A Truth that’s told with bad intent
Beats all the Lies you can invent.
—William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence”
Secrets and lies emerge in my office in all shades. Often, a couple arrives with an affair freshly exposed, a raw wound that cannot be ignored. But others sit on my couch with the secret between them—obvious to me but unmentioned. Neither partner wants to tell or find out. I’ve also sat in countless sessions where one person asks the other, “Are you having an affair?” and it is flat out denied, even though the inquirer has irrefutable proof. Sometimes the unfaithful partner will drop hint upon hint, but the spouse does not seem to want to connect the dots. Other times the suspicious one is hot on the trail, with a damning dossier of evidence in hand, but waiting for the right moment to confront.
I’ve seen the full spectrum of dishonesty, from simple omissions to partial truths and white lies to blatant obfuscation and mental hijacking. I’ve seen secrecy in its cruel version and its benevolent one. Some lie to protect themselves; others lie to protect their partners; and then there is the ironic role reversal where the betrayed ends up lying to protect the one who deceived them.
The twists and tangles of lying are endless. Many unfaithful spouses tell me that their love affairs represent the first time they’ve stopped lying to themselves. Paradoxically, while engaged in a relationship built on deceit, they often feel that for the first time they are touching truth, connecting with something more essential, authentic, and sincere than their so-called real life.
During her two-year affair with the owner of the local bike shop, Megan got tired of hiding from everyone around her. But after having ended the double life, she now feels worse. “Now I’m lying inwardly. I’m deluding myself, pretending it’s okay to live without him.”
It’s not just couples who struggle with issues of secrecy. Secrets litter the social landscape of infidelity. A woman borrows her married friend’s phone and finds flirty texts from an unknown man. A mother knows her son wasn’t with her last Saturday, as he told his wife, but isn’t sure she wants to know where he actually was. And of course there is the “other woman” and the “other man.” They don’t just have a secret, they are the secret.
Secrets and lies are at the heart of every affair, and they heighten both the excitement of the lovers and the pain of the betrayed. They throw us into a web of quandaries. Must they be revealed? And if so, how? Revelation lies on a continuum, from “don’t ask, don’t tell” to a detailed postmortem autopsy. Honesty requires careful calibration. Is there such a thing as too much? Is it ever better to keep the affair concealed? What about the old saying that what you don’t know can’t hurt you?
For some, the answer is simple: Secrecy is lying, lying is wrong. The only acceptable course of action is confession, complete transparency, repentance, and punishment. The dominant view seems to be that revelation is the sine qua non for restoring intimacy and trust after an affair. Lying, these days, is seen as a human rights violation. We all deserve the truth, and there is no circumstance where withholding it can be justified.
I wish it were so simple—that we could use such categorical principles to neatly organize our messy human lives. But therapists don’t work with principles—they work with real people and real-life situations.
“This grad student I’ve been sleeping with is pregnant, and she’s determined to have the baby,” says Jeremy, a college professor who’d thought he was doing a good job of keeping his fling strictly casual. “I have no intention of ruining my marriage, but I don’t want my child to grow up as a secret.”
“A guy I hooked up with just told me he has herpes,” says Lou, looking embarrassed. “My boyfriend is at risk. Do I have to tell him?”
“This girl I fooled around with tagged me in a picture on Instagram after I told her I could no longer see her,” says Annie. “We only kissed, but my girlfriend won’t see it that way. She has been checking my social media obsessively—she’s bound to see the picture.”
Many of you may conclude that in such situations the right decision is disclosure. But not all situations are so clear-cut.
“It was a momentary lapse in judgment—I was drunk and I deeply regret it,” says Lina, who’d been engaged only a few months when a night of partying after her college reunion ended in an ex’s bed. “If I tell my fiancé, I know it will destroy him. His first wife left with his best friend, and he always said if I cheated on him, it was over.” Yes, she should have thought of that before. But should her slipup derail their whole life?
“Why would I tell my wife?” Yuri asks. “Since I met Anat, we don’t fight about sex anymore. I don’t beg her and I don’t bug her, and my family is doing well.”
In an act of defiance, Holly has fallen madly in love with a fellow Yorkie owner she met at the dog park. She’d like nothing more than to tell her “nasty, controlling” husband. “It would serve him right.” But the price of honesty would be high. “With the prenup that he made me sign, I’d lose the kids.”
