I used to think I knew who I was, who he was, and suddenly I don’t recognize us, neither him nor me . . . My entire life, as I’ve led it up to this moment, has crumbled, like in those earthquakes where the very ground devours itself and vanishes beneath your feet while you’re making your escape. There is no turning back.
—Simone de Beauvoir, The Woman Destroyed
“It was like my whole life had been erased. Just like that. I was so devastated that I called in sick and took the rest of the week off. I could barely stay upright. I forgot to eat, which for me is a very big deal.” Gillian tells me that in all of her fifty-plus years, she has never experienced this kind of pain before. “How can this hurt so badly when no one has died?”
The revelation of an affair is eviscerating. If you really want to gut a relationship, to tear out the very heart of it, infidelity is a sure bet. It is betrayal on so many levels: deceit, abandonment, rejection, humiliation—all the things love promised to protect us from. When the one you relied upon is the one who has lied to your face, treated you as unworthy of basic respect, the world you thought you lived in is turned upside down. The story of your life is so fractured you can’t piece it together. “Tell me again,” you demand. “How long has this been going on?”
Eight years. In Gillian’s case, the number works like dynamite. “That’s a third of our marriage!” she says, astounded. She and Costa have been together for twenty-five years and have two grown sons. She works as the in-house legal counsel for a major music publisher and is at the top of her career. Costa, born and raised on the Greek island of Paros, owns an Internet security company that has had to ride out the storm of the economic downturn. Gillian has just confirmed Costa’s long-standing affair with Amanda, his marketing manager.
“I’d had my suspicions” she admits, “and I had asked him more than once, but he absolutely and persuasively denied it. And I believed him.”
Then she discovered the emails and the texts, the Skype account, the selfies, the credit card receipts that went back years and years.
“I felt full of shame and very, very stupid. I was so gullible, so easy to lie to, that at one point he actually concluded that I probably knew because, hey, who could be so dumb? I have so much shock, rage, and jealousy inside. When the anger subsides, it’s all pure hurt. Disbelief followed by crushing belief. I really have no compass for this.”
Adultery has always hurt. But for modern love’s acolytes, it seems to hurt more than ever. In fact, the maelstrom of emotions that are unleashed in the wake of an affair is so overwhelming that many contemporary psychologists borrow from the field of trauma to explain the symptoms: obsessive rumination, hypervigilance, numbness and dissociation, inexplicable rages and uncontrollable panic. Treating infidelity has become a specialty among mental health professionals—myself included—in part because the experience is so cataclysmic that couples can’t manage the emotional fallout alone and need intervention if they hope to make it through.
In the immediate aftermath, feelings do not lay themselves out neatly along a flowchart of appropriateness. Instead, many of my patients describe swinging back and forth in a rapid succession of contradictory emotions. “I love you! I hate you! Hold me! Don’t touch me! Take your shit and get out! Don’t leave me! You scumbag! Do you still love me? Fuck you! Fuck me!” Such a blitz of reactions is to be expected and is likely to go on for some time.
Couples will often reach out to me in the midst of this onslaught. “We are facing a massive marital crisis,” Gillian wrote in her first email. “My husband is in terrible pain, too. He feels eaten up by guilt even as he tries to comfort me. We want to try to stay together if we can.” Her blow-by-blow account closed with a plea: “I fervently hope you can help us use this awful experience to get to a better place.” I intend to do everything I can to help them move forward. But first, I need to help them be where they are.
The disclosure is a pivotal moment in the story of an affair and of a marriage. The shock of discovery galvanizes the reptilian brain, triggering a primal response: fight, flight, or freeze. Some just stand there, dumbfounded; others can’t get away fast enough—hoping to escape the upheaval and regain some sense of control over their lives. When the limbic system has been activated, short-term survival trumps well-thought-out decisions. As hard as it is to do in these moments, I often caution couples to separate their feelings about the affair from their decisions about the relationship. Too often their impulsive responses, while meant to be protective, can destroy years of positive marital capital in an instant. As a therapist, I too must be mindful of my reactions. The drama of infidelity elicits a cornucopia of feelings—sympathy, envy, curiosity, and compassion but also judgment, anger, and disgust. Being emotionally affected is natural, but projections are unhelpful.
