After the turmoil of the first three stages, it is good to reach the calmer waters of Stage Four. The Discoverer starts to believe that the relationship might just survive the cataclysmic chaos of infidelity. Perhaps the Discovered has finally opened up about some small detail of the affair which he or she had stonewalled or evaded before. Maybe there has been a show of tenderness from the Discovered and the Discoverer feels that their partner really wants to recommit.
“I felt like the blood was finally pumping round to every part of my body again,” explained Anita, forty-eight. “I know it sounds strange but until you begin to relax that awful watchfulness, you don’t realize how tightly wound and closed in on yourself you’ve been.” Although there can be hope in the first three stages, it is often fleeting or just wishful thinking. In contrast, by Stage Four, hope is based on solid, demonstrable behavior rather than empty words or wild promises. For some people, these feelings can match the euphoria of when they first met.
However, hope is one of the most fragile of human emotions and this stage is often the shortest and most precarious. If you are still struggling to find any hope for your relationship—perhaps your self-confidence has been knocked or the third party is still on the scene—there is reassurance and grounds for optimism later in the chapter. If you have reached hope but are worried about slipping, there are also strategies for supporting and reinforcing it. However, first, I need to explain why couples can slide back to the earlier stages and reassure that such setbacks are normal.
Anita and her husband Richard had been making good progress with their counseling until the week that Anita found a small teddy bear when putting clean laundry into her husband’s drawers. She was immediately suspicious: “I certainly hadn’t given it to him and I instinctively knew that it was a present from her. It was like I was right back at day one when my son showed me a flirty text from her on his phone.” The return to Stage One: Shock and Disbelief was sealed when Richard admitted that it had been a Valentine’s Gift. “I felt like I had been betrayed all over again; just touching this horrible red satin thing made me feel dirty. Not only did I wonder how he could have kept something so tasteless, but I also wondered, if he could fall for someone who thought that a cheap teddy was good idea, what that said about his taste in women. What does it say about me?” Anita had quickly moved on to Stage Two: Intense Questioning.
Richard tried to explain: “The present meant nothing. I’d forgotten all about it. Otherwise, I would have thrown it away ages ago.” Anita was straight back on the attack: “Deep down you wanted to keep it.” It was clear that they had had this argument many times during the week. Worse still, the pain, the unhappiness, and the sheer nastiness of their fights had made them question whether their relationship had a future. “I really don’t know if I can ever get over this,” admitted Anita, “the feelings are so raw. I found myself sitting in the car lot at work this morning—shaking. I had to will myself to get out and face the day.” Richard felt similarly despondent and worried about the future. “It just doesn’t get any better. I don’t think she’ll ever forgive me.” These are typical thoughts from Stage Three: Decision Time. If you find yourself facing similar setbacks, it is often helpful to go back a chapter or stage again.
Fortunately, the journey back to hope is quicker the second, third, or fourth time around. After much challenging from Anita, Richard finally admitted that, at the time, the present had been important to him. “I suppose that’s why I kept it. However, looking at it now, I wonder how I could ever have thought it was nice. It’s mad, really. I can’t really understand what I saw in her, either.” So why had he not said this earlier? “It seemed kinder to tell Anita that it meant nothing. Why rub her nose in it all over again?” Anita was quick to clarify her stance: “I can tell when you’re not being entirely truthful and it brings up all my old anxieties. So I’m really grateful that you’ve been honest with me now.” During the row about the teddy, Richard had also realized that he was no longer infatuated with the other woman and made an important step forward toward recovery.
How to support and reinforce hope
Whether you are having trouble reaching this stage, are feeling only precariously hopeful, or trying to fight your way back to hope again, here are four strategies to help:
Embracing the fragile moment
During tough times, it is easy to be either nostalgic for the past or worried about the future. The hardest place to live is in the present. However, this is the only place that real joy can be experienced. When the playwright Dennis Potter was interviewed on TV shortly before his death from cancer, he was filmed chain-smoking and taking swigs from a hip flask of morphine. His wife was suffering from breast cancer and would die nine days before him.
However, he was still able to find small explosions of joy: “The only thing you know for sure is the present tense, and that nowness becomes so vivid that, almost in a perverse sort of way, I’m almost serene. You know, I can celebrate life. Below my window in Ross, for example, the blossom is out in full now. It’s a plum tree, it looks like apple blossom but it’s white, and looking at it [through the window when I’m writing], instead of saying: “Oh that’s nice blossom” ... I see the whitest, frothiest, blossomest blossom that there ever could be.” Potter might not have lived to taste the plums but that did not matter because he was living in the fragile moment. Unfortunately, many people struggling with infidelity cannot enjoy their moments of hope—perhaps a family day out by the sea—and the chance to top off their store of good times together. This is because instead of marveling at the blossom, they are worried that the fruit will rot on the ground.
