A strange thing, indeed, that those words, “two or three times,” nothing more than a few words, words uttered in the air, at a distance, could so lacerate a man’s heart, as if they had actually pierced it, could sicken a man, like a poison that he had drunk.
—Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way
Are some affairs “worse” than others? Do some kinds of infidelity hurt less and prove easier to recover from? Much as I’ve tried to identify patterns in the interplay between action and reaction, I have yet to find a tidy correspondence between the severity of the offense and the intensity of the response.
It’s tempting to try to organize affairs according to a hierarchy of violation, where jerking off to porn is a minor infraction, which is certainly less than getting a massage with a happy ending, which is in turn preferable to actual penetration with a Russian hooker, which is still milder than finding your girlfriend in bed with your friend or discovering that your husband has a four-year-old son living three blocks away. Certainly, not all transgressions are created equal. However, as appealing as it may be to create a gradation of betrayals, it’s not especially helpful to measure the legitimacy of the reaction by the magnitude of the offense.
When we traverse the landscape of romantic suffering, countless considerations are at play that steer the story of an individual or a couple in one direction or another. Shock comes in varying degrees. Even after decades of this work, I still cannot predict what people will do when they discover a partner’s affair. In fact, many have told me that their response is far from what they would have predicted themselves.
The impact of an affair is not necessarily proportional to its length or seriousness. Some relationships will collapse upon the discovery of a fleeting hookup. In a moment of unguarded intimacy, a woman slipped into reminiscence and told her husband about a brief extramarital fling that happened decades earlier. She was flabbergasted when he promptly ended their thirty-year marriage. Others will exhibit a surprisingly robust capacity to bounce back after extensive treachery. It’s striking how some people barely react to life-changing revelations, while others respond with great fanfare to mere wandering eyes. I have seen people devastated from knowing that their partner even fantasized about someone else or masturbated to porn, while others philosophically accept the nameless encounters that accompany business trips to far-flung places.
In the tangled tale of infidelity, every nuance matters. As a therapist, I need emotional specifics. Researcher Brené Brown explains that in the wake of a shocking or traumatic event, “our emotions get the first crack at making sense of the pain.”1 Some things inflame the heartbreak (“he did what?”) and others become markers of relief (“at least she didn’t do that”). To borrow terms from healthcare entrepreneur Alexandra Drane, some are magnifiers—particular elements that increase the suffering. Others are buffers—protective shields against the hurt.
How infidelity will land on you and how you will respond has as much to do with your own expectations, sensitivities, and history as it has to do with the egregiousness of your partner’s behavior. Gender, culture, class, race, and sexual orientation all frame the experience of infidelity and give shape to the pain.
A magnifier can be a circumstance. Pregnancy, economic dependency, unemployment, health challenges, immigration status, and countless other life conditions can add to the burden of betrayal. Our family history is a prime magnifier—affairs and other breaches of trust we grew up with or suffered in past relationships can leave us more susceptible. Infidelity always takes place within a web of connections, and the story started long before the acute injury. For some, it confirms a deep-seated fear: “It’s not that he doesn’t love me, it’s that I don’t feel lovable.” And for others, it shatters the image they had of their partner: “I picked you because I was so sure you were not that kind of person.”
Buffers include a strong network of friends and family who are patient and provide a safe space for the complexity of the situation. A well-developed sense of self or a spiritual or religious faith can also mitigate the impact. The quality of the relationship itself, prior to the crisis, always plays a major part. And if one feels that one has options—real estate, savings, job prospects, dating prospects—it not only tempers vulnerability but gives one room to maneuver, inside and out. Parsing the pain points of betrayal helps to identify opportunities for strengthening these protective buffers.
In my early meetings with infidelity’s casualties, I scan the wounds until I locate their specific emotional quality, identifying magnifiers and strategizing for buffers. Where does it hurt the most? What twisted the knife? The slight, the disloyalty, the abandonment, the breach of trust, the lies, the humiliation? Is it loss or rejection? Is it disillusion or shame? Is it relief, resignation, or indignation? What is the particular feeling or constellation of feelings around which you circle?
Some people are able to express their feelings immediately. Their emotional literacy enables them to recognize, name, and own the particulars of their suffering. But I also encounter many who have shut down without ever identifying their emotional pain points. They live haunted by unnamed feelings, which are no less powerful for their anonymity. “You’re only the second person I’ve ever told my story to,” a young man named Kevin wrote after reaching out to me on Facebook. “It’s been ten years. Perhaps finally writing this all out is my own form of therapy.”
