“Going back to my marriage feels like a prison sentence. But I can’t abandon my kids.”
“I wasn’t looking to fall in love with someone else but I did, madly. Now I can’t decide which relationship to give up.”
“I know I strayed, but I didn’t mean to hurt you, and I never stopped loving you. Can’t we move on?”
These are some of the conflicts you’re likely to struggle with now that your affair is out in the open. Clearly, they’re different from the ones your partner is facing. No matter how badly you feel, the effects of your infidelity are almost never as shattering, disorienting, or profound for you as they are for the person you deceived.
Why is this? To begin with, your sense of self has not been assaulted. It’s very likely, in fact, that the opposite is true—that the experience of having a lover has validated you. You may feel desired by two persons, whereas your partner feels loved by none. The affair may also give you a new sense of control over your world, with more power, more choices than ever before. Your spouse, in contrast, probably feels diminished, and threatened by an uncertain future.
Although your partner is suffering from a very different and significantly more debilitating sense of loss than you are, I’m sure you’re experiencing your own definition of hell. Unburdening yourself of your secret should take a huge weight off your mind and offer some temporary relief, but you’re likely to remain as conflicted as before. While part of you may be irresistibly drawn to your lover, another part may be disgusted with yourself for cheating or making your children suffer. The bitterness you thought you felt toward your partner may soften into remorse at the pain you’re inflicting. You may decide to give your relationship another chance, only to discover that your partner isn’t ready to let you off so easily. As you agonize over your options and the compromises that each entails, you may find yourself trapped in a minefield of choices—paralyzed, unable to stay or leave.
As you struggle to bring order to this chaos you call your life, you need to remind yourself that your partner is in no frame of mind to appreciate your predicament. Your conflict over leaving your lover, your grief at losing a soulmate or best friend—why should your partner care? These are your issues, and you need to grapple with them alone. To expect sympathy or understanding is only to alienate your partner further.
Although your partner may insist on an unconditional commitment, you’re probably not equipped to make any irreversible life decisions at this fragile time (we’ll deal with those decisions in the next two chapters). Your immediate task—your partner’s, too—is to identify your intense and contradictory feelings, and recognize how appropriate and normal they are at this stage of your journey. Here are the most common ones; try to identify your own:
• Relief
• Impatience
• Chronic anxiety
• Justified anger
• Absence of guilt
• Guilt over the children
• Isolation
• Hopelessness
• Paralysis
• Self-disgust
It’s usual, once the truth is out, to feel a surge of relief. Even if you don’t know where you’re headed, you’re likely to feel deliciously extricated from the complications that your lies and deceits created for you. You may even feel cleansed or sanitized. Andrea, a thirty-nine-year-old housewife, described her relief when her husband, Jeff, discovered her affair: “It had become ridiculous, juggling two lives. I couldn’t manage the deception, never mind the pressure. If I knew I was going to have sex with my boyfriend on Wednesday afternoon, I’d make love with Jeff on Tuesday night so he wouldn’t expect it again so soon. I came to dread his advances. When he finally found out, I swore off my boyfriend, and for the first time in years my life came into focus. It felt wonderful, being one person—always in one place, always where I was supposed to be.”
Marty, a married, forty-seven-year-old stockbroker, was delighted to get out of the fast lane: “I had lied so much to so many people, I didn’t know anymore who I was, and what I had said to whom. I couldn’t keep my lives apart, or separate truth from fiction. I was always scared to death of slipping up and getting caught. I’d spend the evening with my girlfriend and then race home, cursing every traffic light, my nerves on end, knowing once again I was late and that the minute I walked in the door I’d have to pass my wife’s inquisition. I was too old for this. When she finally confronted me, I was more than ready to tell the truth—I was flooded with relief.”
Confessing the secret may make you, like Marty, feel whole again, but before long your feelings are likely to become more muddled and complex.
Once the affair is disclosed, you may be eager to reach out and rebuild. It’s not just that you want to reconnect, but, more selfishly, that you want to stop feeling guilty every time you confront your partner’s pain. Your partner, however, operating under a different timetable, is likely to be outraged by your apparent efforts to minimize the damage and move on. As marriage and family counselor Dave Carder points out, betrayed partners “need to feel anger as intense as the infidel’s infatuation, anguish as intense as the infidel’s joy, retaliation as intense as the infidel’s deceit.”1
Apologetic but impatient, you now may wonder, “How long do I have to put up with my partner’s incessant, guilt-inducing verbal assaults that seem to resolve nothing and only pull the two of us further apart?”