“Safety-first” living
During the Hope stage, the Discoverer wants to believe their partner and trust again, but it feels like an impossibly giant leap of faith. “Safety-first” is a contract to bridge the divide. The idea is that the Discovered commits to providing reassurance for the Discoverer by being more open and transparent about their movements and activities. For example, when Jeanette, thirty-eight, had an Internet affair, she offered to move the home computer from the study to the living room: “In that way, my partner could see that I was on eBay rather than chat rooms. I also cut down the number of hours that I spent online, too, and we’d watch a movie together instead.” When putting together your “safety-first” contract, here are some issues to consider:
• How often should your partner contact you by phone/text/ email on an average day? How often is it acceptable for you to contact him or her?
• What level of scrutiny of private communications is acceptable?
• Should your partner call if he or she is going to be late home? How late before there is a need to call? Ten minutes, half an hour, an hour?
• What should happen if there is some contact with the third party? (This is particularly tricky if the affair happened at work. What could be done to reduce the amount of time spent together? What types of conversation are acceptable? What types are not? How much information do you want about this contact?)
• What changes to routine would be advisable or desirable? For example, driving a different way to work or dropping out of a circle of friends, for a while, because these activities were associated with the affair.
• How could you ask for, rather than demand, these changes?
It will probably take several conversations to set up a “safety-first” contract but this is an opportunity to practice better communication and for the Discovered to make amends. Unfortunately, it is easy to get caught in a downward spiral of blame and defensiveness and the result is despair rather than hope. So how do you avoid this trap?
Choose a moment to talk—when the two of you are reasonably relaxed, rather than straight after a row. It is also important to stress that the changes are only for the next few weeks, while confidence and trust is at a low point. For example, after two months, Jeanette’s partner Patrick suggested moving the home computer back upstairs as he found himself checking work emails rather than switching off in the evening.
Try and keep intrusion into private correspondence to the minimum—just enough to offer reassurance. Patrick decided to ask for the password to Jeanette’s private email—which she had used to communicate with her lover—but not to bother with her work account: “I didn’t want to trawl through the endless memos and office jokes—I get enough at my own office—but mostly I didn’t want to come across as a paranoid control freak,” he explained.
Finally, you can ensure the smooth running of your “safety-first” living contract by giving positive feedback to your partner about how it is helping. For example: “I really appreciated that call as I’d started to worry” or “I know that you feel checked up on but I really enjoy chatting about our days together.”
If your partner reveals something upsetting, it is natural to be angry or bitter. However, when you have calmed down, go back, and thank him or her. Returning to Anita and Richard, whom I mentioned earlier in this chapter: Richard told Anita that he’d seen his former mistress in the grocery store. This revelation prompted an explosion from Anita. “She accused me of still fancying her [his lover] and following her, and only telling her [Anita] to cover my tracks,” said Richard. In counseling that week, Richard admitted that he would think twice about future similar disclosures. Fortunately, Anita backed down and asked for forgiveness. “Actually, I’d been pleased that you had told me but at that moment I had all these negative feelings eating inside me—because you hurt me so much—and I needed to get them out somehow.” By apologizing and offering positive reinforcement for honesty, she had kept the “safety-first” contract alive.
Reconstructing the affair in your mind
Although by this stage of recovery, the majority of the fundamental questions—who, when, where—have been asked, and answered, the Discoverer is still left with the “why” of infidelity. So, at first sight, going over the smaller details of an affair might seem a strange way to prolong hope, but it is an important part of the healing process for both partners. Reconstructing the events allows the Discoverer to put her or his life back together in some semblance of order and to make sense of what has happened. For the Discovered, it is important to understand the full impact of their deception. Answering their partner’s questions and making a full disclosure will also unpick the bond with the third party, created by secrets, and help the Discovered understand their own behavior better. Reconstructing the affair is particularly important when the Discovered is still holding a candle for the third party.
Brian and Tina had been married for eight years and had a toddler when Tina’s one-year affair was discovered. Although she readily agreed to end all contact and enter counseling, their progress was minimal. The problem was that Tina still had strong feelings for her ex-lover. “If I could just flick a switch and fall out of love, I would, but it’s not that simple,” she explained. Beyond basic information, Tina had refused to discuss the affair. Her silence allowed the affair to be filed away as something romantic and special. With some encouragement, Brian finally began to push for details: What did she do for childcare when she was meeting up with her lover? How did the other man deceive his wife to get free time? After they finished, I asked Tina for her reaction. “It all sounds rather sordid and deceitful. I’d had this image of my lover as being kind and honorable but actually he treated his wife appallingly. She trusted him implicitly and he abused it.”
Reconstructing the affair can easily degenerate into destructive rows. So what is the difference between something positive, which can help a couple to move on, and simply dwelling on the pain?
• Reconstructing involves laying down the chronology of the affair against what was happening in your life. How did the affair impact on your life together?