Nancy’s ongoing flirtation with a dad at her son’s football games reignited her long-dormant sensuality. “I feel gratitude for the awakening of that part of me that is not just a mother, wife, or servant. I feel even more gratitude that I didn’t act on it,” she says. Her husband is delighted with her newfound erotic energy. But she’s wondering, does she have to tell him about her “affair of the mind”? Nancy is of the firm belief that honesty means complete transparency.
In circumstances like these, might it be wiser for the involved partner to stay quiet and to handle matters alone? Truth can be healing, and sometimes fessing up is the only appropriate response. When counseling her patients about the wisdom of truth-telling, my colleague Lisa Spiegel uses a simple and effective formula: Ask yourself, is it honest, is it helpful, and is it kind?
Truth can also be irrevocably destructive and even aggressive, delivered with sadistic pleasure. On more than one occasion, I’ve seen honesty do more harm than good, leaving me to ask, Can lying sometimes be protective? To many, this notion seems unfathomable. But then again, I’ve also heard informed spouses scream, “I wish you’d never told me!”
At a training for therapists, a participant working in hospice care asked me for advice. “What can I say to the terminally ill patient who wants to confess to his wife a lifetime of infidelity before he dies?” I replied, “While I understand that to him, ‘coming clean’ after all these years may seem like a genuine expression of deep love and respect, he needs to know that he may die in relief but she will live in turmoil. While he’s resting in peace, she’ll be tossing and turning, sleepless for months as she replays movies in her head that are probably far more torrid than the affairs ever were. Is that the legacy he wants to leave?”
Sometimes silence is caring. Before you unload your guilt onto an unsuspecting partner, consider, whose well-being are you really thinking of? Is your soul-cleansing as selfless as it appears? And what is your partner supposed to do with this information?
I have seen the other side of this situation in my office, where I’ve tried to help a widow deal with the double bereavement of losing her husband to cancer and losing her image of their happy marriage to his deathbed confessions. Respect is not necessarily about telling all, but about considering what it will be like for the other to receive the knowledge. When exploring the pros and cons of revelation, don’t think just in either-or terms or in the abstract, but try to imagine yourself in the actual situation with the other person. Enact the conversation: Where are you? What do you say? What do you read on the other person’s face? How do they respond?
The question “to tell or not to tell?” becomes even weightier when social norms render people particularly vulnerable. As long as there are countries in the world where women only suspected of glancing elsewhere can be stoned and burned alive, or where homosexuals can be barred from seeing their own children, honesty and transparency should always be thought of in context and on a case-by-case basis.
Therapists working with infidelity must grapple with the thorny issue of secrets. The conventional approach stipulates that clinicians in couples therapy cannot keep things under wraps; and that in order for therapy to be productive, the unfaithful must end the affair or come clean. Otherwise they are to be referred to individual therapy. I often hear American colleagues say that there is nothing you can do with a secret in the middle of the room. Interestingly, my international counterparts say something quite different—there is a lot you can do so long as the secret is not revealed. Once you have raised the curtain, there is no going back. They caution against gratuitous revelation, citing the unnecessary pain inflicted on one’s partner and the harm to the relationship.
In recent years, a small minority of therapists, including Janis Abrahms Spring and Michele Scheinkman, have begun to challenge the American orthodoxy around secrets, finding the traditional approach to be unhelpful, limiting, and even damaging. I have chosen to adopt what Spring calls an open-secrets policy. When I first meet a couple, I let them know that I will see them apart as well as together, and our individual sessions are confidential. Each is guaranteed a private space to work through their issues. Both people have to sign off on this. Like Spring, I see the decision to reveal or not to reveal as part of the therapy itself, not as a precondition for therapy.
This approach is not without its complications, and I constantly grapple with it. I have on occasion had to answer yes to the question “Did you know all along?” when a partner finds out they have been deceived. While this situation is painful for all involved, it is not an ethical breach under the terms of our agreement. And for the time being, I find it to be the more productive stance. As Scheinkman writes, “A no-secrets policy holds the therapist hostage, unable to help in possibly one of the most critical moments in a couple’s relationship.”1
This policy does not apply just to affairs. In fact, the turning point for me was a session in which a woman told me that for the past twenty years she couldn’t wait for sex with her husband to be over. She didn’t like his smell and faked her orgasms. Knowing that this wouldn’t change and not considering it a marital dealbreaker, she didn’t see the point of telling him. I was willing to proceed with therapy cognizant of her pretense. So I had to ask myself, How is this secret fundamentally different from others?
