In the last chapter, I encouraged you to look at different concepts of love before making any irrevocable decisions about your future. Now I encourage you to confront your doubts and fears about recommitting so that they don’t overwhelm you and push you blindly in a direction you’ll later regret.
It’s best to wrestle with these concerns by yourself. In the presence of your partner, you’re more likely to defend your position than to challenge it or own up to the errors in your thinking. It’s also virtually impossible to be honest with yourself when you’re censoring your thoughts or couching them in euphemistic language to protect your partner’s feelings. You need to see your ambivalence for what it is, not honey-coat it, or water it down.
Let’s look at ten common concerns that men and women struggle with after an affair. Some are relevant to hurt partners, some to unfaithful partners. Most of them apply to both of you.
1. “Once there’s been so much damage, can we ever get back together?”
2. “Now that you’ve been unfaithful, how can I trust that you won’t stray again?”
3. “Can both of us change in ways that matter? Are we basically incompatible?”
4. “Yes, you’re making some changes to save our relationship, but are they permanent or sincere?”
5. “Do you want me, or just the package (financial security, an intact home, shared parenting)?”
6. “Are my reasons for staying good enough?”
7. “Should we stay together for the children?”
8. “Doing what you did, you couldn’t possibly love me, so what’s the point of going on?”
9. “Isn’t it wrong for me to be too affectionate, to spend too much time with you, before I’m positive I want to recommit?”
10. “Won’t I be able to make a better decision about my lover if we spend more time together?”
Taking a hard, close look at each of these concerns should help you make a more informed, considered, self-enhancing decision about separating or staying together.
In the aftermath of the affair, it’s normal to assume that love, once lost, can never be recaptured; that trust, once gone, can never be regained. What I ask you to do, however, is to judge your life together not by how you feel today but by how you’ve felt about it in the past. Look back. Were you ever happy or intimate? Can you remember what drew you to each other when you were courting? A hopeful prognosis for the future often hinges on the strength of those early years. If you were off to a strong beginning—meaning that you both tried to manage conflict constructively; that you shared loving feelings and a common vision of the future; that you had mutually satisfying sex and enjoyed a reasonable number of fulfilling activities together—there may be more hope for your relationship than you think. If you can find little to build on, however—if the relationship rarely worked for you or was seldom good—then it may not be salvageable today.
One danger in looking back on your life together is that you’ll be unfair to your memories, and see them through a veil of bitterness. Be careful not to distort the past to satisfy the present. Very often unfaithful partners selectively remember the bad times to justify their affairs, and hurt partners selectively recall the good times to redeem themselves and to prove that “I wasn’t as bad a partner as you’re making me out to be, and our relationship wasn’t as awful as you make it sound.”
Try to acknowledge what was honestly good and what was genuinely bad, and try not to look through revisionist glasses. This is the time when couples make sweeping, simplistic, self-serving statements about their relationship. Those who want to leave remember: “We got married because she was pregnant,” or “I always came last, after the dog and the baby.” Those who want to work it out recall: “We were so excited when the baby came,” or “We had great times together.” If you rewrite history to justify your feelings today, you’ll get nothing from this exercise.
Prophecies can be self-fulfilling. The assumption that your relationship can’t be put back together, that nothing will help, may, in itself, defeat you. If you’ve given up on your partner, you need to be aware of this, and question whether you’re creating a sense of hopelessness that’s unjustified or premature. The happiness you shared is no guarantee of future joy—those honeymoon years may not survive a world of mortgages and dirty diapers. But the forecast for your relationship is brighter if you were happy once.
If you’ve been betrayed, you’re likely to worry that you can’t ever trust your partner or feel secure in your relationship again. Are these worries justified? Obviously, there’s no foolproof formula for evaluating your risk, but there are five indicators that offer clues.
A professed belief in monogamy guarantees little, but if your partner can’t even give you the verbal assurances you need, you have less reason for trust.
When one of my patients asked her husband why he had cheated on her, he explained, “I didn’t expect you to find out about it.” “According to your logic,” she fumed, “if you didn’t think you’d be caught, there’d be no reason not to cheat. Is your conscience ruled only by the risk of punishment?” Her husband’s assumption that any behavior was permissible as long as it wasn’t discovered fueled her doubts that he’d ever stay faithful to her. And she was right. Less than two weeks later she found him kissing one of his old girlfriends over Kir Royals at a local lounge.
Back in Chapter 2, we looked at a list of assumptions that justify or lie behind a partner’s infidelities.
I encourage you to discuss this list as a way of learning about your partner’s beliefs and making educated guesses about his or her future behavior. Among the most common ones:
• “What my partner doesn’t know won’t hurt.”
• “I only have one life to lead, and I deserve to be as happy as possible.”