• Reconstructing is about understanding the motives and thought patterns of your partner as the affair progressed. What was he thinking when he took his lover away for the weekend? What was she feeling when she dropped the children off at her mother’s for an afternoon rendezvous with her lover? How did your partner and the third party imagine the future?
• Reconstructing is done because of a niggling fresh question that needs answering. Be gentle and afterward thank your partner for cooperating (after all, it shows that the two of you can work through difficult material together). By contrast, dwelling on the pain goes endlessly over the same ground and punishes either yourself or your partner.
• Reconstructing replaces your wild imaginings with the often mundane reality of what actually happened.
• Reconstructing can be viewed in a positive light: “I need to do this to put things behind us” and your partner cooperating is concrete proof that they want to help your recovery.
To take an example of how a reconstruction can help, Julie, thirty-one, was pregnant when she discovered that her partner of four years had been unfaithful. She had gone home early due to ill health from her best friend’s wedding and her partner had got talking to a fellow guest: “I had to know everything in exacting detail—I am an analyst and fine detail is important to me. He slept with her twice in a two-week period and both incidents involved alcohol. For the most part it seemed he was sending text messages and he maintains that he only saw her about five times.” This knowledge helped Julie pinpoint her anger: “I feel worst about the lies and the betrayal. The fact that he couldn’t say no and that it was easier to hurt me than to turn her down. However, I have also seen the actual messages between them and she was quite obviously the protagonist—even though she knew I was pregnant. So a lot of my anger is displaced to her. That might be wrong but she was very persistent.”
So has Julie gone through periods of being hopeful? “Yes, all the time! The hopeful part is that he is finally opening up to me. He tells me how things feel, in intense and often painful conversations, but we have got down to the root cause of his unhappiness.” They had started living together for convenience rather than out of a positive commitment to each other. “The hopefulness is that we have a future together and I can see it. It feels like happiness and if I am honest, I haven’t felt that for a while either.”
Enjoying the improvement in your sex life
In my research into adultery, 83 percent of couples who had reached this stage reported significant improvements in their love life. One woman, fifty-one years old, whose partner of twenty years had been unfaithful, reported sex going from “once a month, and most times not even that, to three times a week.” Another example is Miranda, forty-six, and her husband, whom she met when they were teenagers; they had been married for over twenty years when he had a four-month affair with a work colleague in luxury hotels. “I was bored in bed before the affair but could never tell him what I wanted; when our relationship exploded we put it back together in a new way and our sex life was liberated.” This was not an uncommon experience, and 15 percent of couples in the research reported, unprompted, that infidelity had encouraged them to try new things in their lovemaking.
So what is behind this phenomenon? For many respondents, sex provides the reassurance that they crave but for others it is something darker—almost as if they are reclaiming their partner.
Peter, fifty-one, reported “very frantic and passionate lovemaking” after his wife admitted to an affair with an old flame. “But sometimes, I get turned on by what she’s done and imagine it’s him, not me, making love to her—this seems so sad and perverted.”
However, I think the real reason for improved sex lives is even more fundamental. There are two parts to our sexuality: our own inherent sexuality (what touch excites us, personal preferences, the physical process of reaching orgasm) and relationship specific sexuality (chemistry, the give and take between each partner’s inherent sexuality, what’s happening in the wider relationship). If we have been with our partner for a long time, we become so familiar with our relationship specific sexuality that we lose sight of our own inherent sexuality. However, the rupture of the affair makes each partner step back and remind themselves about their own personal preferences. When this inherent sexuality is reintroduced (what we really fancy) rather than the relationship sexuality (what both partners don’t mind), the effect is dynamite.
Paul and Tracey, the couple from the second chapter who rowed after he finally revealed that his inappropriate friendship had been sexual, went through the dark frantic lovemaking stage. “It was just like the self-help books describe—really intense,” said Paul. “However, afterward, Tracey would turn away from me as if she was disgusted and, to be honest, I didn’t feel that hot either.”
After a while, their sex life did change into something more positive. How had things changed? It took them a while to put their finger on the difference. Finally, Paul found the words: “It’s more tender. I don’t want to climax but make it last as long as possible and afterward we cuddle together and feel close.” They had also talked a lot about the difference between having sex (which is what Paul called his relations with the other woman) and making love (what they did together).
During these conversations, they found a degree of honesty that had been absent beforehand. “I often couldn’t be bothered,” said Tracey. “I would sulk if I didn’t get sex as often as I wanted,” explained Paul. This increased tension had prompted Tracey to often have a drink to help her get into the mood for making love, which further fueled Paul’s unhappiness: “It didn’t make me feel very special that my wife had to be tipsy before wanting to touch me.” After talking, Tracey realized she should “make more of an effort” and Paul concluded that “I’d been really rather teenage and selfish” and their lovemaking became deeper and more meaningful.