Was it any less grave than a clandestine affair? Would her husband be less hurt to learn that she had been lying to him all along than to learn she was sleeping with someone else? Should I insist that she reveal her distaste in order for us to continue therapy? Sexual secrets come in many forms. Yet therapists tend to struggle more with lies about extramarital sex than with decades of lying about intramarital sex. We hold many confidences without experiencing an ethical conflict. Infidelity may not always take the gold medal in the hierarchy of essential disclosures.
“We live in a culture whose messages about secrecy are truly confounding,” writes Evan Imber-Black in her book The Secret Life of Families. “If cultural norms once made shameful secrets out of too many events in human life, we are now struggling with the reverse: the assumption that telling secrets—no matter how, when, or to whom—is morally superior to keeping them and that it is automatically healing.”2
To understand America’s views on secrecy and truth-telling, we need to examine the current definition of intimacy. Modern intimacy is bathed in self-disclosure, the trustful sharing of our most personal and private material—our feelings. From an early age, our best friend is the one to whom we tell our secrets. And since our partner today is assumed to be our best friend, we believe, “I should be able to tell you anything, and I have a right to immediate and constant access to your thoughts and feelings.” This entitlement to know, and the assumption that knowing equals closeness, is a feature of modern love.
Ours is a culture that reveres the ethos of absolute frankness and elevates truth-telling to moral perfection. Other cultures believe that when everything is out in the open and ambiguity is done away with, it may not increase intimacy, but compromise it.
As a cultural hybrid, I practice in many languages. In the realm of communication, many of my American patients prefer explicit meanings, candor, and “plain speech” over opaqueness and allusion. My patients from West Africa, the Philippines, and Belgium are more likely to linger in ambiguity than to opt for stark revelation. They seek the detours rather than the direct route.
As we consider these contrasts, we also have to take into account the difference between privacy and secrecy. As psychiatrist Stephen Levine explains, privacy is a functional boundary that we agree on by social convention. There are matters that we know exist but choose not to discuss, like menstruation, masturbation, or fantasies. Secrets are matters we will deliberately mislead others about. The same erotic longings and temptations that are private in one couple are a secret in another.3 In some cultures, infidelity is commonly treated as a private matter (at least for men), but in our culture, it is usually a secret.
It’s almost impossible to discuss cultural differences without taking a moment to observe America’s favorite point of sexual comparison: les Français. Debra Ollivier describes how the French “favor the implicit over the explicit, the subtext over context, discretion over indiscretion, and the hidden over the obvious—in that, they’re exactly the opposite of Americans.”4 Pamela Druckerman, a journalist who interviewed people around the globe for her book Lust in Translation, expands on how these predilections shape French attitudes about infidelity. “Discretion seems to be the cornerstone of adultery in France,”5 she writes, noting that many of the people she spoke with seemed to prefer not to tell, and not to know. “French affairs can seem like Cold War conflicts in which neither side ever draws its guns.”6
Back at the ranch, the guns are blazing. While Americans have little tolerance for extramarital sex, deception is often condemned more harshly than the transgression it seeks to conceal. The hiding, the dissimulation, and all the tall tales are the main ingredients of the affront and are seen as a fundamental lack of respect. The implication is that we only lie to those beneath us—children, constituents, and employees. Hence, the refrain echoes from private bedrooms to public hearings: “It’s not that you cheated, it’s that you lied to me!” But would we really feel better if our partners gave us advance notice of their indiscretions?
Amira, a thirty-three-year-old Pakistani American social work grad student, still vividly remembers the day she began to unravel her father’s secret. “Dad was teaching me to drive. He had this weird Japanese trinket hanging from his rearview mirror. One day I tried to take it down, but he stopped me and told me it was a gift from Yumi, his secretary. That name came back to me immediately seven years later, when Dad asked me to look for an address in his phone, and I found a string of texts from someone called Y. Then I knew.”
“Does he know that you know?” I ask her. She shakes her head.
“Will you ever tell him?”
“What I really want to tell him is ‘Learn to delete your text messages!’ Maybe one day I’ll show him how. I just wish he had covered his tracks. I don’t like feeling complicit in his deception of my mother.”
