Thursday's Thought

 

More About Healing from a Partner's Multiple Affairs

 D-Day 1 let me in on my husband's secret affair. D-Day 2 filled in the questions unanswered after D-Day 1. It wasn't one affair but dozens. It wasn't one woman but many. It hadn't started a few years ago, it spanned our entire relationship.

You, more than most, can imagine my shock. 

Like those of you who responded to the post on multiple affairs, I thought I was married to a monster. Who could do such a thing? Who could build their entire marriage on a lie? What the hell had I got myself into and how was I going to get myself out? 

Nights were the worst. I had no names or faces to attach to these new affair partners and so I was left with some shadowy imaginings. Of course, they were all sexy, young, vibrant. (The truth, according to my husband, is that they were all sad, middle-aged and desperate.)

As I've explained before on this site, I stayed mostly because I lacked the energy to leave. I had three young children and if the marriage was over, I wanted to be sure it was TRULY over. I didn't want to disrupt their lives until I was sure. And I wasn't sure about much in those early days post D-Day. 

But what I want to say to those of you reeling from your own discovery of multiple partners is this: Though what your husband did seems monstrous, it helps you in absolutely no way to see him as a monster. In fact, if you're even considering trying to rebuild a marriage, it will help you much more to recognize that his monstrous behaviour is the outward expression of his own pain.

Yes, I know. Nobody wants to hear that. Our infidelity culture is built on the idea that only assholes cheat. That a good guy would never do such a thing. And I have taken many slings and arrows from the chump tribe who will not entertain the notion that, sometimes, good people do horrible things. 

And though I wanted to believe that, I knew it wasn't true. I had seen good people do bad things for much of my life. I had a mother with multiple addictions. I watched her get sober. And make amends for so much of the pain she'd caused. Did I owe her that second chance? No. I don't think any of us here on this site owe anyone a second chance. Second chances are gifts. Second chances are mercy. Writer Anne Lamott puts it this way: "...the beauty of living from your merciful heart instead of your ticker-tape brain — judgmental brain — is the way home. It’s the way to peace, the way to feeling safe and connected. It’s all the things we long for.”

The way home. The way to peace. The way to feeling safe and connected. Isn't that we're going for? It requires a radical change in how we see infidelity and those who cheat. It requires us to challenge the idea that this person who betrayed us so profoundly is a "monster". That he is beyond redemption.

Mercy – a second chance – is hard. And yet, I think we're hard-wired for it. Until we become brittle from bracing for hurt. 

Our challenge, and it is a formidable one, is to remain soft in the wake of the betrayal. To not just consider mercy for those who betray us but to absolutely ensure we give it to ourselves. That we forgive ourselves for not knowing. That we remind ourselves that we are and have always been enough. That we didn't deserve this. 

One commenter asks: "How do such monsters exist and in what world can I ever have the powers to get over such a betrayal?"

To which I reply: I see his actions as monstrous, his pain as monstrous but not him as monstrous. I suspect he too see his actions and pain as monstrous. I suspect he's as baffled as you about how he was able to betray you so deeply. And it is his job to determine how he did that and to ensure he learns tools that will prevent him from ever doing it again. The power to get over such a betrayal is within mercy. It was only when I could acknowledge my husband's pain that I could begin to view him with compassion instead of contempt. It was when I could view him with compassion that I could see myself with compassion. That I could forgive myself for not knowing better, for not choosing differently.

Mercy, as Lamott says, is the way home. 

Multiple Sex Partners: "I just don't understand"

I'm re-posting this recent comment from Breathe, over on the Share Your Story thread so that more of you can read it. I think "Breathe" speaks for a lot of us, who come to terms with one affair, only to realize that there's so much to the story. How, we wonder, can we heal from even more pain? I'm also including my response after Breathe's letter.

My D-Day was six month ago. He had an affair with a coworker.
The last months were more than tough, but we were doing so great, I was doing so great.

I just experienced a big milestone on my healing journey. I reached a point where I realized that I cannot fight the whole thing anymore. I understood that it was his choice. And I also understood that I need to accept that he did this because otherwise I keep myself from living in the presence and be happy again. It was time to be kind to myself again.

My husband's affair felt like there was a battle and I wasn't there to fight it. The battle was over. But I was still fighting it. It just felt so unfair that I did not get a chance to fight it. To stop him from going to see her, to be with her.

However, the moment I realized that I cannot fight a losing battle I was somehow free again. I was able to stop all those mind movies, to stop reliving things to the fullest, I stopped having all those fantasies about doing bad things to them, to her, you know what I mean. I could ease this excruciating pain that sometimes – frankly spoken – I would inflict on me on purpose.

Learning about the “loss cycle” from my therapist, I understood that I surrendered.
And with it came this wonderful peace of mind that I hadn't felt since ages. I felt so so good. My friends even said I look so relaxed and so young again.