Chris, a thirty-nine-year-old car dealer, felt proud, even exonerated, for confessing his sexual transgressions to his wife. At the urging of his parents, he became a born-again Christian and came to believe that his sins were washed away with his tears. Having forgiven himself, he expected his wife to forgive him, too, but she remained unmoved. “He feels pure—good for him,” she said. “Now everything’s dumped on me. What am I supposed to do with his deceit—rejoice?”
Shock, bitterness, rage, despair—these are your partner’s more typical responses, and you’ll only add to your frustration if you expect them to go away any time soon. There are no quick fixes, no magic words. What will heal you is what Melanie Beattie calls “the passage of experiences”2—those small, concrete acts, those cumulative moments that convince your partner that you’ve faced your own duplicity, your own unbeautiful self, and are safe to trust again (I discuss these experiences in Chapter 6). This takes time. For now, you need to hang in there with as much compassion and forbearance as you can muster, bearing witness to your partner’s emotional chaos and, through caring acts, making your partner feel secure, valued, and willing to risk loving you again.
One way you may manage your anxiety, now that the affair is out in the open, is to plunge into a flurry of activity, sometimes purposeful, other times meaningless; sometimes to build a new life, other times to avoid thinking about it.
The greater your confusion, the more likely you are to throw yourself into compulsive activities to distract yourself. Any diversion will do—watching TV, exercising, shopping online—as long as it draws you away from the real task of confronting yourself and your life.
“After I confessed to my wife and broke off with my girlfriend, I was frantic to have a completely new life,” Dave told me. “I never gave myself a chance to think, much less feel anything. In one week I quit smoking, started working out, designed a new wing off the bedroom of our house, reorganized my office, and bought a new, expensive recreational toy—a faster, sleeker boat. Change was the operative word. It took months to realize that I hadn’t even begun dealing with any of the real issues.”
These escapist tactics, as Dave discovered, may for a time quell your anxiety and delude you into thinking that you’re in control of your life and that everything is back on track. But compulsive busyness—as I pointed out in the last chapter—is nothing but a superficial and temporary fix, a distraction from deeper, more unsettling issues within yourself and your relationship that ultimately need to be addressed if you’re going to build a new life together. It’s fine to keep active, and understandable that you want to start fresh: Turning over a new leaf almost always feels great. But in time you need to sort through your feelings and deal directly with the issues that made you stray.
Even after the affair is revealed, you may feel little or no guilt over your behavior, no remorse for breaking your covenant of trust.
This apparent callousness, this seeming indifference to the pain you’re causing, is likely to have an explosive effect on your partner. “It’s the height of insensitivity, the final insult,” a patient named Glen told me, when his unfaithful wife admitted that she wasn’t sorry for having the affair. “She says she wants me back, but she doesn’t have a shred of regret for cheating on me. Is she totally blind to my feelings, or is it that I matter so little to her?”
There are five common reasons that you, like Glen’s wife, may feel no guilt or need to apologize:
1. You’ve written off the relationship and are using the affair to expedite your exit.
2. You have a characterological disorder that makes you incapable of experiencing compassion or remorse for anyone.
3. You’re angry at your partner.
4. You’re euphoric about your lover.
5. You hold certain assumptions about infidelity that justify your affair.
The first of these reasons needs no amplification. The second is beyond the scope of this book. Let’s look at the other three.
There could be many reasons for your anger. You may feel undernourished, taken for granted, used. You may feel you’ve given up too much for too little, sacrificed important goals or dreams, delayed any real personal gratification for much too long. Years of accumulated resentment may leave little room for any other emotion.
Certainly while you’re having the affair, and even after it’s revealed, you may feel more anger toward your partner than guilt. That’s because the two emotions are inversely related: The greater your anger, the less your guilt; the more venom you direct at your partner, the less you direct at yourself. The anger you experience may be a legitimate response to the way your partner has treated you, or a defense against the guilt you feel for what you’ve done (“It is human nature to hate those whom you have injured,” wrote Tacitus, almost 2,000 years ago). What makes it hard to know the difference is that anger always feels justified—it’s a basic characteristic of the emotion.
Anger often has a sanctimonious edge to it, and may make you feel entitled to go elsewhere for the love and attention you think you deserve but never got at home. That was John’s case, when he exploded at his wife after twenty-five years of marriage. “I’ve been miserable for too long and you’ve been a bitch,” he blurted out. “I quit. I’m out of here.”
John’s fury felt legitimate and liberating. It blinded him to it all—his long absences from home, his lack of involvement with the children, his failure to make his wife feel important to him—and convinced him that his affair was a just reward, a way of evening the score. If he had come out from behind his anger, he might have found that he wasn’t so innocent, nor his wife so flawed.
