How Esther Perel offers a Master Class in Holding Cheaters Accountable

Esther Perel can be polarizing among us betrayed spouses. At least at first.
For one thing, she responds to the unfaithful partner with compassion, something we're loathe to see. We want to see the unfaithful partner drawn and quartered, strung up and humiliated. Compassion? That should be for us, not them! But yes, she has plenty of compassion for us, too.
So, if you can manage it, listen to this recent podcast episode. It features a couple in which the guy is a serial cheater. The wife knows. She is working to forgive. But the husband feels unready to cut ties with the Other Woman.
And though Perel doesn't respond with an eyeroll or a "puh-leeze" or a "JFC, are you kidding me?", she nonetheless calls this guy out. And that's her magic. She calls him out in a way that allows his eyes to open rather than his heart to close.
Consider: 
You see yourself as a good person but you’re not doing good things and you keep trying to close the gap.
Perel makes clear that these guys who are worried about the impact on the Other Woman, or, in the case of the man on her podcast, the impact on the woman's son (he had been the child of a single mother who saw himself in this boy), are lying to themselves, as well as to everyone else. But she doesn't call him a liar. She says, you see yourself as a good person. Yes, he does. A lot of these guys do. They're often as baffled as the rest of us how they got themselves into a situation that, to pretty much everyone else, makes them look like NOT good guys. 
...but you're not doing good things... 
We all know by now, if you've been reading this blog or Encyclopedia for the Betrayed or any number of other books or reputable blog posts, that cheaters are masterful storytellers. And the person they're mostly telling stories to is themselves. They don't always realize it. In fact, part of coming clean after infidelity is recognizing the stories they've told themselves. Stories like, "nobody appreciates me", or "I work so hard and get nothing in return" or even vague, amorphous stories about how life/work/family just isn't what they thought it would be. And so when someone shows up and pays attention to these guys, listens to their stories, it's intoxicating. They want it to continue. It can feel like a drug. Besides, they tell themselves another story, nobody needs to get hurt. ...but you're not doing good things... That's pretty much cold water on the "nobody gets hurt" story. Because people do get hurt. They are devastated. They are traumatized. Besides, Perel points out, even if nobody finds out ...you're not doing good things. So if you consider yourself a good guy but...you're not doing good things..., well, then,  how do you square that circle? You don't. Not until your actions are aligned with your declared values. 

And consider this too:
You may leave this marriage, you may stay in this marriage, but you still wouldn’t understand squat.
How many of us are beseeched to "let it go", "move forward", "stop dwelling in the past". As if that's the problem. As if everything would be fine if we could just overlook that teensy indiscretion (that might have gone on for years), or move past those lies that made us think we were crazy. And that's Perel's point here. Without interrogating the infidelity, without examining the stories they were telling themselves, anyone who cheated isn't going to learn a damn thing, whether they stay or go. The key, she insists, is to understand the why of the infidelity. What were they looking for that they didn't think they could get inside the marriage? What lies were they believing about what they were doing that kept them neither inside nor outside the marriage but straddling this delusional line? That's where the healing will be found. Or perhaps not the healing per se but the finger pointing towards the healing. 

And, finally, consider this:
I think you might get more from understanding the meaning than the facts.
Wow, huh? A whole lotta these guys spend their time citing the facts of theirinfidelity rather than the meaning. Why? Well, it's a whole lot easier to catalogue (honestly or otherwise) the number of times they slept with her, or the name of the restaurant they took her to, or the times they told her that they never planned on leaving their marriage. So much harder to understand the meaning behind those actions. Like Perel's comment above, infidelity tells us a whole lot about ourselves, some of it none too flattering. And looking in that metaphorical mirror can feel excruciating. Owning the ways in which we betrayed people we care about is painful. But, as Perel points out, it's necessary if we're going to move forward in a way that takes us toward a deeper, more meaningful relationship. 

