When Mark and I were at the very beginning of our relationship, moving from a flirtatious friendship into love, he signed off some early little love note “a thousand ships for my beautiful.” Now who was I to resist a suave Helen of Troy reference to my powerful, intoxicating, doomed and dangerous, mythical beauty? (If I were that woman, I would have married a different kind of man.) But the name stuck and for years that was what he called me: “Beautiful… My Beautiful…” It meant so much to me that he saw me that way: that whatever I saw myself as, or other people saw me as, I was his Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman who ever lived. So, at some still early stage in our relationship, when we were making silly promises to one another (we seem so young when I think of this), I asked him, if he ever were to be with someone else, to find her some different pet name and keep mine sacred. Of course, he promised (so seriously and sincerely), I would always be his one and only Beautiful.

The years went by, we got married, and I assumed “Beautiful” was safe, mine forever. And more than that, I thought other words were safe: words like “you’re so special” and “I love you.” But five years after our wedding, knowing something was wrong but not knowing what, and desperate to track down the source of my discomfort, I installed keystroke tracking software on our computer and saw some of those sacred words (along with our credit card numbers) given easily and freely to women who were known only by their suggestive screen names. And when the precarious towers of addict lies came tumbling down, I learned of other words, left casually for other women.

That old life of mine, in the fantasy of the Matrix, had been consumed with the quest for knowledge, for proof, of some objective factual truth. I sought to know by installing tracking software, by checking phone records, by holding an ear to Mark’s lips to catch the words he mumbled in his sleep. But the answers I found only left me wondering all the more what was real. How could I know “I love you” was real if he could say it to a woman he met on the street as easily as his partner of over a decade and the mother of his children? How could I know “special” was real if the barista at Starbucks was hearing the same? How could I know “beautiful” was real if it applied equally to me and a tiny, pixelated video image in a chat box? If the man I trusted more than anyone I’d ever met could deceive me, how could I know anything that anyone says is real?

The truth is I don’t. I can’t. Not really. I can’t see into Mark’s mind and heart (or anyone else’s but my own). I can’t ever really know that his current words (or anyone else’s) aren’t another vast charade about to come crashing down on me. So my journey now plumbs the next question, the one that came when the answer to that old question broke me: How do I live with not knowing?

I know I can try to take back the words, like so many roses, petal by petal, over time. I can learn to look at Mark’s actions — at the fact that, nearly six years after disclosing his sex addiction, he has grown and changed dramatically and that he’s still here working — and I can take a leap of faith from there. I can trust in his commitment to his recovery program and through my own I can learn to see myself as beautiful, special, loved and wanted, always, and regardless of what happens. All those things I have done and am doing, but it only takes me so far. Not all the way to a new Beautiful.

But sometimes I glimpse it. Sometimes I can see it resting serenely in the unknowable: in a deeper, grander reality, something that goes beyond facts. Sometimes, when I’m able to see every individual moment of my life — the joyous and the painful ones — as just the way they ought to be, rather than as good or bad, sometimes then I see how my life can become my own Helen of Troy. My own Beautiful.