‘I Blew Up My Marriage. Now I Want Her Back.’

In 2018, I was struggling to find a job after I had just lost one. And a week before our son was born, I got a call and I got a new job. (“Our” is me and my then-wife.) The birth was incredible. You know, we embraced each other and cried together. We had the perfect relationship on the surface, I suppose. By July of the next year, I was asking my wife for a divorce. I had started up an emotional affair with a co-worker, and my reaction was to take a leap and dive headfirst into a divorce and a relationship with someone who didn’t say all the right things at the moment. Fast-forward to now: I professed my love to my ex. I want my family back desperately, and I asked my affair partner to move out. (We had gotten engaged in 2021.) I have told all this to my ex, and she has since asked her boyfriend to move out. And we’ve just been slowly texting each other. She asked me to go for coffee. She said she wants to know 100 percent yes or 100 percent no. But what I’m struggling with now is this idea of redemption. I don’t like myself right now or what I did to her. I don’t know that redemption is even possible.

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