Writer Anne Lamott tells a story in her recent Dusk Night Dawn about the time she came face to the face with the Wife of the man she'd had drunken sexual encounters with before she got sober.
Lamott began by reaching out by mail. "I tried to make amends to her," she writes, "for having a drunken and sporadic affair with her husband."
Lamott did not expect forgiveness. She writes that she understood the damage she had caused to this Wife and, she says, her children. She wrote not expecting forgiveness, noting that "sober friends" suggested that whether or not the Wife could forgive "was her business."
It's advice I've given to Other Women who've come to this site looking for direction on whether they should contact the wives they've hurt. Only if you can do so without asking them for anything, including forgiveness, I've told them. Only if your intention is to acknowledge their pain and your role in it.
Many can't do that. The same self-absorption, moral ambiguity and emotional immaturity that got them into an affair with a married man (who, incidentally, shared those characteristics) gets in the way. And so they reach out to us trying to explain themselves, to defend themselves, or to ask for some sort of absolution for the pain they've caused. In far too many cases, they're centering themselves and their experience.
Lamott didn't do that.
The Wife responded by letter, telling Lamott that, as a Jew, she was compelled to forgive. She told Lamott that she had already forgiven her. "She hoped that I was able to stay sober and that, because my guilt had alienated me from humanity, God, and myself, over time I could forgive myself."
Lamott wept.
Lamott tells us she was, with time, able to forgive herself. That she wanted a life that was "lighter...with looser chains."
Years later, she tells us, "the craziest thing happened."
Imagine. You come clean, thanks to the 12-steps and a small church community (and no small amount of determination). You write to the Wife you hurt, in part because the 12 steps require that you "make amends". You become a bestselling writer. And then, one day, in a class you're offering to aspiring writers, a woman shows up. The same women whose husband you had an affair with.
They hugged.
Yes.
They hugged.
Imagine.
"You can't get there from where either of us was," writes Lamott. "This is no straight route."
I can vouch for that. While I have not hugged the OW in my situation, I have let her go. She never wrote me a letter. Never apologized. She never asked for my forgiveness though I, like the Wife of Lamott's affair partner, hope that my husband's OW got sober, gained an understanding of why she sought intimacy with other wive's husbands, and eventually forgave herself.
Because I believe that in true self-forgiveness there is more than just loosed chains, there is a refusal to again hurt others. Only when we can look directly at the ways in which we harmed others, and therefore hold ourselves accountable and do the necessary work through that pain, can we put ourselves on an alternate path.
This is no plea to Other Women to write letters to us Wives. For one thing, they're not likely the ones reading this.
It is, however, to remind all of us that forgiveness is possible. That a true apology can soften hearts. And that, whether or not the Other Woman asks for our forgiveness, it is still in our power to give it. That by extending compassion to others, even when they are at their least deserving, it reflects back to us and allows us to extend compassion to ourselves too.
Lamott's story reads, to me, like a parable. It has been more than three decades since she cheated with this Wife's husband. Decades since she got sober. There has been much time for the messiness, for the pain to heal. For the story to become myth.
But it nonetheless shows us what's possible. It shows us how we can heal when we center ourselves and our experience. When we refuse to let the bad behaviour of others alter our own humanity, our own moral compass. When we see it as the product of damaged people, rather than looking at ourselves as damaged.
"The experience left me longing to be more like her, to evolve toward deeper goodness and courage...," writes Lamott.
To feel whole. To feel worthy.
In the wake of infidelity, that is often our job too. Not to make them feel that way but to remind ourselves that we already are.
