the world turned upside down

I was right. I might have had the date wrong, but I was right. He's been cheating on me. He came home yesterday and told me himself.

Part of me can't believe it. Can't believe that he'd go and do the ONE thing he's ALWAYS sworn he'd NEVER do.

The rest of me is hurt. I can't even bring myself to be angry with him for it. All I feel is pain. And a desperation to save my marriage. I always told him that if he ever cheated on me, I'd leave him. But now that it's happened, I've realized that he and our marriage are too important for me to just give up on. Not without a fight, anyway.

I completely agree with him that there are problems in our marriage. I've been trying to talk to him about them for months. But every time I tried, he would push me away and make me feel like I was the only one with the problem. He admitted to me yesterday that he'd hoped that if he ignored it, it would go away. Wrong answer! If he'd only opened up to me and worked on the problems with me, we wouldn't be in this position.

I wrote a little note this afternoon because I didn't want to forget anything. I asked him to read it when he got home. In that note, I specifically asked to sit down with him and talk to him tonight after the kids went to bed. Now HE'S in bed and I'm out here crying my eyes out. I just don't know if he really does want this marriage to work. He says he does but that he's afraid that if it doesn't work, he'll end up hating and resenting me. All I know is that we can't put off trying to fix it even one single day. This is an emergency situation, and needs to be handled pronto.

But I don't want to put too many demands on him. I don't want to push him away further by doing that. I just don't know how to find the middle ground.