It’s Time for Me to Get over My Affair Now

No, not in the way that you might think.

During the most rigorous phase of Covid-19 lockdown, my husband and I escaped one Saturday and went for a walk along the beach near our house. It is not a pretty beach but the sky was bright and the wind was brisk and I felt more alive than I had for many weeks.

Everything was blue and green and white around me. The sea matched the sky, with just a darker ribbon faintly marking the line where they met, and the bright edges of the dune grass sparkled against the clouds. Very few people were out and about, so there was a wild loneliness to the seashore. It was that incongruous type of blustery wildness that somehow manages to hold a sort of familiar safety within its vastness.

I looked at the horizon and let the salty wind rush over me and I thought (with some wonder, given the quarantine circumstances and the Covid uncertainty everywhere) that I was pretty close to feeling truly happy at that moment.

But, as usual, there was a fly in the ointment of my wellbeing. Always, I felt that familiar shadow, like the fuzzy outline of a fingertip, held accidentally against a camera lens in an old photo.

The shadow on my happiness was the knowledge of what I did to my husband, to everyone in our shared lives, when I cheated on him.

We don’t talk about it much, not these days, but I couldn’t help it. I said suddenly and urgently, “Do you think we will ever be free of it?”

He knew exactly what I was talking about. He said, “I think we will, yes. It already feels a long time ago for me, now. It’s almost like another lifetime.”

He explained that he still has huge difficulty reconciling what I did with who he had believed me to be during the years that we were happily married before I strayed, but that the initial sharp hurt of my affair has receded — for him — under the heaps of memories we have accumulated in the years since it happened.

It’s as though he made the decision to forgive me almost on an academic level, and in the making of that decision, he let go of a burden he didn’t know he was carrying. That the generosity of his forgiveness, as a decision and an act in and of itself, allowed him the emotional space to begin to heal.

Of course, it will never feel that way for me.

In the immediate aftermath of the affair I felt, to quote Hannah Gadsby’s seminal stand-up routine Nanette, soaked in my shame. I was saturated with it. Her description of being “soaked in shame” speaks to me so clearly, because it is so accurate.

I was physically drenched in the waves of knowledge of my own mistake and the weight of them was heavy on me, like soaked clothes after heavy rain.

I would wake in the morning and the first thing I would remember was the look on my husband’s and children’s faces when they discovered what I had done. The day would turn instantly grey as it hit me. Sometimes, I didn’t even want to get out of bed. I didn’t want to face the people I had broken, and I definitely didn’t want to talk to my husband about any of it.

But I soon realised that this response to shame isn’t helpful to anyone. It is self-indulgent and it’s selfish to shut down and refuse to communicate with someone who deserves explanations and truth.

Refusing to confront the awfulness of my behaviour, or making repeated excuses for it, or burying it inside me — those things might feel more comfortable for me, but they were just pushing the problem down the line. And that in itself was insulting to my husband who was taking such a risk in trying again with me.

I went the other way when I grasped that fact. I suddenly wanted to lay everything on the table, a cathartic and complete unpacking. I eagerly answered any questions he had for me, and I kept dredging up any details I thought might help.

I demanded that my husband’s thumbprint be added to the security settings on my phone, insisting that he should always have access to my text messages or emails or search history if he wanted them. (He never did).

I enabled Find My Friends, an app I had always dismissed as creepy and invasive and invited him to check my whereabouts whenever he might feel insecure. (He did this only once, and I think it might have been to humour me).

I had various plans in my diary that I’d made when I was living alone before we reconciled, and if these plans involved overnight stays I cancelled them. I changed my working hours so that during the week, there were no daytime hours during which I’d be unaccounted for.

I made myself bustling and bright and always available, always smiling, always making plans, and trying so hard all the time to be considerate of my husband’s needs and my children’s needs. Nothing was too much trouble. I devoted myself to visible atonement and to regaining everyone’s trust. I almost relished the self-flagellation putting myself last.

But I still had that painful kernel of shame inside me. I was window dressing and ignoring it. I was creating the shape of a good wife around the skeleton of what I knew to be true, which was the fact that I was bad. Irredeemably bad. No nuance.

Sometimes in a quiet moment, I would suddenly remember my husband’s face when he realised the depth of my betrayal and I would start crying out of nowhere. I would ring him at these times and sob, “I’m so sorry, I am so so sorry.” I knew that he believed me, but I could also see that it didn’t help him when I burdened him with these random, out-of-the-blue apologies. This, too, was a selfish impulse. It was more about me than him.

Things settled down over time, in the way that things always do. But the shame stayed where I’d left it, deep inside.

That blustery, bright day on the beach, I realised three things.

Firstly, I will never be free of that faint shadow. I will always see a smudge at the corner of any given moment of happiness because I did a bad thing and there is no way to undo that. I broke my vows and that’s all there is to it. Thinking obsessively about how and why I broke them is helpful to nobody. It’s like poking the hole where a tooth used to be; addictive, but creating only pain and leading possibly to worse damage.

Secondly, the faint shadow isn’t threatening or ominous. It can just exist. I can just let it be; I can leave it in the frame as a salutary reminder to me, a warning not to allow complacency to creep in, a gentle nudge always to remember what’s important.

Thirdly, that if my husband can forgive me, I owe it to him to start to forgive myself. I did a bad thing but I am not inherently bad. I didn’t flick a switch and lose everything that was ever good about me, even if I did cause undeserved chaos to a lot of people.

It’s lazy to be so binary and to define myself internally as a bad person forever. It stops me from doing any work on myself. And, vitally, I can’t fully respect my husband if I believe he’s capable of loving a bad person.

So, yes. After several years of allowing it to define me, it is time for me to move on from my affair. To stop letting it be the heart of who I believe myself to be. To stop taking the easy, selfish way out and retreating to the safety of the wet blanket of shame. Basically, to grow up a bit and to think about what forgiving myself might actually look like.

(Ironically, since I decided to move on from what I did, I have written about it almost obsessively; it’s as though the act of writing everything down is performing some kind of exorcism. It helps).

If you’re reading this and you’re still soaked in a similar shame, I can say only this: I promise that it’s easier to look outward than inward, even if it hurts more at first. And, please, try to find a horizon to fix your eyes on and take some deep breaths.

An example of some of the writing I have done about it: