2
Cheating on My Husband
This lesson could be about cheating, and why it’s so destructive for you personally. Why lying and betrayal create more stress in you than they do in others who have potentially led less stressful lives. But no, we can talk about that later. This lesson is about denial.
How little you knew. How much you shut off your own powers of deduction! How great was your power to deny, and deny again. Because listening to yourself when the truth hurts is painful (of course). If you had listened to yourself, how different would your actions have been? And yet I think that your cheating was the impulsive act of your secret self, who was stronger than your denial. An act that would push you finally to listen to yourself and hear the words that had been screaming in your unwilling ears for so long: There is something wrong!
It’s terribly difficult to listen to yourself when nothing you have said over the years has been validated or considered worth hearing. I hear you. Women, especially, are taught as children that their role is to be “the good girl.” We are made up of sugar and spice and all things nice. Stray from the norm at your own risk!
And yet you could not stay in your “good girl” state of arrested development any longer if you intended to be happy. So you cheated with your first boyfriend. The fact that he was also the first to give you sexual pleasure is no coincidence. You might have loved him, but lust was a strong component. Among your many fine examples of denial was this: you missed sex. You wanted better sex. But could you admit it? Not really. Because liking sex for its own sake was bestial and cheap (or so you were taught). But somehow, you thought, “love” made it better. Less like cheating. Less cheap than a random betrayal.
Of course, the admissions you might have made would have forced you out of your relationship, right then and there. You would have had to admit that, really, you had rarely been sexually attracted to anyone, because the strength of attraction had to be very strong in order to overcome the sexual repression that ran deep in your veins, conditioned by the sex-negative society permeating your consciousness. To be fair, you didn’t have the language…and relationship education is not taught by schools, nor by those parents who have never been taught themselves.
So you were afraid to lose the only stability you had ever known. I understand. But if you had been honest with yourself, you would have recognised that the stability you thought you had was very shaky indeed. You could have told your husband. You could have treated him with the respect he deserved and been honest, instead of hiding your true feelings — from him and from yourself. He could have had a choice to work on a different kind of future with you.
“But hey!” I hear you say. “I wasn’t the only one in denial! He was too!”
Sure. There’s no question about that. But you are not responsible for how anyone else chooses to live their life, the lies they tell or how they construct their own reality. You are responsible for your own life, your own emotions and your own reality. And the sooner you realise that, the happier you will be.
Strive to be as honest with yourself as you possibly can be, because the consequence of remaining in denial means your life is a lie. And living in lies will make you unhappy.