This section is written to help you, the unfaithful partner, decide whether to reveal your affair or not. Most of this book is predicated on the assumption that your partner knows the truth, and that the two of you are struggling to rebuild your lives in the face of it. But what if your affair is still a secret? Does your partner ever need to know? If you want to strengthen your relationship, does it make sense to confess?
There are some compelling reasons for keeping the affair to yourself. You may want to hold on to both your lover and your spouse, and know that you’ll be forced to choose between them once the truth is out. You may have trouble coping with conflict and want to avoid the emotional avalanche you’re likely to set off when the affair is revealed. You may feel that you lack the strength and commitment to endure your partner’s vicious accusations, or worse, perhaps, your partner’s sobs of grief.
There are some equally strong reasons for confessing. If you want to escape an unhappy marriage, you can use the truth as an exit visa. If you want to hurt your partner for ignoring or mistreating you, you can use your revelation as a weapon of revenge. If your relationship is faltering or simply standing still, you can speak out to shake it from its lethargy.
Whatever you choose to do, it’s important to do it deliberately, after exploring your motives and thinking through the long-term implications. Once your secret is out, you can’t get it back, and the two of you will have to live with the repercussions for the rest of your lives. If you decide not to tell, you’ll have to live with the effects of your silence, which will take a toll of their own.
Most of you, I assume, are motivated by a desire to work things out with your partner, or at least to find out whether reconciliation is possible. The rest of this section is to help you explore your alternatives, weigh the advantages and disadvantages of each, and make a decision that’s right for you.
Keep in mind that even if you’re determined to rebuild your relationship, there’s no correct response: It’s not always better to confess or to conceal. You may decide to tell in order to get close again, and you may decide not to tell in order to get close again.
Therapists and writers on infidelity are quick with opinions on which option is best, but there’s no definitive research on how a couple’s healing process is helped or crippled by the truth. Remember, we’re talking only about whether to reveal the affair, not about whether to give it up. That’s discussed in Chapters 3 and 4.
From my clinical experience with couples, I’ve identified four situations in which it may work against you to disclose your affair:
1. You believe the revelation will crush your partner’s spirit irremediably.
2. You believe the revelation will create an obsessional focus on the affair, and keep the two of you from examining the problems that caused it.
3. Your partner is physically disabled and unable to provide sexual companionship, and you choose to stay together to provide medical and emotional support to someone you care about.
4. You believe your partner will physically harm you.
The last two scenarios are outside the scope of this book. Let’s turn to the first two, which have broader application, and see how they apply to you.
You may not want to tell the truth if you think your partner is too fragile or vulnerable to make constructive use of it. You’ll want to be particularly careful with partners who have been devastated by past betrayals or losses, and who may accept the news as punishment for their failings or as proof of their own unworthiness. There’s no way to predict with certainty how your partner will react, today or over time, but if your knowledge of your partner’s character and personal history leads you to suspect that your secret will shatter his or her sense of self, it’s probably wiser to keep the truth to yourself.
Tim told his wife, Tina, about his former lover so he could wipe the slate clean, but his confession did more damage than good. Had he considered her childhood experiences, he might have anticipated her response.
Tina had been sexually abused by her stepfather when she was a teenager. A former fiancé had cheated on her. Her husband’s revelation ravaged her again, and reinforced her belief that men were cruel and sordid. “I’ll never allow myself to trust a man or be intimate with one again,” she told him. Tim spent the next two years struggling to win her back. The couple managed to stay together, but Tina remained immersed in obsessive thoughts about the world’s unfairness and her own basic undesirability. Today, the two of them are as far apart emotionally as they were when Tim confessed.
Jeremy, a forty-three-year-old advertising executive, looked more closely at his wife Anne’s vulnerabilities, and took another, more productive tact. She was raised by a mother who convinced her she was too plain to attract a man, and she grew up hating her body. “I’ve been married seventeen years,” Anne told me, “and I still feel repulsed every time I get undressed and see my sagging breasts and thick legs in the mirror.”
