Your Quiet Courage

You've got to tell the world how to treat you [because] if the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble.

~James Baldwin

There is one question that hangs over so many of us in the days following discovery of our partner's infidelity: Will my marriage survive? Of course, it's a question that only dogs those of us who think we want our marriage to survive. Plenty of others cut and run, convinced that infidelity sounds the death knell of any marriage. I used to envy them their certainty. 

But those of us who stay tend to agonize over it: Will my marriage survive?

Mine has. I'm coming up on the 15th anti-versary of D-Day and here I am. Ring still on finger (engagement ring, anyway. Wedding band remains tucked away in a drawer), husband beside me.

But it is with the hindsight of 15 years that I recommend a far more important question to those of you in the early days of discovering betrayal. Who will I become?

We all become something after earth-shattering events like betrayal. There is simply no going back. Our world has changed. And, like it or not, we are changing with it.

But those who emerge from betrayal with a strong sense of their self and their worth are those who refuse to be defined by it. Or, as a good friend put it, they don't ask "why did this happen to me?" but rather "why did this happen?" The betrayal, they realize, isn't really about them at all. They are collateral damage. Or, as we often put it on this site, he didn't cheat because there's something wrong with you, he cheated because there's something wrong with him.

Chinook, who wrote the quintessential blog post on how to survive betrayal, urges us all to recognize that who we are is worth revering:

As a society, by and large, we only value loud courage: the action hero kind of courage. Punching. Shouting. Kicking him out. Calling a lawyer. Going it alone. (We don’t appreciate the phenomenal difficulty that single mothers face every single day, but we do applaud the woman who kicks the bum out.) We don’t value (or even recognize) the silent kinds of courage. The courage to find compassion for yourself and others. The courage to really feel the pain. The courage to stay with someone who has hurt you but is trying like crazy to make amends. The courage to shield our children. The courage of grace. We appreciate things that look physically courageous. We mostly don’t know how to even recognize emotional and spiritual courage. Does it take courage to leave? Yes. Does it take courage to stay? Yes.

However you choose to respond to what's happening to you, know this: You get to decide who you are. You get to decide what your marriage becomes. "My heartbreak, my rules," right? You get to decide, as Chinook put it, if the person you are becoming wants to build a marriage with the person he is becoming. Because if we let anyone tell us how they're going to treat us, then we are in trouble.