DEAR EMILY,
I’m a 55-year-old woman—married in the past 30 years, still employed and a grandmother. My problem is my husband. While we were just getting to know each other, he had a relationship with someone else. My parents were against him in the beginning because he has been a diabetic since he was three and feared I would only be taking care of him all my life.
We had a stable and happy marriage. The birth of the cell phone changed all this when his office provided one for official business. Trying to see how it worked, I toyed with it, then got the surprise of my life when I saw “Mahal luv u.” Then I saw another message, “Mahal I miss u, I want to hug and kiss u. Luv u.”
Every message ended with “luv u.” My husband’s replies were the shocking part because in every message he sent, he was just as loving to her. I was devastated!
They’ve been at this text mode since then. Every time I leave for work, I knew they’d contact each other. At lunch I usually called my husband and most of the time it’ll be busy. Then he’d call back and mistakenly call me “Mahal,” his name for her, so I’d just hang up.
I had confronted him but he just kept quiet despite my ranting and raving. Turns out she was his ex before me. Why didn’t he marry her, I asked. He said she was not as intelligent as me and was a yes-woman. He said he preferred somebody more challenging like me.
I think God wanted me to feel happy and see how it felt to have someone else, when one day, I reconnected with an ex from college. He called me on my cell phone, we met and had a few lunches together. He’s married with kids himself. When he wanted something more and I declined, he got mad and we lost contact after that.
I told my husband about him and said that what he could do I could also do. He certainly didn’t like it, but he googled this ex wanting to know everything about him. Then, I learned my ex died, and that hurt me because we parted in anger. I didn’t love him, but I found a friend in him. I didn’t understand my grief and told my husband about it. He just hugged me and said he understood what I was going through. That made me cry.
Last year I had a quadruple bypass and my husband really took care of me. Before my bypass, I had become a diabetic and insulin-dependent like him, which made us compatible. In sickness we’ve watched out for each other. I’ve even rushed him to the hospital when he’d have hypoglycemia. That’s why I don’t understand why he and his ex are still texting and calling each other.
I could tolerate it before, but now it just causes me stress and probably my heart attack. They haven’t stopped! My help tells me she’d hear him talking in a loving way to someone, and the next moment, he’d be angry talking with another—probably to me.
I’ve asked him to leave, but he says he is happy the way things are. It seems he is content to have this long-distance affair since his ex is in Mindanao. She is a single mother, never married and has even named her child after him. I’m sure it’s not his child. Imagine an educator coveting someone else’s husband!
I am thinking of exposing her as an immoral dean to the nuns in her university. I want to cry but I can’t, which I don’t understand.
FRUSTRATED WIFE
Didn’t fate give you a taste of happiness—like bringing back your ex to you—albeit momentarily? And though you didn’t jump at the chance, didn’t you feel good about it?
Your husband seems to be having this pseudo-affair as if making up for the frustrations that diabetic males go through! Sex to most of them becomes just a sad memory because of what their medications bring along. It’s even doubtful if he’d have the audacity to go through a real affair with this educator without humiliating himself—at the back of his mind.
Obviously, and in lieu of a real affair, the vast distance between them gives this sense of security and satisfaction, thus the heavy traffic of loving texts at all hours.
Isn’t he even adamant in maintaining the status quo? You’re the devil he knows and is comfortable with! He clearly knows, with his health issues in tow, that nothing much will come out of this ersatz affair. But he certainly will not refrain from enjoying this flirtation. After all, not much responsibility goes with it.
Give him the longest leash you can find in your psyche and allow him this diversion. If he and you care enough to watch out for each other’s back, health-wise, there certainly is still much love left to give to each other. It’s just you who is seriously stressing yourself about it. Loosen up. Nobody’s going away anywhere with anybody.
E-mail: emarcelo@inquirer.com.ph or emarcelo629@gmail.com