Her husband, Jeremy, had assumed all those years that he was sexually incompetent, and that his penis was too small to please her—why else would she be so unresponsive in bed? He had slept with one of his clients mainly to prove to himself that he was a good lover, and had succeeded. Now, armed with this corrective feedback, he came to see that his sexual problems with Anne were more a result of their insecurities than her looks or his organ size. Less obsessed with his virility, he worked to convince her that she was physically attractive to him, and helped her overcome her shyness. He kept his affair to himself, however, realizing how the truth would only undermine her confidence. Today, four years later, he still believes his decision was the right one.
Remaining silent may be right for you, too. If you have reason to believe that your revelation will harm the relationship as much as the affair itself; if you fear that the news will permanently scar your partner and lead to a separation; if you want to contain the damage and keep your relationship intact, it may make sense to keep the secret secret.
Another reason to hide the affair is so that you and your partner won’t spend all your time picking through its lurid details when you should be working to improve your relationship. There’s always a danger, when the affair is known, that your partner will be swallowed up in bitterness and resentment and not allow the two of you to piece together what it was about your relationship that made room for a third person. To keep your sights where they need to be—on the two of you—you may have to keep your secret tucked away.
Several well-known therapists and researchers have supported this idea that the truth can cause more harm than good. Frederick Humphrey, Professor Emeritus of Family Studies at the University of Connecticut, believes that revealing the affair permanently alters, sometimes even destroys, a relationship, and that couples have a better chance of pulling together when unfaithful partners first try to work through their own ambivalences and dissatisfactions, preferably in individual or couples therapy. Humphrey blasts therapists who push their patients to spill their secrets. “Verbal exhibitionists,” he calls them—people with an inflated sense of authority and a rigid, unquestioned sense of right and wrong, who substitute principles for research.1 Humphrey traces their tell-it-all mentality both to the let-it-all-hang-out sensibilities of the 1960s and to the Judeo-Christian concept that confession is good for the soul. Corroborating Humphrey’s position is statistical evidence that when husbands learn their wives’ secrets, their marriages are likely to worsen or end in divorce.2
My friend and colleague Bert Diament has reached a similar conclusion. He recommends that “if you want to do your partner a favor, if you want to feel less guilty and prove your love, get out of the extramarital relationship, keep it to yourself, and work to develop an intimate partnership with your spouse. Find out what’s wrong and work to make it right.”3
There are equally compelling reasons for owning up. Here are four common ones. Some may strike a chord with you:
1. Telling the truth is usually better than having your partner stumble on it.
2. Telling may increase your chances of staying faithful.
3. Telling may waken your partner to the need to address what’s upsetting you before it’s too late.
4. Telling reestablishes the primacy of your relationship with your partner.
If you end the affair and reveal it, your honesty may earn you a modicum of trust—certainly more than if you’re caught in a lie. When your partner has to deal with a double deception—the affair and the cover-up—recovery becomes twice as hard.
Gail and Chris are a case in point. Chris was spending an excessive amount of time on business trips with his office manager, Sandy; he was hardly ever home anymore. Gail confronted him more than once, but he adamantly denied any wrongdoing and tried to make her feel ridiculous for fabricating “such nonsense.” She tried to trap him with a lie of her own: that she had hired a detective who had seen him entering Sandy’s apartment. He admitted going there, but insisted that he was merely picking her up for a company lunch. It was only when Gail got his mother to make him swear his fidelity on the Bible (he was a devout Catholic) that he admitted the truth.
Gail was angry about the affair, but what really infuriated her was the way Chris had continued to lie about it and make a fool of her. She still loved him and wanted to keep the family together, but she felt too insulted, too betrayed to rededicate herself to him. Her pride told her to get out, and she did.
