INFIDELITY
How Can You Know What Percentage of the Affair Might Be Your Fault?
There are enough resources around now that you really can do this.
When laboratory and clinical research analyze infidelity with dispassion, the relationship itself turns out to be the cause in most cases.
If you’ve just found out you’ve been cheated on, you have my sympathy. It’s a devastating discovery for many people, one some struggle with for years.
One of the things some people struggle with is believing their spouse’s or long-term relationship partner’s secret affair was completely their fault. Many people do not like hearing this, but third-party situations, especially in a long-term marriage, really do run on a long continuum.
An affair situation is a huge emotional upheaval, and people’s feelings about it and how they look at it sometimes change as time moves us on. We all want to believe, when we’ve heard that ourselves or someone we’re close to got cheated on, that all the fault lies in the cheater and we ourselves were the best partner or spouse.
The fact is, sometimes that’s true and sometimes it isn’t. The fact is that it can take many, many years for us to arrive at a balanced view of what really happened in our affair-prone marriage, or something we will consider to be our final view, as Glenna Gill tells in The Chameleon Effect of Marriage on My Identity.
You can discover a situation like Ellen A’s, where a wife held it together at home while a cheating husband literally had a girl in every port … to a situation like The Adulteree’s, where the guy insists his marriage was “just fine” until almost the very end of this wonderful series of articles … to a situation like Liam MacAdam’s, where the guy had a dead bedroom and ended up cheating because despite every effort to work with his wife, the issue remained intractable … to a situation like the one I was in.
We decided on a no-physical-contact rule, then we broke up, he committed himself to marriage counseling … and what he had to say about it the last time we spoke, two years later, was that she “sort of slept through it” and “acted like she really didn’t want to be there.” He’s still there, but he mooned about on my website without speaking to me literally for years. I think he finally just quit.
The affair was eight years ago.
(Who does that if their marriage is working out?)
Obviously, we have a continuum here between the spouse who has, all things considered, been a pretty good spouse, as things go, and the cheater is just sowing some wild oats for who knows what reason (Finn Lang writes about that in his incomparable piece here) … to the spouse who would have worked with their cheater had they spoken up prior to cheating … to the spouse with emotional problems of their own, who is either abusive or unilaterally imposes an emotional or sexual cutoff in their marriage, badmouths their spouse to family so they will look like the bad guy should they separate or divorce, and then wonders why the other person cheats.
It’s when you’re in the middle of that continuum that things become murky. You know you haven’t mercilessly cut your spouse off, and you would certainly be open to hearing about anything that was making them unhappy, but they never said anything.
Or, did they?
This is when an honest accounting of your own part can be done, but can also get a little dicey.
I wasn’t thrilled admitting that if we’d gotten together back then, I would have treated my ex-affair partner exactly the same way his wife did, either. Um, because I already was.
Our own faults are the worst.
Obviously, it’s best if you do this kind of sifting and soul-searching with a good therapist. But you can do some good work on your own, too.
In saying this, however, you can never assign one hundred percent of the blame, or in most cases likely anything over forty-nine percent, to the partner who didn’t cheat (I have heard of a few cases that really pushed that, however, usually including some form of spousal abuse, or a person who was really intransigent in the face of obvious serious marital issues, combined with family problems that precluded divorce).
Somebody has to make the decision to chat someone else up. Then they have to make the decisions, a.) to drive to the hotel room, and b.) to pull their pants down.
Their spouse was most likely not standing there with a loaded gun forcing them to do that.
In addition, cause and effect in the marital relationship sometimes weaves a tangled web. If you read the series of articles by The Adulteree, which I already linked, we find a tale of a wife angry enough to divorce the husband — a wife who, it turns out, had a million and one grievances but never told the husband about them. Similarly, there is a case John Gottman cites (or perhaps cobbled together out of several representative couples) about the man who had an affair because he didn’t feel needed in his marriage. Turns out the wife had repeatedly asked him to share with her about his job and about any ways he might be feeling unhappy, yet he had turned away from her because he “didn’t want to burden her.”
He ended up turning toward an affair partner who definitely needed him because her life was a total mess, and came from a childhood where parents always shut him down whenever he himself acted too needy.
So, you never know. There are affair situations that, if they aren’t one hundred percent the cheater’s fault, they are pretty damned close.
But then you have the situations like Liam MacAdam’s, linked above, or worse ones I’ve heard of where the eventually straying spouse actually asked for marriage counseling, repeatedly, or let it be known, sometimes for years, that they were unhappy and the marriage needed improvement, only to be met with, “Well, I’m not going to change, so what would be the point of that?”