Transported by an intense sexual or emotional connection to your lover, removed from the mundane obligations of an enduring relationship, you may not care about or even question how your affair affects others. “I feel so supremely happy, so in sync with the world, I don’t want to analyze it,” one patient told me. “In fact, I don’t want to think about the consequences at all. I just want it to last.” Since it’s natural to attribute meaning to our feelings, the unadulterated joy you feel may signal to you that what you’re experiencing is true love at last, and leave no room for guilt. This doesn’t necessarily mean that your relationship is doomed; it may signify only that the affair has a powerful, intoxicating hold on you at this moment in time. Later on, looking back, you may realize that you were caught in a whirlwind of emotions and unable to sort through them until the dust cleared.
A third reason you may not experience guilt is that you hold certain core assumptions that justify your adulterous behavior. Some of these assumptions are likely to predate your relationship and reflect long-held ideas about love and commitment. Others may be rationalizations, conjured up to protect your self-esteem, suppress your guilt, and grant you permission to stray. To the extent that you believe them, you’re likely to feel little compunction about your behavior:
• “My affair is permissible as long as I love the other person.”
• “My affair is permissible as long as I don’t love the other person.”
• “What my partner doesn’t know won’t hurt him or her.”
• “A one-night stand, a fling, doesn’t change our relationship.”
• “I only have one life to lead and deserve to be as happy as possible. It’s okay to get some of my needs met from my lover, and the rest from my spouse.”
• “My affair has made me a happier person and therefore a better partner.”
• “My affair lets me satisfy my needs without breaking up the family. I’m doing it for the kids.”
• “People aren’t meant to be monogamous.”
• “I have no impulse control.”
• “My biological instinct is to be adulterous.”
• “All men are wolves.”
• “Every couple has its secrets.”
• “I’m entitled to keep a part of myself hidden and separate from my partner.”
• “Since my partner probably knows about my affair but isn’t confronting me, it must be okay, as long as I don’t flaunt it.”
• “I shouldn’t have to sacrifice what I need to make my partner feel secure or happy.”
• “I never promised to be perfect.”
• “If I commit myself fully to any one person, I’m bound to get hurt.”
I encourage you to look at these and other assumptions that lie behind your feelings, and ask yourself:
• Are these ideas true?
• Are these ideas useful? Do they still serve me today?
You may discover that some of them are undermining your ability to be intimate and faithful, and decide to revise or reject them. Keep in mind that with an attitude that supports infidelity, you’re more likely to stray.
A patient named Len used to tell me that all men cheat. But when he took a closer look at his assumption, he realized that he had cultivated it as a young boy in order not to hate his unfaithful father, and had continued to act on this belief throughout his adult life, weaving his way through three marriages and a succession of one-night stands. He finally came to see that he was not his father, and that this assumption, which he had cloaked himself in for over twenty years, no longer served his purposes. Believing something, he realized, doesn’t necessarily make it useful or true.
After you end the affair, you may feel guilty for abandoning your lover, and mourn this person’s loss for months or even years.
Your remorse is understandable. This new companion may have seemed like a lifeline to you, drawing you into a world of sexual intimacy and excitement that you thought was out of reach. You may have felt understood and cared for in a way you no longer dreamed was possible. Or perhaps you just had more fun and felt more alive. Above all, your lover may have changed the way you experienced yourself—bolstering your self-esteem in some deeply corrective way, and making you feel more intelligent, competent, attractive, sensual, adventuresome. In short, as Ethel Spector Person puts it in Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters, the experience of romantic love may have helped you “overcome the strictures of the self.”3 It’s natural to feel guilty when you abandon someone who gave you such a precious gift, particularly if you lured that person with promises, spoken or implied, to stay together.
A patient named John is typical in the way he wrestled with guilt over ending his affair with his thirty-five-year-old art director. “She’s given me—or rather, I’ve taken from her—the best years of her life,” he said. “She’s now five years older and her chances of meeting someone else and having a child are seriously diminished. I owe her big, and I feel like a heel for abandoning her, even if it is to go back to my family.”
Guilt is one emotion you’re likely to feel; grief is another—grief for the loss of someone who may have restored your youthful vision of yourself and given you a glimpse of a better life. This grief can strike at any time, even years later: Something you hear, see, or smell can suddenly release a deluge of feelings.
“I was standing in line at McDonald’s more than a year after I stopped seeing Dean,” Alice told me, “when I became exquisitely aware that the stranger in front of me was wearing the same aftershave lotion he used. I felt physically ill and had to rush outside for fresh air.”
