Why I’m So Glad That My Husband Cheated on Me

It hurt like hell, but now I’m smarter, kinder and more loving

Jan Tuckwood,

AARP

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Published October 23, 2024

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Laura Liedo

Welcome to Ethels Tell All, where the writers behind The Ethel newsletter share their personal stories related to the joys and challenges of aging. Come back each Wednesday for the latest piece, exclusively on AARP Members Edition.

It happened on March 23, 2007, a Friday, at 7 p.m.

I’d just come home from work and put a can of Campbell’s chunky chicken noodle soup in the microwave. I was mixing myself a Bloody Mary when I heard my husband come in the front door.

He walked into the kitchen, grabbed the vodka bottle from me and poured himself a glass. I could see he had already been drinking. His eyes were dark and round, the way they always got when he was mad. He spit out four words: “I want a divorce.”

I heard him say other words, too — “I want to date other people” — but the first four sent me to the floor, and I stared at the white tile until it became a big blank spot, a hole, an erasure of 17 years of marriage and a family.

The soup stayed in the microwave for days. I could eat almost nothing and drink only milk. I lost 20 pounds in two weeks. I was barely there — my divorce demolished me.

Two hundred and thirty-three days later, on Nov. 11, our anniversary, I wrote in my calendar: “Today, I started to love him less.”

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And today … I love him in a faraway storage unit of my mind.

He is like an old Christmas ornament I once treasured but put away, out of sight, wrapped in plastic. We send friendly texts on birthdays. But I don’t really know him anymore, nor do I know the shrunken me who hit the tile floor that Friday night.

When my husband left me for another woman — he’d been cheating for several months — my friends swooped in to feed me mashed potatoes as they assured me that the sun would come out again, though not tomorrow.

My best friend, Jo Beth, who had just split up with her husband, sent me a copy of Melody Beattie’s The Language of Letting Go, with a note: “My wish for you is that you come through this smarter, kinder and more loving.”

I didn’t know what a “codependent” was until I read Beattie’s book, but I soon learned her definition: “A codependent person is one who has let another person’s behavior affect him or her, and who is obsessed with controlling that person’s behavior.”

I had tried to control what was uncontrollable.

My first therapist diagnosed me quickly: “Oh, I get it,” he said, “You’re a high-functioning, self-aware workaholic with abandonment issues and a tendency to parent your spouse.”

Gee, how did he know? Yes, yes and yes.

My abandonment issues have been with me since I was 9 when my father died suddenly of a heart attack. I became hyperresponsible, helping my pregnant mother with my younger sister, who was 5, and later with my brother. My mother never remarried. She was devoted to us, and she saw much of my father in me.

“Your father was a creator, and I’m a mechanic,” she would tell us.

I am a creator, too — a journalist — but unlike my father, I married another creator, an artist. Perhaps I needed a mechanic, or at least someone capable in the more ordinary tasks of living.

In 1992, as Hurricane Andrew targeted South Florida, my husband’s idea of hurricane supplies was a bag of pork rinds, a six-pack of beer and a half-gallon of ice cream.

Neither one of us was practical. So I tried mightily to do it all. I suffered from what I call “the curse of the competent woman.” I did everything I could think of to make him happy — at home and at the office, since we worked in the same newsroom — but he dumped me anyway.

I had a choice: I could feel like a piece of crap forever and let his behavior determine my value. Or I could pick myself up off the floor.

It took five years of therapy, soul-searching and praying to learn the language of letting go.

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I went to my father’s gravesite and sat there, dragonflies swarming around me. I had not been there since I was 9, and here I was at 51, realizing that the two most devastating traumas of my life — his death and my divorce — were twin wounds woven together. Until I faced one, I couldn’t face the other.

I had hoped my artist husband would be a man like my writer father … but that was not to be. I could not make it so … I had to let go. I learned to direct my energy into my own light.

I’ve had two loving and long partnerships since my divorce. My boyfriend of five years has a pantry so well-stocked, he’s ready for Armageddon.

I love him dearly, but not in the same way I loved my husband. I’m not swept away.

And that’s the point. I’m glad my husband cheated on me, because if he had not, I would have been lost to the tumult of trying to please him.

It hurt like hell. But I came through the heartbreak smarter, kinder and more loving — because I first learned to love myself.

AARP essays share a point of view in the author’s voice, drawn from expertise or experience, and do not necessarily reflect the views of AARP.

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Jan Tuckwood is an award-winning journalist who was associate editor and revenue content director of The Palm Beach Post for 30 years. She’s also a former fashion editor of The Denver Post, and her work has appeared in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and Glamour magazine, among other publications. She is the editor of five books, including the official history book of Palm Beach County, and she is the coauthor of "Too Young to Be Old," the 2022 memoir of Diane Gilman, HSN’s “Jean Queen,” who has sold nearly 20 million pairs of jeans.

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