Recovering from an affair is hard enough, but if you leave the discovery to chance—a suspicious bill, an undeleted text message, or some other incontrovertible evidence (one of my patients learned about her husband’s adulterous life when she contracted gonorrhea)—you may set up a barrier of distrust that can’t ever be dismantled. Even if the two of you decide to stay together, you can expect your partner to adopt a seek-and-ye-shall-find mentality, forever on the lookout for signs of infidelity. Your double deception will have taught your partner to look for lies behind your every word and promise. Your pledge to remain faithful is more likely to fall on receptive ears if you confess of your own free will than if you’re trapped into a confession by a suspicious partner.
By telling the truth you’re more likely to confront its meaning and avoid a repeat performance. Without this kind of bold self-examination, you may dismiss the affair too lightly and maintain the fiction that everything is fine and back on track.
Telling also puts your partner on guard, and makes it harder for you to cheat. Denver-based psychologist Len Loudis suggests that when you reveal the affair, you should fill in all the details, not about your sexual escapades, but about your modus operandi—the excuses, the lies, the maneuvers you used to orchestrate your rendezvous—as a kind of insurance against using these methods again. By surrendering your battle plans, you keep yourself in check and let your partner know you’re serious about staying honest and committed.4
Revealing your secret may sound an alarm that you’re unhappy, and give your partner a chance to address your grievances.
Tom, a thirty-nine-year-old teacher, never disclosed his affair to his wife, even after they entered couples therapy. She knew they had problems—they hadn’t made love for more than four months—but she assumed he would always be there for her and their baby, and never took his complaints seriously. It was only when he announced that he was seeing another woman that she realized how furious, how discounted he had felt, and how fragile their marriage had become. “I don’t know how many times he told me he was miserable,” she acknowledged after he left her, “but somehow it never registered until it was too late.” Had Tom told her he was interested in someone else, it might have awakened her in time to the fullness of his distress.
Sometimes it takes a confession for your partner to hear your cry for help. Divulging your secret may hurt, but it may also be an act of kindness that your partner will come to appreciate if the alternative is to lose you, or to drift through life with someone who is only half there.
When only you and the affair-person know the truth, you create a conspiracy of silence between you, even when the affair is over. As infidelity expert Frank Pittman notes, secrecy can damage a relationship as much as sex; the problem is not just whom you’re lying with, but whom you’re lying to.5 The person who knows the truth becomes the person you’re closer to. The person in the dark becomes the outsider. When you tell your partner your secret, you give this relationship the primacy it deserves.
Knowledge is power, and when you share your secret, you give your partner both. Your confession says, in effect, “I don’t have the right to control critical information about our relationship that I know would matter to you greatly. I don’t have the right to decide what’s best for you. You should be able to decide whether to stay with me, knowing everything I know, with equal access to the truth.” By revealing your secret, you put the two of you back on an equal footing and allow yourselves to reconnect in an authentic way.
In Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Pigs in Heaven, Jax sleeps with his girlfriend Taylor’s landlady, and wrestles over whether to confess it. When the landlady asks him, “Who does it hurt if you don’t tell her?” Jax replies:
Then I know something she doesn’t. I’ve got this robin’s egg in my hand. Do I give it to her or do I not? Maybe she’ll cook it, maybe she will throw it at me, who knows? So I keep it in my hand, right here. And every day when I talk to Taylor, and when I lie in bed with Taylor, it’s here in my hand and I’m thinking, if I forget for one minute then we’ll roll over in this thing, uh-oh, big mess. Until that happens, I’m holding it and I can feel the shell of it as thin as the shell on your teeth. I’m choosing what Taylor knows and what she doesn’t. I have the power. I will be the nervous yet powerful guy in the know, and she will be the fool … and if she’s the fool, then how can I worship the ground she walks on? I’m being a bad boy. But bad boys can still confess and beg for penance.6
Jax’s secret created a palpable distance between him and his girlfriend. A patient named Jane set up a similar barrier when she kept her affair from her husband, Larry. When his business began to fail, he took to drinking and retreated into himself. She had given up a high-powered job to take care of their baby and felt isolated, overwhelmed, and unattractive. When her gynecologist made a play for her, she was flattered.