That, ultimately, is Perel's goal. Not (never!) to let people off the hook for bad behaviour but to guide them toward a deeper understanding of themselves. To show them that they can be a good person who does a bad thing but they need to acknowledge that bad thing and  stop doing it. That in order to choose to be in a marriage or out of it, they need to respond rather than react. They need to make a conscious choice rooted in respect for their partner and themselves. Shame doesn't get us there. Hard work tempered by compassion does. That work is theirs, of course. It is not our job to fix them or point them toward understanding. It is our job to set clear boundaries, do what we can to keep ourselves physically and emotionally safe and learn how to trust ourselves. And that, too, must come from compassion. There's enough to go around.

Guest Post: What two years have taught me

by Chinook

Two years ago today, I found a series of text messages on my husband’s phone that changed me forever. When the one-year “anti-versary” came around, I marked the occasion with a summary of what the year had taught me, which Elle kindly published for all of you to read. It’s been two years and I thought I’d send an update. I remember how desperate I was in those early days to hear from women who were further along the post-betrayal road than me.

My story is this: Two years and ten weeks ago, my husband started testing the waters of leaving me. He was middle aged and unhappy. Marriage was tough and parenting was exhausting, but rather than talk about it and work towards positive change, he decided to pin his feelings of frustration and unhappiness on me. He began secretly searching for apartments and, to ease his fear of abandonment (ironic, I know), started dating a much, much younger woman from his gym. All this after I had spent years killing myself to single-handedly keep our marriage on track with everything from special anniversary gifts to kid-free weekends away.

My gut knew something was wrong from (I now know) the first day he took the other woman’s number. It was screaming “emergency!” but my husband shut down every attempt I made to talk about it. I even asked my husband point blank if he was having an affair, which, of course, he told me was “crazy”. And then eventually I checked his phone.

Here’s what I’ve learned in the year since I last wrote.

1. Calling it PTSD is accurate and necessary.

Discovering the affair was horrific, but the most profoundly traumatizing part was the seven weeks of non-stop lying that came after. After I packed a bag and walked out on him and the kids, without telling him where I was going, who I was seeing or when I’d be back (I went to a girlfriend’s house for the weekend), my husband suddenly realized the staggering size of his stupidity, and swung into desperate damage control. Any trust I had left was obliterated as he swore up and down, including swearing on the lives of our children, that he had told me everything, only for me to discover, in my sleuthing, lie after lie, each one of which he fessed up to immediately but then swore it was the last.

I had been too shell-shocked to make any kind of decision when I first found the texts on his phone but after those seven weeks of lying, which were the seven most traumatizing weeks of my life, I had to kick him out for my own emotional safety. I was a wreck—a shell of my former self. I had real, horrific PTSD symptoms (panic attacks, hypervigilance, intrusive thoughts) and required medication to get through the day, then other medication to get through the night. Calling it “PTSD” felt a bit dramatic at first. After all, I hadn’t been to war or anything. But it was accurate; I really was traumatized. It was necessary to call it PTSD in order for other people to understand what I was experiencing and in order for me to have compassion for myself.

This is something that all the Dear Sugar podcasts and Esther Perel lectures either don’t say or don’t emphasize properly: betrayal is traumatizing. The best source I’ve found for information about betrayal trauma is Michelle D. Mays and I encourage everyone here to read her blog.

2. There can be no healing without truth—and the truth must come from him

Discovering you’ve been cheated on is like being shot at close range—your body is instantly ripped apart in hundreds of places and you are riddled with shot. The only instrument that could dig the shot out of me and leave my ripped-open body a fighting chance at healing was the truth.

Some people don’t want to know the truth but as far as I’m concerned, there can be no real healing without it. As Elle has pointed out, the truth doesn’t have to mean all the details—it doesn’t matter if her dress was red or blue, if they ate Greek food or Indian—but it does matter why he had an affair (“I wasn’t thinking” is not an acceptable answer), how he justified it to himself (“I didn’t think you’d find out” is not an acceptable answer), how long it went on, and what lines he crossed.

My husband actually chose to start individual counselling around the time he started his affair. This might seem odd—after all, why participate in something that can help make you healthy while you’re simultaneously doing something that will destroy your entire life? I think of it like someone going to Alcoholics Anonymous while simultaneously getting black-out drunk every night—they know they have a problem but they aren’t ready to do the hard work needed to change.

My husband went to therapy but kept the affair hidden from his therapist. He kept it hidden from everyone, including his best friend. Until I caught him. How was he able to compartmentalize so effectively? A traumatizing childhood of neglect, abuse and abandonment that he had never dealt with. As Elle says: hurt people hurt people.

