Our Story

The Beginning

We all have our own personal journeys, filled with triumphs and challenges.

Our story began in our Junior year of high school. We had a History class together. We had a great connection and instantly became friends.

We felt so comfortable with each other from the start. We were babies, just 16 and 17 years old.

We started dating in April 2003, a few years after graduating high school. We had built an incredible foundation of love and friendship by this time.

We did struggle in the first years of our relationship as I battled with a severe anxiety disorder. We were so young, and navigating mental health 20 years ago was impossible. We were both very alone in our struggles and very frustrated and exhausted. Mental health, especially anxiety disorders, wasn’t a talked about thing. If you suffered, you did it alone, but luckily, I had a partner who stuck by my side.

We took our time dating and waited many years to marry. I always wanted my anxiety to be gone before I put on a wedding dress to say I do. The thought of walking down the aisle to my beloved husband, fear and panic-stricken, was not my idea of a fantasy wedding.

The truth is that day never came, sadly. Anxiety has been a part of our story early on. However, as the years passed, I learned how to cope better and had more skills to deal with it.

My husband proposed a year and a half into dating, and I wanted to wait.

Fast forward, we finally married in 2017! It was a beautiful day full of love, family and friends, and God. It was what we always dreamed of.

The affair

Little did I know what the future was in store for us. A little over a year later, I got the call that my husband had been caught in an affair at his place of employment.

I remember I was in our bedroom when I got the phone call. I don’t remember a whole lot, to be honest, probably the shock, but I do remember falling to my knees in our bathroom and crying. I waited for him that evening to come home. His sister came over as I waited. I felt like I no longer knew the man coming home to me. Never ever would we have imagined this to be our story.

I remember having a calm conversation with him, I felt like I was out of my body, but it was between sobbing and asking him if he was in love with her. He said no! Do you want to be with her? He said no. He then proceeded to ask if I was in love with him???

Wait, he was questioning MY devotion. How dare he? He was the one having an affair, not me!

I kicked him out.

He stayed with a friend for a few months before coming back home.

Of course, it took some time, many months, even longer, to understand my husband’s brokenness. He was also addicted to pornography. An addiction that, come to find out, started in his teenage years, and come to realize he was already addicted by the time we started dating.

Pornography plays a huge role in leading to an affair.

Fighting his own insecurities as well as dealing with childhood issues, on top of years of my anxiety and how that troubled our relationship, made for a concoction of issues.

And here I thought we were ok. Starting a new journey together, when we married and said such beautiful and heartfelt vows, I was sure we were on the right track. This couldn’t be us.

We always said that we would never EVER cheat on each other!

And yet here we were.

5 years later

We survived an affair. All those things added up to my husband having an affair. I found Christ as an adult when I was 29 years old. And my husband had God in his heart but had been lost for some time. God wanted him back.

The ONLY way we survived this was through Him and our love for each other. I still really loved this man, and God led us to a wonderful Christian counselor years before. She was also the woman who married us.

Her guidance and her love for Christ helped our marriage. God also guided me to forgive my husband and helped heal him of his addictions. We would also attend many seminars and women’s and men’s conferences.

He brought light to such darkness. He brought beauty from ashes. We fought very hard to save our marriage. And I was genuinely able to see how broken my husband was. And here I thought it was just me.

We have no professional experience in the sense that we are not counselors. Our experience is actually experiencing an affair in our own lives. Through this blog, I hope to give a glimmer of hope to people suffering in their marriages and lives.

Also, we understand mental health and how sex addiction in a marriage can devastate and crush your soul. Both for the betrayed and the betrayer.

It will mostly be me writing in this blog. But, occasionally, my husband will write about things like addiction and pornography. And just his perspective on things as the betrayer.

We are grateful that we can have such a good marriage after such a tragedy. An affair is a traumatic experience; through our eyes, it takes time, hope, and faith to make it through.

I pray this blog can help you find hope and healing during difficult times. I am just starting ASenseOfHope, but I’m sure my blog will evolve over time.

You can now find things on mental health, forgiveness, prayer, healing, addiction, and affair recovery. I’ll try my best to post once a week.

I ask for grace and hope my words can be a blessing and a help to you in some way. I know you feel alone. But you will get through this. Don’t give up.