“Have you considered telling her?” I inquire. Immediately, she says no.
A second-generation immigrant whose parents came to America before she was born, Amira has a foot in two worlds. She knows her silence is unconventional here. “My American friends would have gone immediately to their mothers. They would see exposing the secret as the right and caring thing to do.” But while she went to school in suburban Kansas, when it comes to family matters, Amira’s code is rooted in Karachi. “Yes, we value honesty and trust,” she says, “but we value the preservation of the family even more.”
Amira’s decision came almost as a given. Here’s how the logic went: “If I tell her, what then? Break up the home? Divide all that we’ve worked to build? Conduct ourselves like Americans—impulsively and selfishly—and end up spending weekends with one parent and weekdays with another?”
She did feel anger and resentment on her mother’s behalf. “But my parents love each other,” she adds, “and you should know, they were an arranged marriage. I know that my mother is massively uncomfortable with the topic of sex, but it’s not like my father is much better. My gut told me that he chose the path that allowed our family to stay together. Maybe my mother would rather not be bothered. It felt fair, so I was able to make peace with it. Besides this one stain, Dad is the most upstanding father, husband, and citizen. Why would I want to ruin all these great things about him?”
“What about the disrespect to your mother?” I ask.
“The way I see it, my father considered it to be most respectful to not shake the core of our family by being open with us about something that we couldn’t weather. And as for me, I found it to be most respectful to keep whatever facts I came across to myself. I wouldn’t dare shame my parents by thrusting this truth into the daylight. For what? So that we can be ‘honest’?”
Clearly, the conviction that telling the truth is a mark of respect isn’t universal. In many cultures, respect is more likely expressed with gentle untruths that aim at preserving face and peace of mind. This protective opacity is seen as preferable to disclosure that might result in public humiliation.
Amira’s reasoning is part of a long-standing cultural legacy that extends beyond Pakistan to all family-oriented societies. Her framework is a collectivist one, where family loyalty mandates compromising around infidelity—and secrets. Of course, we could look at her situation through the lens of gender politics and see her elucidations as a sad but ingenious apology for patriarchy. Furthermore, we cannot afford to minimize the damaging effects that secret-keeping may have on children. As my colleague Harriet Lerner highlights, secrecy “puts a crack in the foundation of the relationship with both parents and operates like an underground river of confusion and pain that affects everything. It not infrequently leads to symptomatic behavior and acting out by kids and teens who are then put in therapy where the real source of anxiety and distress is never identified.” 7
But is Amira’s choice any more distressing than that of her fellow student Marnie? The twenty-four-year-old New Yorker is still haunted by the day she grabbed her mother’s “secret phone” and threw it down the stairs into her father’s hands. “He deserved to know she was cheating!”
Marnie had known about her mom’s affair with her chiropractor for several years. “She used to hide her secret phone in the laundry hamper and would spend hours ‘doing ironing.’ Yeah, right. She wasn’t that domestically inclined.” On that fateful day, “My mom started crying frantically and saying, ‘Oh my god, what did you do? What did you do?’ My world came crashing down in a matter of hours. Now our family is completely splintered. No more dinner for four at TGI Fridays, no more big family parties on holidays. The last time I saw my mom and dad in a room together, I was fifteen.”
Marnie still agonizes over the painful and irreversible consequences of the tumbling phone, but it would never occur to her to question the moral platform from which she threw it. Her value system, while dramatically different from Amira’s, is just as instinctive. In her individualistic framework, the personal “right to know” trumps the harmony of the family. For Marnie, lying is categorically wrong; for Amira, it depends on the particular situation.
I have often witnessed the tension between these two world views. One accuses the other of duplicity and lack of transparency. The other is repelled by the destructive spilling of secrets in the name of honesty. One is shocked by the distance that the other seems to establish between men and women. The other sees unvarnished directness as damaging to love and antithetical to desire. Collectivist and individualistic cultures both manage the overt and the covert, with pros and cons on all sides. Since we tend to get stuck within our own paradigm, it is instructive to know how a neighbor from another country addresses the same situation with a very different ethical and relational logic. That said, in our global world, many of us are children of multiple cultures, and these dialogues take place within our own hearts and minds.