“I assumed life would be simpler when I told Joan I was going back to my wife,” Burt said. “I told myself, ‘Out of sight, out of mind.’ But the more out of sight she was, the more I thought of her. I kept fighting the urge to e-mail her, to accidentally bump into her. I don’t regret returning to my family, but at times I still long for Joan.”
Your guilt at deserting your lover may infuriate your partner even more than the affair itself: What could be more insulting, more demeaning, than living with someone who cares more about a lover’s feelings than about your own? But nothing, not even your guilt, will cut your partner deeper than the way you continue to grieve your loss, even while you say you’re working to recommit. This grief may not dilute your efforts to restore trust, but they may dilute your partner’s. Ask for understanding now, and you can expect contempt.
Your partner, in turn, shouldn’t ask for assurances that you’ve emotionally detached from your lover. This is something you probably can’t give, and puts you in the position of having to lie or tell the truth and make your partner squirm. Your partner needs to recognize that your love for this person may have been real, and that any effort to discredit it will only generate resentment. You, in turn, need to remember that your partner is suffering and may attempt to devalue the lover only to restore lost self-esteem and woo you back.
Both of you should consider that what you, the unfaithful partner, have come to value so deeply is not necessarily the lover, but how the lover made you feel; that what you’re seeking is not a replacement for your partner but an alteration of your basic sense of self; and that what you need can perhaps be found with your partner, if you’re both willing to open yourselves to change. You may both have to live with the ghost of the lover, but that doesn’t mean your life together can’t be rich and fulfilling.
As a parent, you’re likely to worry about the effect your affair is having on your children, and on their feelings toward you. What could be more frightening than the prospect of losing their love and respect? In your heart, you want them to see you as a parent they can look up to, not someone who is confused or lost, not someone who has abandoned them.
When Bill imagined himself telling his sixteen-year-old son about his new friend, Heather, he was overcome with guilt. His first marriage had ended when his wife was killed in a car accident, and he had brought up John, then one year old, alone. Now, six years into his second marriage, he was faced with an impossible decision. “I’m crazy about Heather,” he told me, “but I don’t want John to lose another mother. How can I traumatize him again, now, in his adolescence? If I tear his home apart a second time, he’ll never forgive me.”
For you, as for Bill, there’s no risk-proof way to tell your children about the new person in your life. They probably won’t understand, much less have compassion for, the idea that you were unfulfilled at home, or swept away; all they’ll hear is that you’re threatening the family and the security of their lives. They may try, in their own way, to justify your behavior to themselves because they need to stay attached to you, or they may turn against you for denying them their childhood.
When Tina tried to explain why she was seeing another man, her eighteen-year-old daughter turned away in disgust. “I don’t understand why you can’t just talk to Daddy and make him realize how unhappy you are,” she said. “You tell me you hate him for being so passive, but why can’t you just go to him and say, ‘Look, I need you to do more for me—pay the bills, make dinner reservations, fix the toilet, whatever. Just take some of these jobs off my back.’ With everything we have as a family, is this issue really so important that you can’t work it out? I hate you for breaking up the family. I hate you for thinking only of yourself.”
Your guilt toward your children is likely to intensify if you were a victim of your own parent’s infidelity. As you think of throwing your kids into the same brutal crossfire, you’re bound to relive your own childhood traumas.
This was true for Frank. When he was thirteen, his father left home for another woman, and put Frank in the position of having to choose between the two households. “I hated my father for doing that to me,” he said. Thirty years later, however, Frank found himself in his father’s shoes, preparing to leave his wife for his lover, and forcing his children to choose between the two families. “Do I leave the marriage and make the kids suffer, or do I stay and deny myself?” he asked. “It’s like choosing between air and water.”
None of Frank’s solutions came pain-free, so what he did was nothing; he left neither his wife nor his lover, but simply waited for the right time to act—which, of course, never came. First he waited until his second son became a bar-mitzvah, then he waited for his daughter to graduate from high school. And so time passed. Frank never did resolve his dilemma, and he continues to feel stuck, embittered, and only peripherally involved in each of his relationships.
For you, as for Frank, there are likely to be two voices warring within you: the child, encouraging you to listen to your passions and live for the moment; and the duty-bound parent, reminding you of your greater, long-term responsibility to your family. It’s hard to know which voice to listen to. Perhaps all you can do right now is console yourself with the knowledge that nothing you do will make you totally happy or satisfy all your needs; that whatever decision you make will be tinged with regret. (I’ll help you resolve these ambivalences in Chapters 3 and 4.)
To get through this time, you may find it helpful to remind yourself that your kids will grow up, that you’ll probably have many opportunities to talk to them about what happened, and that their feelings toward you and your affair are likely to change over time. Your own understanding of what happened will change as well, and so will the way you explain it.
