You know you’re a badass, right?

Since shit went down a year and a half ago and I found out I was married to a cheater for 20 years, I’ve come across a number of amazing spouses who have also been through the same hell. Our hells are similar and they’re different. One thing that is true is we are all fucking badass for surviving what we have survived.

Let’s take a look at some of the things we’ve survived. We’ve survived finding out, rather shockingly, that our loving spouses are mutherfucking liars and anything but loving. Some of us were newly married, some of us together decades. We were either alone while we discovered that we were married to an asshole or we were sitting with someone and maybe even the asshole themselves. Some of us took a huge breath in and held it because we were hoping when we exhaled slowly the ground around us wasn’t giving way and opening up to swallow us in a black hole.

We’ve survived the shitty knowledge that our spouses have fucked other people. The same spouses that made a vow to love us and honor us. Some of us have even survived our spouses fucking our best friends. We’ve read emails and text messages from our beloveds professing their love for their affair partners, we’ve read first-hand about their disdain for us. Our spouses have casually talked about our children to their lovers. They’ve even used the cute family nicknames of our kids and shared our kids’ pictures with their loves and can you believe some had the fuckity fucking gall to introduce our kids to their lovers.

We’re still standing – mostly – after learning truth after brutal truth through intuition and detective work, having to develop a skill we never thought we’d need. Some of us spouses have been sitting in the offices of people we don’t know – therapists who specialize in infidelity – who are “supporting” our spouses through their “full disclosure” to us about the disgusting things our spouses have done. We’ve learned they paid prostitutes and escorts. They’ve had multiple affairs for multiple years. They’ve had sex on our marital beds, in their cars, holy fuck, they’ve had sex in our cars, the same cars they carry their children to and from school and church. Some of our spouses left to go on dozens of business trips into the waiting genitals of someone else, making their traveling their own special me time. We’ve sat through learning some unbelievable, mutherfucking shit, haven’t we?

We’re amazing, we’re completely badass and our cheating, fucked up spouses don’t even deserve us. You and I both know it. They’ve taken our devotion and love and taken advantage of it because they are selfish assholes who only thought of themselves and in some cases still only think of themselves.

You know another reason we’re badasses? We are keeping our heads above water, all the while dealing with the pain bestowed upon us and we’re working our asses off to figure this shit out. Most of the burden of someone else’s choices fall on us. Should we stay or should we go? We’ve got the patience of saints, the tenacity of search and rescue dogs and the strength of grizzly bears. Most of us have bigger things to think about than our spouses fucking someone else because someone has to and we’re those only ones who haven’t lost their mutherfucking minds. Someone has to think straight so we sometimes have to set aside and stuff down our pain and sorrow to think about our family, home and our children. Someone has to put the kids first and it’s up to us. We’re amazingly compassionate, sometimes to our remorseful partners and sometimes to ourselves when we know our marriage is over.

Some of us are trying to stay married even though odds are our spouses will cheat on us again. Day after day we have had to face the realization that we’re in marriages with fucked up spouses who are cheaters. Day after day we have to think about going or staying or starting over. Any which way you look at it we have to cope somehow, someway. We have learned to figure it out as we go because nothing is the same or ever will be the same. Our worlds shattered, our heart closed. We are amazingly resilient to be surviving this and to have survived this bullshit.

We’re a heap of smart, caring, loving badasses. Don’t you forget it.