• “The 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.”
• “I never promised to be perfect.”
• “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.”
Drawing from this list, a hurt partner named Leah asked her husband, “Do you still believe men are biologically programmed to be adulterous?”
“No,” he said, “but sometimes people get swept away by emotions they can’t control.”
“What you’re saying,” she shot back, “is that you’re not willing to be accountable for your behavior. So how can I trust you again? What I need you to tell me is, ‘I’m not sure, but I turn down temptations every day. I eat salads when I crave hot fudge sundaes, I force myself to go to the health club when I’m feeling dead tired, I discipline myself in a hundred ways to keep myself healthy, and I can do the same for us.’ If you’re so unsure about controlling your impulses, why should I believe you won’t cheat on me again?”
Having been so deeply hurt, you’re probably wary of trusting your partner again too quickly. After all, there’s no way to know you’re not being conned; language can be used to hide the truth as well as to convey it. I suggest, however, that instead of writing off your partner’s words as lies, you store them away and test them in the coming months against his or her behavior. If you’re serious about trying to get back together, why not give your partner a chance to come through?
Even if your partner’s attitudes on monogamy seem substantially different from yours, don’t give up hope. The problem could be not that your views are incompatible, but that your partner is temporarily on the defensive and unwilling to give up ground.
When Tom’s wife called him depraved for sleeping with their eighteen-year-old babysitter, he shouted back, “There are seven billion people in this world, all trying to make sense of their lives; who are you to judge me?” He didn’t really believe he was justified, but he felt his integrity was under assault and rushed to protect it. He and his wife spent days verbally clawing at each other, as you and your partner may do, but their views over time turned out to be less polarized than they seemed. Tom agreed to see a couples therapist with his wife to work out his discontentment.
A partner with a history of duplicity is more likely to lie and deceive again than someone who has strayed only once.
When Marilyn looked back over her twelve years with Marshall, she saw that he had been double-faced from day one. While they were engaged, she had called an unfamiliar number on his BlackBerry and found herself speaking to a woman he was still dating. Shortly after Marilyn gave birth to their first child, her husband left the hospital for four hours—to bring back pizza, he said. A week later she got a call from a nearby motel, asking if she had left a pair of earrings in their room.
Marshall’s pattern of lying extended beyond his sexual behavior. He told Marilyn that he had gone to college at Amherst (it turned out to be the University of Massachusetts); that he was Spanish (he was Puerto Rican); that his father was a doctor (he was a lab technician). Lying was a way of life for him, a deeply ingrained pattern that defined how he related to others. When Marilyn finally confronted him about his latest affair, he admitted it, but promised that he was a new man and would never stray again. Marilyn looked back over their life together and told him to pack his bags.
I’m not suggesting that a single affair is more forgivable than seventeen, or that having only one means it won’t happen again. However, a partner with a long record of lies and deceptions is more likely to have difficulty breaking this pattern than someone who has strayed only once.
Partners who are aware of their needs and can negotiate them in a spirit of reciprocity and compromise are more likely to stay at home and work through their issues. Partners who are unaware of their needs but expect you to intuit them, or who keep them bottled up inside for fear of creating conflict, are likely to let their unhappiness fester and grow. Holding you responsible for their own feelings of alienation, they go in search of satisfaction in another person’s bed.
Some partners, of course, just lack communication skills and have no idea how to reveal themselves, having never done so before. Life may have taught them to cover up their feelings, avoid intimate conversation, and keep their needs to themselves. At this point, what should matter more to you than your partner’s silences, therefore, is your partner’s ability to see them for what they are—a breeding ground for discontent—and to work with you to become more candid and direct.
It’s not your job alone to break through the silences, but you can help by encouraging your partner to open up to you and by creating a climate of tolerance and acceptance for what your partner has to say. Ask your partner not to protect your feelings, but to trust you with the truth as he or she experiences it. If you both learn to be more honest with each other and to speak more forthrightly about your needs, you’ll develop a mechanism for resolving your problems within the context of your relationship and reduce the chances that one of you will stray.
A forty-four-year-old financial advisor named Sam felt seriously mistreated by his much younger wife, but rather than admit it and risk a confrontation, he repressed his anger and sought out the companionship of a lover. The affair acted as a catalyst, giving him the courage to speak up. Sitting with his wife in my office, he unleashed the rage that had been caged within him for years. “I resent the way you’re always making fun of my paunch and my bald spot,” he fumed. “I resent the way you don’t even look up from your magazines when I come home at night. I resent the way you dictate how I should spend my money, though I make more than enough to support us both.”
Sam’s wife sat there, speechless, shocked. When he finally finished she took a deep breath and said, “Okay. It’s good to hear you complain, to know what you’re thinking and feeling. I never realized how much these things troubled you. I can work on correcting them—and I will.”