The disclosive dilemmas do not end when an affair is revealed. At every step, the questions continue to arise: What to confess? How much? And how to do it? Furthermore, what we tell others depends on what we are willing to admit to ourselves. Very few people I meet are lying to their loved ones in cold blood. More often than not, they have constructed elaborate scaffolds to legitimize their actions, otherwise known as rationalizations.
“The tendency toward infidelity depends to a great extent on being able to justify it to ourselves,” writes behavioral economics expert Dan Ariely.8 We all want to be able to look in the mirror and feel good about the person we see, he explains, but we also want to do things that we know aren’t quite honest. So we internally rationalize our various forms of cheating in order to maintain a positive self-image—an ethical sleight of hand that Ariely calls the “fudge factor.”
When dealing with the fallout of infidelity, it’s important to unpack these rationalizations; otherwise we risk simply dumping them on our partner in the name of truth. Kathleen had her antennae out for years, but when she could no longer tolerate her husband Don’s emotional and sexual absence, she took a closer look at his iPad. Her suspicions confirmed, she now wants the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Don has come to meet me for advice on how to answer her questions.
A youthful sixty-something Chicago native, Don grew up poor, with a father who struggled to keep a job and a much-revered mother who managed two jobs. He’s worked hard to create a life of comfort and refinement, and has dedicated himself to serving his constituency as a community leader. Kathleen is his second wife—they have been married twenty-two years. From the moment Don comes into my office, it is clear that this is a man with deep contradictions. He loves his wife, has always been devoted to her, but he has never been faithful to her.
To begin, I ask him to bring me up to speed. Kathleen is aware of his two mistresses, Lydia and Cheryl. She also knows that they have been in his life for decades, conveniently located on opposite coasts at a safe distance from his family home. As he lays out the logistics of his triple life, I sense a slight irritation with the fact that he was discovered. After all, he had handled his triptych with such care and discretion. The pleasure of his affairs, he admits, was the sense of control it gave him when he had a personal world that eluded the eyes of society.
Now Kathleen knows the basic facts. What she is asking him is, Why did this happen?
“So what will you tell her?” I ask.
“Well, the truth is, I had these other women because I wasn’t getting satisfying intimacy at home.”
Of the hundreds of truths he hasn’t told his wife, this is the one he chooses to start with? Clearly we’ve got some work to do. I ask Don to consider how that will make her feel. And more important, is it even as true as he believes it to be? Or is this simply one of his rationalizations?
“Do you really think that if you had better sex with your wife, you wouldn’t have your mistresses?” I ask semi-rhetorically.
“I do,” he insists. He tells me a long, involved story about menopause, hormones, her increased self-consciousness, his difficulty sustaining erections. With his ladies, he has no such trouble. That doesn’t surprise me in the least. But before he goes telling his wife that he did this because something was missing with her, he needs to ask himself, to what extent was he missing in action? I suspect that if I were to ask Kathleen, she would probably agree that, given his long-standing emotional retreat, it’s little surprise that their sex life became dull and unimaginative. Don looks uncomfortable, so I press ahead.
“Imagination—that’s the key word here. With your affairs, the arousal starts on your flight over there. You don’t need the blue pill because what turns you on is the plot, the planning, the carefully chosen clothes. All the anticipation is what fuels the desire. When you come home and the first thing you do is take off your nice clothes and put on old sweatpants, nobody’s going to get turned on.”
Don seems a little taken aback at my bluntness, but he’s listening attentively. He’s by no means the first man or woman to come to me to carp about sexual ennui at home. I don’t deny the erotically muting effects of domesticity. But sex with his wife stands no chance when all his energy is devoted to his wanderings. Rather than blaming the lackluster sex at home for his affairs, maybe he should fault the affairs for the sexual dullness with his wife. Furthermore, he’s been roaming for a very long time, in his first marriage and in every relationship since. This isn’t about hormones, age, or arousal. It’s about him.
“Do you see now that what you wanted to say to your wife is anything but true? These are your rationalizations—stories you’ve told to yourself to justify continuing to do what you want. Now, let’s try to find something more honest to tell her.”