Once your affair is exposed, your relationship with your children is not the only one that may suffer. Your parents and many of your friends may judge you harshly and cut you off from your usual sources of emotional support.
The cruelest rejection may come from your parents. “At first my mother called me every day to tell me I was making her sick,” Barry told me. “She backed off only after I stopped taking her calls. Lately she tries to be supportive by asking me how I’m doing, but I can see she’s looking straight through me, wondering where she went wrong, and how I got so screwed up.”
If your parents are deeply religious or hold conservative values, they may treat you as a degenerate, a pariah, a family disgrace, and pressure you to stay with your partner and end the affair. You may start to wonder, “Do they care about me and my happiness, or only about abstract principles and what their friends will say?”
Some parents will blame themselves for your behavior, and turn a deaf ear to your professions of passion or pain. Domestic tranquillity—that’s what they wish for you. The last thing they care to hear about are your marital problems, or your joy in the arms of your lover.
Your closest friends may also be ill-prepared to listen to your conflicts, particularly those who know you and your partner as a couple and are anxious not to take sides. Some may have moral blinders on, or feel too threatened by the fragility of their own relationships to support your feelings or come to your defense. Others will assault you with their theories about love and commitment, when all you want is a sympathetic ear.
Tina, a fifty-four-year-old professional golfer, laughed at the idea of discussing her young lover with her family, but she thought she could share her angst with her best friend, Ginny. But Ginny was no comfort: “Get a grip on yourself!” she bellowed. “You’ve got four kids!”
Anxious to avoid the judgment of family and friends, you may keep them at arm’s length and spend all your free time with your lover and your lover’s friends. This may entangle the two of you more deeply than you want or are ready for.
It’s tempting to try to break out of your isolation and surround yourself with people who flatter your thoughts and feelings. But if you really want to look honestly at yourself, you need to speak to those who have no personal stake in your decisions—those who are firmly there for you, but who will challenge you to accept your complicity in your problems at home. Don’t forget, however, that no matter how helpful these individuals are, they know only a part of you—the part that you’ve chosen to show them or that you know yourself—and they have their own private agendas and biases. Few of them know you well enough to advise you wisely or give you the support you need.
One sensible option at this vulnerable time is to consult a therapist—someone who is likely to be neutral and therefore able to respect your feelings and help you make sense of your chaos.
It’s common at this early stage to see your relationship as an emotional death camp, with no chance of pardon or escape. You may decide to stay for many reasons—fear of being alone, guilt, the children, financial security, a sense of moral responsibility—but you’re likely to assume that love is gone forever and that your partner is incapable of meeting your needs.
You may be right, but you also may be distorting the truth in favor of your lover. That’s what Jerry did. The fifty-five-year-old engineer couldn’t praise his lover, Cindy, or fault his wife, Judy, often enough. “Cindy seems to know what I need and what I’m thinking even before I do,” he told me. “She makes me feel appreciated. She accepts me for who I am. Judy doesn’t have a clue about me, and I don’t think she’s capable of changing. I’m going to stick it out with her because of the kids, but I feel like I’m incarcerating myself.”
Jerry’s belief that his wife couldn’t support him became a self-fulfilling prophecy. He never communicated to her in ways that let her hear what he was asking for. He never gave her a chance to change. He never tested whether she could respond to his needs.
Your situation could turn out to be less bleak—but only if you don’t allow your sense of hopelessness to dictate your behavior. It would be sad if, because of the way you’re feeling now, you never let your partner try to please you.
To leave or stay, to run off with your lover or say goodbye—these critical choices are likely to leave you paralyzed with indecision, unable to move or stand still. All you know is that you can’t juggle two lives anymore—it’s too much to handle.
Joy, a thirty-four-year-old professional fund-raiser, was married seven years when a flirtatious scene at her Christmas office party got out of hand. “I stayed late that night, drinking much too much, trying to drown out my inhibitions. When Evan asked me to dance, I was knocked over by how great he felt. Before I knew it we were kissing. I never thought about the consequences because I never expected it to go anywhere, but two weeks later we met at his apartment and had sex, and the rest, as they say, is history. I never expected to fall in love, but I have, and now I don’t know what to do. My husband’s a decent person, and I’m not unhappy in our marriage, but I’m not ready to give up Evan, either. I can’t just jump back into the marriage and pretend I want to be there. I’m really in over my head.”
