World Cup, and Being Kicked in the Balls

     The World Cup always reminds me of the time I was kicked in the balls, and not for the reasons one might assume. It was during the 1998 World Cup that my then wife told me she had a boyfriend. We had been married 10 months.

     Something had been wrong in our marriage for weeks, or maybe even months, before she told me. I had been trying to find out what the problem was, but she wasn't talking about it. In fact, we weren't really talking about anything.  We were able to not talk, I thought, because we were at home, and there was always something else we could be doing. So I planned a weekend away. I knew it didn't matter where we went, so we drove down to Rochester, and booked a hotel. At first, when we got in our room, she remained silent. I turned on the T.V., and discovered the World Cup.  To its great credit, it managed to hold my interest, despite my fragile emotional state.  Anyway, after hours of me prodding her to tell me what was wrong, she told me about her boyfriend. To give you some idea of what that did to me at the time, I will tell you that writing that sentence, these 12 happy years later, made my insides flip. We spent the weeks following that revelation in limbo, while she decided who she wanted to be with. I finally set a date. If she hadn't broken things off with him by that date, I was going to leave her. That date came, as those dates do, and she hadn't left him. I packed up a few things from our apartment, (including one of her CDs! Ha!) and moved back to my mother's basement.
 
     All things considered, I don't think it took me very long to recover. It was only a matter of months before I was able to tell this joke:  If you think it was hard for me that my wife had a boyfriend, just imagine how hard it was for him - his girlfriend had a husband!.