For Kevin, a twenty-six-year-old programmer who lives in Seattle, what hurt the most was not that his first love cheated on him—it was whom she did it with. Years of carrying the shame “of being clueless” have left Kevin with some serious trust issues. He met Taylor at sixteen—she was the gorgeous senior who took his virginity and held most of his attention during high school. Kevin introduced Taylor to his older brother, Hunter, and the three became inseparable.
Initially, when Taylor broke off the relationship, it took Kevin by surprise. He was “hurt, but not heartbroken.” Strangely, Taylor and Hunter were still hanging out together. “Even my mom asked if I was okay with this. But I trusted him so unconditionally that when he told me they were studying, I believed him. I couldn’t imagine that he of all people could betray me.”
Looking back, he asks himself, “How could I not see?” But it is human nature to cling to our sense of reality, to resist its possible shattering even in the face of irrefutable evidence. I assure him that his “cluelessness” is not something to be ashamed of. This kind of avoidance is not an act of idiocy but an act of self-preservation. It is actually a sophisticated self-protective mechanism known as trauma denial—a type of self-delusion that we employ when too much is at stake and we have too much to lose. The mind needs coherence, so it disposes of inconsistencies that threaten the structure of our lives. This becomes more pronounced when we are betrayed by those we feel closest to and are dependent on—a testament to the lengths we will go to preserve our attachments, however fraught they may be.
Finally one day a kid at school blurted out to Kevin, “Do you realize your brother is sleeping with Taylor?” “It made no sense to me,” Kevin recalls, and yet a few minutes later, he walked to a place that was quiet and called his brother asking if it was true. “He knew he had royally fucked up and apologized profusely. I remember crying for hours, with my head buried in a blue pillow. Things between my brother and me changed forever.”
In his writing, I can hear the voice of his sixteen-year-old self. His story is frozen in time, with vivid details—the time of day, the name of the kid who told him the humiliating truth, the minutes he waited before his brother picked up the phone, the color of the pillow he cried into. Psychologists refer to these as screen memories—when we fixate on specific details in order to conceal the more distressing emotional aspects of the experience, making the trauma more tolerable.
In Kevin’s next email, I can hear the relief as it starts to make sense to him why he can see the pillow more clearly than Taylor’s face. The depth of a betrayal goes hand in hand with the depth of the attachment. For many, the betrayal of a friend goes even deeper than that of their own partner. Taylor’s duplicity smarted, but Hunter’s cut deeper. When it is someone in one’s own social circle, a member of one’s own family (in all its intergenerational permutations), or a person in whom one placed one’s trust (nanny, teacher, clergy, neighbor, doctor), the rupture is exponential. Where do we turn? I have heard more than one story where the friend and confidant turned out to be the lover. The more synapses of coherence are snapped, the crazier people feel and the longer it takes to recover.
For years, Kevin had been stuck in embarrassment and shame at his “dumbness.” As a result, he couldn’t trust his own perceptions. “Whenever I hooked up or dated a girl, I was constantly thinking, ‘There must be someone else in the picture.’” Understanding that the issue was not his failure to see the signs, but rather his brother’s profound failure to honor his trust was pivotal for Kevin. He’s working on the relationship with Hunter. And he has discovered newfound compassion for his younger self, which allows him not to immediately close off when things get more serious with a girl he likes.
Certainty is searing, but gnawing suspicion is its own kind of agony. When we begin to suspect that our beloved is duplicitous, we become relentless scavengers, sniffing out desire’s carelessly strewn clothes and clues. Sophisticated surveillance experts, we track the minute changes in his face, the indifference in her voice, the unfamiliar smell of his shirt, her lackluster kiss. We tally up the slightest incongruities. “I kept wondering why she had so many early meetings at the office when she is supposed to start at ten.” “Her Instagram posts didn’t match where she said she was. Dates don’t lie!” “It was puzzling that he had to take a shower and put on deodorant before going for his run.” “All of a sudden, she was so eager to invite Brad and Judy to dinner, when for so long she didn’t even like them.” “Does he really need his phone in the bathroom?”