After I found the text messages on his phone, as he lied and I caught him and he lied more and I caught him again, and every time I became more broken, more emaciated, more desperate, he finally came to accept, with his therapist’s help, that he had to come clean about absolutely everything for the sake of my mental health, even if it meant that I would loathe him forever, turn his children against him, and divorce him in the most unequitable and brutal way possible.

So, he told me everything.

I hit him. I screamed. I threw him out. My trust for him was levelled, right down to the scorched earth. But that day, when he came to me with information instead of me sleuthing around to find it and making myself sick in the process, was a turning point. That was the day my cheating, lying, compartmentalizing husband ceased to exist and a different man started to become.

3. It’s really, really, seriously not about you. At all. 

This is something I’ve written about in the past (and so has Elle) but it warrants repeating now: The affair had nothing to do with you. So, if you’re blaming yourself in any way, you can stop. The affair was 100% about your partner wanting to escape his problems instead of doing the hard work of facing them head-on.

It took some time for this to sink in, but the affair also had nothing to do with the Other Woman. Men who cheat aren’t looking for someone better than their partners, they’re looking for someone who will make them feel good about the fact that they are traumatizing another person by cheating on them. In other words, they’re looking for someone who is awful. The Other Woman’s number one most attractive feature to your cheating partner is that she was there, and she was so lacking in self-respect that she was willing to engage in something illicit with someone else’s partner. That’s a level of rot that cannot be salvaged by all the flat stomachs and perky tits in the world.

4. Separation was awesome.

We were separated (as in, living in separate places) for nine months, and I’m so glad we were. It was expensive to have two households but it was necessary. That separation gave me the chance to feel safe again, to grow stronger, and to evaluate whether I was making choices out of fear. It showed my husband that I was damned serious about leaving him. And it gave him the opportunity to prove he would do anything to earn a second chance.

He seized that opportunity and showed me how life would be different if I took him back. After nine months of complete and utter devotion to his individual therapy and to the kids and to me, I let him move into the guest room where he continued his devotion to self-transformation and to us. His devotion continues but now, we’re back in the same room together.

5. The loss is permanent

I no longer wear my wedding ring. I took it off two days after catching him in his affair, once the initial shock faded, and I have never put it back on. I can’t imagine that I ever will. I have also permanently taken down all the wedding photos that used to be on display in our home. When I see a friend posting about their wedding anniversary on Facebook or Insta (“seventeen years with the love of my life!”) I feel intensely sad because I don’t want to ever celebrate another wedding anniversary again. It would feel like a celebration of the day he took vows that he didn’t even try to keep.

There’s so much loss after a betrayal. The loss of trusting him unconditionally. The loss of never wondering, in some corner of my mind, if he’s lying. The loss of feeling lucky to be with him. I mourn those losses every day. As Elle consoled me recently, and wrote about in this brilliant post, so much of the first few years is just working through the grief.

6. The gains are also permanent

I am not the same woman I was two years ago today and thank God for that.

She was an incredibly hard-working person, that former Chinook. She had been forced to single-handedly carry the weight of her marriage for over four years, and she was doing it. She was also terribly self-sacrificing and exhausted and seething with resentment.

My priorities are completely different now. My top priority (after the kids, though sometimes even before them) is me. Not my marriage. Not my husband. Me. It took my husband having an affair to do it (which is messed up), but I now feel completely justified in saying what I want, in taking what I need, and in refusing to accept something that is not good enough for me. And if any of those actions result in the loss of other people, including my husband, I accept that trade-off.

Two years and one day ago, I was always scared of rocking the boat in my marriage (for good reason—my husband used anger and disapproval as a countermove whenever I wanted us or him to work on something). I was always overextending myself to help others. I was always besieged by the feeling that it was selfish to put myself first.

Shedding that feeling, which I have had for my entire life, even in childhood, has been the single best thing to come out of this whole mess, and I really don’t think I could have done it without a seismic shift in my life.

7. Feed the right wolf. Over and over and over.

You know the old fable: There are two wolves fighting. Which one will win? Whichever one you feed.

