I’m struggling with a level of rejection and betrayal that I can’t seem to shake.

My wife and I were married for nine years. We built a life together and had two beautiful daughters (4,3) who mean everything to me. This divorce was completely unwanted on my end. Up until the day she filed, I was still fighting for our marriage and believed we would find a way through our problems. Even after I started discovering things that had been hidden from me, I still wanted to save our family.

Through this process, I found out she had what she admitted was, at minimum, an emotional affair. What hurts almost as much as the affair itself is that she kept it hidden until I hired my own attorney and started uncovering things on my own.

Keep in mind, she wanted us to have one attorney. Her attorney is her girlfriend’s husband. I didn’t feel comfortable with that. Now I know why she wanted one attorney.

Side note - she dropped her original attorney and picked up a woman attorney last week.

After we separated, she moved out and went to live with her parents. In the process, she left behind journals in our home. As I read through them, I found entries from years ago—early in our marriage, before we even had our girls. In those entries she wrote about “lusting” after other men. Reading that felt like a punch to the gut. It made me question everything.

Now I’m sitting here wondering: Was I ever enough? Was she ever truly committed to us? Was I the only one fighting for this marriage all these years?

I know nobody is perfect, and I know marriages have struggles. But finding out that these thoughts and feelings may have been there long before I ever knew about them makes me feel like I’ve been living in a different reality than the one I thought I was in.

The hardest part is that while I’m grieving the loss of my marriage today, I’m also grieving the marriage I thought I had for the last nine years. I look back at memories that once brought me joy, and now I find myself questioning what was real and what wasn’t.

For those of you who discovered affairs, hidden feelings, journal entries, or things your spouse concealed for years, how did you move past the feeling that the person you loved may have been living a completely different story than the one you believed you were sharing?