AUTHOR’S NOTE – The narrator in this diary and the diary itself are, of course, imaginary. Nevertheless, it is clear that such persons as the writer of these notes not only may, but positively must, exist in our society.
Any expressions of racism, misogyny, sociopathy, or even complete nonsense by the character in this work belong to him, and him alone. They do not reflect the views of the author.
It is up to you to decide whether or not you believe this work of fiction contains any grains of truth.
_________________
My name is Eric Roach, and I’m a cuckold.
I have been a good husband and father for over twenty years. I still am – maybe not the best one ever, but definitely in the top decile.
I have dedicated my whole life to my family – to my wife, and to my twin daughters, both of whom went to college last fall.
All my life, I have enslaved myself in the supermarket that I own – twelve fucking hours of work every day for the last seventeen years. Sure, I have spics who do most of the heavy lifting, but I still have to watch over them all the time. They’re simply not trustworthy.
I literally sacrificed my entire life so that my family lacks nothing!
In hindsight, if I had known that my wife would betray me, maybe I would have invested more time and energy into myself. I wouldn’t have given my daughters any less love or attention, but I wouldn’t have killed myself in order to spoil the vixen so much.
I’m not a rocket scientist, but I’ve provided my family with a high standard of living. So why? Can someone please explain to me why my wife decided to cheat on me after twenty years of happy marriage?
Why does a person who has never done harm to anyone, and who served his country faithfully and was even wounded for it, deserve such a punishment?
*
I was the only child of an elderly couple. My mother was also an only child; as I was growing up, her parents still lived nearby. They owned several properties in the commercial center of our town, and made a good living from the rent they collected. On both my father’s and my mother’s sides, I was a descendant of one of the oldest families in town. My father was a farmer like the rest of his family, and my mother was a housewife.
We lived on the outskirts of town and had a fairly large property.
I had a happy childhood, I suppose, although I don’t have much to compare it to. I have no recollection of any extraordinary trauma. Rural life was rather boring. My father didn’t put me to work in the fields at the age of six or anything like that.
I had a few friends, but I was not a very sociable child. From a young age I preferred reading books in my room to playing outside.
In hindsight, I think my mother suffered from a certain type of OCD. It was nice to live in a very clean and tidy house, but I didn’t realize the mental toll it took on me until I got away from her.
My earliest childhood memory was of my mother scolding me for not controlling my bowels. I’m not ashamed to admit that I’d wet my bed until I was eleven.
My parents were first cousins, but that wasn’t that uncommon in our hometown. For obvious reasons, I won’t tell you exactly where I live, but I assume that alert readers will be able to guess my location with relative accuracy.
In any case, I don’t have any special medical problems – not even diabetes, which I’ve heard is very common among the offspring of a consanguineous marriage.
From time to time, I did hear a malicious rumor that my father was not my biological father. I chalked it up to jealousy. No one ever had the courage to make a formal accusation, or even suggest who this ‘real’ father might be.
I met Marcia in kindergarten, and we started dating as juniors in high school.
Since I was introverted and a bit strange as a boy, she was the one who made the first move. It took me a while, but by the end of high school I was head over heels in love with her. Although we had tried all kinds of things, the first time we really made love was the night before she left for college.
Marcy was a gifted girl. She got a full scholarship to a decent school, and planned on studying business administration. My grades were good enough that I was likely to be accepted at any decent college myself, but I wasn’t sure which field of study to choose; I was interested in a thousand subjects at the same time. I finally decided to study photography.
I failed miserably as a photographer, dropped out of school, and decided to join the Marines. Marcy and the rest of my family didn’t like it, of course, but they respected my decision to serve my country.
In my first tour of duty, I injured my leg so bad that I had to retire. I receive a small monthly disability allowance to this day.
Although she claimed to be on birth control, Marcy somehow got pregnant with the twins during the summer break of her junior year of college. It was clear to both of us that abortion was out of the question, so we got married in a flash wedding. At the age of twenty-two, we were parents to adorable twin girls.
Marcy had done well at school, and had stuck with business administration the whole time, but never got to complete her degree.
With the retirement and injury benefits, I opened a small grocery store in the center of town. Over the years the business developed, and I gradually bought the adjoining stores. The grocery store became a mini market that ultimately became a supermarket.
***
I have to be completely honest with you: it is not a coincidence that I uploaded my story to Literotica. Some of you probably know my username since I’m a passionate and critical commenter. Like you, I am also a longtime fan of the Loving Wives category. Over the past twenty years I have read tens of thousands of stories about cheating and cuckolding.
Sometimes I wonder if it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Perhaps my obsession with the subject in some way contributed to the tragedy that befell me.