It could be that your marriage was sort of inching towards that end of the continuum, and if so, you will need to be honest with yourself about it. Part of affair recovery is not only that the person who cheated develop empathy for the feelings of the betrayed spouse … but the reverse has to happen, as well.
To that end, how will you know?
You might not. At least, not until you find out about the affair.
Sadly, before cheating occurs, a lot of stuff has been happening below the surface that the partners are unaware of. It’s likely that both people have been keeping resentments down and not voicing them for a while. This is their way of keeping the relationship intact.
They’re trying to keep the peace; they expect a big argument and they don’t expect a good outcome from that argument if they bring up whatever it is. To them, the most important thing is that things are calm on the surface and that the other partner looks calm … if not happy.
Chances are, if there’s an affair now, you stopped telling your partner all the things that bothered you a while ago and they probably stopped telling you, too. Or, maybe you’re still open about things you don’t like, and you’re hearing, “Yes, dear.” And not much else.
How long have you felt (before you discovered the affair, of course) that your spouse was the one and only mate for you? Did you stop? When? Do you think your spouse probably stopped thinking the same of you? When?
Maybe this isn’t you. As I said, a lot of different betrayal scenarios exist. But if this is you, do you remember your partner complaining about things or asking you for things, way back in the day, and you haven’t heard that stuff in a while?
A lot of times in a marriage, people start keeping as secrets the things that were ignored too many times back when they were still brave enough to talk about them.
“But it would be beneficial if he answered, ‘I do sometimes notice other women. I think it’s because we haven’t been talking or having sex much, and it’s starting to get to me. I miss you. I miss us.’ I admit that’s tough to say, but it’s worth it.”
— John Gottman, Ph.D.
Or they keep quiet about things they are painfully insecure about or that they imagine you would be disappointed in them about. What dangerous secrets might your partner have kept from you before the affair? It could be that they were talking about them at some point … before they decided to clam up.
Yep, they decided to stop talking at some point, and they decided to start talking to someone else.
But, before they did that … what were they talking about? How did you respond, and why? If you did have any egregious or unfair behavior coming out from your side, those are probably your biggest clues. Loneliness and disconnect happens in marriage because, at some point, somebody felt betrayed over something, in most cases, long before anyone met a third party.
These are the breaches of trust that occur before the infidelity. Gottman’s list of the most frequent ten include the “I’m here unless I find someone better” phenomenon, emotional affairs, lying, having a parent as a third party in the marriage, emotional coldness, withdrawal of sex, disrespect, unfairness, selfishness, and breaking promises. Have you heard complaints about any of this in the past?
My own checklist looks like this:
Has there been a long “dry spell?” Months or even years with no sexual contact between you?
Have you responded to that difference of your spouse’s opinion with sharp words or a harsh tone? Once they backed down, did you sail happily on, convinced things were just fine? Um … did that happen a lot, at any time in the past?
Do/did you hear things like, “You’re always attacking me. Everything’s always my fault with you!”?
Do/did you hear things like, “You just don’t/won’t listen to me!”?
Do/did your husband or wife start to isolate, stuck in another room doing things on his own? Did you? How much time are/were you spending on Facebook?
What do/did you guys talk about? If there hasn’t been any significant sharing about feelings, about any part of your lives, for a long period, that’s a big danger sign. What was the last “feelings” talk you remember?
Were you feeling sort of glad you didn’t have to be bothered?
At any time, did you respond to any odd change in your spouse’s behavior by exerting pressure on the person to go back to the way things always were, instead of listening to what you were told and compassionately trying to understand how he was feeling and why? We grow in life, and people are supposed to change. Nobody owes you anything just because “that’s the way we’ve always done it.” Cling to this in a miasma of bad temper, and you may find yourself alone.
At any time, did you exert this pressure by talking negatively about the person to family or friends, using public opinion to try to scare them back into the way you feel secure and think things are “supposed” to be?
Has the person moved out in the past? Requested marriage counseling?
If you answer yes to any of these questions, you might be one of the forty-nine percent club. For further information that might help you ponder what really happened before your spouse cheated, anything by John Gottman (one great book is linked at the beginning of this piece) and After the Affair by Janis Abrams Spring are great resources.
If you’re looking for a shorter read, may I also point you to this Medium piece by therapist Becky Whetstone: If You’re Thinking of Leaving Your Spouse, Read This …. | by Becky Whetstone, Ph.D. | Unfaithful: Perspectives on the Third-Party Relationship | Jul, 2023 | Medium
The truth is, only your partner knows the secrets of his or her own heart … if they are self-aware enough, and not addicted or mentally ill.
In order for you to know them, too, you have to care, and ask. Then you have to listen.
That is at the heart of any good resource out there.