Faye was a bit shorter than I expected. A bit heavier than her online photo, with a new nose ring. She was not in the least bit what I anticipated when I arrived downstairs in the hotel lobby where I was staying. I’d invited her to join me for lunch, as I’d heard so much about her from other people I know and respect. She was completely unpretentious, authentic, honest, and I appreciated her openness from the start. I didn’t come to Winnipeg to interview her, but what I learned from her over lunch was too good to keep to myself.
“You’re so cute,” she said.
“I should have told you I look about half my age. I always forget to tell people that when they’re meeting me for the first time,” I responded. (By the way, I didn’t say this as a brag. I really look like I could be in college, which can make it hard to get the respect I need to get things done.) In my online pictures, I’m usually wearing makeup and my hair is styled. But in real life, I prefer going sans makeup and pulling my hair back into a tight bun, similar to the ones ballet dancers wear. Although I’m thirty-six, I can easily pass for a high school student. “Good genes,” I tell her. “I got some good genes.”
We walked a few steps to the hotel restaurant I’d grown fond of. “Let’s take a picture together,” she said before asking the waitress to snap a couple of shots. I moved over to her side of the table, and we took a few pictures.
She’d always done great with her weight, but in recent times had picked up quite a bit, she informed me. I could tell she was getting back to the person she once was, but wasn’t wholly comfortable with where she was at that moment. Once she shared her story with me, I understood why.
“It was my husband’s birthday, and I was preparing the house for his arrival from work,” she began. “The presents were bought, and I’d made reservations at a great restaurant.”
When her husband arrived home, he asked her to come into the living room. He had a question for her.
“Are you having an affair?” he asked matter-of-factly.
“Of course not!” she quickly shot back.
“Please don’t lie to me.”
She knew he’d somehow found out. After her face turned red and her eyes swelled with tears, she admitted she had indeed been carrying on an affair.
Many years into their marriage, her brief affair had been discovered. It began innocently with one of her husband’s closest friends who was married to one of her closest friends. They’d text each other jokes and innocently get together with the kids. Then one day, something changed.
In Elizabeth Gilbert’s book Committed, she quotes the work of a psychologist named Shirley P. Glass, who spent most of her career studying marital infidelity, how it begins and how it inevitably causes so many things to end. Gilbert wrote:
How many times have we heard someone say, “I wasn’t looking for love outside my marriage, but it just happened”? Put in such terms, adultery starts to sound like a car accident, like a patch of black ice hidden on a treacherous curve, waiting for an unsuspecting motorist.
But Glass, in her research, discovered that if you dig a little deeper into people’s infidelities, you can almost always see how the affair started long before the first stolen kiss. Most affairs begin, Glass wrote, when a husband or wife makes a new friend, and an apparently harmless intimacy is born. You don’t sense the danger as it’s happening, because what’s wrong with friendship?1
I understood exactly what Dr. Glass was saying. Before I got married, I learned from speaking with marriage advocates and counselors that keeping friendships with the opposite sex can be dangerous for this exact reason. Prior to meeting Keith, I’d remained friends with every ex-boyfriend I’d had during my adult life. However, I’d always told them—as well as any male friends I had whom I hadn’t dated—that when I met the man I was going to marry, our friendship would effectively end. It wasn’t personal; I just didn’t want to ever have that temptation.
I never felt bad about that, and as a matter of fact, a few have even come back to tell me how much they respected that decision and how I’ve remained faithful to it. This was not something Keith requested, nor did I make this request of him regarding his former flames and friendships. But once I told him what I planned to do, he decided to do the same. After seeing the number of marriages ending because one or both spouses decided to keep in touch with an old flame or friend via Facebook, I am so happy I made that commitment.
I’ve spoken to many who have ventured down the dangerous path of “friendship” to affair. Here’s Gilbert again talking about Glass:
It was Glass’s theory that every healthy marriage is composed of walls and windows. The windows are the aspects of your relationship that are open to the world—that is, the necessary gaps through which you interact with family and friends; the walls are the barriers of trust behind which you guard the most intimate secrets of your marriage.
What often happens, though, during so-called harmless friendships, is that you begin sharing intimacies with your new friend that belong hidden within your marriage. You reveal secrets about yourself—your deepest yearnings and frustrations—and it feels good to be so exposed. You throw open a window where there really ought to be a solid, weight-bearing wall, and soon you find yourself spilling your secret heart with this new person. Not wanting your spouse to feel jealous, you keep the details of your new friendship hidden. In so doing, you have now created a problem: You have just built a wall between you and your spouse where there really ought to be free circulation of air and light. The entire architecture of your matrimonial intimacy has therefore been changed. Every old wall is now a giant picture window, every old window is now boarded up like a crack house. You have just established the perfect blueprint for infidelity without even noticing.2
What Gilbert and Glass have described is exactly what happened with Faye. She and her husband’s friend began exchanging text messages. Their kids played together, so the exchanges didn’t seem odd to them. Then one day, he sent a text in which he accidentally transposed a standard word into a sexually explicit one. Faye’s mind began to swirl. Her husband had always worked long hours. Very long. She began to resent that. Throughout their course of marriage, she’d had five miscarriages, one of which occurred when she was already five months along.
