Forgiveness, like love, is a concept as much as a feeling. If your assumptions about it are extreme or unrealistic, you may never forgive, or you may forgive too quickly. In this chapter we’ll look at some of the most common of these assumptions so you can make a more considered, self-interested decision about whether you can, or want to, forgive. Keep in mind that I’m speaking not only about the infidelity, but also about the many less obvious ways in which your partner has failed you, and you’ve failed yourself, over the course of your relationship.
Among the most inflated ideas you may have about forgiveness are:
1. “Forgiveness happens completely, and all at once.”
2. “When you forgive, your negative feelings toward your partner are replaced by positive feelings.”
3. “When you forgive, you admit that your negative feelings toward your partner were wrong or unjustified.”
4. “When you forgive, you ask for nothing in return.”
5. “When you forgive, you forget the injury.”
Dictionaries reinforce these idealized notions. The Random House Dictionary of the English Language1 is typical. To forgive, it says, is “1. to grant pardon for or remission of (an offense, debt, etc.); absolve. 2. to give up all claim on account of; remit (a debt, obligation, etc.). 3. to grant pardon to (a person). 4. to cease to feel resentment against; to forgive one’s enemies. 5. to cancel an indebtedness or liability of....” Many religious authorities and theologians would add, “to give up one’s right to hurt back.”2
These definitions, while useful as abstract prescriptions, are likely to make forgiveness seem out of reach, and leave you thinking, “If this is what forgiveness means, forget it. Only a saint could act in such an unconditional, all-or-nothing, self-sacrificial way.”
As I say in How Can I Forgive You?,3 forgiveness is not a pure, selfless act, a pardon granted unilaterally by the hurt party. It’s a joint venture that begins when you share your pain after the affair is revealed, and evolves as you and your partner forge corrective experiences that rebuild trust and intimacy. Forgiveness is a voluntary offering that must be earned day after day after day.
I’m reminded of the time when my son Aaron started nursery school. After wandering around, poking at the puzzles, he turned to me and announced, “I can’t go. It’s too hard.” Well, of course it was—if he had to master everything that day.
When it comes to forgiving your partner, you, too, may feel stretched beyond your limits. “It would take me a lifetime,” you insist. “Maybe longer.” And I say, “Right. Exactly. The process of forgiving unfolds ever so slowly and continues throughout your relationship. There’s no end point, no time when you can take the scaffold off your lives and say, “We can stop remembering and say our work is done.” To paraphrase Kafka, the decisive moment in human development is continuous.
Maybe right now you can forgive 10 percent of what your partner did, and maybe as the two of your rebuild your relationship you can forgive another 70 percent, but never more. That’s fine. “Resolution of the trauma is never final; recovery is never complete,” counsels Judith Lewis Herman, associate professor of clinical psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School, in her study of psychological injury.4 You’re not necessarily a good person if you forgive totally; you’re not necessarily bad if you can’t. You can only give what you’re capable of giving, and what your partner earns.
Some of you may resist forgiving because you see it as “the cessation of animosity”5—a state in which bitterness vanishes and love and compassion take its place.
This is a romantic notion, in my view, since in all my years of practice I’ve never known a person who was capable of achieving such an emotional turnabout. In life, psychological injuries don’t ever completely heal or disappear, nor do more positive ones magically replace them. Whether you’re the hurt or unfaithful partner, the memory of how your partner failed you is likely to make you wince, even years from now. To expect to start from scratch, as if nothing had happened, is to set yourself up for disillusionment.
As the hurt partner, you’re unlikely ever to feel much compassion for your partner’s conflicts over the affair. You may never understand, or care to understand, your partner’s grief on giving up the affair-person. This is normal. When you forgive, you don’t have warm, fluffy feelings whenever you think about your partner’s deception, but you’re likely to be less emotionally sensitive to it, and less consumed by bitterness and anger. Your animosity becomes less central to your relationship and shares a place with other, more positive feelings. You cast the affair into the broader context of your life together, and see it for what it is—a part of who you both are but not all of who you both are. And you see that your partner is more than a betrayer, and that you’re more than a victim.6
As the unfaithful partner, you may never completely forgive your partner for falling short of your expectations, and that’s normal, too. Forgiveness, like mature love, allows for the simultaneous consideration of conflicting feelings, the integration of hate and love. When you forgive, positive feelings don’t replace negative feelings; they coexist with them. Your resentment remains, but balanced against the realization that your spouse wasn’t so imperfect, and the affair-person wasn’t so perfect—nor were you so innocent.