I divide post-affair recovery into three phases: crisis, meaning making, and visioning. Gillian and Costa are in the crisis phase, and what they don’t do at this stage is just as critical as what they do. It’s a delicate moment, requiring a safe, nonjudgmental container for the intensity of emotions that are running wild inside and between them. At this point, they need calmness, clarity, and structure, as well as reassurance and hope. Later, in the meaning making phase, there will be time to delve into why the affair happened and what role each of them played in the story. And finally, in the visioning phase, we will ask what lies ahead for them, separately or together. For now, however, we are in the emergency room performing triage. What needs most urgent attention? Is anyone at risk? Reputations, mental health, safety, children, livelihood, and so on, must all be taken into consideration.
As a first responder, I stand right by the couple, sometimes on a daily basis. It speaks to both the isolation of modern coupledom and the stigma of infidelity that the therapist is often the only person to know what is going on at this early stage—the stable base to support their collapse.
So many flying pieces—two people grappling with the fact that they have been living in different realities and only one of them knew it. Few other events in the life of a couple, except perhaps death and illness, carry such ruinous force. Couples therapist Michele Scheinkman emphasizes how important it is to hold a dual perspective that encompasses the differentiated experiences of the couple, something they are unable to do for themselves at this time.1
I do this in my sessions, as well as in our correspondence. I encourage writing—in a diary, to me, or to each other—as a release valve. Journal writing provides a safe place to purge, unrestricted. Letter writing is a more deliberate, carefully edited process. Couples often need separate coaching to find the right words. Sometimes the letters are read aloud in our sessions. Other times they are sent, with me copied. There is something deeply intimate in being the witness to the epistolary exchanges between these wounded souls. It offers a whole other window into the relationship that one cannot see only on the couch.
In a way that I have come to anticipate, Gillian and Costa tell me that they have had some of the deepest, most honest conversations with each other since all of this came out—into the middle of the night. Their history is laid bare—unfulfilled expectations, anger, love, and everything in between. They listen to each other. At this critical juncture, they have cried, they have argued, and they have made love—a lot. (It is uncanny how the fear of loss can rekindle desire.) They are once again, as my colleague Terry Real likes to say, face-to-face—the way we are when we first fall in love, before we settle into the side-by-side alignment of everyday coupledom.
The discovery of an affair can be all-consuming. So much so that we forget that it is only one chapter in the larger story of a couple. The acute trauma will give way to a process of recovery, however long it may take, either together or apart. Shock has a constricting effect, like a punch in the stomach. My task is to help couples catch their breath and relocate themselves in the bigger picture of their relationship, beyond the immediate ordeal. To begin, sometimes even in the first session, I will ask them to share with me how they met—their origin story.
Gillian and Costa fell in love during her last year of law school. He pulled up on his motorcycle outside the library and invited her to go for a ride. She was charmed by his boldness, his gallantry, and his warmth, all delivered in an exotic accent. Surprising herself, she hopped on board.
She affectionately describes him as “volcanic”—unafraid of conflict and confrontation, and with an unabashed zest for life. She characterizes herself as more of a peacemaker, erring on the side of pragmatism. “Costa was good for me,” she says, “he encouraged me to shake off my New England properness and be more spontaneous.”
Before Costa, she had been engaged to Craig, a Wharton-groomed MBA who was poised to take over his family business. But she had been ambivalent for quite a while: “Craig loved being loved by me more than he loved me.” In the end, she broke off the engagement because she “wanted to be adored.”