Partners who can’t get beyond their own needs and appreciate yours are more likely to cheat again. It makes sense, therefore, to ask yourself whether your partner can:
• see you as a separate person, someone other than an extension of himself or herself;
• appreciate what you’ve been put through, and the emotional damage the affair has caused;
• feel compassion and remorse for your pain;
• listen to your point of view, even if it differs from his or her own.
If your answer to most of these questions is no, you need to ask yourself not “Would my partner stray again?” but “Why wouldn’t my partner stray again?”
Unless your partner is willing to explore why the affair happened and accept a fair share of responsibility for it, your hopes for a committed relationship are likely to be built on sand.
“Kevin had an affair six years ago, but to this day he refuses to talk about it with me,” a forty-seven-year-old decorator complained to me. “I know almost none of the details, but it sits between us. I feel its presence. I don’t believe he’s cheating on me anymore, but I have no security about tomorrow, because I have no understanding of where I went wrong, or how, or whether, he’s changed. And I doubt he does, either.”
When nothing is learned and nothing changes, the problem remains, and so does the temptation to stray.
This section is written for hurt partners, but there’s a message for unfaithful partners as well: If you want to explore why the affair happened and what caused you to stray; if you’re genuinely sorry for the harm you’ve caused and are serious about making amends, now is the time to come forward and say so, without acrimony or prevarication. Save your counter-accusations and self-serving rationalizations for later, when you have more perspective on them; right now, they’ll only make your partner question the sincerity of your commitment to change. Only when you show the inner strength to face your imperfections and accept your complicity will your partner feel secure enough to invest in a future with you.
Assumptions take on a reality of their own. If you believe your partner is wrong for you and can’t change, you’re likely to write the relationship off and start looking elsewhere. But if you treat your belief as merely that—a subjective reality that may or may not be true—you can give your partner a chance to prove you wrong.
To test the truth of your assumptions, tell your partner, face to face or in writing, exactly what changes you need to feel more loved, respected, and cared for. Try to express yourself in a noncombative, noncoercive way—no threats, no ultimatums. Try also to couch your requests in terms that are positive, not negative; concrete, not global. Saying “You never make me feel important to you” doesn’t communicate what you need as clearly as “You can make me feel more important to you by coming home for dinner most nights, planning fun things for us to do on weekends, and initiating sex.”
Among the requests I hear most frequently:
• “Control your temper better. Tell me what’s bothering you without sarcasm.”
• “Stop drinking.”
• “Speak up for what you want.”
• “Do things with me that I want to do, even if you don’t.”
• “Praise me more often. Tell me what you like and love about me.”
• “Show more affection.”
• “Get more involved in raising the kids (pick them up at soccer practice, read them a bedtime story).”
• “Tell me what’s going on in your life.”
• “Show an interest in what’s going on in my life.”
• “Don’t take it personally when I want to spend time alone.”
• “Worry less about the future and focus more on today.”
To make sure you know exactly what your partner wants, I recommend a commonly used communication exercise called mirroring or open heart listening. Partner A tells Partner B what’s bothering him or her and suggests changes for Partner B to make. Then Partner B paraphrases what has been said until Partner A feels sufficiently understood. The roles are then reversed.
Try to listen carefully and nondefensively to the changes your partner wants from you. To decide whether they’re fair and attainable for you, ask yourself:
• “What do these requests reveal about me—about what’s likable and dislikable about me?”
• “Am I capable of doing what my partner wants?”
• “Am I willing to try?”
• “Will these changes enhance me as a person or compromise my integrity; will they lead to personal growth or threaten my well-being?”
• “Have I heard these complaints from others, recently or in the past?”
• “Did my parents or other childhood models behave in ways that I’m now being asked to correct in myself? Am I replicating the very same behaviors I find reprehensible in others?”
Your first response to your partner’s requests may be, “You’re asking me to become someone totally different from who I am.” And you may be right. Partners often say, “If only you would just …” and then ask for the one quality that’s totally uncharacteristic of you. At this unmoored time, however, even the most modest request may seem unreasonable. If you’re locked in a power struggle, you won’t want to give up an inch of ground without a fight. It may be, though, that your partner is asking for small changes that won’t compromise you, but will make a world of difference in the way you experience each other.
If you’ve heard your partner’s complaints before—from old lovers, family, friends—you may be coming face to face with something unbeautiful about yourself that restricts your ability to relate more intimately to others and that needs to change if you’re ever going to sustain a mature relationship. It just may be—and this is a bitter pill to swallow—that the changes your partner is asking of you would make you a more likable human being.