For a very long time, I wondered why we LW diehard fans enjoyed reading so much about humiliated husbands? Why do we keep eating the same overcooked dish from the same boring recipe: a wonderful husband betrayed by a selfish vixen, who achieves the perfect revenge and a new pussy (or reconciles with the whore, if you are a brain-dead, effeminate wimp?)
It is pretty clear from the comments that most LW readers are quite intelligent and reasonably sane, so what on earth could make us enjoy eating the same chocolate-flavored-mud dish every day for years? What created that perverse and neurotic fixation? What can make people – many of them over fifty years old – demand their daily pound of female flesh like so many teenage junkies?
It can’t just be unresolved mommy issues, can it?
Isn’t February Sucks the most well-worn story because it represents the ultimate humiliation?
Doesn’t the masochistic and subconscious delivery of the wife into the hands of another man represent the ultimate submission of the inferior towards the greater, stronger, and worthier?
Any sane husband with minimal levels of testosterone and self-respect wouldn’t have allowed such a scenario to happen in the first place, but if it had already happened, he would have run away without looking back. End of story. But us? Oh, we enjoy reopening that wound and poking at it again and again and again.
I started to believe both endings – reconciliation and revenge – were just excuses to wallow once more in the same humiliating beginning.
Are the BTB screamers overcompensating, terrified that they’re unworthy?
Have the RAAC passive-aggressive cowards outright accepted that they are?
Why does the wife in those stories have to be so unrealistically selfish and shallow? Will our fragile minds hurt if we read less escapist stories?
I was so upset by all those questions that over the years I took several psychology courses at The Open University. Believe it or not, I even read Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905). Psychology has always interested me.
I learned that the most important motto in psychology is “Everything Starts At Home.” In other words, the key to understanding our behavior lies in analyzing our relationship with our parents during our sensitive early childhood years. Freud suggested that we go through five stages during that formative period, beginning with the oral stage and ending with the genital stage.
After some careful self-examination and a sharp analysis of my relationship with my parents – especially my mother – I ultimately concluded that our shared pathology must indeed be related to mommy issues.
It’s so depressing to admit that, even at our ridiculous old age, we still carry oedipal complexes. We can’t forgive our mothers for belittling us for bowel incontinence, or for calling us tiny – pun intended.
On the other hand, we are innocent of chauvinistic and misogynist writing. We are not only the product of a patriarchal society that is thousands of years old, we are also victims of our childhood. Moreover, we are hardly unique in that regard. Fiction that brutalizes its female characters has been around forever; likewise with men like us. It is the black blood that pours from our common wound.
***
Everything between me and Marcy had been great until less than a year ago, when the girls had left home to go to college. Despite the chasm that’s recently opened between us, I would never rewrite history and call her a bad mother, or a bad wife, during all those many happy years. We perfectly complemented each other as partners. I took care of providing, and she took care of everything else: a clean and orderly house at all times, shopping, errands, three hot meals a day, and an excellent education for the girls.
To answer the obvious question: yes, I have heard of Empty Nest Syndrome. I’d heard of it before our kids left for college. Still, the change in my wife was shocking. I felt like I barely had time to check in with her before everything went off the rails.
As someone who has read a lot of LW stories, I immediately recognized the alarming signs: changes in mood, decrease in sex, and long and frequent trips outside the house.
As things got worse, we barely talked to each other. In the battle of passive-aggressive pettiness, she won all the time. She started to remind me of my mother more and more.
All my instincts screamed that something bad was happening, but, like a deer in the headlights, I was frozen.
Don’t you dare judge me until you’ve been in my shoes! Oh, how I’m sorry for all the times I commented venomously on stories that depicted a weak husband struggling to dump an unruly wife. Now I know that it’s not easy to walk away from twenty years of shared history – most of it happy.
At first, I held on to every possible excuse to explain her actions, but when she started leaving the house every day around 4:00 PM and coming back around 9:00 PM, I knew something very serious was going on.
9:00 PM was usually the time I closed the supermarket and returned home, so imagine my surprise when, one day, I returned home and Marcy simply wasn’t there. Worse, she hadn’t even left me anything to eat. I had to defrost something in the microwave.
When she finally came back home and saw my furious face, she said flatly that she had a sale that was delayed, but was eventually closed successfully.
“What?!” I shouted, “What sale? Since when do you sell things? What the hell are you talking about?”
Her cold response was that she was not ready to continue talking to me if I was going to immediately raise my voice.
“Are you cheating on me?” I demanded to know.
The shrew went from defense to attack instantly, using the tritest method possible.
“Do you suspect that I am cheating on you because you are cheating on me?”
I was quite mad and stunned, but bravely strove not to lose my composure. “Maybe it’s just my subconscious warning me of your bad actions,” I growled.
She just smiled and went to the shower. Needless to say, I slept on the sofa that night.
