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.

Wednesday Word Hug

Anatomy of An Affair

Long-time readers of this blog know that Cheryl Strayed's Tiny Beautiful Things, which is a compilation of her incredible run as Dear Sugar on The Rumpus, is one of my favorite things in the world. Dear Sugar is now back...on radio. And the most recent episode, a celebration of Valentine's Day, features a letter from a woman who reconnected with her high school boyfriend.
It began with a phone call from him...and evolved into daily texts and calls and a meeting (no sex, though, she swears!).
Our heartbroken letter writer wondered, now that her first love's wife found their correspondence and he stopped all contact, whether her "emotional affair" was actually cheating. She also wondered whether she should stay with her husband, for whom she no longer felt any passion though she loved him and had a good life with him.
The "Sugars" – Cheryl Strayed and co-host Steve Almond – were their usual compassionate, warm-hearted, wise selves.
But what was particularly interesting for we Betrayeds was how typical the trajectory of this emotional affair was. Everything about it was cliché. And viewed through the lens of detachment, it can be helpful for us to see just how little our spouses' affairs had to do with us.

She's Vulnerable
Her former love reached out to her when she was about 50. Her kids had left home. She and her husband had a nice, if predictable life. Her career was...fine. Her marriage was...fine. But mid-life is when so many of us begin to wonder if this is all there is. Marriage can, if we haven't worked hard on it, seem a little...stale. Where's the passion? we wonder. Is this all there is?

Enter Distraction
Her first love represented passion and excitement. He reminded her of who she used to be – young, sexy, fascinating. They reconnected and shared their new selves. As Steve Almond says, they shared their stories, which is a more intimate betrayal than sex. So now you've got this alchemy happening. Someone at a crossroads, trying to figure out where to go with her life, meets up with someone who distracts her from those big, scary questions. He makes her feel young again. Like all things are possible.

It Escalates
The phone call becomes regular texting and more calls. They arrange to meet up. They do and it feels wonderful to be with someone who, they believe, really knows them Really gets them. Sure there's a spouse at home but he/she hasn't paid attention to them in years. Doesn't even seem to notice that they're having this secret relationship. Besides, nobody's getting hurt. Right? They don't have sex but the atmosphere is charged. Electric with possibility. How can routine home life compete with that? It can't.

D-Day
The wife finds the texts. She insists that her husband make a choice. Either he loses his marriage and family or he re-commits. He chooses to re-commit telling his former love that his wife found the texts and it's over. We don't hear on the show how this played out...but we're living how this played out.

The Married OW Wonders What's Next for Her
She writes a letter to a radio show that offers advice. That advice includes: Yes, emotional affairs are cheating. They're as devastating (sometimes more!) than sexual affairs. And then the Sugars tell her that there's no escape from life's big questions. We can distract ourselves (look! somebody likes me just the way I am!). We can ignore what's right under our noses (a spouse who loves us. A spouse who's likely feeling as disconnected and lonely and confused as we are. Or who will listen to us as we outline just how disconnected and lonely and confused we are). But there's just no way around coming to terms with who we are, what we want out of our lives, what we want from our relationships, and how we want to spend the rest of our days. They urge her to tell her husband about what she did (thank-you Sugars for advocating for deep, painful honesty over deception and a much shallower connection!) and see if they can reconnect based on the love they continue to feel for each other. They recommend that she do some deep soul-searching of her own to determine what she wants from her life. They remind her that long-time love will never have the intensity or passion of new (and forbidden) love but that it brings rewards of its own.

The End
We don't know what letter-writer decides to do. But we have been given a glimpse into the affair itself. It's so clear that circumstances converged that allowed both former love and letter-writer to reconnect in their secret friendship, convincing themselves all along that what they were doing was okay. Instead of self-examination (who am I now that my kids have left home? how do I create meaning in my life? how do I maintain passion in a 25-year-old marriage?), they opted for fantasy. They created their own world in which responsibilities, disappointments, real life was held at bay. A world in which their spouses were kinda erased.
It had to end. But, unfortunately, not before other hearts were broken.

Reach...

This is how you get unstuck, Stuck. You reach. Not so you can walk away from the daughter you loved, but so you can live the life that is yours—the one that includes the sad loss of your daughter, but is not arrested by it. The one that eventually leads you to a place in which you not only grieve her, but also feel lucky to have had the privilege of loving her. That place of true healing is a fierce place. It’s a giant place. It’s a place of monstrous beauty and endless dark and glimmering light. And you have to work really, really, really fucking hard to get there, but you can do it, honey. You’re a woman who can travel that far. I know it. Your ability to get there is evident to me in every word of your bright shining grief star of a letter.

This is an excerpt from a letter from a woman struggling to get past the death of her young daughter. And though that's a pain I hope I never have to experience, the pain of betrayal can also leave us "stuck."
I felt that way for at least a couple of years after D-Day...maybe longer. I felt stripped of choice. I hadn't been the one who cheated...and yet I was stuck dealing with the consequences. If I left, I felt that I was tearing apart a family. If I stayed, I felt like a fraud, pretending to be a wife to a man I couldn't respect.
And so I stayed in that spot, resenting it – and my husband – with every pore of my being. 
It's only in hindsight that I can see that the advice columnist – Sugar – is absolutely right. That place of "stuck" isn't really stuck at all. It's where the healing takes place. It's a dark place where you wrestle with the demons and, if you fight hard enough and long enough, triumph over them. You reach for healing and if it feels elusive, you reach a little further. 
So that when you emerge from that place – and you will emerge eventually though never as soon as you think you should – you'll come out a different person. You'll have integrated the pain into the fabric of your being. But not just the pain, the healing too. You'll never again experience the world in quite the same way. If you're truly triumphed over the demons, you'll emerge more compassionate. You'll live your life with an honesty and integrity that, perhaps, you didn't always. You won't have the time or energy for bullshit anymore or for people who aren't honest with you. You won't feel anger towards those who create such drama so much as dismissal.
You'll smell the roses a bit more deeply, hug those you love a bit more thoroughly and love a lot more gratefully. You'll know that life can deliver pain for sure, but you'll also know that it can deliver such exquisite joy that you'll feel privileged to be alive. You'll know that those moments are what make life worth the struggle. And you'll know what to do if you ever feel stuck again. Fight like hell and reach...trusting that those of us who've also been there will pull you out.