Her Mediterranean man adored her and knew how to show it. He was totally smitten with this powerful, elegant, and independent woman. “I had just moved to the States, and she was so American,” he explained. She was a stark contrast to the women of his childhood, whose strength was often measured by how stoically they endured lifelong mistreatment by their philandering husbands.
Gillian remarks that she had always suspected that her ex-fiancé, Craig, in his unconditional self-love, would one day cheat on her. It wasn’t like him to put anyone else’s needs ahead of his own. At the core of her choosing Costa lay her certainty that he, on the other hand, would never be so selfish. She just knew it. She banked on his devotion. How could she have been so mistaken?
They got married at his family home in Paros—white walls, blue awnings, red-tiled roofs set off with pink bougainvillea blossoms. As she watched her impeccably coiffed mother stumbling happily through the syrtaki dance, our bride felt deeply affirmed in her decision to give up the man with the right degree and the right pedigree for the man who would forever cherish her. Reflecting the emancipatory values of her time and ignoring her parents’ misgivings, Gillian traded in their model of marriage for her own ideal.
When Costa’s secret came to light, her disillusion was all the more searing. It wasn’t just an attack on her, it was an attack on her entire belief system—a breach of some of the most dearly held assumptions about coupledom today. Marriage has become a mythical castle, designed to be everything we could want. Affairs bring it tumbling down, leaving us feeling like there is nothing to hold on to. Perhaps this goes some way toward explaining why modern infidelity is more than painful. It is traumatic.
Whether we were totally blindsided or had been tracking the spores of evidence all along, nothing prepares us for the actual unveiling. After years of hovering around the truth, Gillian noticed one day that Costa had left his computer at home. “I finally had to look,” she says. “And then I couldn’t stop looking.”
On what she calls “D-Day,” she sat for hours digging through the digital evidence. She was flattened by the images. Hundreds of photos, emails exchanged, desires expressed; the vivid details of Costa’s eight-year affair unfolded before her eyes. Just a few decades ago, she might have found a phone number in a suit pocket, lipstick on a collar, or a dusty box of letters. A nosy neighbor might have blabbered. Caught, Costa would have told her the story as he saw fit, omitting choice facts to protect her or himself. Today, courtesy of technological memory, Gillian is more likely to burrow into the excruciating details of her husband’s duplicity. She can study her own humiliation, memorizing pages of painful electronic evidence.
Betrayal in the digital age is death by a thousand cuts. She sees them swilling oysters, laughing in Taos; she sees Amanda posing seductively. Here, a shot of them riding his Yamaha, Amanda wearing Gillian’s helmet; there, an email with a romantic itinerary in Greece. And everywhere, endless texts chronicling the minute details of Amanda’s life.
For everything Gillian sees, there is more she imagines. Him kissing her. The wedding ring on his finger, his hand on her breast. She remembers the way Amanda looked at him at the Christmas party last year—and herself dismissing that look, “like an idiot.” She recalls how Amanda complimented her on her chocolate mousse the night Costa invited her to dinner at their home—and herself playing the good hostess, “what a fool.” Now she’s wondering, “Was his hand on her knee under our dining room table? Were they laughing about it at work the next day?” The images play over and over, unrelenting, and as soon as she gets one out of her mind, another takes over.
I think it’s safe to say that the majority of affairs today are revealed through technology. Current discoveries have taken a graphic turn, occasionally even happening in real time. While Gillian’s excavations into Costa’s computer were deliberate, for others, technology breaks the news, unsolicited. The iPad left at home makes an unsuspecting husband witness to the text conversation his wife is having with the lover she is on her way to meet. The baby monitor is inexplicably transmitting a moaning sound, even though the woman has her baby in her arms when she arrives home early from a weekend away. The kitty cam, meant to provide reassurance that his beloved pets were okay, instead gives a man a window into a drunken encounter between his girlfriend and a stranger.
In the early hours of New Year’s Day, Cooper was on the dance floor in a Berlin nightclub when his phone screen lit up. It was a picture of his girlfriend, back in New York on another dance floor, grinding with some guy. The accompanying text from his buddy said, “Yo man, FYI, just saw Aimee making out with some random dude.”