Another reason you may resist forgiving is that it seems to condone, excuse, or minimize your partner’s behavior. It seems to deny that an injustice has occurred, that you’ve been wronged, that you deserve to feel angry or hurt. It seems to say, “What my partner did to me wasn’t so bad or important.”
Forgiving, however, doesn’t mean that you deny your partner’s culpability; only that you free your partner from retribution. As Reverend Marjorie J. Thompson explains:
To forgive is to make a conscious choice to release the person who has wounded us from the sentence of our judgment, however justified that judgment may be. It represents a choice to leave behind our resentment and desire for retribution, however fair such punishment might seem …; not that the actual wound is ever completely forgotten, but that its power to hold us trapped in continual replay of the event, with all the resentment each remembrance makes fresh, is broken. Moreover, without in any way mitigating the seriousness of the offense, forgiveness involves excusing persons from the punitive consequences they deserve to suffer for their behavior. The behavior remains condemned, but the offender is released from its effects as far as the forgiver is concerned.7
You can forgive and also stand by your recognition that your partner went too far. In fact, unless you acknowledge to yourself that you’ve been wronged, there’s nothing for you to forgive. “Blaming is part of getting on with life,” writes Beverly Flanigan in Forgiving the Unforgivable.8 “Someone can be held accountable for an injury. Someone is wrong. Someone should be identified. Then someone can be forgiven.”9
Some of you may refuse to forgive because you see it as a form of absolution or pardon, which is granted with no expectation of repayment. “Why should I free my partner from any obligation to repair the harm?” you ask yourself. “Why should I wipe the slate clean?”
If you define forgiveness in this self-denying or self-compromising way, you’re likely to associate it with the loss of power and passive submission to abuse, and share Nietzsche’s conviction that forgiveness is for weaklings—for those who are incapable of asserting their right to a just solution.10
Forgiveness doesn’t have to make you weak, however, nor does it have to make your partner unaccountable. If your goal is reconciliation, forgiveness requires restitution. Should your partner be deceased or physically unavailable, you may choose to “release” this person unilaterally in order to take control of your pain and recovery. If you’re trying to rebuild a relationship, however, you need to build it together. Forgiving is a two-person process; you can’t forgive those who refuse to acknowledge and redress the harm they’ve caused you—you certainly can’t have a vital, intimate relationship with them. As Judith Lewis Herman points out, “True forgiveness cannot be granted until the perpetrator has sought and earned it through confession, repentance, and restitution.”11
A partner who wants to be physically and psychologically connected to you must work to win forgiveness through specific concrete behaviors. Unearned forgiveness, like unrequited love, reinforces the assumption that it’s your job alone to stay attached, that your partner doesn’t need to share the burden of recovery. If you have even a shred of self-esteem, you’re likely to find this to be a dysfunctional notion.
“While reconciliation may be a desirable outcome, psychologically, forgiveness has to be earned,” writes clinical psychologist Robert Lovinger in Religion and Counseling. “To forgive people who do not acknowledge the injury, or even worse, rationalize their injurious behavior as having been deserved, is to sustain the injury all over again.”12
You may refuse to forgive your partner because you’re afraid to bury the memory of what went wrong. Remembering, you think, keeps what happened from happening again. It also lets your partner know that your pain can’t be dismissed too lightly.
The truth is, however, that you, the hurt partner, won’t ever forget how you’ve been deceived, whether you forgive or not. Years later, you’ll still be able to recall the exact moment of the revelation, and all the gory details of the affair. You, the unfaithful one, are likely to want your partner to forgive and forget so that you can move on to a peaceful reconciliation, but you can’t rush the process. If you don’t attend to the damage you’ve caused, your partner probably will.
When you forgive, you don’t forget how you’ve been wronged, but you do allow yourself to stop dwelling on it. Your hurtful memories are likely to stay alive, but relegated to a corner of your mind. You continue to see the damage, but only as part of a picture that includes the loving times as well—the ones that remind you why you’ve chosen to stay together. The past may continue to sting, but it’s also likely to teach some important lessons, and inspire you to do better.