In the course of our conversations, I get to know and like Don. He is not a Don Juan who revels in the conquest. It seems strange to say, but he is a man with a genuine love and respect for women. They raised him and they shaped him—his mother, his sisters, his aunts, his mentors. As a teenager and as a boy, he lacked confidence, acutely aware of his poor education and humble beginnings. He figured out that one of the ways to feel more manly was by surrounding himself with strong, accomplished women. Both his long-term loves have advanced degrees (as does his wife), are “age appropriate,” have had children of their own, and are not looking for more—a perfect fit, since he’s always been clear with them that he will never leave his wife. He’s careful, respectful, and loyal. Some would call him a true gentleman.
Did they know about each other? I ask him. He admits that Mistress 1 knows about Mistress 2, but Mistress 2 knows only about the wife. And he promised Mistress 1 that he’d stop sleeping with Mistress 2, a promise he did not keep. Meanwhile, he told both of them the same half-truth he told me: that his sexual needs are unmet at home. Slowly, as we unravel the intricate web of his affairs, he realizes that he’s been lying to all three.
Living in triplicate has taken a tremendous toll. In the early days, Don had a life with a little secret on the side. But as time wore on, the obfuscation increasingly structured his entire life. Secrets have a tendency to mushroom. You can’t tell your partner where you were between six and eight, because then you may have to tell her where you were between four and five. You think you’re keeping it all together, but in fact you are becoming more fragmented. As his pieces come back together into a cohesive whole, Don is less dissociated and has become more open both with himself and with his wife.
“What else has Kathleen been asking?” I inquire.
“I’ve promised her that I will never do this again, but she asks me, ‘What will stop you if you have the opportunity?’ I’ve told her that I won’t do it again because I know that if she were to find out, there would be no hope of repairing our relationship.”
Don is emphasizing the fear of getting caught. It’s honest, but there’s more. What would happen if he were actually straight with Kathleen about the fact that he’s not by nature a one-woman guy?
He looks surprised at the idea. “No, I’ve never said that. I was always fearful of what her reaction would be. I think she would say she didn’t sign up for that.”
“Fair enough. And I’m not suggesting you impose a harem on her. But the point is, she didn’t sign up for the lying either. You never gave her a choice. By definition, if you go behind someone’s back, you’re acting in a unilateral fashion.”
Don’s surprise is giving way to relief. “I love my wife, but I also love other women. That’s who I’ve always been. Just to admit that is so helpful. I’ve never said any of that, not to Kathleen, not even to myself.” Now we are reaching a new level of truth. So often, in the wake of an infidelity, I hear repentant partners promise never to be attracted to another again. This simply engenders more fibs. It would be more realistic to say, “Yes, I may feel attractions, but because I love you and I respect you, and I don’t want to hurt you again, I will choose not to act on it.” That’s a more honest—and more trustworthy—statement.
Now that we are clear on what Don wants to tell his wife, we turn our attention to how. I suggest that he begin with a letter. Handwritten, because it’s more personal that way, and hand-delivered.
The goal is threefold. First, take responsibility for his hurtful behavior, in particular, the way he rationed his closeness by giving her only a fragment of his divided self. Second, be vulnerable with her about his own proclivities and how, for years, he justified it to himself at her expense. And third, pour out his love for her and fight for their relationship.
Over the years I have come to find love letters a lot more conducive to healing than the more common therapeutic practice of having the unfaithful partner create an exhaustive inventory of offenses—hotels, dates, trips, gifts. I thought that Don needed to acknowledge that he was a master of deception. I didn’t think it would help his wife to know the details of every lie.
When Don returns the following week, he tells me that Kathleen was moved by the effort and sincerity he had put into his letter, but also was cautious—wanting to believe but afraid to trust. I am hopeful for this couple. Despite granting himself hidden and selfish privileges, Don always loved his wife. From the very first session, I could hear it in the way he spoke about her—with reverence, fondness, and admiration. Kathleen was deeply hurt, but Don’s hidden lives had not fractured her love and regard for him—or her respect for herself. She was determined not to let the crisis rewrite their whole history.
Over the next few months, I guide Don as he ends his long-standing relationships with Cheryl and Lydia with as much care and integrity as possible, and continues to rebuild his connection with his wife. More than once, he succumbs to the knee-jerk response to lie when Kathleen asks about his comings and goings. This bad habit is going to take some hard work to break, but he is committed to the task. And every time he gives her a straight answer, he is amazed by the simplicity of the transaction. Their ordeal is not over, but I have a sense they will come out of this crisis stronger and closer.