Anyone can be a hacker these days. For all the years that Ang was watching porn, Sydney thought, That’s his business. But when he lost all interest in sex with her, she decided that now it was her business. A girlfriend told her about some spyware she could use to track his online activities. “I would sit there at my desk, watching these videos, knowing that he was watching them at the same time, jerking off, for hours on end. It messed with my head. At first I started dressing and acting more like those porn girls, thinking I could win him back. In the end, I felt betrayed, not only by him but more by myself.”
You no longer need to hire a private detective—you have one in your pocket. The accidental slip of the send button. “Why is Dad sending me a naked picture?!” The butt call. “What’s that heavy breathing in the background?” The “unusual activity alert” from the fraud department at Visa. “I’ve never even been to Montreal!”
And in this parade of technological whistleblowers, let’s not forget the marvels of GPS. It’s been a while since César began to suspect that Andy’s extended hours at the gym might not have been confined to the weight room. “For all the time he’s supposedly lifting, I’d expect to see a bit more muscle! And I know he sits in the sauna, but how long can you stay in there before you melt?” Since he couldn’t very well follow Andy without being seen, he followed his phone instead. The blue dot on the map left the gym after only thirty minutes and headed downtown.
Not only do our gadgets enable disclosure, but they preserve a digital record. “It’s become an obsession, almost pathological,” Gillian tells me. “I keep reading the emails, trying to fit it all together. Hundreds of texts between them in a single day—from seven a.m. till midnight. The affair was present all the time, in the midst of our life. What was I doing when he wrote that? At nine-twelve p.m. on August 5, 2009, we were celebrating my fifty-first birthday. Did he run to the bathroom to text her just before he sang ‘Happy Birthday,’ or was it after?”
Infidelity is a direct attack on one of our most important psychic structures: our memory of the past. It not only hijacks a couple’s hopes and plans but also draws a question mark over their history. If we can’t look back with any certainty and we can’t know what will happen tomorrow, where does that leave us? Psychologist Peter Fraenkel emphasizes how the betrayed partner is “rigidly stuck in the present, overwhelmed by the relentless progression of disturbing facts about the affair.”2
We are willing to concede that the future is unpredictable, but we expect the past to be dependable. Betrayed by our beloved, we suffer the loss of a coherent narrative—the “internal structure that helps us predict and regulate future actions and feelings [creating] a stable sense of self,” as psychiatrist Anna Fels defines it. In an article describing the corrosive effects of all kinds of relational betrayals, she reflects, “perhaps robbing someone of his or her story is the greatest betrayal of all.”3
In the obsessive drive to root out every facet of an affair lies the existential need to reweave the very tapestry of one’s life. We are meaning-making creatures and we rely on coherence. The interrogations, the flashbacks, the circular ruminations, and the hypervigilance are all manifestations of a scattered life narrative trying to piece itself back together.
“I feel so broken,” Gillian says. “My mind goes back and forth, sweeping through the timeline, adjusting the memories and wedging all the new stuff into place so that it starts to align with reality.”
Anna Fels uses the image of a dual screen, where people are constantly reviewing the life they remember on one side and the newly revealed version on the other. A sense of alienation creeps up inside. It isn’t just their lying partner they feel estranged from, but also themselves.
This crisis of truth is captured poignantly in the movie Love Actually. Karen, played by Emma Thompson, retreats to her bedroom to digest the realization that the gold necklace she saw her husband buy was not in the Christmas package she just opened. Her gift was a Joni Mitchell CD, which we hear playing as the scene cuts to his young secretary, in sexy lingerie, putting on the necklace, and then back to a tearful Karen retro-gazing at her life as depicted in the family photographs on her dresser. Joni sings, “It’s love’s illusions I recall/I really don’t know love at all.”
