Infidelity Is A Form of Emotional Abuse

Abuse doesn’t always leave visible scars.

Despite my unavoidable anger when my husband’s mistress told me I was emotionally abusive toward him,

I believed her.

Of course, the unspoken caveat was that she was not and could meet his needs in a way I was unable.

I had always prided myself on being both an independent, self-sufficient woman but also a kind, empathetic soul. I was horrified that perhaps I made the adult dearest to me feel belittled or disparaged.

Ironically, she told me this after a night when she’d gone bar-hopping until the wee hours of the next morning with my husband, who had subsequently transferred a couple hundred dollars out of my paycheck to pay for their time together while I sat alone with our children.

I still believed it.

And, it hurt.

I spent even more hours than I already had in the previous months looking long and hard at myself in the mirror in an effort to self-reflect on how I might have personally damaged the man I loved.

It wasn’t until the ability of hindsight allowed me to look in that same mirror that I was able to see I had been primed to feel that the blame for our situation rested squarely on my shoulders alone.

That it was all my fault.

And was therefore, what I deserved.

Gaslighting is inevitable with any form of infidelity. It’s not just blatant lies that allow affairs to endure. It’s those seemingly innocuous statements that make us question our own truths.

It’s not enough to destroy only our trust in them.

Adulterers crush the trust in our own perceptions of reality.

The damage done to our psyches is just another cog in the wheel that keeps driving the affair vehicle down the road.

By the time this event occurred, I had withstood nearly two years of my husband’s manipulative gaslighting techniques. Each and every time I’d attempted to bring up my unease with his situation or open up about my feelings of anxiety, fear, and betrayal, I was left invalidated and dismissed.

“You’re overly sensitive about this. There’s no reason to be so overbearing and jealous. We’re just friends. I come home to you every night,” he would say.

Letting these statements sink in on repeat caused me pause. Was I that far off base?

Was it my own mind that was the one turning the tricks?

I was already emotionally bruised and battered. There’s nothing like an extra kick when we’re already down.

And so, when his mistress told me I was the one truly inflicting the abuse,

I believed her.

My husband’s natural dissatisfaction and disappointment with middle-age propelled him on a search for more exciting terrain. Forever the escapist, he jumped feet first down the hole into the spiraling abyss of fantasy affair world. His thrill-seeking, addictive personality enthusiastically chasing the white rabbit.

Before I knew it, I had fallen straight in after him.

Except, Wonderland wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

Where my husband was seeing vibrant color for the first time, I was seeing only dull shades of gray. While he lived an illusion of his own creation with someone with whom there were no joint responsibilities or the mundane drudgery of adulting, I was left behind in the dust of the real world of parenting, bills, and grocery shopping. The freedom he secured from our joint constraints trapped me in a nightmare from which I was unable to wake.

Both of them were afforded the luxury of only showing each other their most positive attributes.

He gave his best parts away to her,

while I was left with the scraps.

The veil of justifications my husband and his mistress hid behind fueled their shared fantasy. Self-deception and distortion of the truth rationalized the abandonment of all their morals and convictions.

As history was rewritten, I became the villain in their exclusive narrative.

In their spectacular fantasy woven with nothing but lies, my husband became the masked hero of his own storyline.

Turns out the wizard behind the curtain was just a coward in disguise.

The incongruence between his words and actions caused me confusion. Betrayal by a loved one is such a devastating emotional shock that I refused to see that my primary adult attachment could act in such a way. To numb the pain of cognitive dissonance, I instead chose to bury my head in the sand.

Unable to break free of the chains of denial, we both remained caged. Forever running on the hamster wheel of our own creation.

We both refused to see anything but his ideal self.

Neither of us wanted to believe that character didn’t exist.

The relief that befell my husband after his confession years later didn’t extend in my direction. In his mind, I was the priest in the confession box ready to wash him of his professed sins.

When I was unable to so readily forgive, he desperately pulled the same justifications he used to commit his acts straight out of his back pocket. I had been told so many times that because I earned a higher income, because I was controlling, and because he felt sexually rejected when our children were toddlers, I was the cause of his own choices. In his well-revised book of our marriage, I was the antagonist and so, therefore, he was the victim.

To him, victimhood entitled him to betray every vow we’d ever promised each other.

The realization that the one person who promised to protect and cherish our marriage was too busy protecting his own ego was a cross too heavy to bear.

As the betrayed, not only are we abused, but then we’re blamed for it.

The proverbial knife in our backs is enough to bleed out, but knowing the person we gifted our loyalty to is the one holding the weapon is what makes our hearts stop in its tracks.

His repeated statements that he never intended to leave our relationship or hurt the ones he claims to love are meaningless.

Betrayal is not love.

Regardless of intention, it’s the action that matters.

I might not have suffered any bruises, but my ability to love took the beating of a sledgehammer.

My wounds may not be visible,

but the scars will remain forever.