So what if you’re not getting a sexual bonus? I would check that you have truly reached the Hope stage. If you are not comfortable being intimate with your partner, it is probable that either one of you is, or both of you are, still stuck in decision-making. Be reassured, you are not alone. Seventeen percent of people in my research—who had felt hopeful about their future—did not feel ready to make love again. For these people, it is impossible to reconnect sexually before regaining trust—and trust is generally the last ingredient in the recovery from infidelity. In the meantime, I would recommend finding nonsexual ways to be physically intimate: kissing each other when you arrive or leave, casual physical touching (a hand in the small of the back to guide your partner through the door or squeezing a hand at moments of stress), and cuddles (preferably on the couch or in bed and lasting ten minutes or more.)
By embracing the good times together—however fleeting; by setting up a contract for “safety-first” living, reconstructing the affair in your mind, and enjoying the improvements or the beginnings of a reconnection in your sex life, you should begin to feel hopeful more often and for longer periods of time. (If you still cannot reach the Hope stage, look at the exercise: “Letting go of blame.”) There will still be dark days when you feel in competition with the third party and worry that your everyday love cannot compete with the excitement of an affair, but even here there are grounds for optimism.
The difference between married love and affair love
Married love ebbs and flows. Sometimes, it is just like when you first met but at others, you are tired, disappointed, bored, and even angry. In contrast, affair “love” could not be more spicy. It is one long, emotional rush—fueled by danger and secrecy. However, the very things that make affair love so seductive are nearly always its downfall. Affairs always take place in a bubble: an unreal world where it is easy to confuse infatuation for true love and to believe that your feelings will never change.
I am reminded of a story that a young gay friend told me at the end of the seventies. He was dating a member of the Italian nobility with an apartment overlooking a park in Central London. They spent their time either in bed or drinking champagne. It all sounded terribly glamorous. Unfortunately, the baron was terrified that someone would find out that he was gay as that would be, to quote my friend, “social suicide.” (When the baron had been young, homosexuality was illegal and gay men were routinely imprisoned.) He claimed to be desperately in love but could not introduce my friend to either his family or his friends and seldom risked being seen out with him in public. He once grandly declaimed, probably fueled by champagne, “I can love you, but only as far as the door.” On another occasion, he wished: “If only we could spend forever here in this bed.” Although there was no third person in this relationship, it was just like an affair: secret, confined, and obsessive.
So what happens when the person who has been having an affair decides to go public, or is discovered, and declares his or her new love for everyone to hear? In theory, the affair should emerge from the shadows and the new couple ride off into the sunset. However, it is never that simple. Although the couple know each other, their relationship has not been tested outside the bubble. When Jenny left her marriage and moved in with her boyfriend, it was not quite what she expected: “For the first time, I had to face up to his flaws. I’d sort of known that he was not a reader. His shelves were full of DVDs and a collection of sci-fi novels based on a TV series, but I’d not realized that he would be upset if I went up to bed early with a good book. Of course, when we’d been having an affair, and time was limited, I didn’t want to do anything as mundane as reading! But actually, it’s very important to me.”
This was not the only problem. “At first it was bliss to spend Sunday morning in bed together, but I soon realized just how little we had in common. I’d have to wrack my brains to keep the conversation going. It hadn’t seemed a problem before. What had we talked about? Then it hit me, we’d always been worrying about ‘our situation’ or ‘planning our next time together.’” Jenny had known all this information before but the adrenaline rush of the affair had stopped her from taking it on board.
When someone leaves their partner to pursue their new love, expectations are through the roof. The third party is a “soul partner” and the relationship is “perfect.” Nothing less is acceptable. After all, the person having the affair has given up everything. Under even the best circumstances, this is a lot to ask. With guilt, shame, and the family’s disappointment thrown into the mixture, rows and upsets are almost guaranteed.
“Slowly, I realized that I’d made a huge mistake. Emily was wonderful but she was also a bit of a princess,” explained Mike, forty-three, who left his partner of fifteen years for his mistress. “On her birthday, I produced a pile of presents which she quickly unwrapped and then there was an ominous silence. ‘Where is my main present?’ she asked. She had opened it about four presents back.”
Mike started to reevaluate his relationship with his wife, Kate. “We had our ups and downs, but I never felt that I had to keep proving my love or that Kate measured it in the quality of the restaurants, hotels, or places I took her to. We could have just as much pleasure from sitting outside a bar on a sunny afternoon and watching the world go past.” While he had been under the influence of affair love, he had seen Emily only in white tones and Kate in black ones. Once the adrenaline rush had worn off, he realized the world was more nuanced. Three months later, Mike left Emily and he and Kate started counseling.