At the same time, you shouldn’t automatically assume that you’re the only one who needs to change. If you’re depressed, or desperate to get your partner back, be on guard against the temptation to agree to the impossible, or much too much. (One woman told her husband she expected him to do 90 percent of the work in the relationship, and he was so lacking in entitlement, so self-sacrificing, so frightened of losing her, that he said, “Fine, I’ll do that.”)
Keep in mind that your partner may be finding fault with you as a way to make sense of, or to avoid taking responsibility for, his or her own unhappiness. This should be evident when:
• your partner asks you to change for the same reasons that originally drew the two of you together (for example, your valued spontaneity is now dismissed as irresponsibility);
• your partner blames you for qualities that he or she lacks but unconsciously envies (for example, your self-effacing partner resents your ability to do things for yourself);
• your partner attempts to degrade or subjugate you;
• your partner’s requests are excessive and reflect inordinate needs. (One partner told his wife, “I’m king in this community, I’m king in my company, and I expect to be king in our home.” Once, when she asked him to remove his muddy sneakers before coming into the kitchen, he bristled and said, “Never tell me what to do in my own house.”)
The same caveats apply to you. When you are the one requesting changes, you should examine the source of your discontent and not automatically assume that your partner is the problem. Before you roll out your easy list of grievances, or walk away if your partner fails to address them, you need to turn inward and question the legitimacy of your complaints. I encourage you to ask yourself:
• “Am I demanding more than my partner, or anyone, can give?”
• “Am I blaming my partner for making me feel inadequate, unloved, or insecure, when this is the way I’ve always felt about myself?”
• “Does it follow that because I’m unhappy, my partner has let me down?”
• “How much of my dissatisfaction is due to me—my unrealistic expectations, my unresolved conflicts, my excessive needs, my distorted perception of my partner and our interactions?”
People are often experts in how their partners need to change, but have few insights into changes they themselves need to make. Jay, a forty-seven-year-old businessman, is a case in point. “I can’t afford my wife [Joan],” he kvetched. “Her tastes are too rich, and she makes me feel small.” Convinced that he could never satisfy her, he went off with a woman half his age who asked nothing of him. To prove his generosity, he lavished her with extravagant gifts.
While Jay was debating whether to return to his wife, he handed her a list of twenty requests that began: “Show more appreciation when I give you a present, and don’t make me feel I can’t take care of you.”
Joan was baffled. She had always thought of her husband as a financial success, and felt fortunate to share such an indulgent lifestyle with him. “When we were in Hong Kong, you went into the most expensive store and tried on a South Sea pearl necklace that cost $100,000,” Jay reminded her. “You never said anything, but I knew you expected me to buy it for you. Then when we got home I wanted you to buy an Audi, but it wasn’t good enough, you had to have a Lexus. You made me feel cheap.”
Joan listened in disbelief. She had tried on the necklace for a lark, she was sure. As for the cars, hadn’t he liked them both and told her to buy either one?
What Jay couldn’t see was that he was blaming Joan for his own feelings of inadequacy—feelings that began when his father ignored him as a child, and deepened as he trailed behind his father in the family business. While there were things Joan could say to make Jay feel more successful and secure—she could thank him more enthusiastically for his gifts, and not return them, as she sometimes did—his dissatisfaction with the marriage said as much about him as it did about her. She alone could never heal his injured sense of self.
There are no simple answers to the questions, “Should I change to satisfy my partner?” or “Should my partner change to satisfy me?” What you’re asking of each other could be unreasonable and self-serving, or it could be the catalyst you both need to transcend your old selves and open the way to a more profound and lasting relationship.
You may be tempted to escape the tedium and discomfort of so much self-scrutiny by exiting your relationship and attaching to someone new. But if you don’t examine the issues that led to the affair, or accept a fair share of responsibility for your dissatisfaction, you may forfeit an opportunity for growth, as a person and as a partner.
It often happens that your partner suddenly, and completely voluntarily, makes the changes you’ve been pleading or silently hoping for. An overweight partner may hire a personal trainer, say, or an absent father may make time for the kids.
These changes may seem promising at first, but you’re soon likely to question how heartfelt or lasting they are. You may even feel irked. “Why,” you wonder, “did it take an affair and the threat of separation to get my partner to do what I’ve been clamoring for all these years?”
The changes may also frighten you because they seduce you into trusting someone who may let you down again. As the hurt partner, you’re likely to ask yourself, “Am I being manipulated? Once I’ve committed myself to you again, will you assume that all is fine and revert to your old ways?” As the unfaithful partner, you’re likely to worry, “Are you changing just to lure me back and trick me into giving up my friend? Once I return, will you become complacent again and leave me wishing I had left for good?”