But one week ago, something terrible happened. Out of the blue, there was D-Day 2.
We were about moving houses and while packing boxes I found an old bank statement showing that he withdrew a lot of money in a dodgy part of the city in December 2018. And suddenly there was this thought I wanted to deny but I couldn´t.

Long story short: He also betrayed me with prostitutes. He visited brothels and sensual massage places. Basically, since we are together. He has done it since 20 years.

Today I still feel numb. And I am so so confused! How can you live and love someone and not see that he is acting out like this. Even though, looking back, it now all makes sense. It´s like I finally found the missing puzzle piece.

After the revelation of the affair, he kept saying that he feels so relieved that everything is out and that I know everything now. I should have known better!

We both are committed to make our relationship all it can be.I see that he wants to become a better man. He still tries hard. Every day.

But now I wonder if we can? I understood the “why” of the affair. I did not approve but accepted that emotional betrayal. But can I accept all the other betrayals as well?

He says that he only did it for the excitement, for the thrill of doing something forbidden. Less for sexual satisfaction. He says that this part of his life belonged only to him. He also says that he did not like it, but he could not stop it.

I don't understand. I just don't understand.

Any first aid advice out there?

I didn't understand either when I learned, first, that my husband was having an affair and, then six months later, that he had had multiple sexual encounters. But there I was, trying to make sense of it all. And what I've learned is this: I will never understand how he was able to conduct this double life. But I can accept that he did. I can accept that his compulsion was powerful enough to override his own value system and his love of his family. I can accept that he believed the stories he told himself, that nobody was getting hurt, that he was just "different" than other people with a stronger sex drive. But I couldn't accept any of that until he sought help. In my case, he had reached out for help before I learned about the sex addiction. The exposure of his affair opened the door for him to admit he had a serious problem that threatened everything that mattered to him. It was up to him to discover what drove his behaviour. My job was only to accept it had happened and move on. It was my choice, also, whether to move on with him in my life or without. But the accepting was, for me, not optional. Because not accepting was a denial of reality. He had cheated on me with many many people. All the wishing in the world wasn't going to change that. And like you discovered, accepting offers us the chance for peace.  

This is the job in front of you now. To accept that his behaviour is his to understand. To recognize that hurt people hurt people. That they behave in ways that harm themselves as well as those they love. That they behave in ways that exploits others as well as exploiting their own values.

Oddly, I think understanding has come for me, if slightly. I understand that my husband had never learned how to manage deeply painful feelings from growing up in an oppressive, abusive home. Sex was an escape for him. It took him out of his day-to-day life into something of a trance – he was either seeking it, arranging it, or engaging in it. Immediately following, he was filled with shame and regret and would tell himself, 'not again'. Until the next time. It was addictive behaviour. And addictive behaviour rarely makes sense to those of us who aren't addicts. 

I wish you peace, again. I think you'll find it. 

Honoring an anniversary after infidelity

If trying to find a way when you don't even know you can get there isn't a small miracle; then I don't know what is.  ~Rachel Joyce, author

Today is my husband's and my anniversary. Twenty-four years ago we stood in front of family and friends and promised to be each other's one and only. We promised kindness and respect. To stick with each other through "good times and bad." 

There was a lot of bad.

I didn't know just how bad it was but it was bad. 

And when I discovered how bad it was, I reeled. I cried. I curled up in a ball on my bathroom floor many many nights and sobbed into my dog's neck. I could see nothing but the bad. I couldn't conceive of my marriage ever being anything but bad ever again.

And yet I stayed. I stayed because I was afraid to leave. Afraid to disrupt my young children's lives. Afraid of what my husband might do if I left. Besides, I was exhausted. I could barely get through a day let alone find the energy to kick him out, or leave myself. And so I waited. I waited until I felt strong enough to leave. I made my expectations clear – no cheating, no lying, full disclosure. If he stepped outside the line, even the slightest bit, I was gone. He knew that. He went to therapy. He attended 12-step meetings.

And I waited.

For strength. For a sign from the universe. For my kids to get older. For myself to get clearer.

It was never so much about if I'd leave but when, though I held out faint hope that my feelings for him might return. That I might love him again as I had that day twenty-four years ago. 

And here we are. 

It has not been easy. It has, in fact, been extremely hard. (I was going to write the "hardest thing I've ever done" but that would be untrue. Since that horrible time, I have had to commit my daughter to a psychiatric ward and that, my friends, is the hardest thing I've ever done. I have had to bury my mother, which was another very hard thing.)

But the thing with infidelity is that the pain eclipses every other thing. It blocks out the light. It leaves us squinting in the dark with no expectation of light ever again. This, we are certain, is our life. Not just for today but tomorrow. And forever.

That is a lie.