The past makes me sad. The present makes me happy. The gains make me happy. The losses make me sad. If I think about what he did then, I get livid. If I think about what he’s doing now, I feel grateful.

There is nothing to be gained from letting thoughts about what he did take up residence in my mind. Those thoughts cannot protect me. Best to actively chase them away. There is no point in chastising him for what he did. He hates himself for it. And it can’t be changed. Best to let him know when I feel pain, let him know how I need to be comforted, and let him.

Keeping my mind and heart at peace means feeding the right wolf.

And that’s something I have to do every day.

8. I am slowly making my peace with it all.

I’m friends with a married couple in which one person financially betrayed the other by secretly spending a lot of their retirement savings on frivolous things. That was a few years ago now, and they’re genuinely over it. When I asked the betrayed partner how she did it—how she forgave—she just shrugged and said that she’s a forgiving person.

I am not a forgiving person, and this whole experience has forced me to consider whether that is doing me any good in life. Forgiving someone doesn’t mean that you’re okay with what happened, it means that you accept that it did happen, which leads to peace. And although I cannot say that I forgive him, I am slowly making my peace with what happened.

9. Trust isn’t an all or nothing thing.

I wrote above that my husband told me everything.

But did he?

The truth is that I’ll never know. He confessed to things I would never have found out on my own and which I consider unforgivable—like sending the other woman photos of our kids and even taking our youngest to meet her. He also maintains that the affair did not pass second base (he had the opportunity, many times, but couldn’t bring himself to do it because he was still on the fence about leaving me), which I find unlikely but which he has no reason to lie about, given that I consider my children’s involvement far worse.

I spent much of the first year post-D-day verifying everything he told me, trying to catch him in a lie. Did he love this constant mistrust? Of course not. But he understood it and was completely transparent, giving me all his passwords and always leaving his phone our where I could see it and check it. Slowly, as he proved himself day after day, trust started to come back. It was extremely slow and it came in tiny increments (think of an hourglass through which only a single grain of sand passes per day). But 730 days later, I’d say my trust is back up somewhere around 80%.

10. There is, eventually, a shift from present to past

A few months ago, I felt a strange and very welcome shift. In talking about the affair with my therapist, I heard myself say “but that was a long time ago”.

I’ve heard women on this site, Elle chief among them, say that as they drove along towards their happier future on the road of self-compassion and self-worth that they built themselves, they discovered at one point that the affair was no longer all around them, it was in the rearview mirror.

I get that now. My new present tense is that he is a kind and respectful and open and equal partner. (He’s actually a far kinder and more respectful equal partner than many of my friends’ husbands who didn’t and probably wouldn’t cheat.)

The affair and lying and pain? I can still see them. But for the most part, they’re contained within the small rectangle of the rearview mirror.

Here's How We Set Ourselves Up. Let's Stop

Because I didn’t feel like I deserved love. Showing up and asking for love without having anything to offer in return was out of the question. I would have to be of service in order to earn love. I would have to be sexy and funny and larger than life. I would have to dance on tabletops. I would have to win and keep winning. I would not be able to rest.
~Dear Polly, The Cut

