There is a specific kind of cruelty in discovering that someone was doing two things at once — that while you were having one conversation with them, they were having another entirely different one somewhere else.
I discovered my husband’s affair at the same time that we were actively trying to have a baby. We had been trying for seven months. We had had the conversations couples have when they make that decision — about timing, about the future, about what kind of parents we wanted to be. Those conversations felt like the most adult and intentional thing I had ever done. He was having them with me while maintaining a relationship with someone else.
The notepad
I found out because of a notepad. He had been offered a short-term work placement in another city — a genuine professional opportunity. We had discussed it together. I had supported him going. The notepad was on his desk. I was looking for a pen and I picked it up and a page fell open. There were two columns. One column had my name at the top. The other had a name I didn’t recognise. The columns listed things. Places. Dates. What each of us thought about the placement. What the future looked like from each location.
I put the notepad down. I picked up my phone. I went and sat in the garden. I stayed there for a long time.
The money
When I started going through things properly I found the financial evidence too. The hotel bookings. The restaurant bills. Things paid for from our joint account — from the savings account we had opened together because we were trying to have a baby and wanted to be responsible about it. The money was not the worst part. But it was its own particular violation — the use of our future together to fund something that was actively dismantling it.
The baby question
I have been asked whether the fact that we were trying to conceive made everything harder. The honest answer is yes and no. Yes, because there was something specifically painful about the collision of those two realities. No, because in some ways it also clarified something. The discovery meant that the question of whether to continue was answered more quickly than it might otherwise have been. I knew quite early that I did not want to bring a child into a marriage I now understood to be built on something false.
Where I am now
We did not continue trying. We are no longer together. What I am still working through is the grief for the version of my life I had been building in my imagination. The conversations about names and schools and the things we would teach our children. All of that existed in real and specific detail in my mind. None of it existed in reality. The grief for an imagined future is a strange and particular kind of grief, because there is no object for it. Just the space where something was supposed to be.
I am learning to grieve that space. Some days I am better at it than others. I have not ruled out the possibility of a future in which I might be ready again. That feels, for now, like enough.
— Ava