I'm a new member to Straight Spouse though I have been a straight spouse for a few years now.  It took me a while to find my way here, and it's nice to see so many people who I can relate to and feel like I'm not alone.  I just want to write out my story as it's been stewing inside me for a while and sometimes it feels like it will explode.  Thank you for your patience and I wish everyone the best.

The whole story goes back 19 years ago when I first met her, but everything she claims she told me is blurry.  It feels like my memories are not sure what actually happened and what didn't.  It's a haze.  We met in college, she came to the university with her green card as she pursued her graduate degree and I was a senior about to graduate.  The beginning was a little rocky as she turned me down two times when I asked her out, but by the third time, she relented and we began our relationship - a roller coaster I would later come to wish to have never happen at all.

Three years later, we start a long distance relationship as I get a job in a different city and she has to stay to finish her PhD.  When she graduates after two years of this LDR, we decide to get married and she finds a position that is in the same city.  Things seem to go well and we are blessed with our first and only child.  After our child is born, our activity in the bedroom wanes to extremes until it was no longer a dry spell but a drought bordering on a state of emergency.  I had heard that sexual interest wanes in marriage as comedians always joke how no one who is married does it, so I assumed maybe this is normal.  Eventually after one of her rejections, I decided I had enough and began masturbating again.  Long ago, I decided I would not cheat in a relationship and I would not enable someone else to cheat in a relationship, still having some amount of sex drive, I sought to find a compromise through masturbation.  As a couple, we worked well together as we considered each other best friends, or so I thought.  This continued for a few more years, until I learned the truth.

It began on the morning of November 1, 2013.  I remember it particularly clearly because it was right after the first time our child went around the neighborhood to do trick or treating.  My wife had just returned home from a work-related trip to NYC and we were so excited to see our child get dressed up and say "Trick or Treat" to all the neighbors and see their eyes light up as they accumulated more and more candy in their basket.  It was a Saturday and we had just dropped our child off for a makeup class that he missed because he was sick.  On the car ride home, my wife mentioned that she had a growth on her skin that she was worried about and wanted me to look at.  When we get home, she reveals the growth and it was around her rear and genitals area.  I didn't recognize it but she was worried and wanted me to figure it out.  I tried checking it out on my phone and one of the search results said it could be from an STD.  I joked about it sarcastically "you didn't have sex with anyone, did you?".  She was silent, which at the time I remember I found really odd.  I was expecting a quick response like "No" or "Of course not" that quickly denies it as that seemed like the natural response.  Then she finally broke the silence and confessed to me that she slept with another woman.  She asked if that could spread STDs, and I said I don't know, but I would guess you can still get an STD from that.  Then I pressed more about this heartwrenching news that she cheated on me and with a woman and what that even means for us.  In my head, I went to the only point of reference I had for this at the time, which was Friends and Ross's first wife.  I remembered that scene was supposedly comical and everyone laughed.  I laughed at it when I first saw it, but I was not laughing this time and I am no longer laughing anymore about it.  My life and world as I knew it was shattered.

So, as happens when things get shattered, I desperately tried to piece things back together the next few weeks.  First was the questions to her, which she answered a few but then grew distant and resistant about.  It appeared that she was not sure herself what she felt and what she wanted.  I did get to piece together that her "work-related" trip to NYC was not so "work-related" but rather that was where she hooked up with this woman.  We were in LA at the time, so she was flying across the US just to see this woman...  As my attempts to solicit answers to all the questions in my head from her failed, I began taking time to find out about it online.  I quickly stumbled on an online blog that I found out the two of them had been keeping since my now ex-wife was pregnant with our child.  Since their blog was in their native language which I can't read, I did a lot of machine translations with google and got the gist of the whole thing.  It was completely devastating, especially when I came across a love letter that my ex-wife wrote to the woman.  Being handwritten, I had to ask some of my friends who could help me translate them and I realized in all the time I've known my ex-wife, she never did anything remotely like that for me.  I saw how far she went for this person and I knew that it appears she at best just likes me, but she loves and lusts for her.

It took her a whole year to finally decide to she wanted us to separate, and we agreed to move across the country where I got a new job opportunity and she could be closer to that woman to begin our separate lives.  We started out living in close proximity to each other so that we maintained joint custody of our child and could each send them to school from either of our homes.  A little over a year into this, my ex-wife decides to drop off all of our child's belongings from her place with me and then decline to take our child for her time with them.  For a year, she thrust sole physical custody of our child with me and did not leave a word.  She did not reply to any of my texts or phone calls.  She basically ghosted our child and I for a whole year.  I grew more and more depressed and sought a counselor who encouraged me to file for divorce.

The divorce is heated but relatively not too messy.  She doesn't fight me for physical custody of our child and everything else is mostly by the book.  Right now, I'm trying to keep things cordial when I have to deal with her around the logistics for her visits with our child, but still struggle with it.  That's where I'm at for now.  I hope to someday reach a better place in terms of how I feel about everything but have mixed feelings and memories of my past.