Lessons Learned
This is part sixteen of my story of recovering from my wife’s affair and rebuilding our marriage. If you haven’t already, please start at the beginning with part one.
My wife and I just passed the three-month mark since we both started working to recover from her affair, and to save and improve our marriage. We’re also about to celebrate our twenty-fourth wedding anniversary, so it seems like a good time to take stock of where we are.
When I look back at the past three months, the progress we’ve made astounds me. We’ve gone from a true low point in our marriage — in our lives, in fact — to a place now where we are both happy, supporting one another, rebuilding our relationship, and very much in love with each other again.
In our most recent session, our marriage counselor told us how proud she is of us, and said we’ve done so much better than a lot of other couples do when facing a similar crisis in their relationship. I’m not saying this to brag. There are some things we just got lucky with, some things we had going for us that other couples might not, and so on. But looking back, there are some core principles that I think have worked for us so far, and some missteps that made things harder for one or both of us.
Before I start doling out what could be taken as advice, I want to stipulate that I have very little idea what I’m talking about. I’m not a therapist or expert in any way, and pretty much all I know about the topic of dealing with infidelity is what I’ve experienced firsthand.
I realize there are no two people out there just like my wife and me, and no marriage exactly like ours. A lot of what I say may only apply to other couples in very similar situations. I would say the defining characteristics of our personal infidelity turmoil are:
- We had a good, if flawed, marriage to begin with.
- The affair itself was relatively brief (in our case, about 6 weeks, with only one night of physical intimacy).
- We are now both fully committed to one another, and totally engaged in rebuilding our marriage better than it has ever been.
So as incredibly difficult as parts of this have been, I fully recognize that in some ways we have gotten off easy. Many people dealing with infidelity are probably facing much more numerous and serious issues. If your situation doesn’t have anything in common with the description above, there may not be a lot of good takeaways from this, but you might find something meaningful here.
So, with all of that out of the way, here are a few things that I found to be most important over the past few months:
The offending partner should give immediate and full truth. It’s tough to overstate how much more difficult this experience has been made for me simply because my wife did not reveal the full truth about everything to me on that Thursday morning when I first confronted her.
I told my wife within an hour of her first confessing: “Please, no more lies. Whichever way this goes from here, there’s no reason for it anymore. Tell me everything, with one hundred percent honesty.”
She chose not to comply with that request, and lied when she told me she would. I think if she had told me the truth immediately, she may not have started talking to him again four days later. She says her biggest reason for doing that was that she was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to get over her affair. I don’t think she realized that a large part of why she felt that way was probably because she knew she hadn’t told me everything yet. She had to have been afraid of how I would react if or when I found out about the lies she was still telling me and the details she was hiding.
For me, there was solace in the truth. Each new revelation hurt, but it also was a relief. When I would get new pieces of honesty from her, each time I felt like, “Okay, now that part of her betrayal is over, too.” If I had received the full truth all at once at the beginning, it would have been one single wound, and we could have begun the healing process earlier.
Likewise, the injured party needs to be honest as well. From the beginning, I told my wife, “My filter is off. I’m an open spigot, just letting everything spill out.” I told her exactly how I felt, constantly. To her immense credit, she accepted it all, even when my lack of a filter meant I was saying things that hurt her, in a way that didn’t cushion the blows at all.
If you’re trying to rebuild a new, better relationship after infidelity, I feel like it’s crucial that both parties be totally open and honest. Anything less, and you’re rebuilding on the same shifting sand as before.
Stay future-focused. I think this is one of the most important things to do, and one of the most difficult. For the hurt partner, the temptation is strong to return to the scene of the crime over and over, looking for new clues to answer the hows and whys. And certainly some forensic examination is appropriate and useful.
I’ve used this writing, in part, as a way to examine what happened, and explore some of the things I can’t fully relate to or explain on my own. Much of it has been cathartic, and has relieved me of some of the burdens I carried. But it’s easy to linger too long in the past.
Two months ago, most conversations between my wife and me revolved around the affair. Now, most of them revolve around what lies ahead of us. Where should we retire to one day? What do we want out of our next house? Where should we go for our twenty-fifth anniversary trip next year? What hobbies or interests might we want to pick up? These conversations are fun, positive and help us both feel comfortable with where we are headed, and confident that we’re headed there together.
Talk to the right people. Don’t give in to the desire to tell everyone about the pain you’re going through. Talking to the wrong person about it might only cause more pain. In my situation, where I am fully committed to doing everything I can to not only save, but improve, our marriage, I wouldn’t want to talk to someone who might flood my brain with negativity.
A voice of reason, or even someone who is likely to play devil’s advocate with you, can be an asset. I have not tried to shut out negative thoughts, and my natural skepticism has at times helped me to suss out the truth. But because my primary goal all along has been doing whatever I can to save our marriage, I also need to try to maintain a positive outlook, and the very few people I’ve talked to about it have been selected because they can help with that.
My wife and I also don’t want to complicate things by introducing more people with more emotions to the situation. We see this as a personal issue between her and me alone. I have avoided telling anyone who would potentially complicate the situation or cause it to drag on longer. For instance, I haven’t told my mother, because I know her timeline for forgiving my wife would likely be much longer than mine.
Don’t force forgiveness. I felt what I thought was forgiveness very early on. She had made an awful mistake, but I knew it was contrary to her core character and principles. Once she chose me, chose our marriage, and broke it off with him, within a couple of hours of me first confronting her, I forgave her.
Of course, her renewed commitment to our marriage, if it ever really existed at all back then, only lasted for a few days before she started talking to him again. This is much harder for me to say I forgive her for, even now.
For one thing, forgiveness feels like something I already gave her once. I told her I forgave her for what she had done, and she tossed that forgiveness aside and kept doing it. Is that forgivable? Yes, but it will take more time.
I’m not sure what forgiveness looks like now. If it just means not being mad at her about it anymore, then I’m getting there. I still have moments of anger, but they are becoming rarer and less intense.
So I’m not sweating it. I don’t think of forgiveness as a finish line we need to get to. I don’t think my wife does, either. I think of it as something that will just happen on its own, if we keep doing the things we’re doing now.
Stay optimistic! I believe that the right balance of optimism and realism will benefit a person in almost any difficult situation. Dealing with a marital trauma such as this is no exception. In fact, it may be a time when optimism is most needed.
My optimism has been rooted in two things: belief in myself and belief in my wife. We are intelligent people, and emotionally intelligent people. Even though we allowed things to drift off course in our marriage while neither of us was paying attention, we both understand the impact of our feelings and our mental state on ourselves, on one another, and on our relationship. I knew from the beginning that if we both were determined and persistent, we had the tools, the outlook and, most importantly, the desire needed to recover from this turmoil. I believe in us.
Optimism got me through the roughest parts of this. When I felt most hurt, I reminded myself that the source of the pain was all in the past. There was nothing that could be done to erase it, no matter how much either of us wanted to. That’s cold, hard reality, but I also reminded myself of the potential for a wonderful future.
I picture us finding a home for our retirement years, crossing places off our travel “bucket list,” attending our kids’ weddings, meeting and loving our grandchildren. We’ll do it all together, because that’s what we both want more than anything. As long as we’re together, our empty nest won’t be so empty after all.
I know it won’t be all perfect. It won’t all unfold as expected. Grief and tragedies will come, and when they do, we’ll be there for one another. Through happiness and sorrow, I’ll be able to look into the eyes of the sweet, shy girl I met over twenty-five years ago, the woman who gave birth to our children and raised them with me, the woman I want to grow old with, my flawed and wonderful partner in life, the other half of me, my wife.