Gillian’s dual screens are often X-rated. “Our sex versus their sex. My body; her body. Those hands I love caressing another, those lips kissing hers. Him inside of her, whispering with that irresistible voice, telling her how hot she is. Did they have favorite positions? Was it better than our sex? Did he alternate days between her and me?”
Her marriage and her memories have been infiltrated. Once a source of comfort and security, they now fill her with nagging uncertainty. Even the happy times can no longer be remembered fondly—they have all become tainted. Costa insists that when he was with Gillian and the boys, he was fully there—physically, emotionally, all of it. Their life together wasn’t false, he asserts. But to her, it feels “like a distortion mirror.”
Costa is patient in answering her questions, and their conversations help her to reconstruct their full chronology. He has tried to console her. He has expressed his regret multiple times. Is he going to live in purgatory forever? Will he be guilty till he dies? From his perspective, things are clear. “I want to rebuild with you, not rehash the same things over and over.” I have explained to him that repetition helps restore coherence and is intrinsic to healing; nevertheless, when days turn into weeks, he becomes increasingly frustrated. And so does Gillian.
“He begs me to leave the past in the past and move on,” she tells me, “but that just makes me feel that he is minimizing my pain. I keep feeling as though I’m on one of those waterwheels. I come up for air and glimpse the future, and then I get pulled back into the water and I think I’m going to die if I don’t come back up.”
Unfortunately for repentant adulterers, the broken heart takes a long time to mend. “You think that because you’ve taken responsibility, apologized, and said ten Hail Marys that you’ve done your part!” she says. “I see how that works for you, but it doesn’t for me. I need to hear it again.” This is a situation that many couples find themselves in, and I explain to Costa that in the crisis phase, it is to be expected. Gillian is not doing this simply to annoy him. “You’ve known this history for eight years, she just caught on. And she’s got a lot of catching up to do.” If she is still incessantly interrogating him three years from now, then it will be a problem.
For Gillian, as for many, many others, infidelity is not just a loss of love; it is a loss of self. “I am now a member of the cuckolded wives club,” she tells Costa. “This is inalterable and will be true for the rest of my life, no matter what the outcome. You made me this person. I don’t know who I am anymore.”
When love goes plural, the spell of oneness is broken. For some, this dissolution is more than their marriage can bear. Costa and Gillian want to find a way to stay together, but each in their own way fears that even if their love is to survive, it will remain contaminated forever.
“I love you; it has always been you,” Costa assures her. “Amanda is something that happened. I would have ended it after a year, but then her daughter got sick and I felt guilty. I know you may not believe me, but you are the love of my life and that hasn’t changed.” Indeed, why should she believe him when she now knows that for eight years he has slept beside her every night and then woken up to text Amanda “Good morning, my love”? And yet, she wants to.
The sense of obliteration that Gillian describes is a story I hear all the time from modern Western couples, but it is not the same everywhere. We would love to think that pain is pain, democratic and universal. In fact, an entire cultural framework shapes the way we give meaning to our heartbreak. In my conversations with a group of Senegalese women, several of whom had been cheated on by their husbands, none talked about having lost their entire identity. They described sleepless nights, jealousy, endless crying, outbursts of anger. But in their view, husbands cheat because “that’s what men do,” not because their wives are mysteriously inadequate. Ironically, their belief about men underscores their ongoing oppression but protects their sense of identity. Gillian may be socially more emancipated, but her identity and self-worth have been mortgaged to romantic love. And when love calls in its debts, it can be a ruthless creditor.
My Senegalese friends draw much of their identity and sense of belonging from their community. Historically, most people anchored their sense of self-worth in complying with the values and expectations of religion and family hierarchy. But in the absence of the old institutions, we are now each in charge of the making and maintaining of our own identity, and the burdens of selfhood have never been heavier. Hence, we are constantly negotiating our sense of self-worth. Sociologist Eva Illouz astutely points out that “the only place where you hope to stop that evaluation is in love. In love you become the winner of the contest, the first and only.”4 No wonder infidelity throws us into a pit of self-doubt and existential confusion.