Should your partner refuse to change in ways that are essential to you, or fail to keep promises, it may be wise to pack up and move on. But if you see that an effort is being made, you may want to put your skepticism on hold, lower your barrier of distrust, and give your partner an honest chance to come through. Your partner can’t step into your life unless you open the door.
Your wish to be wanted for yourself is probably greater than ever now, and so is your mistrust of your partner’s motives. Should your partner want to recommit, you’re likely to assume that it’s not because of you, but because of a set of favorable circumstances that only tangentially include you. This assumption may not be conscious or correct, but it will strongly color your decision to stay in the relationship.
“Why should I take my husband back?” a patient named Gail asked me. “He’s afraid of losing the kids, the lawn, the golden retriever, the fifty-four-inch TV. Who knows? Maybe he’s learned that single life isn’t so hot and wants someone to pick up his shirts at the laundry. I’m not sure I’m even part of the picture.”
Jeff, an unfaithful partner, also doubted his importance to his spouse. “Judy wants me back because I pay her Visa bills, and she wants kids,” he complained. “But it’s not me she loves. Any man would do.”
It’s normal to wonder what role you play in your partner’s decision to recommit, and to seriously consider separating if all you seem to be appreciated for are mortgage payments or meals. But if you expect to be loved only for yourself, and feel cheap and compromised when you’re not, you have unrealistic expectations about what holds couples together.
Even when you were courting, your partner was probably drawn not totally to you, but to an idealized portrait of you, and to your ability to enhance his or her self-image. Financial and emotional security, companionship, the comfort and familiarity of home, support in times of sickness or in old age—these are all elements of any lasting relationship. All are incentives to remain together and satisfy needs as basic and deep as love itself. If you’re happy at home, you won’t mind being valued for what you bring to the relationship, beyond yourself; in fact, you may even feel enhanced to know you’re satisfying your partner in so many different ways. If you’re not happy, however, you’re likely to think your partner is loving you for the wrong reasons, and feel used and unappreciated.1
It may be painful to admit, but after the affair you both may prefer the package to each other. There’s no way, though, to assign percentages to the factors drawing you together. Should you work to reestablish an intimate connection, you’re likely to see in time that your lives are entwined in a thousand different ways and that it’s neither possible nor preferable to isolate this person you call yourself from the package that comes with you.
You may worry that you are staying for the wrong reasons, too. And you may be right.
“I’m here because I’m Catholic, period,” one patient conceded. “I made a commitment that was meant to be forever. And yet I feel so miserable, I have to wonder what I’m doing.”
“No one in my family’s ever gotten divorced,” another patient told me, “and I wouldn’t have any idea where to begin. But I’m terrified of staying in a marriage as debilitating as the one my parents had.”
If you’re sticking around only out of guilt, fear, or a sense of duty, you may want to rethink your decision, or prepare yourself for a life of self-imposed incarceration: you the prisoner, and you the keeper of the keys.
Let’s look at some of these questionable reasons for staying.
If you’re staying with your partner because you believe you can’t make it on your own, financially or emotionally, stop and ask yourself, “Am I being fair to myself? Am I underestimating my capacity to function, to support myself, to create a fulfilling life for myself outside this relationship?” You may be afraid to be alone but discover, when you examine your life more objectively, that you spent time by yourself before and did just fine; or that you didn’t do fine, but you were younger, less resourceful, less solvent, and more encumbered than you are now.
You may perceive yourself as financially dependent on your partner, but underestimate your qualifications or wherewithal to get a job. Have you had one before? Are you exaggerating how safe and protected, how well taken care of, you’ve been with your partner? One woman, who believed she was unable to survive solo, realized that her husband, the great provider, had gambled away most of their life savings, and it was she who had kept the bankers from foreclosing on their home.
It’s important to ask yourself what is it about being without a partner that frightens you. Often what makes the idea scary or depressing is the meaning you give it—that you’re not good enough to attract someone else, that there’s something basically unlovable about you. What upsets you may be less the reality of living alone than your negative assumptions about it. If you’re honest with yourself, you may realize that you’ve been focusing on how lonely you might be outside the relationship, and ignoring how lonely you are inside a relationship that’s abusive or depriving.
Though your marriage contract has been violated, your religion may still exhort you to regard marriage as sacred, divorce as sinful, and forgiveness as divine.
Religious doctrine can give meaning to life as a source of moral certainty, spiritual fulfillment, and consolation.2 What current research on commitment indicates, however, is that your chances of improving the quality of your relationship are better when your religious beliefs reinforce a deeply felt desire to recommit, than when they act as constraints, imposed from above.3 When religious dogma is your only reason for staying, you may end up satisfying your faith, but not yourself, or your partner.