Forgiving, in short, entails conscious forgetting, which Jungian analyst Clarissa Pinkola Estés describes as “refusing to summon up the fiery material … willfully dropping the practice of obsessing …, thereby living in a new landscape, creating new life and new experiences to think about instead of the old ones.”13
Unearned forgiveness is cheap forgiveness. It’s something you grant, not because your partner deserves it, but because you feel pressured to, either by others or by romantic or moralistic assumptions about what forgiveness means. Given rashly or prematurely, it buries the pain alive, and robs you and your partner of the chance to confront the lessons of the affair and properly redress each other’s wounds.
Here are three common assumptions about forgiveness that may cause you to forgive too quickly or too easily, before the wrong has been acknowledged and addressed:
1. “Forgiveness is always good for you.”
2. “Forgiveness shows that you’re a good person.”
3. “Forgiveness eliminates conflict and moves the relationship forward.”
It’s commonly assumed that forgiveness is not just a gift to your partner, but a gift to yourself, in service of your best self, and that it imbues you, the forgiver, with a sense of well-being, of psychological and physical health. By forgiving, “you set a prisoner free, but you discover that the real prisoner was yourself,”14 wrote Lewis Smedes, former professor of theology and ethics at the Fuller Theological Seminary in California.
If your partner has hurt you or let you down, you may look to forgiveness as a way of healing yourself and moving on. You may try to release your partner from the grip of your bitterness or disillusionment, and reclaim the energy that you’ve invested in these corrosive emotions. Forgiving, you hope, will free you from the role of victim and let you get on with your life.
This idea that forgiveness is categorically good for you is popular both with the general public and with professionals, but it hasn’t held up under study. In fact, it has been shown in some cases to be anti-therapeutic, spawning feelings of low self-worth in the person who forgives.15
“A too ready tendency to forgive may be a sign that one lacks self-respect, and conveys—emotionally—either that we do not think we have rights or that we do not take our rights very seriously,” writes Jeffrie Murphy in “Forgiveness and Resentment.”16 Murphy goes on to point out that a willingness to be a doormat for others reveals not love or friendship, but what psychiatrist Karen Horney calls “morbid dependency.”17 My own clinical experience confirms that unearned forgiveness is no cure for intimate wounds; that it merely hides them under a shroud of smiles and pleasantries, and allows them to fester.
You may have been taught by family or religious leaders that forgiveness is a redemptive act—a form of self-sacrifice that good people make to their enemies. By forgiving, you demonstrate your compassion and innocence, and preserve, or create, an image of yourself as martyr or saint.
Forgiveness by itself, however, is not admirable—unless, of course, you believe that silencing yourself and denying yourself a just solution is admirable. What you consider magnanimity may in fact be nothing but a way of asserting your moral superiority over your partner and freeing yourself from facing your own contribution to the affair. What you see as self-sacrifice may serve the larger purpose of putting your partner in your control, under a debt of gratitude that can never be fully repaid.
Some of you may be so anxious to reconcile that you’ll do anything, even forgive. If you’re a dependent personality, or if you’ve been raised by alcoholic or abusive parents, you’ve probably been trained to smooth over conflict, often by denying or dismissing your own hurt or resentment. You’ve learned to stay attached by burying your grievances. You forgive easily because you can’t acknowledge or express your anger, and you’re afraid of triggering explosive scenes, alienating your partner, and living alone.
The problem with expedient forgiveness—forgiveness granted without any attitudinal or emotional change toward the offender18—is that it’s likely over time to exacerbate feelings of depression and grief, and feed an underlying aggression toward your partner. Those who forgive too quickly tend to interact with a false or patronizing sweetness, punctuated by sarcasm or overt hostility. The result is a relationship ruled by resentment, petty squabbles, numbness, surface calm, and self-denial—a relationship lacking in both vitality and authenticity.
A patient named Pat modeled expedient forgiveness when she put her husband’s affair behind her long before the two of them had examined its meaning and put it to rest. “I know Henry never stopped loving me,” she told me. “I don’t need him to beg for my pardon.” Eight years later, however, though Henry never strayed again, they were still stumbling over trust and intimacy issues.
As I’ve said, “making nice” settles nothing. If you want to pave the way for genuine forgiveness, you can’t sweep what happened under the table. You need your partner to understand your pain, feel remorse, apologize, and demonstrate a commitment to rebuilding the relationship. To heal, you need to forgive, but your partner must apply the salve to your wounds, first.