Men and women alike affirm this tale. Of course, there are nuances in what they highlight; the conversation on affairs carries an implicit gender bias. Perhaps because men have always been given more permission to pursue and to boast about their conquests, their tears have been suppressed. Men whose wives turned elsewhere were more likely to express rage or embarrassment than sadness. They were allowed to grieve the loss of face, not of self. We know much more about hurt women and straying men than we know about hurt men or straying women. But as women are leveling the playing field of infidelity and it is becoming more culturally acceptable for men to show emotion, I hear more and more men who have been blindsided by betrayal giving voice to their own loss of identity.
“The world as I knew it was over,” Vijay wrote to me. A forty-seven-year-old Anglo-Indian deli manager, with two kids, he’d just discovered an email that his wife, Patti, had sent to her best friend, containing a series of texts between her and her lover. “I felt like I was falling through dark, gravity-less space. I desperately tried to find something to cling to. But almost immediately she was changed. Me too. She seemed cold, retreated. She cried, but it didn’t seem like she was crying for us.”
Milan’s voice cracks as he tells me, “I fell in love hard. I really believed in a future with Stefano, and I gave it everything. Then he totally shut down on me sexually. He got hooked on meth, and then he fell in love with some kid. I came home and he was screwing him in our bed. And he just ignored me, pretending I was his roommate. This went on for months. I was so humiliated, but I couldn’t leave. And as a gay man, I was not supposed to be jealous: it was only fucking, after all. I needed him. I have so much contempt for myself, for allowing him to treat me this way. I barely recognize myself anymore.”
The crisis of identity is not only reserved for the partner who was betrayed. When the veil on a secret is lifted, the shock is not only for the one who discovers the affair but also for the one who was engaged in it. Looking at his or her behavior through the newly opened eyes of the aggrieved, the protagonist of the affair confronts a self-image that is barely recognizable.
Costa is having his own breakdown. Confronted by Gillian’s excruciating pain, he is awakened to the reality of what he has done and what it has done to her. The partition between his public life and his secret life has come crumbling down.
In our private conversations, he struggles to come to terms with his own disparate pieces. He has never been to therapy, is rather suspicious of so-called experts, and doesn’t expect much sympathy to come his way. I make a point of letting him know that I’m not the moral police. “Even though you had an affair, and a rather long one at that, I don’t pretend to know you. I’m here to help, not to judge.”
Costa has to reckon with the discrepancy between his self-image and his actions. From childhood on, he had promised himself that he would never act like his philandering and domineering father, who had treated his mother with contempt. Costa has always seen himself as a principled man—morally upright and deeply attuned to the pain of a woman whose love has been desecrated.
“I am not that guy” was the pillar around which he organized his entire sense of self (and won Gillian’s heart). It also was the phrase used to dissuade Gillian of her suspicions over the years. Determined to shore up this better-than-my-father identity, Costa became a man who was rigid and quick to judge. Unconsciously, he believed that his absolutism would help to hold his paternal heritage at bay, but in a twist of fate, it drove him to act in the very way he always hoped to avoid. “I felt like my life had flatlined. I was becoming an automaton. I was bound up, tied tight, stiff and formal like I had a stick up my ass.” He describes how he had begun to feel irrelevant, his own business struggling and the salary gap between them steadily growing. Gillian was busy with everybody else. “And then she started talking about retirement plans and long-term care, and I felt like she was burying me alive!” Enter Amanda, who offered him a way “to loosen up and reconnect with passion.”