Jane kept her secret to herself, and let her husband think he was the only one letting the family down. But eventually she realized how unfair she was being. “We were both running away from stresses in our lives,” she told me, “so who was I to feel so holier-than-thou? I sat him down and told him about my affair. At first I thought he’d get up and leave, but he just sat there staring into space. Then he began to cry. Neither of us had any idea what the other had been struggling with and how lonely we both felt. Knowing that we were both hurting made us less ashamed, and taught us to look to each other for support, rather than to something outside ourselves, like alcohol and lovers.”
When you, like Jane, divulge your secret, you allow your partner to know you. You also allow yourself to experience your partner’s acceptance of you. Without this acceptance, your guilt and your deception may sit between you, never allowing you to feel as close to your partner as you did to the affair-person.
Several infidelity specialists maintain that confessing the secret is a nonnegotiable first step toward restoring trust. “Any effort to disorient your partner is a power play that will eventually hurt the relationship,” says Frank Pittman in Private Lies. “People who are lied to become dependent, anxious, delicate, and overreactive.... Dishonesty is the enemy of intimacy, and is not likely to be good for marriage. Dishonesty creates distance.”7
To Emily Brown, author of Patterns of Infidelity and Their Treatment, secrecy is “crazy-making.”8 Telling the truth, she points out, serves the critical function of precipitating a domestic crisis and creating an opportunity for honest dialogue and self-examination.
My own view is that no two situations are alike and that what is good for one couple may be bad for another. Even if you’re committed to rebuilding the relationship, there’s no one clear way to proceed.
For some couples, the truth can have adverse, even destructive, consequences. For others, it’s essential for restoring a damaged relationship. Managing the truth of your affair is not unlike managing the truth about cancer—some people recover better when they know everything; others do worse. In grappling for the best strategy, therefore, it may help to ask, “Best for whom?” What may be good for you may prove disastrous for your partner and your relationship, and vice versa.
If you decide to confess, keep in mind that your partner’s reaction will be influenced by the way he or she reads your motives. If you’re perceived as trying to respect your partner’s right to be as informed as you, your admission is likely to elicit a more positive response. If you come across as someone who merely wants to be absolved of guilt, your partner won’t be as receptive or forgiving. Your intentions can be misinterpreted, of course, so it’s a good idea to make them clear.
Some of you may want to remain silent about affairs that were one-night stands or that happened long ago, on the assumption that they no longer pose a threat to your relationship. Others may argue the opposite: If the affair were so innocuous, so deeply buried in the past, then why not reveal it? By keeping it a secret, you may be imbuing it with an importance it doesn’t deserve.
Should you disclose the affair and fail to process what it says about you and your partner, your relationship will probably not hold together over time—or will merely hold together. Restoring intimacy takes more than a confession of infidelity. Should you neither disclose the affair nor process what it says about you and your partner, you may be lulled by the apparent lack of conflict between you and think that all is well again. But nothing will have changed.
Many unfaithful partners decide to hold on to their secret while they address what’s bothering them in the relationship. That’s a solution worth considering; you can certainly confront your partner with your unhappiness without revealing the affair or making your partner go through the arduous and delicate task of learning to trust and forgive you.
However you decide to handle your secret, the idea that one solution is always better than another is, I believe, an illusion. When you do X, Y doesn’t always follow; the human heart doesn’t run by these kinds of laws. All you can do is try to make a thoughtful and judicious decision, taking into account both your motives and the impact your behavior is likely to have on your partner. In the final analysis, if an intimate reconnection is what you hope to achieve, what matters most is not that you reveal or hide your affair, but that you use its lessons to strengthen your relationship.