In addition to forgiving your partner for wronging you, you should consider forgiving yourself for the wrongs you’ve inflicted on your partner, your family, and yourself.
For you, the hurt partner, these wrongs might include:
• being overly naive, trusting too blindly, ignoring your suspicions about your partner’s infidelity;
• blaming yourself too harshly for your partner’s betrayal;
• tolerating or making excuses for your partner’s unacceptable behavior to preserve your relationship;
• having such poorly developed concepts of self and love that you felt unentitled to more;
• hurting and degrading yourself by making unfair comparisons between yourself and the affair-person;
• feeling so desperate to win your partner back that you acted in ways that humiliated you—in front of the affair-person, your family, your friends;
• losing your sense of self; losing sight of what you value in yourself;
• putting your kids in the middle by needing them to support you, love you, and take your side against the other parent;
• being so upset by the affair that you weren’t there for your children;
• isolating yourself unnecessarily; trying so hard to protect the feelings of your children and parents that you cut yourself off from their support;
• contributing to your partner’s dissatisfaction at home (for example, by failing to take your partner’s grievances seriously; getting buried in your career or in the needs of your children; being too critical, unavailable, or needy).
You, the unfaithful partner, should consider forgiving yourself for:
• feeling so needy, so entitled to get your needs met, that you violated your partner;
• exposing your partner—the person you love, the parent of your children—to a life-threatening disease;
• blaming your partner for your dissatisfaction, without realizing how your own misperceptions, misbehavior, and unrealistic expectations compromised your relationship;
• developing attitudes that justified your deception and minimized the significance of your actions;
• failing to confront your partner with your essential needs; acting in ways that blocked your partner from satisfying them;
• having unrealistic ideas about mature love that rendered you incapable of tolerating disenchantment in your relationship;
• having such poorly developed concepts of self and love that you didn’t know how to create and sustain intimacy, or feel satisfied in a committed relationship;
• inflicting chaos on your children, family, friends.
No matter how your partner may have contributed to your unhappiness at home, you, the unfaithful partner, are solely responsible for your deception, and need to forgive yourself for the harm you’ve caused by violating your covenant of trust. You may also want to forgive yourself for the hurt you’ve caused your children. This may be an easier task if you can teach them through your own example that two people who love each other can make mistakes, take responsibility for them, and work to renew their lives together.
It may help you and your partner to forgive yourselves if you learn to accept yourselves as fallible, erring human beings—conditioned, confused, struggling to make the most of a life you neither fully understand nor control. Self-forgiveness doesn’t relieve you of responsibility for your words or actions, but it may release you from self-contempt and from a “crippling sense of badness”19 that makes you believe, “I can’t do better.” With self-forgiveness, you bring a gentle compassion to your understanding of who you are and why you acted the way you did, and reclaim what you most value in yourself.
Promises mean little by themselves, but when they’re coupled with specific, relevant behaviors, they can reassure your partner of your continuing commitment to change. They can also help to keep you honest and focused. I therefore encourage you to complete the following covenant, or to incorporate it into one of your own:
_________________[your partner’s name],
We have survived a shattering crisis that destroyed the integrity of our relationship. I appreciate the chance to work with you to rebuild something new, something stronger, based on a more conscious understanding of who we are and what we need from each other. I understand that fidelity alone doesn’t create a successful relationship.
I now realize how I often blamed you for my dissatisfaction. I didn’t know how to look inside myself and uncover my own contribution to my unhappiness. I expected you to fill me, delight me, heal me. I didn’t understand how my personal issues made me misperceive and mistreat you, how I made it impossible for you to know me or to give me what I needed. I alienated you at the very time that I wanted to love you, and that I wanted you to love me.
[Add for the unfaithful partner:]
I now realize how my ideas about fidelity and love made me think I was entitled to be unfaithful. I’ve looked back into my past and understand where these ideas came from, and how they served me. I no longer expect you to meet my idealized fantasies of romantic love. I now understand why I strayed, and that understanding protects me from straying again. I commit myself to you fully, and through my behavior, not through words alone, I’ll continue to demonstrate my commitment to you.