At first we may keep our questions to ourselves, afraid to falsely accuse, if we’re wrong, and even more afraid to face the facts, if we’re right. But eventually the desire to know trumps the fear of knowing, and we begin to probe and to interrogate. We test, asking questions to which the GPS has already given irrefutable answers. We set traps. “Every dark secret I’ll discover better by pretending,” sings a scheming Figaro in Mozart’s classic opera. We act like we know when we only fear. Anton tells Josie he has proof that she has been sleeping around—there’s no point in continuing to lie about it. “You can tell me,” he says. “I already know everything.” But it’s a bluff. Feeling caught, Josie tells him more than he had ever bargained for. Now he can’t get the images out of his head. In a common twist, Josie tells me later that initially Anton’s suspicions had been unfounded. However, as his snooping increased, so did her frustration and evasiveness. Eventually, resenting her life under surveillance, she says, “He was so convinced I had been cheating on him all along that I decided to do it for real.”
Sometimes the corrosive torment of doubting a partner’s fidelity is made worse by the cruel practice of gaslighting. For months Ruby was asking JP if something was up, and he kept telling her she was crazy, jealous, paranoid. She was almost at the point where she believed him, were it not for the day he left his phone at home. In hindsight, his vociferous denial should have been proof enough. Now she feels doubly betrayed. He made her doubt not just him but her own sanity.
When suspicion turns to certainty, for an instant, there may be relief, but then a new arrow strikes. The moment of revelation often leaves an indelible scar. How did you discover the affair? Did you find your husband’s email address in the Ashley Madison data dump? Did someone else make sure to inform you? Or were you treated to a full-frontal view? Simon walked in on his wife and the contractor in his own bed. He hasn’t slept in it since.
Jamiere was prepared for the discovery, but not for the way it happened. She recognized the signs, for Terrence had done this to her before: the sudden interest in grooming, the new shirts and clean nails, the high volume of emergency meetings at work. “You’d think the second time around he’d have gotten better at it, but he made all the same mistakes.” Yet he steadfastly denied it. Finally she got her proof: an email from the husband of the woman. “He sent me a trail of their texts, which included some really nasty comments about me. How Terrence was repulsed when I got so big with the twins. My crooked teeth. My ghetto accent. There was so much contempt and ridicule it made me vomit.”
Jamiere was distraught at the tone of Terrence’s texts, but she also was upset at the fact that they had been sent to her, unsolicited and unabridged. Determined not to let any man continue to push her around, she confronted Terrence. Then she wrote a letter to the man who had unilaterally decided to dump the offensive texts in her lap, pretending that it was for her benefit, when it screamed “revenge.” Our work now focuses on rebuilding her self-esteem.
Not only do people discover their partners’ secrets; they sometimes become unwilling parties to the deception. Afraid to let on to their friends, their parents, the kids, the colleagues, the neighbors, and in some cases, the media, the betrayed become accomplices in the secret. Now they too must lie—to protect the very person who lied to them.
“I was standing there holding two identical pairs of earrings,” Lynn recalls. “I started to ask him why he bought me the same gift twice, when the answer crystallized like an apparition. Six years with his secretary. That’s a lot of matching earrings.”
For the sake of the kids, Lynn and Mitch have decided to stay together. And for the sake of the kids, she has kept it hidden. “I don’t want anyone to know,” she told me. “So now I am the one lying, to my parents, to my own daughters. I make waffles in the morning and kiss him goodbye like it’s just another day. What a farce! I want to protect them, but in the end I feel like I’m protecting him—how twisted is that?” The secret that was kept from her is now the secret she must keep from others. Mitch seems liberated by the disclosure; Lynn now feels imprisoned. Sometimes she has to remind herself that she is not the guilty one.
What will help both Lynn and Mitch is to carefully select one or two trusted confidants so that the wound does not fester. They may not want to notify the entire village, but lifting the shame of silence matters a great deal. Inviting one or two people into their grief lets some air into a situation that is often hermetically sealed.
When the secret is out, often the anguish is reinforced by the punishment of social disapproval and pity. Ditta hates all those mothers at school looking at her with false compassion while secretly feeling glad that it didn’t happen to them. “How could she not know?” they whisper. “What did she expect, working on four continents and leaving him alone with the kids?” The collective voice of condemnation ranges from mild criticism to full blaming of the victim—for “allowing” it to happen, for not doing enough to prevent it, for not seeing it when it was happening, for letting it go on so long, and of course, for staying after everything that happened. The gossip hisses around every corner.