The thought of separating may be more than you can handle. “I take the iPad, my husband takes the laptop?” one of my patients asked herself, as she imagined them dividing their possessions. “It’s too much for me to deal with right now.” And yet, when she pictured herself living with her well-founded suspicions, she questioned which was worse, the trauma of separating or the reality of living in a damaged relationship for the rest of her life. “One is brief, the other lasts a lifetime,” she said, shortly before contacting a lawyer.
Some of you may worry that your partner will be shattered if you leave. This concern may reveal a healthy desire to rebuild your relationship, but it may also cover up your fear of separating, your qualms about being on your own, your need to be needed, your hesitancy to pursue a life that works for you.
If all you’re doing is sacrificing yourself, it’s likely that your spouse would prefer to be free of you and have the chance to meet someone who genuinely wants to share a life with him or her. When you’re not committed in a meaningful way, you can’t do much to restore or nourish your partner’s sense of self, and your partner is likely to be better off finding support somewhere else.
Parents agonize about the impact that their divorce and the splintering of their family will have on their children. And so they should.
Though findings depend on a child’s age, sex, and level of psychological adjustment at the time of the divorce,4 most studies confirm that children from divorced families fare worse as a group than children from intact families, at least during the first two years after the separation, in areas of scholastic achievement, conduct, psychological adjustment, self-esteem, and social competence.5
It seems equally clear, however, that what most determines a child’s well-being is less the presence of both parents in the same household than the level of interparental conflict to which the child is exposed—before, during, and after the divorce. It appears better for children to be in a divorced family in which there are low levels of conflict than to be in an intact family in which there are high levels of conflict.6
In her study of ninety-eight divorced families, sociologist Connie Ahrons found that both men and women believed that staying together for the children was a mistake, that they should have separated earlier, and that their children “were better off in an honest and well-functioning household, even if it were a household that had experienced divorce.”7 Of course, people tend to spin rationales to justify their behavior; if these couples had decided to stay together and work things out, they might have drawn different conclusions.
No one would encourage you to split up capriciously, without trying to resolve your conflicts first. However, if you’re staying together only for the sake of the children—if you’re simply treading water in an embittered, spiritless marriage out of guilt, fear, or obligation—then, in the long run, you may not be doing your children a favor. On the contrary, you risk providing a regrettable model of love for them, one that you wouldn’t want them to replicate in their own adult lives. Moreover, if you’re unfulfilled in your marriage and become excessively self-absorbed and depressed, your children are likely to suffer from your emotional withdrawal.
If you decide to separate or divorce, the physical distance between you and your children may be less damaging to them than the emotional distance between you and your children. You are family, whether you share the same household or not, and your children’s psychological adjustment hinges more on your emotional availability than on your physical proximity alone. If you leave home, or see your children only part-time, you should make every effort to maintain a caring involvement with them. As Joan Kelly concludes in her review of research on post-divorce adjustment, children who “begin the divorce experience in good psychological shape, with close or loving relationships with both parents,” are likely to maintain their adjustment “by continuing their relationships with both parents on a meaningful basis.”8
Your decision to leave may be less crucial to your children’s adjustment than your willingness to develop a “parenting partnership” with your ex-spouse.9 Kelly found that children who were positively adjusted before the separation were likely to maintain a similar level of adjustment after the divorce if their parents avoided direct, aggressive expressions of their conflict in front of them. Children did not become more depressed or demonstrate more deviant behavior unless “a parent asked them to carry messages, asked intrusive questions about the other parent, or created in the child a need to hide information or feelings about the other parent.”10 In other words, children managed to survive relatively unscathed unless they felt caught in the middle of the conflict.
As you consider your options, remember that your choices are not just to be unhappily married or happily divorced, but also to keep a worthy marriage intact by working out your differences and dissatisfactions. It should come as no surprise that most children, given the choice, would want their families to stay together and get along. If in your own mind there are enough good reasons to recommit, you may not only preserve the nuclear family for your children, but you may also teach them a valuable life lesson: that people who at one time hurt and even hate each other can learn to love each other again; that people can separate and then return; that interpersonal conflicts can be successfully resolved; and that a crisis in intimacy can lead to meaningful change and a stronger connection.
Convinced that your partner could never sleep with someone else and still love you, or ever love you again, you may succumb to despair or indignation, and give up on a relationship that in your heart you’d like to save.
Some of you may turn your pain inward with thoughts such as, “I’m a loser,” “I can’t compete,” and “I’m unlovable,” and write your relationship off as a terrible joke. Others among you may turn your pain outward and strike back preemptively, abandoning the person who abandoned you. The fact that your partner seems to have more choices than you, to have less to lose if the relationship fails, may only increase your wish to get the upper hand. Your anger is likely to feel empowering, and you may be reluctant to let it go, though it may simply mask feelings of self-deprecation, neediness, jealousy, or disillusionment.