Costa assures me that he never stopped loving his wife and had no intention of leaving her. He wanted to end it with Amanda many times, but felt obligated to her too, especially when she seemed to be facing one crisis after another. The sensitive boy who had witnessed his mother’s humiliations became the man who could not leave a damsel in distress—a weakness his mistress had detected early and played on skillfully. Furthermore, he is convinced that because he had changed so much—become less depressed and stopped moping around the house—so had their marriage, for the better. (Gillian, I know, concurs with this assessment but rejects his justifications.) He seems to think that because, unlike his old man, he didn’t publicly strut down the street with his mistress, his principles remain intact. His identity politics have created a blind spot. Only now, in the harsh light of the voluminous evidence, does he see the stretch of his rationalizations. Is Gillian’s pain and shame really so different from his mother’s? I ask him.
Aware of his need to recalibrate his personality with the unwelcome additions, I begin to help him parse out what the affair meant to him and what it represents in the fuller context of his life. As the process unfolds, our repentant Romeo is eager to share his new insights with his wife. I caution him that this conversation is premature. Her angst takes precedence over the analysis. We are still in the crisis phase, and at this stage the compassion goes toward her. Only when the betrayed partner feels emotionally met will he or she be able to listen to explanations without hearing them as justifications. It is too soon to expect Gillian to see Costa’s point of view, let alone consider what part she might have played.
For now, he needs to listen. This is going to take some work, because he is so invested in preserving an image of himself as not being a “sleazebag” (as he puts it) that he feels compelled to justify himself and his actions. He sees how bad she feels, but it makes him feel bad about himself (shame), which prevents him from feeling bad for her (guilt).
The shift from shame to guilt is crucial. Shame is a state of self-absorption, while guilt is an empathic, relational response, inspired by the hurt you have caused another. We know from trauma that healing begins when perpetrators acknowledge their wrongdoing. Often, when one partner insists that they don’t yet feel acknowledged, even as the one who hurt them insists they feel terrible, it is because the response is still more shame than guilt, and therefore self-focused. In the aftermath of betrayal, authentic guilt, leading to remorse, is an essential repair tool. A sincere apology signals a care for and commitment to the relationship, a sharing of the burden of suffering, and a restoration of the balance of power.5
I know it won’t be easy for Costa. If you’ve cheated on someone, it’s hard to watch the suffering that you’ve caused and to give your partner the time and space to really grieve, knowing you’re the cause of it. But that’s exactly what she needs. “If you want to help Gillian feel better,” I tell Costa, “first you need to let her feel like shit.” Holding space for her pain is important, and physically holding her is equally so. Costa is doing a lot of this. Obviously, it is easier for him to respond empathically when his wife is sad than when she goes on the attack. That said, the lashing out is unavoidable, at least for a while. The time will come for telling her to ease off. Meanwhile, it is his consistent empathic stance that will help her anger subside gradually.
Costa makes a great effort to be available for her anguish. He tells her over and over that he loves her. Gillian calms down for a while—an hour; sometimes two or more; on occasion, a whole day. She believes him, of course she does—he’s her husband. But then, BOOM, she remembers. “I used to believe him before, and look where that got me.”
Her suspicions mount again. This time, she’s not going to shut her eyes and pretend nothing is happening. So she starts to scavenge for more information. He has forfeited his right to privacy. Who is this woman whose picture he liked on Instagram? What was the dentist doing for three hours? Did he even have an appointment? She will call and find out for herself. Fear and rage merge and she explodes. Sparing nothing, she goes after his family, his culture, his genes, and of course, Amanda. It’s open season.
“Cheater! Liar!” Now she’s pushed Costa over the edge. He is willing to take responsibility, but in no way will he let this be the final verdict on his identity. “I have cheated once and I have lied many times about that one thing,” he insists, “But I am not a cheater or a liar.” Her pain mirrors back an image of himself that he can’t tolerate, so he gets mad. When she continues to feel bad, it confirms that he is bad. The tension mounts again. “I am not that guy! I will not allow her, this affair, or anything else to define me.”
I decide to take him on. “I hear your conflict and I see your conscience. But when you consider the duplicity, year in, year out, you are closer to being ‘that guy’ than you would like to admit.”