The baby wouldn’t come out naturally, so she was forced to carry the dead child in her womb for a week before the doctors could remove it. “He didn’t even come with me to the appointment,” she said sadly. She became bitter. And over the years, that bitterness grew until it took over her heart and nothing he did was good enough and everything he did was all wrong.
The thoughts just kept flowing through her head. They never stopped. “Negative thoughts,” she continued. “I never should have allowed those negative thoughts to grow. They run through our mind all day. Weird thoughts. Uncharacteristic thoughts. Thoughts I’m ashamed of repeating,” she said. “The key is never allowing them to stay. You can’t control them running through your mind, but you can control how much you feed them.”
I remember a husband I once interviewed who said something similar: “You can either feed negative thoughts or you can starve the suckers.” Faye realized she’d never starved them. She had continued to feed them, and eventually they got fat and took over her life. After admitting to her affair with another man, Faye ran out of the house and went for a drive, during which she decided she was going to leave her marriage.
As soon as she returned home, she began packing her bags. Her husband, Edward, who Faye now talks about as the very essence of grace, did something I don’t think I could ever do.
“Faye, are you leaving because you want to, or because you think you have to?” he asked.
“I have to leave,” she responded. And what he said next seems to still astonish her to this day.
“If you want to stay, I will forgive you,” he said, as tears continued to pour down Faye’s face. “If you had an affair, that’s because our marriage was broken. And if our marriage was broken, that means I had something to do with it. So if you want to stay, stay.”
When Faye shared this story with me, it pulled at every heart-string in me. How could someone be so forgiving? How could a betrayed spouse give so much grace? Could I do that? Would I do that? These are questions that challenge me. And ones I hope I never need to answer because an affair, in my mind, is forgivable but rarely reconcilable. Thank goodness, for Faye, her husband is a much better person than most. He did what few men would be able to do. He forgave her and looked for a pathway forward, addressing what was lacking in their relationship.
Faye went to counseling by herself to get to the root of what caused her to become so miserable in the first place. They both worked hard to find their way back.
“Are you happy now?” I asked.
“Yes, oh yes. I’m very happy.” She explained that once Edward forgave her of such a heinous action against him and their marriage, she respected him as she never had before. She saw him in a new light. Everything that had once bothered her about him no longer mattered. Rather than being upset about his working long hours, she began to appreciate that the reason he works such long hours is to provide for her and their four children. As their son got older, he was able to help out in the family business, freeing Edward up a little more in the evenings.
“It comes down to those thoughts,” Faye concluded, in a remorseful tone. “I never should have let them in. I never should have fed them. If I could do it again, I’d shut them down from the offset.”
My time with Faye was powerful, and as I traveled to the hair salon, my mind lingered on the tough and transformative lessons she was learning.
I wasn’t going to the salon to get pampered; I desperately needed a hair washing. Since I was going to travel a lot, it meant I had to do a lot of mundane things (like having my hair washed) in transit.
I’m a focused and intense person as it is, and my time with Faye only amplified that. Fortunately, the hairstylist I booked online was in the mood to talk.
“You’re from Los Angeles, right?” Apparently, she’d heard the voice message I’d left earlier. “What are you doing in Winnipeg?”
I explained it was my first international stop around the world interviewing women and couples happily married twenty-five years or more to discover the secrets of a happy marriage.
“That’s interesting!” She wanted to know more and launched straightaway into a line of questions. What have you learned? How long have you been married? Where have you been so far?
I shared a few notes from my previous interview, that I’d be celebrating a decade of marriage next year, and that I’d loved every moment of being married. She leaned me back in the chair and began telling me about her marriage. Where it went wrong. She told me she’d met her husband in Bible college. They’d both come from homes with strict religious beliefs.
She’d wanted to marry a man when she was much younger, but her parents had talked her out of marrying because he was Catholic and she was Protestant. She had trusted them, but now she wasn’t so sure. Her husband had lost faith in their beliefs and stopped attending church. He held a grudge against the church, and she wasn’t sure why, only that she’d gotten the impression that he wished she didn’t take their two children to church with her each week.
I could tell she was questioning her marriage, wondering if it was worth it or if it would ever get better. I just listened. I’d asked God when I began this journey to make me a woman who preferred to listen and share what I’d learned from others rather than attempt to become a teacher. I never want to be so sure about something that I become inflexible or come across as a know-it-all. So I listened. And listened. And listened as she expressed her frustration and disappointment.
Then I shared. I told her about Faye and the affair she had, and how her husband forgave her in spite of how badly she wronged him, and how all of a sudden, she began to see goodness in the things that once drove her crazy. When he worked so much, rather than complaining, she became appreciative of his hard work and dedication. She realized that his purpose for working so much was to provide for his family.
I told her how Faye unknowingly entertained negative thoughts about her husband and their marriage and eventually began thinking about a plan B (if only subconsciously). Then I shared with her one of my favorite quotes, “It’s better to spend your time creating the perfect love, rather than looking for the perfect lover.”3
“If you think the man you have is not perfect, the next man won’t be either. Do you remember the dating scene?” I asked. “Did you like it the first time around?”
You can guess her answer.
Before I left, she asked how she could follow my journey online and learn as I learn. I gave her the club’s web address and told her about our Facebook community, in which close to two hundred thousand women around the world interact. Later that day, she posted a wonderful message on our community page, thanking me for our talk, for being an inspiration, and to let me know she’d be following me on my journey as I discovered, along with everyone else, the secret to a happy marriage.