Henry, the fifty-year-old chairman of a publicly held company, went through the same emotional wringer. He had agreed to stay with his wife and focus on their problems, but he couldn’t keep his hands off his lover, Edie. One day, feeling lonely and confused, he asked Edie to lunch. The experience was both titillating and anxiety-provoking. “I made a fool of myself,” he admitted, “fondling her under the table, giggling like an eighteen-year-old kid. But I was so hot, I couldn’t control myself. I’m a grown man, the CEO of a major company, what the hell am I doing, running around, acting like an animal in heat? On one hand, I’m telling my wife, ‘Let’s work things out’; on the other, I’m sneaking off with Edie. And the more time I spend with her, the more confused I get.”
Part of your ambivalence, like Henry’s, may come from the fact that you were swept up in an affair without really understanding the consequences, or without consciously seeking it out, and now feel gripped by emotions you can’t control. You may be intoxicated with life in a way you haven’t been for years, and unable to extricate yourself from the excitement.
Any resolution may seem more appealing than this impossible balancing act, but nothing is clear or obvious, and every solution seems weighted with compromise. Your relationship with your spouse may not be so terrible, nor your relationship with your lover so fantastic. “If I put as much tenderness and care into my marriage as I do into my affair, would it be as good?” you may begin to wonder.
Your affair may have you soaring now, but it could slow to a crawl if the two of you move in together and have to see each other up close, in the common light of day. If you recognize each other for what you are, not what you imagine each other to be, you could find yourself shedding one unrewarding relationship for another—encumbered, this time, with alimony and visitation rights every other Sunday. Floundering like a boat that has slipped its moorings, you may want nothing more than to escape from everyone, and would gladly trade all prospects of love for a life of peace and solitude.
Trapped in your ambivalence, you can expect to find yourself bombarded with questions for which there are no obvious answers:
• “Do I still love my partner?”
• “What is love?”
• “Am I normal?”
• “Am I justified?”
• “How do I get answers?”
• “Why is this happening?”
• “How do I get out—and from which relationship?”
Love is not pure; it’s made of many complex, sometimes contradictory, feelings. While part of you says, “If only I could make a clean break from my lover and commit myself to my spouse,” another part rejoins, “If only I could run off with my lover and block out the past.”
Whatever you decide, your partner is likely to be ravaged by your attachment to another person, and to doubt that the two of you can ever love each other again. At this stage of your odyssey, both of you need to leave yourselves open to many warring emotions, without hastily drawing conclusions about the future. Human beings aren’t constructed to feel one way about anything—least of all love.
Whatever you now feel about your love life—relieved, empowered, ambivalent, trapped—you may also feel deeply ashamed of yourself for violating religious or family values that enjoined you to honor marital vows and stay the course. Having trampled on your scruples and perhaps broken your partner’s heart, you’re likely to feel that you’ve betrayed everyone who matters to you, including yourself.
Grace, married twelve years, upbraided herself for sleeping with a tennis instructor at her health club. “I was feeling so unloved in my marriage,” she told me. “My husband barely touched me. Things got to the point where if he knew I was interested in sex, he’d deliberately reject me. He always had to be in control, and I was going out of my mind with loneliness. Still, being in this illicit relationship makes me feel like a tramp. I can’t believe how easily I turned my back on fidelity, commitment, honesty—all the values I thought I believed in. I’m finally getting the love, the attention, the affirmation I so desperately need, but I’ve broken every rule in the book to get it, and sold my soul as well. I feel more loved today, but shitty about myself.”
Sometimes there’s no justification for the wretched, even diabolical way you treat your partner. “I can’t believe how awful I was to my wife while I was seeing Meg,” Joe, a thirty-two-year-old electrician, admitted:
“I had planned this baseball party for the guys I work with—we were going to hang around, have some beer and pizza, and watch the playoffs on TV. The ‘guys’ included Meg; it was no secret to them we were more than friends. I knew my wife wanted no part of any of this—she was pregnant, and she hates baseball and drinking—and I was counting on her to do what she’s done in the past: get out of the house for the weekend and stay with her sister.
“All I could think of was spending the night with Meg. But right before the party, Susan began to bleed. She called the doctor, and he arranged for her to go to the hospital for a D&C the following day. She didn’t want to burden anyone, so she offered to spend the night in a motel so she could get a good night’s sleep and I could still have my party. I agreed. I also let her drive herself to the hospital the next day.”
Joe shook his head. “I know I must look totally detestable to you. There’s no excuse for the way I behaved. I abandoned my wife when she needed me most. All I can say is that I got completely swept up in the affair and acted like a selfish idiot. I don’t think my behavior is a reflection of my true character. I just think I was lost.”
Some of you may be disgusted with yourself for trying to bring your partner down to your own level—provoking behavior as inglorious as yours to make yourself look better in your own eyes.