The early stages of post-affair therapy are highly volatile, to say the least. Weeks of careful reconstruction can crumble with one remark. Both are on edge, eyeing each other, fearful of the next emotional blow. As Maria Popova writes, “The dance of anger and forgiveness, performed to the uncontrollable rhythm of trust, is perhaps the most difficult in human life, as well as one of the oldest.”6
During the crisis phase, the responsibility for repair lies primarily with the one who had the affair. In addition to expressing contrition and being receptive to the pain of their partner, he or she can do several other important things.
Janis Abrahms Spring identifies one of these steps as the “transfer of vigilance.”7 Essentially, this means that the one who acted outside the relationship takes on the role of remembering and holding the affair in awareness. Typically, the partner who has been betrayed feels compelled to ask questions, to obsess, to make sure that this terrible thing does not get swept under the rug. The wanderer is usually all too eager to put the unpleasant episode behind them.
By reversing these positions, we change the dynamic. Surveillance rarely breeds trust. If Costa holds the memory of the affair, then he relieves Gillian from having to be the one to ensure that it isn’t forgotten. If he brings it up on his own and invites conversation about it, then he communicates that he is not trying to hide or minimize it. If he volunteers information, he frees her from the constant rehashing. One time, Amanda called him. He told Gillian right away, defusing a potential source of distrust. Another time, when they were at a restaurant, he sensed that Gillian was wondering if he had been there with Amanda. He didn’t wait for her to ask—he told her, unsolicited, and made sure she was comfortable staying there. All of this, abundantly displayed, helps to restore trust, as it makes her feel that they are on the same side.
For her part, Gillian needs to begin to curb her angry outbursts—not because they are unjustified, but because they will not give her what she is really seeking. Anger may make her feel more powerful, temporarily. However, psychologist Steven Stosny observes that “if loss of power was the problem in intimate betrayal, then anger would be the solution. But the great pain in intimate betrayal has little to do with loss of power. Perceived loss of value is what causes your pain—you feel less lovable.”8
In the wake of betrayal, we need to find ways to restore our own sense of self-worth—to separate our feelings about ourselves from the way the other person has made us feel. When it seems like your entire being has been hijacked and your self-definition rests in the hands of the person who did this to you, it is important to remember that there are other parts to who you are.
You are not a reject, although part of you has been rejected. You are not a victim, although part of you has been abused. You are also loved, valued, honored, and cherished by others and even by your unfaithful partner, although you may not feel that in this moment. Realizing that she had totally disconnected from her friends after she merged her entire life with the boyfriend who had now left her, one woman made a list of five people she needed to bring back into her life. She took a two-week road trip, rekindling the friendships and reclaiming the parts of herself that each of them valued, and in so doing, she separated the injury from her own essence.
Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl distills a profound truth: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”9
Dress up, even if you don’t feel like it. Let your friends cook you a beautiful dinner. Take that painting class that you’ve been meaning to take for so long. Do things to take care of yourself, that make you feel good, to counter the humiliation and your urge to hide. Many people feel too much shame to do these things when they’ve been cast aside, but that’s exactly what I urge them to do.
Gillian needs to find her own ways to reclaim her value. Costa’s contrition is not enough to ease that pain. Expressing guilt and empathy is crucial for the hurt but insufficient for healing damaged self-worth. Where Costa can help is in resisting self-concern and instead reaffirming her importance and centrality in his life. As he puts aside his worries about himself, he sets out to reclaim the girl who got on the back of his motorcycle all those years ago and made a bargain with the god of love. When he tells her in no uncertain terms, “It’s you I want to be with. It was always you,” he begins the process of reassigning her value, her cherished presence. For the first time, she starts to believe that he is not staying simply out of principle. He is choosing her.
Two minutes later, his phone buzzes. I see a flash of suspicion in her eyes and she recoils. Another trigger, another question. Here we are, in the trenches of romantic recovery. And we will be here for some time.