Not only can an affair destroy a marriage; it has the power to unravel an entire social fabric. Its emotional trajectory tends to intersect with many other relationships—friends, family, and colleagues. After nine years, Mo will no longer go on his annual kayak trip with his best buddies. He has just learned that one had been his wife’s friend with benefits; the other the provider of the Airbnb; the third, a silent witness. Betrayed on all sides, he asks, “Who am I supposed to talk to now?”
For these people, the specific injuries are shame and isolation. The revelation of an affair can leave the unsuspecting partner in a difficult bind: At the moment they most need others for comfort and affirmation, they are least able to reach out. Unable to draw on the support of friends, they feel doubly alone.
Social isolation and silence are difficult, but so too is the advice of others. Friends are often all too quick to offer hasty judgments, simplistic solutions, and unsolicited rants on how “I never liked him/her anyway.” In extreme cases, friends and family are so outraged and reactive themselves that they usurp the role of victim, leaving the deceived partner in the strange position of defending the very person who hurt them. “All my mother could say was ‘I told you so,’ followed by a long list of Sara’s faults, which of course she’d seen from the beginning.” Arthur laughs bitterly. “I found myself telling her to back off, reminding her what a great mom Sara was, how hard she worked. Then I said, ‘Wait a minute. I’m the one who was hurt here!’”
Everyone seems to know exactly what to do. Friends offer their couch, to help pack his things, to change the locks, to take the kids for the weekend. They send numbers for therapists, for mediators, for detectives, for lawyers. Sometimes this is exactly what is needed. But other times, while these actions may be well intentioned, they fail to make space for the full implications of the dilemma.
Affairs hurt enough, but sometimes the timing is the particular nail in the coffin. “Our baby was just two months old!” is an all-too-common refrain, as is “I’d just miscarried.” Lizzy was in her third trimester when she found out about Dan’s affair. But she felt that she couldn’t say anything because it would harm the baby in her belly and disconnect her from the growing life she was nurturing. All she wanted was for the baby not to be contaminated by the negative energy.
“My mother was dying and my wife was off banging a total loser,” Tom tells me. Drake knows that the timing is the least of his worries, but that doesn’t make it less hurtful: “The fact that I found out on our ten-year anniversary is mostly irrelevant, but it’s an ironically torturous element that just adds to my despair.”
When the particular timing is personally charged, the emphasis is on “how could he or she do this to me then?” The then almost overrides the what.
In some cases, it’s the intentional duplicity that burns—the degree of planning it took to pull off such a calculated series of deceptions. The deliberateness implies that the unfaithful partner has weighed his or her desires against their consequences and decided to proceed anyway. Furthermore, the significant investment of time, energy, money, and ingenuity point to the conscious motivation to pursue the selfish motives at the expense of the partner or family.
“Walk me through this,” Charlotte asked Steve after she uncovered his elaborate adventures in the world of high-end escorts. “How did you get to the prostitute? Did you just happen to have five thousand dollars lying around? Or did you go to the ATM ten times to get it? Did you already know what it would cost? Are you such a regular?” Every step of premeditation around the escort meant an active disregard of his wife. There are so many things that Charlotte is angry about when it comes to Steve’s escapades in the sex industry, but what really cuts at the heart of her being is the way he was able to erase her so completely from his awareness.
Was he not thinking of her at the bank? Over tapas? When he changed the sheets? When he emptied the trash? “The discovery was painful in and of itself,” she tells me, “but when it became clear how much energy and planning it took, that really stung. No wonder he had so little time or energy for us.”
Charlotte understands desire, and has had her own opportunities to stray. But she never acted on them. “I know what you did because it was what I didn’t do,” she tells Steve. “When it got right down to it, I couldn’t do it because I couldn’t stop thinking about you. I knew how much it would hurt you. How could you not know that, too? Or did you just not care?”
Carefully premeditated affairs sting, but the opposite scenario can hurt just as badly. In these cases, it is the carelessness of cheating that took place by happenstance. “She told me it was just a spur-of-the-moment fling, it meant nothing.” Rick laughs bitterly. “And I said, ‘That’s supposed to make me feel better? That you would hurt me this much for something that meant nothing?’”
Most of us today take for granted that we will not be the first lover of our chosen partner, but we hope to be the last. We can accept that our beloved has had other relationships, even other marriages, but we like to think of them as transient and past. They are over, for they were not the real thing. We know we have not been the only one, but we believe we are the one. Because of this, one twist in the infidelity narrative that is particularly painful is the relighting of an old flame.
