INFIDELITY
People Absolutely Do Not Acknowledge that an Affair Can Be Anything Other Than Bad.
But it’s truly an ill wind that blows no good.
I was just reading this insightful piece by Holly Bradshaw, in which she talks about what she learned by opening up her marriage. In it, she shares how two people who honestly bent over backwards to make their marriages work learned, through opening up their relationships and having new experiences, how wrong their marriages really were for them. That they were really having to work much too hard for relationships that, likewise, were much too hard.
This story bears a stamp of legitimacy, of sorts, because all the spouses were consulted, all the married people agreed to see other people, and therefore everything was done above board, with nobody finding out after the fact that a spouse was seeing someone else and not telling them.
It stands to reason that, in many affair situations, people may have the same experiences in learning about relationships and deciding what is right for them and what has been wrong with their lives.
However, to many people, the fact that a spouse wasn’t consulted cancels all that out. The shocked, hurt, and sobbing spouse makes everything before and after that Bad.
I’ve pointed out before how, not in all cases, but in many, the shocked and sobbing spouse had a hand in his or her own misery. How, many times, there’s been a dead bedroom for years, with all the emotional walls that come with it. How, in many cases, the shocked and sobbing spouse had been approached with problems and asked for marriage counseling ages prior, and refused to apply themselves on behalf of their spouse and marriage when asked.
I’ve also pointed out how many people argue this line of reasoning that none of that matters because the person cheated. When, in fact, spousal neglect, in cases where that occurs, is a big factor in the cheating that came later.
Many times, exploration of these issues results in a round-the-rosy game of “whataboutism,” where all the rubbernecking onlookers do is try to figure out Who Was At Fault and Who Was Worse. When, really, what you have in any instance of adultery is two suffering people in a suffering marriage, who, believe it or not, were actually doing the best they could see to do at the time.
People who could both use less judgment, more compassion, and a wider berth of privacy.
In any other adverse life event, people adapt.
Someone gets cancer and talks about the positive aspects of it. How they’ve learned to appreciate life, how they mended fences with loved ones under the shadow of death, how it’s made them stronger people. Someone has a terrible accident and ends up paralyzed. What happens? They end up talking about the positive aspects of it. How they’ve learned to appreciate life, how they mended fences with loved ones, how it’s made them stronger people. Someone gets MS, or ALS, or gets macular degeneration and goes blind. A hurricane or a house fire or a tornado happens and blows away a person’s every possession. What happens?
You get it. People dig for the positive, and we applaud their strength.
Adultery, or cheating, is the one adverse life event where we don’t put all the unpleasantness to the side and go straight to looking for the value in it. Oh, it made me a stronger person, look at all the things I’ve learned.
When, in fact, surviving a discovery of adultery, or keeping one under wraps, anyone who retains the power of empathy does in fact learn quite a lot about themselves, about relationships, about marriage and the kind of marriage they would like to have, whether it’s possible with the person they’re currently with, and how they want to live from now on.
It’s just that, when this crucial life learning we all go through during any adverse life event occurs because of an affair, now we call it illegitimate.
Why is that?
Because, to our untrained and judgmental eyes, it looks as if someone had the choice to cheat or not to cheat, to inflict pain on someone else or not to inflict pain on someone else.
When, if we look through the cheating person’s eyes at how their world looked to them at the time, maybe divorce was the thing that was truly unthinkable. (Which we all ought to consider when we tell ourselves divorce is so easy these days.) At some point, a cheater who has any ability to empathize with another person has to ask themselves about that. Why didn’t I just ask for a divorce rather than let this happen? Yet another opportunity for crucial life learning.
Daphne Rose Kingma, in her classic Coming Apart: How to Heal Your Broken Heart, writes:
Because of our obsolete mythologies of love — in particular the myth that love is forever — our natural instinct is to feel as if our relationships have ended “out of the blue,” with no real reason whatsoever, or worse yet, for reasons singlehandedly precipitated by our spouses or sweethearts. Yet, as these stories reveal, relationships always end for a reason — they end when developmental tasks have been completed by one or both partners.
Kingma writes that humans have an existential fear of life, knowing that it is transitory, that we will all grow old and die. We spend our lives looking for security and meaning, and we decide that the meaning in being alive and going through what we go through in a human life must be the love of other people.
Because we really only believe that two relationship styles are legitimate, Kingma writes — the child/family relationship and the spousal relationship — we assign these two relationships all the meaning and all the source of our feelings of security in life. Therefore, because they become our containers for all our feelings of stability, they have to last forever.
Our spouses become our parents, and they had better be there to hold our little hands all our lives, or else we will be devastated.
So we struggle to hold our relationships exactly the way they were when we first said I do. We demand this of ourselves and each other. Often, we demand this of our spouses more than we do ourselves, and that’s where the problems come in. We get to act any way we please, but that spouse is not to feel unhappy with that or to act on feeling unhappy with that in any way. They’re our parents! They’re there to keep us happy — isn’t that what we married them for? — and that’s about it.
Which is a pretty inhumane way to treat your spouse. Yet, our society treats all married people that way, which is why individual people get such a hard time from family, friends, and church when they realize they may need to divorce, and when we hear that someone’s cheated, we picture it happening to us, and we react just as viscerally.
You cannot say to cancer, You aren’t allowed to put me through all this chemo and then take my life. You cannot say to macular degeneration, You are not allowed to take my sight. You cannot say to the tornado, You are not allowed to blow my house down.
Yet we think we are allowed to say to other people, You may not need. You may not change. You may not do anything that might make me uncomfortable, and if you are uncomfortable, you may not do anything about it, because that might make me uncomfortable. And my feelings are more important than your feelings, so I don’t have to view you with any empathy or compassion, and I get to judge you if you find you do feel unhappy and you do something about that that I’m not happy with.
We’re all struggling to feel as if we have some control in a tumultuous life. And we can’t control the weather or our health (all the people who insist we’d all live forever if only everyone would white-knuckle themselves down to a size 00 notwithstanding).
But sometimes, sometimes, we can control what someone else does if we yell at them enough.
And that’s way easier than acknowledging the necessity of change in all life, and that the forces of change move through everyone, and that includes our marriages. We do not know everything. Everyone has something to learn and some crucial growth to achieve in our time on this earth. And most of the time, it’s unpleasant.
I don’t have to learn from that or acknowledge anything positive in it, or accept that there was anything in what happened that I actually needed to learn or to know, if I can just batter that person and call it all Bad instead. Because that person over there owes ME something, damn it!
Wouldn’t it be great if life actually worked that way? But it doesn’t.