When do we *know* our partner's cheating?

In hindsight, I knew my husband was cheating and I knew with whom before he admitted it to me. I knew before I knew. Of course, there was lots I didn't know. The years of sexual acting out with strangers, for instance. But though I didn't know the details, I felt the disconnection. I knew...something.

But because I didn't want to know the truth, I told myself stories to soothe. We were busy with the kids, I told myself. We had growing careers. If he would just deal with his family, things would be better, I told myself (and him). He's a good man, I told myself. He loves me, I told myself. 

We lived like that for a long time. Years. A decade. 

And then...the truth. 

The truth was that my husband was living a secret life. It took place beyond my view, outside of the lines I drew around our family. It existed with strangers. People whose names and faces I wouldn't know if I bumped into them on the street. 

The truth was a thousand-volt shock to my life. The truth was a million stings to my soul. The truth was a red-hot branding iron to my brain. 

The truth changed everything.

"When one person has said the truth, both people in the relationship are emancipated," poet David Whyte recently said to On Being's Krista Tippet. "Even if you look away, when you look back the truth will still be there. And then you can move into the next stage of your relationship."

Emancipation. It's not the first word that come to mind when we discover a partner's affair, is it? For me, I felt the opposite. Not liberated but imprisoned. Trapped in a marriage, with three young children and a man who felt like a stranger to me. Everywhere I looked, I saw a cage. None of my choices looked like freedom.

And yet.

"When one person has said the truth, both people in the relationship are emancipated," says David Whyte.

It has taken many years for me to see the truth of that. There was freedom in the truth for me. Freedom from the fables I was telling myself. Freedom from the self-blame, the confusion. Freedom to make a choice that was the right one for me, even if the right one was far from perfect. Freedom from perfect.

It took years to recognize that. I wish that wasn't the truth but it is. But with practice, with learning to acknowledge the truth of things – uncomfortable things, things I wish weren't true – the span between knowing and knowing is getting smaller. I'm better at recognizing that what I wish was true doesn't make it true. 

It's hard. And it's sad. But it is, yes, also liberating. Emancipation.

Because only when we see people for who they really are, only when we see our situation for what it really is, can we respond honestly. It is then, once the truth has been spoken that both parties can move onto the next stage of the relationship. That stage might, like my own, mean rebuilding a marriage. For others, it might mean separation. Or divorce. 

And I get it. The truth of your marriage, when it's not what you wanted to hear, stings. It wounds. It brings us to our knees. But once we're standing again, that truth informs what's next. Our next right step is rooted in what we know and know. And from that knowing, we can truly choose what's right for us. 

We Are Made Whole, of Broken Pieces

We are creatures made, again and again, by what would break us. Yet only if we open to the fullness of the reality of what goes wrong for us, and walk ourselves with and through it, are we able to integrate it into a new kind of wholeness on the other side.

~Krista Tippett, The Pause, Jan. 16, 2021

Ah yes, the "other side". I felt certain that there was a line I would cross, a magical moment in time in which I would be "over this". On the other side. A place where I no longer felt the pain. Where I again felt whole. Normal. A place where I would feel kinda like my old self but somehow renewed. 

I have good news and bad news. The good news is that there is an "other side". There is an after, a time when you are not consumed with the affair, when you will go days, weeks, even months without thinking about it at all and if you do think of it, it will not make your stomach clench or your heart hurt. 

The bad news is it can take years to get there. And the neither good nor bad news is that it is not some magical moment but a process. You don't get there all at once but in increments. In steps. Sometimes you're aware of these steps, often you're not. Sometimes those steps are forward. Sometimes not.

It's the one thing I wish I'd known when I was in so much pain: This feeling will not last forever. 

The other thing I did know instinctually was that nobody was coming to save me from that pain. I was going to have to be my own hero.

It's a tough realization. That he can't save you. That whether he stays or goes has less impact on your healing than the work you do to save yourself. To remake yourself. 

