Mark and I made some significant structural changes to our lives in the first week.
We purchased seating for his office so that I could be welcome there. This required giving away about half of his book collection so shelves could go to make room for a loveseat. (This took away a lot of the stigma of the room as the place of the discovery of the affair because it became our daily hangout.)
Mark dropped all but one of his sports teams and I started going to the games.
I dropped my early morning workout with a friend and started running with Mark each evening. I changed my work schedule to get home earlier.
We started going to bed together. By not getting up so early to workout, I didn’t need to go to bed so early. Essentially, it was an hour shift. I went to bed one hour later. Mark went to bed an hour earlier so we could sleep together.
Mark discontinued his online gaming subscriptions and gave me the passwords to all of his e-mail accounts. The password issue was a big one in helping to rebuild trust. I had (and still have) total access.
Every household chore was shared from cooking dinner, to shuttling kids, to grocery shopping to laundry to cleaning. We both have full time jobs. What used to feel like chores to me are now some of the most fun parts of our day.
The biggest overall sweeping change was that our lives were now shared instead of lived separately. Again, we made these changes early, but it would be almost a full year before I could truly and freely enjoy them.