It was one of the hardest nights of my life. Not only did I mourn the end of a wonderful life, but I also really tried to understand where I’d gone wrong. It wasn’t possible for a wonderful woman to turn into an insensitive cold-blooded monster in an instant. It wasn’t possible that my life was just another banal story on Lit!
No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t come up with any answer that made sense. There was no justification for those brutal blows – not even an excuse. What would be the next step? Colored grandkids?
*
The next morning, I met with a family law attorney, and after that with a private investigator. I wish I had done it months earlier, but better late than never.
My attorney explained to me that if I wanted a quick and fair conclusion for all parties, I would have to be realistic and compromise. I told him that I was more than willing to compromise. She was the mother of my daughters after all. I told him that I would die before I allowed her to Jew me out of what I had worked so hard and so long to achieve, though.
It took about a week for the lawyer to prepare the envelope with all the divorce papers, and for the P.I. to bring me the incriminating photos.
And there I was, sitting by my kitchen table at 9:00 PM, waiting for my loving wife to come home from her daily debauchery. I’d placed the two envelopes on the table, in plain view.
She finally walked in the door around 9:15 PM.
Although she saw me sitting upright on a chair in the kitchen, and the envelopes on the table, she elegantly ignored me and continued to walk towards the master bedroom. I was surprised to see her return a few minutes later in more casual clothing and carry-on luggage.
“We need to talk,” I said grimly, and motioned for her to sit down next to me.
For some reason she preferred to keep standing about six feet away from me.
“If you check the contents of this envelope,” I said, pushing the relevant envelope towards the edge of the table, “you will find photographic evidence of your infidelity.”
To my surprise, she just smiled a crooked and creepy smile. Since she didn’t show any interest in the envelope or intent to move, I emptied its contents and spread the photos across the table myself.
The photos showed Marcy sitting with a handsome middle-aged man for dinner, entering a motel room with him, leaving the room with him, and finally giving him a French kiss before getting into her car.
“Is that all you have?” she asked, amused.
I started to feel my blood pressure rise. This isn’t how I imagined this moment.
“I don’t think I need more than that,” I answered laconically.
I waited for another response from her, but it didn’t come. She continued to look at me condescendingly with that evil half-smile of hers.
“Since it is clear that you have lost all respect for me,” I continued dejectedly, “for your marriage, for your vows, and for your daughters, I have no choice but to serve you with these divorce papers.” I pushed the other envelope to the edge of the table in her direction. “You will find my offer more than generous. You will receive half of all our joint assets and savings, in addition to a generous alimony for five years. The only thing I’m not willing to share is the business I’d built with my own hands.”
She nodded her understanding
“Well, what do you have to say in your defense?” I asked.
“I accept your generous offer of a divorce,” she said to my astonishment.
“For the past two decades,” she continued, “life with you has been unbearable. I counted the days until the girls finally left the house. If not for the unexpected pregnancy twenty years ago, I highly doubt I would have married you. I had so many dreams so many years ago. They were all crushed by becoming a mother at a young age. For the last twenty years, I was under voluntary house arrest. I sacrificed my life for my children and for this family. No more!
“I had to suffer silently from your cheating, snoring, bad manners, and sour sweat smell. I didn’t raise two children; I raised three. I’m tired of cleaning and tidying up after you. When we were just dating as teenagers, I wasn’t aware of your obscene habits. It wasn’t until we got married, and I moved in with you that I became aware of the poor education you’d clearly received: throwing clothes on the floor, leaving dirty cups and plates everywhere. You weren’t even taught to use a toilet brush!
“Sitting every evening on the couch like a sheik, scratching your balls like a baboon, and then smelling your own disgusting fingertips with delight…
“I’d suffered all these years just to give the girls a semblance of a functioning family. Now I can finally be free – free to live for myself, away from you. Free to spend my time working, traveling and meeting interesting people.”
“And what do you intend to exist on?” I asked disdainfully. “The money and alimony I’ll give you won’t stretch very far.”
“If you were an attentive and caring husband,” she scolded me, “you would have known that over the last year I’ve completed an evening studies pre-licensing course, passed the state’s real estate agent’s exam, found a sponsoring broker, and will soon finish my one-year apprenticeship and qualify for a broker’s license of my own.”
My jaw dropped.
“In the last few months, under the wonderful guidance of my mentor, John – whom you can see in these photos – I managed to close several successful deals, and accumulate a nice sum that allowed me to rent a furnished apartment downtown in the nearest city, and to buy my own car.”
She placed a bunch of keys on the table and said, “I don’t need these anymore.”
“Obviously,” she continued, “I neither need nor want anything else in or from this godforsaken town, so I’ll get the rest of my stuff over the weekend. You didn’t even notice that most of my things haven’t been here for over a week.
“Contrary to what you think, I haven’t cheated on you – not yet, anyway. You are such a wretched miser that you hired the cheapest private investigator you could get. He was so unprofessional that I recognized him right away when he parked outside our house before he even started following me.
