I convinced myself that I was a logical woman who could consider this information about having been cheated on, about his not wearing a condom, and I could separate it from the current reality of our life together.
Why did I need to know that we’d been monogamous? Why did I need to have and discuss inconvenient feelings about this ancient history?
I would not be a woman who needed these things, I decided.
I would need less. And less.
I got very good at this.
~CJ Hauser, The Crane Wife from The Paris Review
One of our dear secret sisters sent me the link to The Crane Wife. I remember there was a flurry of interest when it first came out in the summer. No surprise. It's beautifully written. But also, I suspect, it resonates with so many of us, whether we've been cheated on by a romantic partner or not. Because though the writer tells her story from the chronological point of post-infidelity, the story speaks more to the ways in which she cheated herself all the way through the relationship. The ways in which she made herself small. The ways in which she tried to earn her place in a relationship, as so many of us do, by some sort of weird math that is all addition on his side and subtraction on her own. We take away our wants, we remove our needs, we censor our thoughts, we silence our dreams.
"There are ways to be wounded and ways to survive those wounds, but no one can survive denying their own needs," the writer tells us. But that doesn't stop us, does it? In fact, far too many of us convince ourselves that the survival of our marriage rests entirely on our ability to deny our needs. I certainly did. My needs ranged from the mundane to the existential, from needing my husband home in the evenings to relieve me from the mind-numbing exhaustion of life with a difficult baby to needing to feel seen. And when my husband seemed unwilling or unable to meet those needs, I didn't leave. I concluded that the problem wasn't him, the problem was my needs and my own inability to stifle them.
There was an interesting Twitter thread recently in which the tweeter noted that skills she'd gained growing up in an abusive/dysfunctional home have served her well during this pandemic. For instance, she felt always capable of hope, no matter how hopeless things seemed. She could fill long empty days. I could have written that Twitter thread because my experience was so similar. But the thing is, what helps us survive in unhealthy situations is so often about denying needs. Which is a survival skill but not a life skill. Or, as Esther Perel puts it, "where did you learn to live on crumbs?"
If infidelity offers us any gifts (and the rose-colored glasses I wear convinces me it does), it is the opportunity to reimagine how we're living our lives, to ask ourselves if we are getting what we need and, if not, to ensure that we do. Our marriage can survive when we deny our needs but we can't. And if, post-infidelity, we have decided that we are going to show up in our marriage in a way that honors who we are and insists on respect and honesty and integrity, then we cannot continue to deny our needs. For some of us, that means spending time figuring out what our needs actually are. Years of pretending we had none can leave us baffled at what our needs are. Taking the time to get to know ourselves again can be another gift we give ourselves after betrayal. What makes me light up? How have I sold myself short? What is and is not okay with me? Only by acknowledging and tending to our own needs can we begin to show up, whole, in a marriage.
"Who was I to want more?" the writer asks, in The Crane Wife. What we learn, post-betrayal, is that the real question is "Who am I to settle for less?"