Sid, a twenty-six-year-old MBA student, found himself using his wife, Ingrid, to clear a path for him: “I was deliberately cruel to her, hoping she’d be just as cruel back, and I’d have a reason to leave. I wanted to implicate her, to get her hands dirty, to make her share responsibility for the breakup, so all the guilt wouldn’t fall on me. I even tried to get a friend to have an affair with her, hoping it would sully her and pull her down to my level. Then I made her see a couples therapist with me so he could do the dirty work and convince her that she should be moving out. The worst was when she was nice to me—I couldn’t bear it. When I told her I was leaving, she helped me pack my bags. I was ripping her life apart and there she was, packing my bags. Her niceness suffocated me, and I fought her off so I could breathe again.”
Sid divorced Ingrid and four years later reflected on his behavior. “I was terrible to her. She didn’t deserve my meanness. But I was young and didn’t know who I was or what I wanted, or how to make a marriage work. What I’ll always hate myself for is how I didn’t just get out when I was so unhappy, but dragged her through the mud with me.”
Guilt can be a healthy reminder that you’ve been untrue to yourself, a message to live more closely to your convictions. But when it causes you to trash yourself, you learn nothing; when it makes you write yourself off as no good, you cheat yourself of valuable self-knowledge. I suggest, therefore, that you direct your reproach not at yourself, the person, but at those specific qualities within you that you dislike or consider maladaptive, and that may have led you to treat your partner so shoddily and deceptively while your affair was going on. Once you isolate these negative attributes, you can go to work remodeling them, and open yourself to constructive change and self-forgiveness.
Among those qualities you may fault yourself for are:
• feeling so insecure, so uncertain about yourself, that you become vulnerable to the attentions of those who build you up;
• keeping your unmet needs (companionship, affection, conversation, etc.) from your partner, then going elsewhere to have them met;
• feeling entitled to have your needs met without regard for the needs of others;
• craving excitement and novelty to the point of not being able to tolerate the ordinariness, the predictability of an enduring relationship;
• ignoring or being unaware of your own personal conflicts, and blaming your unhappiness on your partner.
While you may want to explore these and other qualities that you consider unattractive in yourself, you do yourself a disservice if you focus on them exclusively and ignore your partner’s role. You have no right to blame your partner for your affair—no one makes you cheat—but you have every right to address how your partner contributed to your dissatisfaction.
Gender differences play a role in your emotional response to the affair, just as they do for your partner. As I pointed out in the last chapter, these differences are far from exact, but they add another layer to your understanding of your behavior.
Current research on extramarital attitudes and behaviors shows that women are more apt to have affairs for love and companionship,4 while men are more often content with sex alone.5 Women are likely to believe that their infidelity is justified if it’s for love; men are likely to believe their infidelity is justified if it’s not for love.6 Women are also more likely to anguish over the affair than men are.7
These findings won’t excuse you in your partner’s eyes—your insistence that you couldn’t help yourself, that you did what any man or woman would, won’t get you very far—but they may help your partner get inside your head, and spark a useful discussion about the meaning of the affair and the deficiencies in your relationship.
Women: “I finally found someone I can open up to.”
Men: “My lover and I share so much—sex, tennis, jazz.”
In general, women have affairs to experience an emotional connection that they feel is lacking in their primary relationship. They stray in search of a soulmate, someone who pays attention to their feelings and encourages meaningful conversation. Women like to talk, and they develop an intimate bond through verbal interaction. The New Yorker pokes fun at this proclivity in a cartoon of a woman soliciting a male hooker. “Oh yeah, baby, I’ll listen to you,” he says, “I’ll listen to you all night long.”8 As sex therapists like to point out, a woman’s arousal usually begins outside the bedroom; her partner engages her in an emotional (not merely physical) foreplay that enhances her feelings of warmth and security, and, in turn, feeds her sexual responsiveness. Women who stray often develop a close friendship with the affair-person before they become sexually involved. Once a physical bond develops, they continue to seek a more committed intimacy.
Men, in contrast, are more likely to have affairs that lack emotional attachment. They tend to enjoy doing active things, sexual or nonsexual, with their lovers, and to feel closer to them through nonverbal play.9 Often it’s a man’s physical attraction to another woman, not a need for friendship, that draws him into an affair, and it’s the unencumbered sexual adventure more than understanding or closeness that keeps him there. At the time of the affair men are less apt than women to be dissatisfied at home.10 In the gay population as well, men are “decidedly more promiscuous and more drawn to impersonal sex” than females, according to Robert Wright.11 (His Darwinesque explanation is that men can procreate hundreds of times each year, and women only once, so men don’t need to be as discriminating.) As the playwright Edward Albee generalizes in Three Tall Women, women stray because they’re lonely, men because they’re men.