If there was one overwhelming belief I had about my husband's betrayal, it was this: I was not enough.
He cheated because I was not sexy enough.
He cheated because I was not thin enough.
He cheated because I was not beautiful enough.
Smart enough.
Fun enough.
Adventurous enough in bed.
Succesful enough.
I was, clearly, not enough.
There was plenty of evidence to the contrary but that didn't alter my belief. Not one bit.
Because my belief – that I was not enough – was something I had carried around with me since childhood. Though I was barely conscious of it, I had built my life around proving to others that I could be enough, if they would give me the chance to show them.
Every friendship felt like an audition.
Every relationship felt like probation. 
Though I tolerated no end of others' bad behaviour, I didn't allow myself a single mistake. I made mistakes, of course. We all do. And then I would sink into shame so deep, I could hardly breathe. That's the problem with perfection being the only acceptable bar. It's impossible. And when we brush up against that impossibility, it makes us so incredibly angry that we're ready to just burn it all down. The system is rigged. 
Yes, it is.
But we're the ones doing the rigging.
We're the ones demanding perfection of ourselves.
We're the ones choosing the wrong people. And then blaming ourselves when it all falls apart.
And so when my husband admitted that, yes, he was having an affair, somewhere deep down inside was a voice that said of course, he was. Because you are not enough.
We talk a lot about our deep knowing here, on this site. It can be hard to discern which is our deep knowing and which is the voice of the critic. But let me tell you this: Your deep knowing will never tell you you're not enough. Your deep knowing is a voice of love. It is a voice of acceptance. It is, if you're religious or spiritual, a voice of divine love. It is, if you're not religious or spiritual, a voice that speaks the truth of every person's value. 
Your deep knowing will never tell you you're not enough. 
Your critic most certainly will. 
We've all had critics in our lives and, far too often, their voices take root in our bodies and chastise us decades after the actual speaker is gone. It might have been a parent, a sibling, your fifth-grade teacher who laughed at your dream. It might have been a boss, a friend, a bully.
But you have thrown the door open to that critic to move in with you, to offer nothing but reminders that you are a profound disappointment.
Critics are absolutely not the voice of truth. They speak nothing but lies. 
My critic insisted for years that I was not enough. Not matter how fast I danced, it was never fast enough. No matter what I achieved, the critic would move the finish line further ahead. 
The system was rigged.
But it was us doing the rigging.
Let's unrig the system.
If there is a silver lining to my husband's infidelity, it was that, with a whole lot of work and some new truth-telling glasses, I could finally see the flaw in the system. I could see that I was setting myself up. 
What I wish for all of you is that same revelation. 
He didn't cheat because you are not enough.
He cheated for any number of reasons that – and this is the truth – have nothing to do with you.
He cheated because he believes he's not enough. He cheated because someone paid attention to him and it felt good. He cheated because it made him feel young. He cheated because his moral compass is broken. He cheated because it distracted him from money woes, an empty nest, a special needs child, a sick wife, a dying parent.
He cheated, as Esther Perel reminds us, because he was looking for another version of himself.
Your work, in the wake of his infidelity, is to unrig the system that you've rigged against yourself. To refuse the system that our culture has rigged against us. The one that says we're not allowed to age, to soften, to choose for ourselves.
The good news is that we have everything we need for the challenge ahead. We have ourselves. And that is enough.

What If You Shifted The Story You're Telling Yourself

Driving my daughter to march in our local Pride Parade this past weekend, I flipped on the car radio. Esther Perel's voice, one I recognize from long hours listening to her incredible podcast Where Should We Begin, filled the car. She was being interviewed about relationships (duh!). But she told more of her backstory than I've heard before. About how both of her parents were the only surviving members of their families after Hitler's reign of terror. About growing up in Antwerp, surrounded by other survivors of the Holocaust. And she noticed something that set her on the course of her life – helping us find connection with each other. What she noticed was that there were two groups of people (not neatly delineated, she pointed out) that each told a story. One group told stories of victimization – what had been done to them. The other told stories of survival – what they themselves had done. She noticed something else. For those who perceived themselves as victims, she said, the most you could say about them was that they weren't dead. But those who perceived themselves as survivors? They were alive.

Not dead vs. alive. See the difference?

Betrayal isn't the Holocaust. But, as Perel insists, trauma is trauma and all pain is legitimate. 

Of course, betrayal isn't the whole of our story. We bring plenty of baggage into all our relationships. Baggage about our worth. Baggage about love. Baggage about expectations. Baggage about entitlement.

But betrayal can also blow our stories wide open, it can give us the opportunity to re-examine what we've been telling ourselves. It can allow us to rewrite. Because stories are not set in stone. They are always ALWAYS a story, narrated by someone who has bias.
How might your story be different if you framed it as a story of survival, of triumph, rather than a story of being victimized. As Laura, the founder of Infidelity Counseling Network, told me: Her healing began the day the she changed the question from 'why did this happen to me?' to 'why did this happen?'
I have zero doubt that you can just as easily tell all of us here about the ways in which you're a hero. Getting out of bed, for a start. Not murdering your husband in his sleep. Taking care of children, sometimes children with special needs, when your heart is shattered. Checking in with elderly parents. Continuing to get yourself to work. Not risking your sobriety. Not spending money you don't have on temporary fixes. Making dinner. Doing laundry. Remembering your best friend's birthday.
Stories of your ingenuity, of your resilience, of your goodness and your integrity. Stories of carrying on even when it's so damn hard. Stories of survival. Stories that will move you toward feeling alive rather than just not dead.
Try it. Tell us a story of something you did that felt really really hard but you did it anyway. Let us all celebrate your aliveness.
And then, let's all of us make it a habit. I want to be more than just not dead. I bet you do too.