At this point, I should make a confession myself. When I was twenty-three, I had an affair and left the person that I had been living with. (Looking back, I should have had the courage to face our problems rather than run away into an affair, but I was young and inexperienced.) I will never forget the evening I introduced my new lover to my friends; everybody was perfectly civil but there was a frostiness in the air. It was not that my friends were particularly judgmental about the affair but they did not like my lover. Looking through their eyes, I saw all sorts of things that I didn’t like, either. I ended the relationship shortly afterward.
Normally, when a couple start to court, friends and family provide an important vetting service. Someone will say: “She’s an attractive girl but she’s very possessive” or “Did you see the way he didn’t want just to split the bill and haggled over who ate what?” This allows us to step back and weigh up whether these things are important to us or not and make a considered judgment. By contrast, affair love develops in secret away from these checks and balances.
To sum up the differences:
|
Affair love |
Married love |
|
|
Bubble world |
Real world |
|
|
Private |
Public |
|
|
Untested |
Tested |
|
|
Black and white |
Complex |
|
|
No established roots |
Deep roots |
|
|
Adrenaline-fueled |
Settled routines |
|
|
Glamorous |
Domestic |
|
|
Obsessive |
Generous |
|
|
Generally child-free |
Children |
|
|
No responsibilities |
Family |
There are advantages and disadvantages to all these qualities, but it is clear that affair love will eventually burn itself out. In very few cases is this translated into married love. Annette Lawson, a sociologist from Brunei University, conducted research into adultery in the eighties and found that only 10 percent of people who left their partner ended up marrying the person with whom they had the affair. In my research, only 1 percent were leaving their marriage for the affair partner. Even with this minority, there is not necessarily a happy ending. Shirley Glass, PhD (whose research, Not Just Friends, was published by the Free Press, 2004), reports that 75 percent of unfaithful individuals who married their affair partner ended up getting divorced.
How to fight affair love
It is one thing to discover that your partner has been having an affair, but wants to save your relationship, and quite another to learn that she or he is leaving you for the third party. For many people, this is the end of their marriage; others want to fight on. If you fall into the latter category, you have chosen a tough path but there are still grounds for optimism. Here are five strategies to help increase the chances of getting your partner back:
1. Let your partner leave. Normally, I do not recommend separation—as this tends to make it harder to work on the issues in the relationship—but this is the exception. I have counseled couples where they have decided to stay under the same roof and live “separate lives” but the jealousy soon becomes impossible and all the remaining goodwill is squandered on arguments about laundry, groceries, and bills.
2. Concentrate on today. Try and focus on the next seven days. Attempting to make plans further into the future is impossible and increases the risk of being overwhelmed with “What if?” and “How will I cope?” questions. Looking backward is equally destructive and likely to provoke either self-flagellation or depressive thoughts. Having said that, living in the present is hard. So be gentle with yourself if you slip up.
3. Accept all invitations. Staying at home and moping is good neither for your self-esteem or your chances of renewing your relationship. What is more appealing: someone who has an interesting and varied social life or someone complaining about “poor me”?
4. Reassess after six months. Travel optimistically but do not fight past the point of all reasonable hope.
5. Make certain that you are taking your partner back for the right reasons. There is a big difference between your partner getting fed up with her or his new lover and making a firm commitment to work on your relationship again. At this point, it is easy to put doubts to one side and believe in “happily ever after.” However, there is a lot of repair work to do and your relationship needs to move through the rest of the seven steps before reaching recovery.
Torn between two lovers
If the last scenario was difficult, this one is even more painful. The affair might be out in the open but the deceiver cannot decide where his or her future lies. On the one hand, there is a partner who wants to save the marriage and normally children, too. There is also a shared history, property, and probably an “okay” relationship. On the other, there is a new, exciting partner and the lure of the unknown. Over the duration of the affair, a bond has been forged between the deceiver and the third party which goes deeper than good sex. The person trapped in the middle of the affair triangle is aware that both their partner and their lover are hurting. He or she feels pulled first one way and then the other but is unable to find a way forward.
“I don’t know which way to turn,” moaned Simon, forty-five, “I am very drawn to my lover and fantasize about how life would be together. However, I know my wife wants us to stay together. It was our wedding anniversary the other day and we decided not to exchange presents. However, she let herself into my car and left a red rose on the dashboard. It was a really nice gesture and my heart soared.” Simon was trying to balance a three-year affair—which had fed him both intellectually and sexually—and a twenty-year marriage with three children in their teens. He had felt unfulfilled for several years and that his life had been corralled by other people’s expectations. What should he do? Although I listened sympathetically, I was not really in the position to help. Counseling is not a good forum for making this sort of decision. In the past, when I first qualified, I would listen while someone went through all the pros and cons of staying and going. It was agony. All I achieved was to deepen the confusion and help my client to better understand being stuck.
