somewhere along the way I started performing and I cannot stop

Been thinking about this for months and I have not been able to say it to him, so I am going to try saying it here first.

I do not think I have had an honest evening in about a year.

Nothing has gone wrong. Nobody has behaved badly. He is kind and careful and asks how I am constantly, which is part of the problem rather than a defence against it.

What happens is this. From about the middle of the evening onwards, I am aware that I am going to be describing it to him afterwards, and that awareness changes what I notice and eventually what I do. I find myself filing things. Storing the bits that will be good to tell him. Slightly editing my own experience in real time so that it will make a better account.

Then I come home and give him a version. Everything in it is true. It is just curated, and I am the curator, and I have got so good at it that I am not always sure what I actually thought about an evening until about two days later.

Last month he asked if I had enjoyed something and I had to genuinely stop and work out the answer, because the version I had told him had replaced my memory of it.

I do not think he has any idea. From where he is standing everything is going well.

Has anybody else got into this? How do you climb back out without it landing as a confession that the last year was fake, because it was not fake, it was just managed.

This is the single commonest thing that happens to the wife in this arrangement and almost nothing is written about it. The reason is structural. He is the one who wanted it, he is the one whose feelings everybody is monitoring, and so his reaction becomes the measure of whether an evening went well. Once that is established, you are no longer having an evening, you are producing one, and nobody had to say anything for that to happen.

I did this for about two years. What made it hard to see was that I was not lying about anything. Everything I told him was true. I was simply selecting, all the time, and choosing the true things that would land well. That is not deceit and it is exhausting in exactly the same way.

the honest question is whether he knows. because if he does not, he thinks everything is going brilliantly, and you are carrying the whole thing on your own