Betrayed Wives Club: Here's What I Know

I was recently invited by Samuel (find him on Twitter) to speak with him for his Overcoming Infidelity podcast, which you can listen to here – I'm on episode 3.
Samuel pointed out that my site is "safe space" for those who come, which is something I intended but something that I sometimes forget about. Until someone else notices and points it out.
So let me explain:
Like so many of you, after D-Day I turned to Google for...what exactly? I wanted someone to make sense of my messed-up life. I was desperate for answers, just like those of you who come to me via an Internet search for "why did my husband cheat?" and "how can I make the pain of my husband's affair end?" (Those key word searches break my heart, you guys.)
More than anything – and though I likely couldn't have articulated it back then – I sought community, a safe place where I could lay down my pain and trust that it would be held so that I could take a deep breath. I couldn't find it. Too often, I'd read something that triggered my shame, made me feel stupid, told me I was searching for unicorns.
So I created my own, which is where are you right now.
I wanted to create a safe space. I knew how terrifying it was to share my pain. With strangers! Maybe I'd be outed. Could I trust these people?
I decided to not include advertising, even though it would have been nice to subsidize the time I worked on the blog. But I didn't want a soul to come here and then find an ad for escorts or lube or anything else that might be trigger-y. I crafted each blog post to best share my own experience, noting that this was just my path. We are each free to choose our own, I wrote.
(Eventually, when I was considering whether to continue with my site or shut it down – the time required was impacting the time I had to pursue paid work – I decided on the Donate button, leaving it up to anyone who wanted to contribute. I absolutely value every cent that's been donated over the past few years since I added it. It makes my work feel...legitimate.)
But for all my writing over the past 12 years, for all the work of Esther Perel and Brené Brown and others who have worked hard to shift our conversation around infidelity to one of nuance and critical thinking, there remains this pervasive myth around cheating. Namely, that anyone who cheats on you will continue to cheat on you. Something that is patently untrue. And also, that anyone who stays with a cheater is basically asking for more of the same.
My anger flares just by typing those statements out. They're absurd. But they persist, largely because they trigger our deepest fears about our partners and ourselves. And fear, we all know far too well, is powerful. But these statements remain dominant in infidelity discourse because there's just enough truth in them that we can't dismiss them outright. Some cheaters do continue to cheat. And some women who stay with cheaters – those who haven't set boundaries or who don't insist on change – are, potentially, accepting more of the same.
And so we wonder: Is that us? Are we the idiots who'll be cheated on again? Will there be a chorus of "I told you so's" when we discover his second affair. His third?
It's just enough to keep us frightened, isn't it? Just enough to keep us silent.
But what's most surprising about those sentiments is that they often spring from the lips of other who've been betrayed. Others who've been hurt and, rather than process that pain, inflict it on others. But that, my secret sisters, is not support. We must never value being "right" over being compassionate. Our role isn't to tell another how to respond to her pain but rather to bear witness to it.
Betrayed Wives Club isn't about answers, it's about sitting with the questions. It's about giving you – me, all of us – permission to figure out what's right for us. Without blame. Without shame.
I haven't a clue what you should do (except, and yes I know I'm a broken record, set boundaries. And also love yourself. You are so so awesome. Really.)
The rest? Search me. I don't know. I can barely muddle through my own life.
And it's not my place, or anyone else's to tell you what's right or what's wrong or to predict your future. I wrote last week about being skeptical of easy answers.
Nothing about healing from infidelity is easy, whether you stay or go. But it can be simple. By that I mean:
•prioritize self-respect
•set boundaries
•trust yourself
Betrayal can destabilize everything we believe. But our worth – and our right to determine our own path through the pain – shouldn't be called into question by anyone.