A few weeks later, Simon contacted me again. He had decided to work on his marriage and I arranged a session for both him and his wife, Celia. However, we could not start repairing their relationship because the affair had not really ended. He might not have seen or had sexual relations with the other woman, but they spoke on the phone several times a day. “I told her that I’m trying to save my marriage,” explained Simon. “She got terribly upset and I sort of backtracked a bit.” “So you haven’t told her it’s over?” asked Celia. “Not in so many words,” Simon replied.
Celia was particularly upset that he had disappeared during a family vacation abroad. When she finally found him, he was in a quiet corner talking to the other woman on his cell phone. “She has broken her arm and she’s been really down. I feel responsible and I can’t just abandon her like that,” said Simon. “She has nobody else beyond me.” At this point, Celia broke in: “She has a husband.”
As Simon and Celia argued, it became clear that both of them were torn in two—but in different ways. Simon wanted to work on his marriage and still keep contact with the other woman: “My plan is to wean her off me gradually.” He had talked to a friend of theirs who had let her husband continue to see the other woman (who had eventually found another lover) and they were still happily together.
Meanwhile, Celia was equally torn and vacillating first one way and then the other: “I know that I should think Simon’s suggestion over.” She stopped for a second. “How would it work? Would it involve you seeing her? You might sleep with her again.” Simon agreed that might happen. Celia gave him a dark look and I asked what it meant. “I couldn’t bear that.” Celia sunk farther into her chair and sighed. “I wish I could be stronger, because if Simon could get her out of his system . . .” Her voice trailed away. She definitely wanted to save her marriage but at what cost? If this impasse was not painful enough, each partner’s indecision and lack of clarity was feeding into the other’s. Almost three months after the discovery of the affair, it seemed that they were no further forward.
If this is your dilemma, how do you break the deadlock? If you are the deceived, it might seem that you will never reach the Hope stage. However, there is something that you can do. Instead of waiting for your partner to make his or her decision, you can look at your own indecisiveness. Your partner might not know what he or she wants, but you need to be clear about what is acceptable and unacceptable behavior.
The next counseling session with Celia and Simon was completely different because Celia had done just that: “I could not live with the other woman in my house, and that’s how it felt because she could text or phone at any time. If he wanted to continue to speak to her; he should not live with me and the children. So I asked him to move out.” This had concentrated Simon’s mind. “I missed the kids so much. It was horrible.” He tried to negotiate returning at the weekends but Celia was firm: he could not sleep at home. As Celia had stopped vacillating, Simon began to focus on the reality of his “weaning” strategy: “How can I support her through the pain of splitting up, when I’m the person who is causing the pain in the first place?” He had resolved to be honest with the other woman and end the affair. “I guess she suspects what I’m going to say and that’s making it worse.”
There were several reasons for this positive outcome. Celia had decided what she could live with and what she could not. Her decision had not been made in anger nor as a threat, and therefore she was able to stick to it. In addition, Celia had contained the crisis into a small and manageable time frame. She asked Simon to leave “for the time being” and “until you make your mind up.” This had also left the door open for him to return.
There is a second tool for breaking the deadlock and this is to stop “second-guessing” your partner. When Emma’s husband left their four-year marriage and set up home with his girlfriend, she spent a lot of energy reading his behavior for positive and negative signs: “He would take her to a place where a close friend bartended and I frequented often. He also took her to his brother’s wedding only two weeks after I found out about the affair.” Emma was certain that he had deliberately set out to “humiliate” her.
Conversely, when he sent her four emails saying “sorry that he hurt me, to call him whenever at his new cell phone number and say hi to baby bird [that he gave me as a Valentine’s present],” she saw this as a desire to get back together again. Stepping back from the situation, there are many alternative interpretations to her husband’s behavior: he could have gone to the wedding for the free alcohol rather than to humiliate her. He could have sent the emails to assuage his guilt about the affair rather than to start again. With my therapist hat on, I see a man who is trying to keep both of his options open and will, in all probability, make both women unhappy! However, it is pointless trying to second-guess. There are multiple possible interpretations for our partner’s behavior and our responses are open to multiple interpretations, too. There is supposition on top of supposition and the ground is shifting so much that it is impossible to make any progress.
If this sounds all too familiar, you can break out of second-guessing by being very clear about your motivation and asking for a similar courtesy from your partner. Returning to Emma and her husband’s emails, she should have asked: “Why have you contacted me?” This response would have invited an answer and clarification, while playing along provided only confusion and helped her fall deeper in love. She was thinking of calling and meeting up—even though he was still living with the other woman—but this would have just perpetuated the triangle. “I saw him, by chance, in town and he looked so miserable and different from the smiley, clean, happy guy he was with me,” she explained. It was hard but Emma needed to step back and wait until her husband had made his long-term decision.
FOR THE DISCOVERED: HOPE
• Everything is not lost. The two of you can be a couple again.
• However, you need to make a clean break with your former lover and help your partner feel safe again.