I work on both sides of the dishonesty divide—coaching habitual liars like Don, but also counseling those who have been deceived. We commonly assume that people want to know everything, and we are quick to judge the self-delusion of those who opt for voluntary ignorance.
Carol has always known her husband is an alcoholic. What she didn’t know until now is that he liked to mix his drinks with escorts. While contemplating her options, she tells me that she’s not sure she wants to know more. “That’s your choice,” I tell her. “It’s okay if you don’t want all the details. Let him carry the burden of that knowledge and take responsibility for figuring out who he wants to be as a man, as a person.”
Others feel a need to gorge themselves on detail. In an effort to protect them from information overload, I remind them that once we know, we have to deal with the consequences of knowing. I often ask, Do you really want the answer to your question, or do you want your partner to know that you have the question?
I make a distinction between two kinds of inquiry—the detective questions, which mine the sordid details, and the investigative questions, which mine the meanings and the motives.
Detective questions include: How many times did you sleep with him? Did you do it in our bed? Does she scream when she comes? How old did you say she was? Did you suck his cock? Was she shaved? Did she let you do anal? Detective questions add further scarring and are often retraumatizing, inviting comparisons in which you are always the loser. Yes, you need to know if he protected himself or if you should get tested. You need to know if you should worry about your bank account. But maybe you don’t need to know if she was blond or brunette, if her breasts were real, if he had a bigger penis. The interrogations, the injunctions, and even the forensic evidence fail to assuage your fundamental fears. Moreover, they make reconciliation much more difficult, and if you choose to separate, they will be fodder for the legal proceedings. Another line of inquiry may be more conducive to rebuilding trust.
Investigative questions recognize that the truth often lies beyond the facts. They include: Help me understand what the affair has meant for you. Were you looking for it, or did it just happen? Why now? What was it like when you would come home? What did you experience there that you don’t have with me? Did you feel entitled to your affair? Did you want me to find out? Would you have ended it if I hadn’t found out? Are you relieved it’s all in the open, or would you have preferred if it stayed hush-hush? Were you trying to leave me? Do you think that you should be forgiven? Would you respect me less if I were to forgive you? Did you hope I would leave so you wouldn’t have to feel responsible for breaking up the family? The investigative approach asks more enlightening questions that probe the meaning of the affair, and focuses on analysis rather than facts.
Sometimes we ask one question while the real question hides behind it. “What kind of sex did you have with him?” is often a stand-in for “Don’t you like the sex we have?” What you want to know is legitimate, but how you go about asking it makes all the difference to your peace of mind. My colleague Steven Andreas suggests that to transform a detective into an investigative question, it is helpful to ask yourself: If I knew all the answers to all my questions, what would that do for me? This can bring you to a more useful line of inquiry that respects the intent of the original question but avoids the pitfalls of unnecessary information.
My patient Marcus feels that to trust again, he needs to know everything. He is obsessively grilling Pavel to give him a precise account of his Grindr activities. “I ask you a question; I want an answer.” While I understand Marcus’s need to reorient himself, I suggest that this scavenger hunt, rather than being reassuring, is likely to trigger more rage, less intimacy, and more policing.
It is only reasonable, in the immediate aftermath, for couples to agree on certain limits to preserve peace of mind—for example, ceasing to see and communicate with the affair partner or coming right home after work rather than stopping at the bar. But too often, there is an assumption that a cheater has forfeited all rights to privacy. In the digital age, in the name of rebuilding trust, it is common for a duped partner to demand access to cellphones, email passwords, social media log-ins, and so on. Psychologist and author Marty Klein points out that rather than enhancing trust, this actually thwarts it. “You can’t ‘prevent’ someone from betraying you again. They either choose to be faithful or they don’t. If they want to be unfaithful, all the monitoring in the world won’t stop them.”9
Trust and truth are intimate companions, but we must also acknowledge that there are many kinds of truth. What are the useful truths, for us as individuals and as couples, in light of the choices we are likely to make? Some kinds of knowledge bring clarity; others just give us visions to torture ourselves with. Steering our questions toward what the affair means—the longings, the fears, the lusts, the hopes—offers an alternative role to that of the victim turned police officer. Authentic curiosity creates a bridge—a first step toward renewed intimacy. We become collaborators in understanding and mending. Affairs are solo enterprises; making meaning is a joint venture.