What if his affair really had nothing to do with you?

"Sometimes when we seek the gaze of another, it’s not our partner we are turning away from, but the person we have become. We are not looking for another lover so much as another version of ourselves. ... So often, the most intoxicating “other” that people discover in an affair is not a new partner; it’s a new self."
~Esther Perel, Why Happy People Cheat

Those words would have made me spit with anger if I'd read them in the early days following the discovery of my husband's affair. So I can imagine how more than a few of you are feeling right now. "Who the hell cares if he's discovered a 'new version of himself'," I can hear you yelling at your computer. "I am destroyed by this." 
And yes, it can be painful to hear some of the rhetoric around how affairs can help some cheaters get in touch with their own pain, or about how an affair can actually deepen a marriage. No matter that it's true. Who cares when my own heart is shattered! Why couldn't he get in touch with his pain without hurting me?
I hear you. And I agree. Just because he was so messed up that he thought he could find salvation in the arms of some woman with a trunk full of her own emotional baggage, why do I – and my children – have to pay the price? 
Fair question. And the answer, unfortunately, isn't very satisfying. Life isn't fair. Sometimes we are asked to show up for things that we didn't ask for. Often we are delivered situations that just suck. 
This, clearly, is one of those times.
And yet.
And yet, there's so much truth and freedom in what Perel is saying that if you can find the space in your shattered heart to even consider it, it just might change everything.
Because the thing with infidelity is that our first response, our knee-jerk response, is almost always to point the finger at ourselves. What is wrong with me that he would cheat? What does she have that I don't? Even those of us who are more charitable with ourselves can still find themselves wondering how they could have been so stupid as to miss that their partner was cheating. 
It's all about self-blame. It's about thinking we could control way more than we can actually control.
It's about thinking his affair was about us. When it wasn't about us at all.
It defies logic, doesn't it? How can he cheat on us and yet it has nothing to do with us? Of course, it has something to do with us, our rational brains insist. We are the injured party. We are the ones to whom he pledged fidelity. 
I remember the morning after a long night of "but why..." and "but how...", that I asked my husband how he could drive off in the morning toward her house and leave me to take care of three young children. "But that's the thing," he said to me, exhausted and exasperated from my endless questions and lack of sleep. "I wasn't thinking about you at all."
Heartless, isn't it?
And yet.
And yet, in that moment, the light went on. A-ha! His affair wasn't about hurting me. It wasn't about me at all. In the Venn diagram of marriage and affair, there was no overlap. It was simply two circles, side by side. 
I wasn't even outraged, though I was aware that this was completely fucked up. Instead, I was grateful. I was off the hook. This was completely on him. It had nothing to do with me. It wasn't because I wasn't skinny enough or successful enough or young enough or any of the personal shortcomings I thought were the reason.
In Perel's telling, "happy" people cheat, though I've never seen that up close. My husband cheated because he was looking for something outside of himself that he lacked inside himself. He cheated because he was in pain and he had no remedy for it, indeed he could barely recognize his own pain. He cheated because, as Perel says, he was looking for another version of himself, so disappointed he was in the current version.
In another of Perel's podcasts, a husband who cheated throughout his marriage describes it this way: "The sadness runs all the time. Never goes away. It was there before but I didn't know it. I made sure never to feel it."
This guy didn't find that better version of himself in the affair. But he did find it in healing from the affair. It was the same for my husband. It was when he could fully acknowledge the pain he'd caused, when he could face the shame that had driven so much of his behaviour for so much of his life, that he could unshackle himself from it. 
Yay for him, right? And all it took was completely devastating me. Small price to pay, huh?
Of course not. And though it took time, I became able to recognize that the complete unravelling of my husband, while creating the conditions for wholesale change that he needed, nonetheless caused me incredible pain. It damn near killed me. And our marriage was precarious for a long time.
But, with the long view, I can also admit that my marriage was precarious before I knew it was. When one partner is so disconnected to his own heart, and consequently, to his spouse, the marriage is already on life support, even if the tubes are hidden. 
Whether or not my marriage survived, we each had wounds that needed attention. That we were able to heal together – and to rebuild a marriage – is a bonus. 
We both discovered intoxicating others in ourselves. He can face himself in a mirror having long since stared down the shame that had ruled so much of his life. I too can face myself in a mirror, clear-eyed, having been roughly invited to tend to some long festering wounds from childhood that insisted I was unworthy of love.
Perel's words can feel like tough medicine to swallow so take a tiny dose, if that's all you can manage. But don't discard her words completely. They just might offer you the liberation that you need in order to move forward and heal yourself 

Where did you learn to live on crumbs?