• Although you might be concerned for the welfare of your former lover, trying to “keep in touch” or “be friends” sends the wrong signal and makes your partner feel anxious and unloved. It will also prolong mourning for your affair and make recovery harder for everyone.
• If a clean break is not possible—because the third party was a work colleague—make certain contact is kept to a minimum and on a strictly business footing. This means not asking after her mother or his children or sharing bits of office gossip.
• Volunteer information about any fresh, unavoidable contact with the third party—show emails or texts (however inconsequential) and warn in advance about shared work projects (even if there will be other people in the room). This is an opportunity to prove that you are trustworthy.
• Our natural inclination is to enjoy the Hope stage and do everything to stay in calm waters. Although opening up to your partner and answering questions about the affair might seem painful or even destructive, this is actually another chance to offer proof that you want your relationship to succeed. Ultimately, truthfulness and full disclosure will prolong hope.
• Bizarre as it might seem, your partner’s need to reconstruct your affair is also part of the healing process. The facts—however unwholesome—are better than his or her fevered imaginings. For example, when Julie, thirty-one, discovered her partner had cheated with someone he met at her best friend’s wedding, she wanted to know everything—even the positions used in bed: “However, the more I dug the less interesting the whole thing sounded. The more he talked about it the less he could believe that he did it.”
• You can help your partner feel safe again by being accountable for your whereabouts and phoning if you are held up. If your affair is tied up with some particular behavior—for example, being on the computer, playing tennis, or business trips—volunteer to cut down or temporarily stop these activities.
• If you are feeling ambivalent about staying, or you’re missing your ex, do not keep this to yourself—especially if your partner asks, “What’s the matter?” Being truthful rebuilds communication between the two of you and stops your feelings from festering.
• It is normal to need time to mourn and let go of your affair partner. These feelings do not necessarily mean that you have made the wrong decision.
• Do not be surprised if your mood swings from optimism to despair—it is common after a trauma. Over the next few weeks, the violent changes will begin to lessen—especially if you follow the clean break and “safety-first” policy.
New skill: Finding a positive out of a negative
Before looking in detail at this skill, I have a few examples of it in action. The first comes from a newspaper. One morning, when John Aherne from Edinburgh, Scotland looked out of the window into his front garden, something was missing: “We had this big ornamental lion which has been in our family for more than a hundred years. My grandmother sat on it, my mother sat on it, I sat on it as did my children and my grandchildren.” It would be easy to be angry but John tried to take it with good grace. “At least the thieves were polite and closed the gate behind them.”
The second example comes from my casebook. Eleanor was going through a tough time. Her much-loved father had died after a long illness and her marriage was disintegrating. She did not even feel capable of looking after her two small children and had let her husband have custody. Losing her driving license, after failing a breathalyzer test, could have been the final straw. However, Eleanor decided to see the positive: “It was terribly inconvenient having to take buses everywhere but I really think someone was looking out for me. If I hadn’t been stopped by the police, I would have probably gone completely out of control and ended up crashing and hurting myself, someone else, or who knows what else.”
In even the worst scenarios, people have found unlikely positives from a negative. One of my clients spoke about her father’s death and her mother’s attempt to find humor out of the bleakest of occasions: “At least it’s finally settled the long-standing dispute about where to put the piano.”
What these stories share is a sense of loss and, even if your partner is fully committed to staying and fighting for your relationship, it still feels like a bereavement. You are mourning the loss of your image of your partner as someone who would not be deliberately cruel and also that his or her unfaithfulness has robbed the meaning from a chunk of your life. However, these stories also show that something positive can be retrieved from even the bleakest moments. Ultimately what is important is not the trials and tribulations of life but how we interpret our experiences and the significance we attach to them. To help you achieve this new skill of finding a positive out of a negative, see “Turning lemons into lemonade” in the exercise section.
Summary
• Hope is the most fleeting of the seven stages of recovery and it is normal to have down days.
• Your recovery will be directly linked to the behavior of your partner. The transition from perpetrator of the hurt to healer is difficult, but it is helped by answering questions after the affair and being transparent about movements, feelings, and any contact with the third party.
• Although affairs tend to be very passionate, they take place in an isolated bubble and, when exposed to reality, will often implode.
• After wobbly moments, when you are angry with your partner, it is important to follow up with reassurance: this is a short-term reaction and your long-term ambition is still to heal the relationship.
• Ultimately, one of the best ways to recover from infidelity is to find meaning out of your pain and distress. It is an opportunity for new insights and new behavior. This mindset will both prolong the Hope stage and help you find a way back after some fresh revelation undermines your confidence.
EXERCISES
Building in treats
In the early stages of recovery, it is all angst and long discussions. These are necessary but they are also exhausting. So it is good to build a little fun into your life too.
• A relationship is a living thing and like all living things needs feeding to thrive. So set aside a block of two hours once a week to share a pleasurable experience together.