We are creatures made, again and again, by what would break us, says Krista Tippett. We know this somehow even as we wish it was different. We know this even as our culture often tells us that pain is to be avoided, that broken people are to be pitied.

Remaking ourselves is the work of a warrior. It is the work of finding our wholeness. On the other side.

Living in the Endless Now

Working in conflict mediation I learned that time passes differently for different people. Someone who has perpetuated a trauma might think the trauma was way in the past, because it was a year ago, a decade ago, half a lifetime ago. Someone who has lived with the impact of that trauma may not see this as “past.” For them, the past might be now, and now, and now, and now. Unaddressed trauma is not packaged away, and is often occurring again and again. 

~Pádraig Ó Tuama, from On Being's The Pause

Someone recently described these pandemic days as "an endless Tuesday". We were lamenting the sameness of our days. I see the same four family members every day. I see one friend who's my running partner. I see the occasional grocery store clerk. But a Saturday is pretty much like a Wednesday. Or an endless Tuesday. I have little sense of whether I sent that e-mail a week ago or a month ago. Or two months ago. Time is an untrusty elastic band. 

It reminds me, a lot, of what it was like in the days following D-Day. Everything suddenly different. An expectation that I would just adjust. That I would pretend that nothing had changed while everything had. 

And this weird sense of time. Had he told me a week ago? Or six weeks ago? How was that possible? What had I done in those intervening days? How could I not remember?

Trauma.

Personal or collective, it's much the same. A sense of foreboding. An endless now. No matter that, in the case of betrayal, that traumatic event, to him, is over. To us, it's now. It's happening now. And now. And now. 

"When will you get over this?" he asks, genuinely aghast that we're still devastated a week, a month, a year later. We wish we knew. We don't understand it either. It happened...when exactly? Now. It's happening now.

Trauma is notoriously difficult to treat because the traumatic event has been filed in our brains differently than a non-traumatic memory. It has been filed in the eternal now. Hence the hyper-vigilance, the thudding heart, the shallow breath. Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no....

Pádraig Ó Tuama calls it "in the waiting" and reminds us that in the waiting, we don't need to be alone. The incredible women of Betrayed Wives Club are here. Professional support is available (which I strongly recommend -- particularly EMDR, which specifically deals with trauma). Books and podcasts are available. In fact, I'm in the process of compiling a list of resources to include on this site so please chime in with whatever has helped you.

But right now, in this endless Tuesday of trauma, call it what it is. Betrayal is trauma. And trust that you can move past this with courage and support and enormous self-compassion. 

As Pádraig Ó Tuama puts it, "A new future will only be built on courageous moments, and those are happening now, and now and now."

Ask a Different Question. And change everything

One of my closest friends (and a betrayed wife) sent me a podcast the other day. It held all sorts of fascinating insights and research but nestled among it all was this:
If we change the question we ask, from "can" to "how can", it changes everything.
Consider: Can I get an A in Calculus? versus How can I get an A in Calculus?
Can I ever heal from infidelity? versus How can I heal from infidelity?
"Can" holds within it potential failure. While "how can" is about agency. It's Yoda yet again reminding us that there is no try. There is only do or do not.
Notice the language you use around infidelity and your healing. Are you telling yourself, with the words you use, that you anticipate failure? Or are you reminding yourself, without minimizing your pain or grief, that you hold the power for your own life? That you aren't trying, you are doing. And within that doing is your future self.
That future self can be one that prioritizes self-care and self-compassion, that holds room for her pain while trusting her strength and resilience.
Or that future self can be one who continues to feel powerless.
I don't, for one single second, blame you for his choice to cheat. That is entirely on him.
But how we heal from that betrayal is up to us. We can try or we can do. We can ask if or we can ask how.
There will be days when what we need is to curl up in a ball. But when we uncurl, let's ask ourselves not can we heal from this pain but how we can. Cause that simple change shifts the entire power dynamic back to  you.
Which is exactly where it belongs.