Helen and Miles have been together for eighteen years, and married for fourteen. For the last two years, it turns out, Miles has been having an affair with his ex-wife, Maura, who nearly destroyed him when she left with another man. “Why her?” Helen kept asking. “Why his ex? She hurt him so much. You would think he would want nothing to do with her.” When I asked Miles, he confessed that he had never accepted that Maura had stopped loving him, and part of him still believes that the hand of fate is guiding their relationship. “After all these years, I ran into her while hiking on the Pacific Crest Trail. What are the chances?”
Helen has always known that Maura was Miles’s first love—he married her in college and they were together twelve years. And now she finds herself wondering, “Did he ever really love me? Despite our kids and everything we built, was I ever really the one? Or was it her all along? Perhaps I was just a placeholder for his true love.” Being replaced is always harsh, but when the ex returns and the new is actually old, the added twist is feeling that perhaps we are competing with destiny.
There is a unique edge when the affair rubs up against life or death, birth and disease. We have long known that one moment of lust can leave a legacy for generations. For much of history, the inevitable consequences of adultery were illegitimate children. Contraception notwithstanding, there are still plenty of cases where there is living proof of the illicit liaison, bringing an additional level of shame and a long-lasting reminder. Men raise children they did not conceive. “Most days, I don’t think about it. I’m just her dad. Every once in a while, though, I ache, knowing that this little girl I love more than anything in the world carries the DNA of the man I despise.” Women live with the knowledge that their partners have fathered children elsewhere. “At first he didn’t want kids. When we started trying, it was too late, even for IVF. It was painful to accept childlessness, but I thought we worked through it together. Then I find out that not only was he getting comfort with a younger woman, but she gave him the one thing I couldn’t. She sent me the sonogram pictures out of spite when he told her he wasn’t leaving me. The affair, I can handle, but not the baby.”
Affairs can create new life; they can also pose a threat to life. These days, it has become standard practice to send the partner who has been unfaithful to take an STD test. But sometimes it is too late. At first Tim was pissed to learn of Mike’s multiple hookups. He had told Mike clearly that he wanted a monogamous relationship. But to add insult to injury, Tim is now anxiously awaiting the results of his blood work. “We’ve always practiced safe sex. The most difficult thing for me to grasp is his lack of concern for my health and the risk he put both of us in. My stomach goes cold every time I think about it. And I still don’t know whether he’s sorry he did it or just sorry he got caught.”
Economic circumstances also play an important role in how we experience and react to a betrayal. For the financially dependent partner, it may literally be a case of “I cannot afford to leave.” For the financial provider, the idea that “I’ve been working all these years to support you and this family and now I will have to pay alimony while you go to live with this loser” can be unbearable. For either partner, what is at stake is not just the family and the life they’ve built together, but also the lifestyle they have become accustomed to. When Devon cheated on Annie for the second time, she told him he had twenty-four hours to “get the hell out of my apartment.” Later, she told me, “I pay all the bills, including his car payment, so he can work on his music. I’ve been generous to a fault, but now I’m done.” Her economic freedom is a buffer, giving her a range of options that are out of reach for many others.
Darlene can’t even attend a support group because she can’t afford a babysitter for her kids. She doesn’t say, “I’m done.” She says, “I’m trapped.” She isn’t ready to leave, despite the urging of a number of therapists and members of her congregation. So we work on finding her a new church with a supportive minister, as well as an online community that will respect her choice and lend her an ear. Until she can develop a space to think for herself, she can hardly contemplate her options.
Edith is well into her fifties when she discovers her husband’s decades-long prostitute habit. The lurid nature of it all bothers her, but what really kicks her in the gut is the cost. “I don’t want to sound mercenary,” she tells me, “but twenty years of paid sex—that’s the price of a mortgage!” As she sits at home in their small, rented one-bedroom poring over the credit card bills, those tens of thousands of dollars hurt much more than the sex they paid for.
Money. Babies. STDs. Premeditation. Carelessness. Shame. Self-doubt. Gossip and judgment. The particular person, gender, time, place, social context. If this brief compendium of love’s horror stories shows us anything, it is that while every act of betrayal shares common features, every experience of betrayal is unique. We do no one a service when we reduce affairs to sex and lies, leaving out the many other constitutive elements that create the nuances of the torment and inform the path to healing.