• It is best to make this an activity—where there are things to talk about beyond the relationship—rather than just going out for a meal together. I would also avoid alcohol, too. Some examples could include: going to an art gallery, rummaging through thrift stores together, going bowling, watching a movie, or going for a walk at some local beauty spot. If you feel safer taking the children or friends, so be it, but I would recommend, over time, trying to cut back the family and group outings, and to concentrate on quality time as a couple.
• To ensure that these treats are a reality rather than an aspiration, it is important to plan ahead and defend the time against other demands. (Watch how easily your treats can be encroached upon, this is how your relationship became stale beforehand.)
• Be creative. If you have young children and it is not easy to get babysitters, arrange for them to have tea with a friend and leave work early so that you slot in your treat before their bedtime. Remember, a treat only needs to be two hours—but don’t stint yourself and slice time off the end.
• The three keys to a great treat are fun, delight, and playfulness.
Turning lemons into lemonade
Lemons taste sharp and bitter—however, they can be turned into something delicious and refreshing like lemonade. Here are some suggestions of how to transform your recent experiences into something sweeter:
• Look back over your life and choose three events which were painful at the time. For example, failing an exam, moving schools, the birth of a younger sibling, a bereavement, or your parent’s divorce. Think about how you felt at the time, allow yourself to feel the full range of feelings associated with the event, remember how you imagined life would be. Next, compare the reality with what happened. How good were you at predicting the amount and the duration of the pain? What did you learn? What positives flowed directly from this time? (Taking a personal example: when my first partner died in 1997, I started keeping a diary to make sense of my feelings and from that flowed a career in writing.)
• Look back into history to discover the positives that have sprung out of terrible events. For example, the United Nations was founded in 1945 after World War II to provide a platform for countries to solve their differences. It has also spawned bodies like the World Health Organization and the United Nations Children’s Fund. Can you name three national or international events that seemed purely a disaster and find the positives that were a direct result of them?
• Look back over the past weeks and months since the discovery of your partner’s infidelity. What have you learnt about yourself? In what ways have you surprised yourself? What have you learnt about your partner since the discovery? How have both of you changed?
Letting go of blame
Our society is quick to apportion blame—after all, it is an important part of our legal system—and when discussing infidelity, people often use phrases like “innocent” and “guilty” parties. Unfortunately, in relationships blame heats up emotion, builds up anger, and prevents problem-solving. This is one of the main reasons why I do not use these terms. In nearly all the cases where couples are stuck and cannot reach hope, they have become trapped in an endless cycle of blaming, attacking, and defending. So this exercise accepts that we often need to blame but recognizes that it is self-defeating, and helps you climb out of the trap.
1. Get a large piece of paper and draw lines to divide it into four.
2. Into the first quarter write your name and into the second write your partner’s name. The third party’s name goes into the third quarter and into the final quarter put the names of anybody you blame for encouraging, facilitating, or not warning you of the affair. If there is nobody who fits this description, leave it blank.
3. Under each name make a list of all the things you blame that person for. For example, for yourself: “How could I be so blind?,” or for the third person, “She stole him,” or “He took advantage.” Keep going until you have put down everything.
4. Look at the lists again. Is there something that you have missed off? However stupid it may seem, it is better out of your head and on paper.
5. Read the lists for a final time and write down some of the counter arguments: “Nobody can steal another person. He had legs and made his own choice” or “I wanted to believe in the best of her.”
6. Finally, make a commitment to yourself to let go of blame and perform a small ceremony of destruction for your sheet of blame—by setting fire to it, shredding it, or tearing it up. Next time you find your brain beginning to channel you down the same path, remind yourself: “I have let go of blame,” and picture the paper being destroyed again.
The trust continuum
At halfway through the seven stages from discovery to recovery, it is useful to take stock and consider the central issue of trust. Although, after an affair, many people see trust in black-and-white terms: either you trust someone or you do not. It is more helpful to think of trust as a continuum, rather than as an on-off switch. So draw the following scale:
NO TRUST <——————> COMPLETE TRUST
1. Where would you put yourself on this scale at the moment?
2. How far toward the “Complete trust” end have you moved in the last few weeks?
3. Write down all the areas in which you still trust your partner. (For example, to collect the children from school, to prepare supper, to pay the car tax, to pay his or her salary into the joint account, to buy a card for your mother’s birthday.)
4. Keep going and write more things down.
5. Add the specific areas where you do not trust your partner. This will provide some focus for planning your “safety-first” living.
6. However, the main aim of this exercise is to demonstrate how even at this tentative stage, your partner is more trustworthy than you imagined.
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CHECKPOINT Three key points for surviving Stage Three: 1. Make certain you have all the necessary information to diagnose the seriousness of the affair. 2. Think through the long-term implications for other people. 3. Concentrate on achieving your preferred outcome. It is better to fight and lose than to give up without trying. |