It’s natural to want to turn your back on someone who hurt or replaced you, and to proclaim that you’re better off on your own—who among us, after all, wouldn’t want to believe that this person is disposable? I urge you, however, not to make an irreversible life decision while you’re feeling so bruised. Your assumption that your partner doesn’t love you, or never did, may not be true. There may be reasons the affair happened that have little or nothing to do with you or with your life together. Your partner may feel more humbled and contrite than he or she is willing to admit, and want to work with you to restore the relationship, if you can be open to that possibility.
“I was about to leave my husband for straying once too often,” a patient named Betty told me. “I thought, ‘What’s love, if it doesn’t translate into loving behavior?’ But he came to see, and made me see as well, that what was drawing him to other women wasn’t his unhappiness with me, or his love for them, but his fear of intimacy with anyone—his worry that if he let anyone know him, he’d be seen through as a fraud. When I understood this, I felt less personally rejected and tried to be patient while he worked through his issues with his therapist. It was a beginning.”
If you’re sunk in depression, try to go beyond emotional self-flagellation or obsessive focus on yourself as victim, and look outward at what the affair tells you about your partner’s damaged self. If you’re feeling indignant, try to risk showing the soft underbelly of your anger—the fear, the hurt, the humiliation that lie beneath it. However you feel, depressed or enraged, you need to talk out your pain in a way that allows your partner to be there for you—and allows you to find out whether this person cares enough to listen and is big enough to take responsibility for his or her own share of the problem.
Some of you may think you should keep your distance from your partner and not be too loving until you know for certain whether you want to get back together. The problem with this strategy is that it’s virtually guaranteed to drive a deeper wedge between you. After all, how can you expect to develop more positive feelings toward someone if you refuse to relate to that person in a more positive way?
When Bob started his affair with Laura, he assumed it was wrong to continue living with his wife, Susan, so he found an apartment and moved out. Unsure of where either relationship was heading, he agreed to meet with Susan once a week to keep their connection alive and negotiate practical matters such as taking the dog to the vet, visiting sick relatives, and paying household bills.
Bob avoided his wife sexually and withheld signs of affection from her (calling her on her birthday, wishing her good luck on the first day of her new job), even when he was feeling loving. “It’s the respectable thing to do,” he insisted, “as long as I’m involved with someone else.”
Bob wasn’t mad at Susan or mad for Laura, but his life centered around Laura now, and she became his sole source of companionship, as friend and sexual partner. “I suppose that would have been it for Susan and me,” Bob admitted later, “but she pleaded with me not to pull away completely, and I was happy not to. I’d go home and she’d have my favorite dinner waiting for me, and then we’d take in a movie with our best friends. Or we’d sit in the living room the way we used to, sipping hot chocolate, sprawled out on our huge couch with our books. At first it felt incredibly awkward. Even weird. But gradually I realized how much I missed her. It brought back our happy times together. It helped me make a decision to stay.”
You, the hurt partner, are likely to insist on some heavy talks about the meaning of the affair, and you, the unfaithful partner, are going to need to make yourself available to them to demonstrate that you care about the agony you’ve caused and are willing to change. Right now, however, the two of you need more than painful confrontations to get back on track, so I encourage you to put them aside from time to time and give your relationship a chance to breathe. It helps to do things that once gave you both pleasure.
A friend told me that after a marathon couples therapy session, she and her husband went off to have Chinese food together. “We were brain dead from fighting all evening,” she told me. “All we did was share egg rolls and laugh at how we must look to the therapist, but it was one of the nicest, most intimate times we’d had for months.”
If there are moments when either of you feels loving and wants to show physical affection, I suggest you make yourself clear and let your spouse decide whether your advances are appreciated. Although you may not be living together, you don’t have to be separated emotionally, or even sexually, as long as you’re both honestly trying to work through your ambivalence, and your partner doesn’t think that you’re more committed than you are.
I realize how incredibly scary it must be to you, the hurt partner, to make yourself vulnerable, only to risk having your feelings trampled on again. If your partner’s sexual advances seem to threaten or violate you, you need, of course, to honor these feelings and keep your distance. But you still may be able to enjoy, and even nourish, displays of physical or verbal affection, separate from sex. You’ll probably be more comfortable with this if, at other times, your partner is willing to confront the more stressful issues that lie between you.
Though your interactions are likely to be exquisitely self-conscious right now, avoiding each other will only build higher walls between you. You may assume that your partner doesn’t want anything to do with you until you overcome your ambivalence, but you may be wrong. The pressure you put on yourself to feel absolutely certain before you share quality time may be self-induced, not something your partner requires or even expects of you.