Both men and women can use their knowledge of these gender differences as a form of damage control. If you’re a woman, for instance, you might question how directly you’ve conveyed to your partner how dissatisfied you are with your relationship, and exactly what you need to restore the intimacy that’s missing. After learning about the affair, hurt partners often lament that they weren’t ever given a chance to address their partners’ complaints.
If you’re a man, you might question why you got involved with another person, and how unhappy you were in your primary relationship at that time. What began as a superficial attraction may have catapulted into sexual passion, and then evolved into a strong emotional connection. You may end up replacing your partner, when you weren’t that dissatisfied to begin with, only later to discover that your new relationship is as conflict-ridden as your marriage ever was.
Women: “But I loved him.”
Men: “But I didn’t love her.”
Women are more likely to sanction their affair when it involves love; men, ironically, when it doesn’t. Women tend to attach themselves more deeply to their lovers, both emotionally and sexually, which is one reason that their affairs more often lead to divorce.12
In general, men believe that extramarital sex is acceptable and even condoned by society as long as it’s only a fling and no one finds out. They tend to minimize the significance of a sexual tryst, seeing it as an inconsequential event, an accident, a momentary release.13
Women: “My affair has complicated my life.”
Men: “My affair has given me life.”
In general, women tend to experience more conflict over their sexual transgressions than men, and are less likely to believe their affairs are justified, under any circumstances.14 As I pointed out earlier, a woman, once involved, is more likely to get emotionally entangled with her lover and to have difficulty separating sex from love. In a recent study of unfaithful wives, Carol Botwin found that women as a rule are not as liberated by affairs as men; they anguish more, experience more guilt, become more dissatisfied with their marriages, and feel more dependent on their lovers.15
Women who stray also suffer more from spending time away from their children. As the primary caretakers, they are more often the ones to stash the children away with babysitters or day-care providers while they rendezvous with their lovers—a deception that can make them feel doubly illicit. Women who defy traditional feminine virtues—“self-denial, self-sacrifice, self-effacement, self-restraint”16—are more likely to feel guilty when they act independently and put their own needs first, for whatever reason.
Men seem to be better equipped to separate their affairs from the main currents of their lives. Because they tend to spend less time thinking about people17 and reminiscing about important moments in their relationships,18 their affairs are often less central to them, and preoccupy them less.19 Their ability to enjoy the nonintimate or anonymous aspects of their sexual relationships more than women partially explains their greater infatuation with X-rated movies; just as men are more easily aroused in a vacuum—by the simple sight and novelty of visual images—so they’re better able to enjoy sexual stimulation with an anonymous lover, without the emotional complications they often dread. In a recent, nationwide survey of sexual behavior, 54 percent of men reported having erotic thoughts at least once a day, as compared to only 19 percent of women.20
If you’re a woman who is having an affair, you’ve probably invested a great deal of time thinking about your lover. But it may be—be prepared to hate hearing this—that this investment has led you to attribute more love and specialness to your illicit relationship than it warrants. If, like many women, you have difficulty justifying an affair that’s purely sexual, your guilt may lead you to exaggerate your dissatisfaction at home and magnify your love for your lover.
If you’re a man who is having an affair, you may trick yourself into believing you can keep sexual relationships simple. Unfortunately for you, your lover may react in ways typical of her sex, and come to demand more intimacy and commitment, thereby changing the rules of your game. Should this happen, say goodbye to the freedom and enhancement the affair once gave you.
In trying to isolate specific differences between unfaithful men and women, I run the risk of magnifying, even reifying them. As we saw in the last chapter, these gender-linked differences are often blurred, and may even be reversed. There are men, certainly, who search outside marriage for female friends, not just playmates. And if Carol Botwin is correct in Tempted Women21 and Dalma Heyn in The Erotic Silence of the American Wife,22 there’s a new breed of woman—Botwin calls them “the groundbreakers”23—who aggressively seeks out lovers for sex, and embraces the experience relatively guilt-free.
What I assume most of you share (or you wouldn’t be reading this book) is the very human goal of sorting through the confusion and wanting to do what’s best for yourself, while being reasonably fair to others. It helps to take into account your acquired or innate reactions as men and women, but there’s always much more to the picture than mere gender response.
So far, you and your partner have taken the first step of giving a name to your feelings in the wake of the affair. You’re now ready for the next: making a sound, healthy, informed decision about your future together. Let’s begin by looking more closely at your ideas about love, and at how they can mislead you into submitting to an unrewarding relationship or tossing out a perfectly viable one.