There always will be temptations, but I promise:
• to be the gatekeeper of my life, and take full responsibility for remaining faithful to you;
• to keep my word that I have said goodbye to the affair-person; to prove to you with words and actions that this person is not a threat to us;
• to work out my problems in the context of our lives together;
• to never cheat on you again; to make it unnecessary for you to play the role of detective any longer; to prove to you that you don’t have to be afraid to trust me again.
[Add for the hurt partner:]
• I appreciate your efforts to rebuild trust and intimacy, and I promise to encourage you by opening myself up to you, by forgiving you as you earn forgiveness, and by working with you to revitalize our life together.
• I’ll work on empowering myself not through anger or the withholding of affection, but through direct communication with you.
• I’ll continue to ferret out and take responsibility for my contribution to the affair, and to the problems in our relationship that predated it. I realize I’m not merely an innocent victim.
[Both:]
I thought I understood that a good, loving relationship involves genuine costs and sacrifices, that at times I would feel deprived and frustrated, but I now realize that I didn’t really understand what loving someone meant or required.
• My commitment to you today is not based on momentary feelings, but on a full consideration of all that you bring to this relationship, and all that I need.
• Although there may be times when we hurt, or even hate, each other, I won’t evaluate our relationship on a day-by-day basis. I’m with you for the long haul.
• I’ll work to keep my occasional disillusionment or dissatisfaction in perspective, and to accept what I consider your imperfections. You are enough for me.20
• I’ll try to be patient. I don’t expect our recovery process to be spontaneous or easy.
• I join hands with you in working to create a shared sense of our future together, one kept alive with optimism and joy.
• I am so sorry for hurting you.
• I love you and welcome you back into my life.
__________________[your name]
Sometimes you need to take something apart to rebuild it in a stronger, more lasting way. Lobsters have to shed their shells to develop. Forests have to burn to stimulate new growth. And you may have needed the transformative disruption and trauma of infidelity to break out of a stale, unrewarding relationship and begin again.
A crisis, says Erik Erikson, can be a turning point; by making you vulnerable, it can heighten your potential for positive change.21 Sometimes it takes the threat of losing something to make you realize its value. Sometimes you need to walk to the edge to realize that you don’t want to jump. Until you feel compelled to leave, you may not realize you’re happy where you are, and want to stay.
You probably wouldn’t wish the experience of infidelity on your worst enemy, but if it helps you to uncover defects in your relationship, and grow as an individual and a partner, it may, in retrospect, seem worth it. As Jung wrote, “Seldom or never does a marriage develop into an individual relationship smoothly and without crisis. There is no birth of consciousness without pain.”22
Last summer I bought a fancy Belgian waffle maker from a mail-order catalog. Flipping through its byzantine instructions, I flippantly concluded, “Piece of cake. I can do this.” Sure enough, the first waffle came out perfect. But the second, third, even the tenth, were utter failures—one side overcooked, the other raw, the center sticking to the Teflon maze. After much trial and error, I managed to figure out—but still not master—the waffle maker. In the process I learned a valuable life lesson: Sometimes it takes screwing up to figure out how to do something right. My first waffle, though perfect, taught me nothing; it was only as I struggled to understand what went wrong that I realized how delicate, conscious, and complex a process this was.
And so it is with intimate relationships. We enter them blindly, often effortlessly, swept up with passion and an idealized perception of the partner, often cocky about our ability to keep things hot. Most of us are totally unprepared for what lies ahead, and ignorant of what’s required of us to last the course. We may think we know what it takes, but, oh, how naive we are. The affair shocks us into reality. Fortunately, it also invites us to try again.
There’s nothing glamorous about returning to an old, battered relationship and working to repair the damage. But after sharing so much history—after struggling to come to terms with everything that’s unbeautiful about the two of you—you may now feel more connected, and more accepted and accepting, than ever before, with a wiser, more clear-sighted vision of what you want your relationship to become. Your commitment to your partner today is likely to rest on a more solid foundation than it did when you first vowed to love and cherish each other. Many people in fact would envy the consciousness and openness with which you may now actively protect and promote your intimate bond.
This is a time to rebuild, to commit yourself to a lifetime of renewal, to allow yourself to feel hopeful about your future together. This is a time to channel your energy into creating something new, something better than what you had before. Don’t be afraid to nourish memories of healthy and happy times together, and to dream up new ones that will sustain you. If not now, when?