I was driving to my father's home the other day, with Esther Perel's Where Do We Begin on podcast. This episode focused on a gay couple, one partner had suffered an abusive childhood and considered himself a sex addict. Even in the wake of this partner's infidelity, the other partner wanted to learn from it and the two had recently married.
Perel spent considerable time encouraging the partner who'd experienced childhood abuse to mine his past, to really explore its connection to his difficulty accepting comfort from his new husband.
The husband, who longed to offer comfort to his traumatized partner, noted the other's "drama" and prided himself on being low-maintenance. "I don't need much," he said.
Which is when Perel said the words that, literally, made me stop the tape and take big gulps of oxygen.
Where did you learn to live on crumbs?
I've made no secret of my own childhood dysfunction. I've often shared how my mother's alcoholism created much shame in me and how my father's reliance on me turned me into a parent for him and led me to all variety of boy-men who lacked both the maturity and the emotional bandwidth for healthy relationships. They brought drama. I brought low maintenance.
But never had I heard what I learned from my childhood, and what I continued to allow, referred to as clearly and succinctly as "crumbs".
I'm asking you: Where did you learn to live on crumbs?
So many of us did, didn't we? So many of us, even putting aside the infidelity (that most of us didn't know about...until we did), overlooked his long hours at the office (he's working hard for his family), his TV watching (he deserves to relax after a long day/week), his hanging with the guys (he needs his friends), while we took on the bulk of the housework, the childcare, the care of parents, the day-in/day-out details that keep a house running. And I'm not saying that men don't work hard, deserve to relax, need friends with whom to have fun. But how often did we allow those things to our husbands while denying them to ourselves?
And how often did we accept behaviour in our husbands that wasn't ultimately healthy for us or for our family?
I barely noticed that I was accepting crumbs. I knew I felt angry a lot. I knew that when my husband would come up behind me to wrap his arms around me while I was at the sink doing dishes, I had to stop myself from jamming my elbow in his ribs. I didn't need a hug, I needed help with the god-damn dishes. Did I say that? Of course not. I chastised myself for not being more satisfied with what I had.
StillStanding1 did a great job with her recent post about the rage so many of us feel post-betrayal. But I want to extend that backward. How many of us felt it, on some level, before we learned about our partner's betrayal? How many of us are doubly (triply? quadruply?) angry about the betrayal because not only did he cheat on us but he cheated on us while we were at home doing everything. While we were sacrificing ourselves for the good of our family and barely being noticed for it?
That's a betrayal too, isn't it?
Of course it is. But maybe not in the way you think.
That was a betrayal of ourselves.
That was our acceptance of crumbs.
Where did you learn to live on crumbs?
Maybe it was from parents who expected you to swallow strong feelings and not rock the boat. Maybe it was from teachers who expected girls to be kind and nurturing and take turns and be polite and demure. Maybe it was from a culture that still recoils from angry women, no matter that we have plenty to be angry about.
Wherever it was, it's time for a new lesson.
It's time to reconsider what we've been willing to settle for and set out new terms for ourselves. No more crumbs. Let's ask for exactly what we want. If we've decided to stay in our marriage and rebuild, then there's no better time to make it abundantly clear to our spouse that the only way we can continue is if our needs and wants are acknowledged and respected. It's time to make some demands of our own – beginning with what every betrayed wife should demand (total transparency, access to his accounts/computers/etc), but including everything that we need to make our marriage more equitable and, ultimately, healthier for both.
Maybe you need him home more often, maybe you need him to deal with his toxic family instead of you doing that job. Maybe you need him to talk to you rather than turning on Netflix. Maybe you need help with childcare on weekends rather than him teeing off for 18 holes. Whatever it is, we need to ask for it. Settling for crumbs starves us emotionally.