“I let that hack take these photos. John was well aware our kiss was a performance. He was thrilled anyway; he’s been trying to get into my pants for months now.
“I was going to serve you with divorce papers myself next week. I had intended to give up everything just to get my freedom, but I’d be more than happy to check out your generous offer. Half of everything, you said? I know you well enough to guess that you’re hiding a fat nest egg somewhere, but it’s still a lot more than I expected.”
She took the envelope from the table and pressed it to her chest.
“By the way, I know about the wretched story you’ve been writing for your deviant readers on that porn website. You’ve wasted every spare moment of your time there for years, and now it has become some kind of support group for you. Haven’t you become a real laptop writer?
“I bet you didn’t tell your readers that you were kicked out of the advanced training phase due to poor performance and poor fitness, and that you went on serving as a combat service supporter – or that your ‘war wound’ was the result of you rolling down a hill while you were pooping in the field at night.
“I’m sure you haven’t told them that you have been sexually exploiting your female employees for years. That you have a five-year-old bastard that you completely disown. Not only did you not help his mother at all, you also fired her in an idiotic attempt to cover your tracks. Speaking of those two, maybe you should be worried about being served with some papers of your own in the near future. They might have received some help and advice, and the name of a decent lawyer, from a mysterious benefactor.”
“Hey,” I called out, “where are you going with all these accusations? Where is all this coming from? I do not endorse any of your accusations, but even if we claim, only for the sake of discussion, that some of them are true, where have you been until today? Why didn’t you say anything? What kind of woman allows her husband to cheat on her and does nothing?”
“I suffered in silence for our daughters’ sakes,” she said calmly. “You’re right. I never thought of myself as the woman who would just let it happen. If I’d spoken up, I would’ve either become that woman, or have ruined my children’s childhoods. I actively chose denial. I actively chose to be the woman who just didn’t know instead.”
“And if I was so smelly and sweaty,” I pressed, “why were you intimate with me all these years? You never begged off sex.”
“I had needs too,” she said shyly, and looked down. It was the first time that evening she resembled my modest Marcy. It didn’t last long. She looked back up with both fire and ice in her eyes. “And I decided I would not be the woman who cheated, no matter what. That decision, I sorely regret.”
“I know what’s going on here,” I said confidently. “I believe you when you say you always wanted to leave. You certainly worked hard to be able to, on your own terms. But financial independence wasn’t enough. You had to be the victim. You had to be the good guy. That means I have to be the bad guy. Well, you’ve certainly created a terrible guy. I’m upset that I share a face and a voice with him, but he isn’t me. Deep down, you know that.
“You’ve made another choice,” I said, sneering her own words back at her within audible quotes. “You’ve ‘actively chosen’ to create a villain in your own story. You’ve ‘actively chosen’ to become the woman who was victimized by him, and the whole world, for decades. What a surprise: you give yourself all the credit for having been a martyr in this twisted version of our past, right at the very moment that you – the real you – reaps all the benefits of not being one ‘anymore.'”
There was a long silence while we stared at each other, and then came that evil smile again. It didn’t matter who’d ‘won’ or ‘lost’ the conversation – perhaps our final one, ever. What mattered was that it was over. Everything was over.
“I bet you forgot to mention to your readers,” she said with a sneer, “that you inherited the stores that became your supermarket from your grandmother. Luckily for us, you were her only grandchild. Otherwise we would have starved to death.
“Oh, and don’t forget to tell your infantile readers that for every allegedly abused husband, there are thousands of wives, daughters, and sisters living with daily terror and violence from the ‘men’ of their houses.
“I hope you find yourself a new handmaid soon, before this house turns into one big hill of crap. You should find someone ASAP to do literally everything for you. If you can afford it, find someone who’s even willing to help you shower and wipe your ass, because even though they’re two of the only fucking things you’ll do for yourself, you don’t do either of them well.
“In fact, maybe it’s best for you to move to a motel for a while before this house turns into a sty.
“Perhaps try to buy one of those unfortunate Eastern European brides, even though it will take you time to arrange a visa for her. And even if you manage that, she will probably abandon you at the first opportunity she gets.
“I was going to keep my vows until our divorce was final, even though you broke yours repeatedly for years, but now I’ve changed my mind. I didn’t want to stoop to your level, but the new me thinks that this self-righteousness is outdated and quite ridiculous. My last gift to you will be to make you a cuckold. I’ll call John and set up a meeting for tonight. I have a lot of lost time and bad sex to make up for.”
She walked towards the door and opened it. Before walking out, she turned her head and said, “Goodbye, cuck.”
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Special thanks to my genius editor neuroparenthetical who co-wrote this satire. His sentimental approach somewhat softened the sting, though.
If there is a follow-up in the future, nothing will stop me from taking off the gloves and masks altogether…