Very difficult this.  Now don't get me wrong he left 23 years ago and I am a different person to who I was then but there are things I have never told anyone.  Would my friends think I was the biggest idiot going?  Would they lose respect for me?  Was I gullible or vulnerable?

The years after he left was probably when I was most gullible.  He kept coming back and forth into mine and the children's lives but at this point, I don't want to disclose what an idiot I was.  He fed me lies, told me things I wanted to hear, drove my children to distraction.  My life was like a ping pong ball in a tombola drum.  And I kept letting him emotionally abuse us.  I don't know what made it stop.  Perhaps I got stronger, perhaps the children grew up and realised he didn't really love them.  I don't know..

Anyway, I don't know when or what made me realise that the impossibility of him being gay came into my head.  Maybe it was a very gradual thing.  Obviously I couldn't tell anyone.  So I will just offload some of the instances in no particular order. 

He would go out 'for a drive' (he said) in the middle of the night and come home some hours later.  Always telling me he just couldn't sleep.  It was perfectly normal thing for someone to do, he said.

Or I would come downstairs in the middle of the night and he would be writing.  When I asked what about, he said is feelings over his mum's death.  But he would jump when I came in the door. (I found these letters after he left and it was his fantasies (I hope) of life of a gay man.  The worse essay I found started 'I was shopping with my girlfriend Shirley........... then went on to describe activities in men's toilets.  My girlfriend?  We'd been married for 17 years, how long had this been going on?

In the early years he went to borrow a typewriter from my brother and came home beaten up and covered in blood.  He said he had just asked two guys directions and they thought the typewriter must have been a suitcase.  Although battered, he still had the typewriter.

Okay, now 3 confessions that I find difficult to admit.  I found a gay magazine under the passenger seat of the car.  I went ballistic.  He told me the guy he gave a lift home from work (on the rare occasion he did work) must have put it there. 

He went to play a football match (he hated football) and I took the children along (he wasn't expecting us because I hate football too).  A goal was scored and you know when footballers (British football) all jump about an hug each other?  Well, he went a little over the top and kissed the scorer.

I was going to take his suit to the cleaners and in the pocket I found a pink satin (yes pink satin!) posing pouch. 

This doesn't seem much to what some of you straight spouses have witnessed and my heart goes out to you but it's still that niggling something is wrong is still there.  I've seen a lot of things on this site that is the 'norm' in our situation and that has helped enormously.  Sex life changed (as if he couldn't get it over with quick enough ) and then eventually plummeted to nothing.  Of course, it was always me that initiated it and it was always my fault that he took too long to climax. 

Still, all the lies, the deceit, the betrayal, confusion, paranoia faded into nothingness compared to the years of all of the above and humiliation, degradation, abandonment, cruelty,and his bloody self pity (to this day, I will not tolerate anyone's self pity), emotional blackmail and the list goes on. 

If he is on this forum with a false name, he will know exactly who I am but I doubt he will realise I am talking about what he did - his perception of it all is totally warped.  The last time I saw him and I'd asked to see him, I told him a tiny bit of what he'd done and he disputed it all.  He actually said to me 'but I never hit you'.

This forum is a gift.  I have true empathy for all the straight spouses on this forum and those not yet lucky enough to find it.  Its very cathartic and humbling.  It is a long time ago that this happened to me but it is such a life changing experience that you live with and learn by but never really get over.