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.

From the Vault: I'm About to Wage War Over My Boundaries

I just discovered this never-published post that I wrote in 2012. I didn't post it because it seemed to have little to do with infidelity. Now, of course, I can see that boundary setting has TONS to do with infidelity. The good news is that, while I recognize the "me" in this post, she's not around so much now. The new "me" is so much better at this stuff. Whattaya know, huh? Change is possible...the war is won.

I'm severely pissed off these days.
At my husband. At my 12-year-old daughter. At my thousand-year-old cat. At the government. The list goes on.
I'm sick – sick to death, I tell you! – of feeling disrespected and unappreciated. I cook, I clean, I pick up cat feces that always miss the litter box by just enough. Does anyone thank me? Appreciate me? Treat me with the kindness and compassion I deserve??
Nooooooo...
Including...me.
And that, of course, is the problem.
No-one can take advantage of you without your permission, my mother often reminded me as I lamented yet another situation from which I couldn't seem to extricate myself.
Of course, like generations of daughters before and yet-to-come, I shrugged it off. After all, what the hell did my mother know?
Turns out, quite a lot. And given her own experience with betrayal, I should definitely have listened a bit more closely to her advice.
If anyone knew boundaries, it was my mother.
Me? Not so much.
But boundaries aren't just for keeping ourselves from volunteering too often at the school bake sale. They're an integral part of healing from betrayal. They're an integral part of living a healthy life.
They are, in fact, like a rulebook for how to live our lives. They remind us that we matter...even when other aren't treating us like we do. Make that especially when others aren't treating us like we do.
Wendy Strgar, whom I've cited on this site before, notes in this blog post that "boundaries are the truest measure of how we love ourselves."
And I haven't been loving myself too well these days (or, come to think of it, ever).
Maybe you haven't been either.
Instead, my boundaries are like Silly String. They're hang in threads...and no-one takes them seriously.
The result, of course, is that I do a whole lot of stuff for everyone else and very little for myself. Which (see above) makes me really pissed off.
Well, I'm tired of feeling pissed off.
So I'm spending some time figuring out where my boundaries are. No easy task. In some cases, they don't exist so I'm creating them. Based on nothing more than a feeling in my gut that advises me whether or not what I'm about to do or say "yes" to makes me feel yucky (that's a technical term).
I can't always feel it. I've become something of an expert at sending that little gut feeling to her room where she's completely silent. And so I'm learning to invite her back out and to offer up her advice.
When I listen, it's usually something like this:
"Why are you picking up your son's backpack when you've told him REPEATEDLY to do it himself. Instead, let him know that if he doesn't put them away himself, it'll be tossed in a bin in the garage. And that's where he can find his homework next time he's looking for it."
Wow. My gut is a bitch you don't want to mess with.
And while I don't want to be a bitch, I do want to be respected. Which is, sometimes, the same thing.

How to Live Your Own Love Story

My husband and I are choosing brick. We have to rebuild a crumbling wall and our stonemason offered up a few different choices. My husband chose one. I chose another.
He clenched his teeth. I held my breath. Inwardly, I was thinking, "After everything he did to me, the least the bastard could do was let me pick the brick I want." I resisted the urge to throw one at him.
Perhaps it's not a coincidence that we're building a wall...because that's certainly what I've been doing, metaphorically, by expecting to "win" every disagreement. I'm not the least bit interested in compromise much of the time. Not after all I've been through. What he did to me.
Except that I can't punish my husband forever (though that particular fantasy has brought a smile to my face more than once). The fact that both of us always felt we were giving way more than the proverbial inch is part of what got our marriage into trouble in the first place. If we want to get it out of trouble...and keep it there...we need to learn to compromise in a way that means we both are happy with our choice. Not as easy as it sounds.
But – and here's the key – it can be relatively easy when we stop expecting the other person to make us happy. So much of my unhappiness has stemmed from expecting him to make me happy. "If he let me have my own way..." "If he loved me more." Or better. Or differently.
My mom told me something not long before she died. She knew of my husband's affair and was my strongest support. But one day, when I was raging at the injustice of it all, she gently asked me to consider that maybe my husband had loved me the best he knew how.
"But his best sucked!" I spat.
Yes, she agreed. But now that he knows better, she suggested, he can love you better. And, she said, perhaps if you loved yourself better, how he loved you wouldn't affect you quite so much.
I couldn't hear the wisdom in those words at the time.
But when I think back, her words suck the air from my lungs.
That's it. Exactly.
It's not how he loves me that's the problem...it's how I love myself.
I need to live my own love story. I need to look into my own eyes and see beauty. Strength. Wisdom. I need to stop beating myself up because that only leads to beating him up.
It's not easy. But it shouldn't be that hard either. And when I'm taking care of myself and nurturing my own soul, suddenly needing the have exactly the brick I want just doesn't seem to matter. I don't want to be building walls; I want to be tearing them down.