Reaching the New Normal
This is part twenty-four 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.
Are we getting there? Sometimes it feels like it, sometimes it doesn’t, but the times it does are taking firmer hold now. I feel a mix of pride and relief looking back at how far my wife and I have come in our recovery from her affair. During those good times, I’m taking stock and asking myself, “Is this how it’s always going to be?”
I think the answer is, “Probably pretty close to this, yeah.”
I know I will never forget that my wife cheated on me. As I told her once, “This will always be a part of our story now.” But I’m reaching the point where my day-to-day life is settling into a “new normal,” and it’s a normal that in many ways I’m very grateful to have.
Several weeks ago, I felt a major shift in my mindset, and I think it came from finally gaining full trust in my wife’s new, fundamental commitment to me and our marriage. Her actions over the past seven and a half months have done a lot to reinforce that feeling, but it has taken most of that time for me to accept it, especially after the setback of finding out she was still being untruthful about some painful details of what she did.
But now, my general mood has improved a lot. I’m now more … let’s say “effortlessly happy.” I don’t have to try as hard to keep negative thoughts at bay. I’m talking about the unproductive ones that my therapist calls “pain without purpose.” They simply aren’t there most of the time anymore. And when they do pop up from underneath, it’s much easier for me to use my mental hammer to tamp them back down.
Right before I felt this shift, I met with my therapist. It was my first appointment since finding out the truth that my wife did have sex with her affair partner, and that she had been lying about it for six months, despite my begging her for one hundred percent honesty.
I told my therapist that this was still bothering me. Not so much what had happened (I think I had always sort of known it must have happened), but that my wife had still been lying to me frequently, half a year into our efforts to rebuild a better relationship between us.
My therapist was, once again, a huge help to me in changing my way of thinking on this. She told me, “For you it was a line. For her it was a process.” I had to ask her exactly what she meant by that.
“When she ended the affair, that was the line for you, between what she was doing with him and what she was doing with you, rebuilding your relationship. But for her, there wasn’t a distinct line. It was a process of her leaving her previous behavior and feelings in the past, and fully coming back to you. Now it’s time to move your line, and say you’ve finally both walked through that door.”
That may all seem obvious to some, but to me it was a revelation. I had been thinking of her transformation as a distinct line. On that Sunday afternoon in January, she read what I had written up to that point, describing my feelings of dealing with her infidelity, which I thought had been over for almost a month. In fact, it hadn’t been over, but reading my words led her to decide to end the affair for good. She deleted her secret email account, cutting off her main line of communication with him. I had been thinking of that as the “line.” I see now that, for her, it was merely the first, important step in a process.
The process would have been slower, I’d bet, if I hadn’t found out just hours later that she had still been talking to him. I think that accelerated things for her. She now had to commit more fully to her decision, or else leave me and end our marriage. She knew there was no way she could keep the double life going anymore. She knew she’d need to submit to more intense scrutiny from me — I really couldn’t simply trust her after that. She knew she’d have to be more honest with me, and she was. At that point, she told me a lot of things that she had been lying about.
But still not everything. She couldn’t bring herself to tell me everything.
I pointed out to my therapist that my wife hadn’t reached the end of that process on her own, even after six months. I had had to force her to end it, by actually calling her affair partner, and having him tell me the truth she wouldn’t. I had to hear it from him.
“Does it matter so much how it ended? Isn’t the most important thing that it did end?” my therapist asked me. Yeah. Yeah, I guess so. I mean, I do still think of her making me hear it from him as one of the low points of all of this. It’s one of the times she most egregiously let me down.
This is especially true when viewed through my old lens, which assumed that she had violated my trust and betrayed me once again after the “line” that had been drawn. But when viewed through the lens of her “process,” it’s easier to soften my judgment of her on that topic. She hadn’t reached the point in her process of being comfortable giving me total honesty. She wasn’t ready to end that process on her own yet.
But, if I’m still committed to moving forward with my wife — and I one hundred percent am — then from that future-oriented frame of reference, no, it doesn’t really matter so much how it ended. It matters most that now the process is over. A new line has been drawn, by both of us.
Our new relationship is vastly different from our old one. So much so that I often feel disconnected from that past life. It seems like my wife and I were different people then, in a different marriage. The thing that strikes me is that that old marriage was also in so many ways a typical marriage. In some of my earlier chapters, I protested vehemently that our marriage was not bad. I see now that I meant that in relative terms. It wasn’t bad compared to most other marriages, but it was bad compared to what it is now, and what I firmly believe my wife and I will have from now on.
I look back on our previous marriage now and can see how the distance slowly grew between us, like tectonic plates splitting apart. The growing chasm manifested itself as occasional passive aggression, overreactions, dismissals, defensiveness, resentments, and secret thoughts we didn’t share with one another. The biggest one prior to her affair was her plan to leave me when my daughter graduated high school, but I also feel like I let my wife down by not sharing with her how much I wanted to reconnect with her. Then again, some of her behavior caused me to feel like I couldn’t. And some of my behavior caused her to engage in that behavior. After nearly twenty-five years of that kind of marriage, tracing the thread back to the point of initial fault in order to properly place blame becomes an impossibility.
Neither my wife nor I want that marriage back. We are confident that we won’t let that distance grow again. The key — the only key that matters for us, I think — is communication. I’ve realized that it’s impossible to have a great marriage without great communication … and that with great communication, it’s nearly impossible to have a bad marriage! When there are open lines of communication, and a firm desire from both spouses to have a strong bond and a happy relationship, it’s just very unlikely that things will go wrong. At the very least, no serious marital problem is ever going to sneak up on anyone.
Please don’t picture my wife and I, in our “new marriage,” staring into one another’s eyes cross-legged on the floor as we recite stilted incantations about our feelings and repeat back to each other what we heard. It’s not like that.
It’s simply this: She says what she thinks and I listen, and I say what I think and she listens. Then we talk about it, openly and honestly.
That’s all good communication is, essentially. It’s shockingly simple, and shockingly difficult to begin doing. My wife and I agree that we could not have started communicating the way we do now without some sort of traumatic event shaking us awake first. While I wish that traumatic event hadn’t been an affair, we acknowledge that it might have been better than some alternatives, like a serious health scare or a tragic death in the family.
So nowadays when something pops into my head that isn’t productive and only produces pain and pointless anger, I throw up my mental stop sign, realign my thoughts on something else, and keep moving. And when something pops into my head that I find myself wanting to talk about, my wife and I talk about it. I’m honest about my feelings, and she’s honest about hers. That, more than anything, has made our bond stronger than it’s ever been.
So, if this is the new normal, I’m good with that.