left me an emotional mess, insecure and constantly feeling inadequate sexually (sex has never been the same for me since).
She said she was genuinely sorry and she begged for my forgiveness on her knees crying into my lap, she said that I was a great man and that she didn't deserve me, and other things of that sort and I felt moved to forgive her and try to move past this (it really seemed convincing and I couldn't deny her forgiveness when she reacted as she did). I'm a physician, I practice emergency medicine, and so I work very long and exhausting hours. Part of me thought that I was inattentive, that I didn't have the energy to satisfy her emotionally and physically, and so I suspected that maybe I was somehow responsible for her affairs, or at least that's what I told myself (maybe only to make myself feel better and less inadequate, I really don't know). I've wanted a child for a long time, and she said we will try to have a baby. As I said, I have felt different about sex ever since discovering her infidelities and I still feel that I've permanently lost the confidence and fun that I used to have with sex, but thinking and talking about having a baby made sex as close as it probably ever will be to the happy, pleasant thing it was for me when I was younger and naive.
She got pregnant 5 months ago, I turned into the doting husband I used to be and I even came close to actually forgetting about the misery her cheating has caused me. We found out she was pregnant with a girl from the 3D ultrasound, and I was overjoyed to be having a little girl, I had to hold back tears when finding this out and looking at the 3D images of our daughter. I feel like such an idiot now because I spent weeks talking about baby names and dreaming about meeting our daughter. Every night I had been holding my wife, putting my hand on her belly to try to feel our baby, and thanking her for having a child with me, and this made her getting an abortion out of nowhere all the more traumatic for me.
Without telling me anything, without any warning, she had an abortion at 5 months. Our baby was a perfectly healthy girl. We looked at the 3D ultrasound images just a month previously, and I sat there holding her hand with tears in my eyes to see my own daughter. And without warning this was all ripped from my life, and she said to me that she would probably only want to have 1 baby and she wanted a boy, not a girl, and so she decided to "take care of it". This has been extremely traumatic to me, and I don't know if I'll ever recover. When she first told me this I was devastated and in shock, and I reacted very poorly. I basically immediately had tears in my eyes and I ended up vomiting. I've even had depersonalization/derealization symptoms which I've never experienced in my life.
I was raised in a very Evangelical Christian home, and my wife and I attended a non-denominational church every week. I have always been pro-life, my wife knew this. She is pro-choice and she's always been. Perhaps it's a bad idea for a man who believes that life starts at conception, who believes that killing an unborn baby is still murder, to marry a pro-choice woman. I would strongly advise against it after experiencing what I have. My wife has maintained that it's her body and so she alone can decide whether she wants to carry a baby to term or not, and she said that I have no right to try to make her feel guilty and ashamed of her choice.
I just can't help but think it was a mistake to have given her a second chance after she cheated on me. That had already traumatized me in a way and ruined my sense of confidence as a man and has really messed up sex for me. But this has been worse. I've just been thrown into terrible grief by my own wife all because our healthy and beautiful baby was not a boy, apparently.
I can't express how miserable and depressed I am right now. I've taken vacation from work and am staying at my friend/colleague and his wife's house, and I am so severely depressed that basic tasks like brushing my teeth are extremely difficult and I've basically done nothing but play video games and talk to my friend's wife and himself. I really don't think I can continue with her at all, not after this. I'm assuming she'll end up with a large cut of my income if I divorce her (which I probably will, I haven't talked to anyone for info on this yet, we have no pre-nup), and this will make it somewhat harder for me to get remarried and provide for a family.
In this situation, would it be the normal reaction to get divorced, as I feel inclined to do? I just really want to have a nice, faithful wife with whom I can start a family and who I know is against abortion and won't abort my child. Also, is it likely that when I'm with a different woman that my confidence will return, and I will feel better and more secure about sex and more trusting of my wife? Any advice appreciated.
there doesn't seem to be anything here