On September 19th, 2018, I woke up to a text from my now-ex-husband. “I know everything.” He said. “Don’t make a scene.”
We’d been in LA, visiting one of our best friends from college, and we’d been out for drinks the night before – an excursion in which I had, ultimately, drunk too much whiskey and ended up leaving my phone unlocked after passing out in bed. A few hours later, my now-ex-husband had padded his way upstairs to join me, and – after a very short amount of rummaging around my unlocked cellular device – had found the slew of texts that lifted the veil on a horrible secret. It was an affair sort of secret, and later that day that secret led to our divorce.
The thing about this secret was – it also led to another Marine being separated from the Marine Corps.
I had cheated. And not only had I cheated, I had cheated with the worst person imaginable – one of my Captain-husband’s Corporals.
I’m well aware that by admitting this fact to this particular readership, I’m willingly throwing myself under the bus – or, in this case, the wrath of an online militia that might very well declare me an infidel, light their virtual torches, and pummel the comments section with well-deserved vitriol. So – I suppose I’m writing this to come out of the closet, in a way, and to apologize to a community of people that I once sought enormous comfort in.
To condense a very long story into as few words as possible – my now-ex-husband and I had had some issues, and instead of working on those issues,
I – very impulsively, and very stupidly – both figuratively and literally fell into the arms of a friend of mine, a friend that I had known outside of the Work Setting. The Military Setting. The Marine Corps Setting.
From my angle, there’s a lot to be said – so much, in fact, that I recently wrote a book about it.
But my egregious lapse in judgement had a ripple effect that caused an enormous amount of pain to many more people than myself, and I’m fully aware of this. These people are not limited to, but include – well, first and foremost, my now-ex-husband, whose world was (temporarily, at least) torn to shreds. And then, of course, the Marine whose life took a very swift, very ugly U-turn into oncoming traffic. And then the many handfuls of family members and friends, who had to find out the full extent of the story over the course of time, and who then had to decide if they would Pick Sides – or, as my now-ex-husband and I vouched for, choose both.
Some did. And some did not.
Either way – I am responsible for a lot of hurt, and that is by no means something that has been wasted on a heart and a brain that I took good care of abusing, afterwards, on my own.
I tell this story not for sympathy, but rather to illustrate that adultery is, indeed, very much a punishable offense per the UCMJ. It’s just a little more nuanced than simply being able to point a finger, cry “adultery!” and present a case that will end in conviction.
