The Adoption
After eleven years of marriage and a brief stint as an interim youth minister, I could no longer think of any reason not to have kids. And then, finally, after twelve years of marriage, we adopted a brother/sister sibling group through the state foster care system. Twelve years into a fourteen-year marriage. Treva carefully avoids mentioning how long she was married, as she transitions from the adoption to the following:
The “Last Two Years”
“Items under pressure often crack and shatter. And such was the case in those last two years of my first marriage. As my personal successes and growth in my career and my education increased and my relationship with our new kids bloomed, I began to question a little more openly the dynamic of my marriage.”
She began to openly question the dynamic of her marriage in the final two years? With no context but the video, by this time in her marriage she adopted two kids with a man she believed had violent tendencies, and her relationship with her children was blooming to the point that it was causing her to question whether or not she wanted to stay married. That would suggest she divorced out of concern for the children, but if that’s the case, why doesn’t she have custody?
Treva claims in her video that I violated our wedding vows. She does so knowing that her audience will assume that I cheated on her and sympathize further with her decision to leave. She describes a few months of “decision making and heartache” in which she tried to maintain a routine for the children while she planned the divorce. “We both had to come to terms with the imminent separation we faced.”
What she describes as a “few months” was a matter of weeks. Six weeks that she spent gaslighting me about her commitment to our marriage. A month and a half that saw her shuffling the children around between relatives while she went out and partied with her friends. A handful of weeks that culminated in a yearly trip to Gatlinburg with her best friend’s family where she met the man that she, in her words, “betrayed” me with.
The Affair
I won’t pretend our marriage was without its problems. Several months before she walked out on me and our two children, she joined CrossFit. When I was concerned over the cost, she assured me that we could afford it — she handled the household finances, after all. When I was concerned over the time requirements, owing to my two-hour daily commute and the physical exhaustion I experienced as a result of my narcolepsy, she joined without me. Before long, the loving Christian woman I married was singularly focused on her “fitness goals”. Her doctorate, complete save for her dissertation, fell by the wayside. Her commitment to her children took a backseat to her desire to look “hot”. She even acknowledged the problem when she said she had been inviting more people to CrossFit than she invited to church!
Is there a problem with physical fitness? Certainly not. Is there a problem with becoming so focused on personal fitness goals that you withdraw from your family? I’m sure Treva doesn’t think so.
Her Withdrawal
I only started noticing these problems in March of 2012. Treva signed up to participate in a mud run in Atlanta on our son’s birthday, so we made a little vacation of it. Once we were there, she was checked in and involved with the family until her friends from CrossFit showed up. After that, she focused entirely on them until the run was over and we got ready to leave. As we walked to the car, Treva asked where everyone wanted to go eat. I suggested we let our son decide, since it was his birthday. “Oh, that’s right! It is your birthday, isn’t it?”
Shortly after our son’s birthday, Treva posted this to her second blog, “Life on the Dean’s List”.
“I’m tired and I want to quit…something.“
My Withdrawal
I felt isolated and alone. I withdrew into myself. The week before she left, I was facing struggles at work. Instead of comforting me and taking my side, she accused me of trying to “self-sabotage” and reminded me of everything that was on the line if I lost my job. I didn’t cheat on her. Like her, I was tired and wanted some time alone.
In mid-May, 2012, she walked out. At the end of June, after her annual trip to Gatlinburg, she came home and “confessed” to having an affair. Treva claimed that she had planned on coming home early, but she made the six-hour drive back to Gatlinburg “in the blink of an eye”. Once there, she met up with a guy from the bar and went back to his place, fully intending to have sex. But she said that “as soon as he stuck it in,” she knew it was wrong and asked him to stop. She was so distraught over what had almost happened that she took a handful of sleeping pills and chased it with a bottle of whiskey. She said she wanted nothing more than for me to come rescue her.
And I believed her.
The “Assault”
Her biggest complaint about me for our entire marriage was that I had a low sex drive. I never denied her when she initiated, but I rarely initiated myself. When I asked her what she needed from me to prove that I was committed to our relationship, that’s where she went. I told her, understandably, that I wasn’t ready that night, but I was allowed to sleep in my own bed for the first time in six weeks.
The next day, I came home from work and the house was clean. The kids had been fed. Treva greeted me at the door with a kiss and surprised me with a piece of paper filled with nice things about me, demonstrating that she heard me, she understood why I was upset, and (I thought) she was committed to trying to meet my needs, too.
And so, that night, I wanted to meet her needs, too. I asked if she was ready to have sex with me. She said she was. I asked again, in light of everything that (I thought) almost happened, if she was comfortable with it. She said she was. Then I remembered the doctor’s appointment she told me that she had scheduled for the next day, and asked if we should wait. “It’s not that kind of appointment,” she assured me.
What Really Happened
We engaged in what I believed to be fully consensual make-up sex. My weight didn’t pin her down. I didn’t choke her cries of pain as the air escaped from her lungs. The only thing that was different about that night is that she had sex with another man less than 48 hours earlier. I didn’t know that at the time, though. At the time, I honestly believed she had decided to calm down, come home, and be a wife and mother again. I forgave what I thought was a brush with infidelity because, quite honestly, she gaslighted me into believing I deserved to be cheated on.
I have no reason to believe she didn’t keep her doctor’s appointment the next day, but I now understand that the appointment had nothing to do with me. In the days that followed, she would admit that she knew exactly why she went back to Gatlinburg, and that she hadn’t asked the young man she had sex with to stop. She also explained that her suicide attempt came the day before, when the man from her gym that she had been having an affair with decided to go back to his wife instead. I now believe that the doctor’s appointment was to get the “morning after” pill to ensure she didn’t get pregnant from her one night stand, and the claim that her husband raped her was nothing more than an attempt to avoid taking responsibility for her actions.
