Stories Along The Way

I have been blindsided before.

I have been blindsided by cheating and by lies. But when I look back, I can admit that somewhere deep inside, I knew something wasn’t right. I didn’t necessarily know the whole truth, but I felt it. There were signs. There were things that didn’t make sense.

Sometimes I knew the truth before I was ready to accept it.

But I have never been married to the same person for decades, and I have never experienced discovering a dark secret about a husband or wife after 20 or 30 years together.

I have, however, known people who have.

And it has always made me wonder: How is that possible?

How can you share so many years with another person and not know something so significant about them?

I think about what happens when you’re in a relationship with someone. You learn them.

You know their good habits and their bad ones. You know what they like and what they don’t. You know what makes them laugh, what irritates them, and what kind of mood they’re in. You learn their routines and their little quirks.

Sometimes you know something is wrong without them saying a word.

That’s why I struggle to understand how someone can hide a dark secret from their husband or wife for so many years.

But then I think about my own experiences with dishonesty.

There is a difference between knowing something isn’t right and not wanting to accept it and having no idea that there is anything to discover in the first place.

I understand the first one.

I’ve lived that.

But the second one is harder for me to comprehend.

Imagine finding out after decades that there was a part of your husband or wife’s life you never knew existed.

I can only imagine the questions that would come afterward.

How did I not know?

Were there signs I missed?

Was something happening right in front of me?

What else don’t I know?

And maybe the hardest one:

Did I ever really know this person?

I’ve watched people wrestle with those kinds of questions, and I don’t think there are simple answers.

Maybe we can know another person deeply without ever knowing them completely.

You can know someone’s personality, their habits, their weaknesses, and the person they are in your everyday life.

But you cannot automatically know what someone has made a deliberate decision to hide.

That thought is unsettling to me.

Because I used to think that if you spent enough years with someone, eventually you would know everything important about them.

Now I’m not so sure.

Maybe time doesn’t automatically reveal everything.

Maybe some people become very good at keeping parts of themselves in separate boxes.

And when one of those boxes finally opens after 10, 20, or 30 years, the husband or wife standing beside them may be just as shocked as everyone else.

Not because they were foolish.

Not because they weren’t paying attention.

But because you can’t see a secret you never knew you were supposed to be looking for.

And maybe that’s the part I find hardest to understand:

You can spend years learning another human being and still discover that there was a part of their story you never knew existed.

So I leave you with this question:

Do we ever truly know the person we marry, or do we only know the person they choose to show us?