When you insist that you’re spending every free moment with your lover only to find out where the relationship is going, you may be doing nothing more than putting a respectable face on lust. But you also may be genuinely confused about the intensity of your feelings and looking for a strategy to resolve your ambivalence about recommitting.
The problem with this lopsided approach is that you’re likely to get more swept up in the momentum of the affair and learn little or nothing about your feelings toward your partner. If romance is what you want, go ahead, immerse yourself in your lover, but be aware of how it will tilt the scale away from your partner. In the novel Separation, the hurt partner captures the difference between himself, the husband of seven years, and his wife’s new boyfriend: “Discovery is gone, and only recognition remains.... And the violence of conquest will always carry the day against tenderness, even if only temporarily.... Thus do those who love lose out to those who are in love.”11
Later, as passion fades and conflicts emerge, you may see your lover more critically, and cast your partner in a more favorable light. But by then there may be no partner left to return to.
Spending time with the affair-person won’t give you the perspective to make a wise choice; it will only bring you closer to that person. If you want to test the strength of your relationship with your partner, you need to invest in your partner, even though your feelings toward the affair-person may remain strong.
You have a critical life decision ahead of you: whether to rebuild your relationship or leave. Like most couples I see, you may assume that the best or only way to resolve this dilemma is to listen to your heart. Even experts on human relationships put feelings first. When I asked a preeminent psychiatrist why he left his wife after twenty-five years to marry one of his students, he paused and said, “My lover makes me feel alive.” That was it. I had expected him to pull one of his byzantine psychological theories out of his academic bag, but his feelings seemed so strong to him, so right, that he saw no reason to examine them more closely.
I encourage you, however, to make your decision in a more deliberate and considered way, one that is cognitive rather than emotional. I’m not suggesting that you ignore your feelings but that you question the assumptions that lie behind, and help create, your feelings—assumptions about your partner, about love, and about commitment.
Most couples who successfully survive an affair begin the healing process with an overarching sense of ambivalence. You won’t ever start if you expect to feel 100 percent motivated or certain. What matters most is that you make a conscious choice to begin. You, the unfaithful partner, must end your sexual or romantic relationship with your lover, or at least suspend it for whatever length of time you and your partner agree upon. You, the hurt partner, must invite your partner back into your life. And the two of you must fully commit to the process of reconnecting, as outlined in this book. This doesn’t mean that you have to feel certain about your future together, only that you must behave as if you feel certain, while you work on changing the ways you perceive and treat each other. Put your negative feelings aside, commit to each other, demonstrate your commitment by engaging in the trust- and intimacy-building strategies, and then, and only then, see whether you feel more loving, and more loved. If you wait to feel more positive before you act more positively, your relationship won’t last the course.
Even if you’ve made the decision to recommit, you may feel overwhelmed by what one of my patients called “the hours of restorative surgery that lie ahead.” Here are a few practical suggestions to get you started.
Imagine what your relationship would be like if you made some of the changes your partner is asking for, and if your partner did the same for you. Small changes, remember, can make a world of difference.
Now try to picture yourself six months, a year, five years from now, enjoying each other, knowing that your decision to stay together was right. If you can imagine yourself putting the bitterness and despair behind you, and using what you’ve learned from the affair to inject new life into your relationship, you’re more likely to make it happen.
A pledge formalizes what you’ve agreed on, and gives you a clear goal to work toward and measure your progress against. One couple agreed to the following:
“I care enough about you and think well enough of you to want to work this out. I don’t feel 100 percent loving or certain that this decision is right for me, but those percentages are probably unrealistic given what we’ve been through. I promise to explore my contribution to the problems in our relationship, and to make the changes you most need, including changes in the way we communicate and relate to each other. I want you to be happy with me, and I’ll work to make that happen.”
Don’t listen too closely and literally to your partner’s insults. There’s so much acrimony and misunderstanding between you that you’re wiser to “wear earmuffs” than to react defensively and spitefully to your partner’s every indictment. Try to go beyond your partner’s words and hear the hurt behind them. You’re both struggling to understand what happened, restore your sense of self, and achieve some equilibrium in your shared lives. No one knows the truth at this time.
Reworking a relationship after infidelity isn’t easy, but neither is dissolving one. For those of you who can take an honest look inside yourselves; who have shared a strong, positive history with your partner; who have struggled to support your partner’s career and life stresses—financial strains, personal insecurities, in-laws, health problems, unrealized goals, and the incredible sense of inadequacy that often comes with parenting—you have a unique, perhaps once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to clean your wounds and bind together more securely and lovingly without sacrificing the memories that are golden. I urge you not to turn away from it lightly.
The rest of this book will help you transform a damaged past into a loving and hopeful future—an experience that in itself can be profoundly healing. The next chapter begins the process by helping you unravel the meaning and history of the affair.