The pain is excruciating. I know. But it passes. Not today. Not even soon. But eventually. And though I wish I could tell you differently, the truth is that it takes a long time to pass. And that there are no shortcuts. I don't think it hurts less to leave. I don't think it hurts less to find someone else. I don't think it hurts less in a short marriage than a long one. It just hurts. And it hurts so so much.

And then, one day, I realized it hurt a little less. And then less still. And so on until I'm celebrating my 24th wedding anniversary and I realize it hasn't hurt at all for a long time. And that we are exactly where we want to be and with exactly who we want to be with. He has changed over the years and not just grayer hair and a wider waist. I have changed a lot too. WE know each other much more deeply than we did that day 24 years ago. I have seen him at his absolute worst. I have decided that he is more than that. We have been with each other to bury our mothers. We have been with each other to get our daughter the help she needed. We have grown together and through.

And here we are. Okay. More than okay. Beyond all expectations. Happy.

Can "I'm Sorry" Save Your Marriage After Infidelity?

"For every woman still waiting for an apology," are among the first words you'll read when you open Eve Ensler's book The Apology. Ensler suffered abuse from her father for most of her childhood and youth. Her father died without ever uttering anything resembling an "I'm sorry". Ensler felt caged by the lack of apology and so she found the key to free herself. 
A whole lot of us find ourselves in a similar situation, with a spouse or an ex-spouse who either can't or won't take the necessary steps to apologize to us. I'm not talking about an apology spat out, or one that's really a plea for forgiveness. But a true apology, one that offers a full accounting of the harm done and a genuine reckoning. One that leaves the apologizer unwilling to ever do that to another person again because they cannot, they will not be that person. 
I'm often asked why I stayed with my husband after the harm he caused. Year after year of cheating, lie after lie. And when I look back at those early weeks and months after D-Day, there are a few moments that stand out. Including the day that he told me, whether I stayed with him or left, he was committed to getting emotionally healthy. He could not, he would not remain the same person who could betray someone he loved. 
A genuine apology is a rare thing. In part, as Ensler says, we are not taught to apologize when we are children. I cringe when I hear a parent admonish a child to "say you're sorry", followed by a sullen "I'm sorry" that carries not one iota of self-reflection or genuine remorse. 
And to apologize for breaking someone's trust, their heart? Where to even begin? And so the harm is minimized. It's part cowardice, part survival strategy. As one of our Twitter tribe, whose wife cheated on him, noted after his wife read this post, she felt like a "monster". But then, he added, the next day she wanted to read it again.
Because within that admission, that willingness to confess the monster's sins as your own, lies liberation. If we don't exorcise whatever is driving us to behave in ways that cause harm to those we love, then we will continue to be controlled by it. There are three stages through a genuine apology, Ensler tells us. The first is a willingness to look at what drove the behaviour, to "self-interrogate," she says. Not excuses but understanding. "What made you a person capable of [inflicting such harm]." The second is a "detailed accounting" of the harm. "Liberation only comes through the details," says Ensler. 
Though Ensler is speaking primarily to sexual assault survivors, her words hold true for those of us abused via betrayal. "Survivors," she says, "are often haunted by the why." What we need is not justification but explanation. I often urge women on this site to let go of the why, in part because the cheater so often is baffled himself. He doesn't know why he risked everything that mattered for someone who, ultimately didn't. His job, of course, is to find out. But know this: The 'why' is rarely what our culture tells us. It is rooted in the cheater's own dysfunction, his own wound. Hurt people hurt people.
And the third – a stage few reach – is liberation. An unshackling of the apologizer. A release for the apologized to. 
That's what I got in those moments that I can remember so clearly after D-Day. Those were the moments when my husband made clear that he was committed to becoming a man who could not, would not do that again. When he said to me that he never wanted to see such pain in my eyes again and know that he had created it. When he showed up at his 12-step groups, when he worked with therapists. It wasn't so much an "I'm sorry" in words (though there was that, as well) as an apology in action. I saw his "I'm sorry" more than heard it. 

But what if he won't apologize? 

What are you seeing? Are you seeing someone interrogate themselves (ideally with the help of a trained therapist)? Are you seeing someone willing to go through the shame and discomfort of examining why they hurt someone they claim to value?

If not, can I ask you gently why you're continuing to live on crumbs? If not, why do you have any expectation that things in the future will be different than the past?

If so, can you be satisfied with an "I'm sorry" in actions not words? If so, are you confident that the future will be different from the past because the future him will be different than the past him?
And if you find yourself left, without an apology, without a marriage, then what? Then you unshackle yourself. You can do what Ensler did and put yourself in your ex'es shoes and determine what made him incapable of healthy, generous love. You learn to pity him. Or you accept that you might never know and instead focus your energy on self-care, self-compassion, self-love. 

An apology can create space for compassion. Without it, you will have to create that space for yourself. You can learn to forgive yourself for not knowing, for not having seen it, for having trusted someone unworthy of your trust. And then, you can move forward, liberated. 

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.