INFIDELITY

Why I Have No Sympathy for the Cheated-On Spouse

*or, at least, that’s the way it looks.

Since I write mainly about infidelity here on Medium, I have gotten many comments informing me that I do not understand the cataclysmic injury suffered by the betrayed spouse. I am “making excuses” for adultery and adulterers and don’t care about the betrayed spouses and their children and families.

Actually, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

I just don’t start out every article with a lengthy disclaimer about the cheated-on spouse. Sometimes such a prologue fits in the article I am trying to write and sometimes, it doesn’t.

I guess every writer on Medium has that problem to some extent. I once got into a beef with a popular writer on here who writes a lot about weight loss, weight loss, weight loss. She had some articles sympathetic to the victim of body shaming who has spent their life struggling with weight and is still fat, she just didn’t say that in every piece. Especially the ones where she complained about fat people she saw who were obviously out of shape.

I felt she ought to open every single article with sympathy because I’m fat and sensitive about it.

She rather vehemently disagreed with that and blocked me.

So, I can sort of see both viewpoints, but when you’re trying to write an article that’s under a seven-minute read, and you’ve got other pieces that say the same thing, not to mention a book and a pub with numerous articles by cheated-on spouses, you don’t want to repeat it every time.

And yet, somebody who’s reading their first story by you doesn’t get to see that and feels offended. Or, someone who doesn’t see you go into the cheated-on spouse’s experience every time you want to write something that is tangentially related feels offended.

Like I did.

It’s not that I don’t understand it.

I don’t have to write essays about it to understand it. I don’t have to do that because I have every other spouse on Medium who writes about having been cheated on.

Seriously: How am I going to compete with superb writers like Glenna Gill? And Kelsey Jane? And The Wife? And The Adulteree? And Shattered but Surviving? And Much Reassembly Required? And Ellen A?

I can write about the experience of the cheated-on spouse, and I have, but these people lived it.

They’re doing a way better job of writing about it than I can. Some of these people don’t submit to my pub, but if they did, I’d publish them.

I don’t want to cover ground these people have already covered.

Because, let me tell you something. In addition to the fact that I can’t tell their experience anywhere near as well as they can …

… Everybody knows this aspect of cheating in a marriage already.

We may react viscerally to their stories … but not a one of us is ever surprised. And one of the reasons we react the way we do is that we are terrified of it ever happening to us.

Which is one of the reasons that, as therapist and life coach Marie Murphy, Ph.D. says, a lot of advice for cheaters is just thinly veiled prejudice and judgment.

There’s a lot more about infidelity besides the heartrending experience of the cheated-on spouse that we don’t see written about, and that many people neither believe nor understand.

That’s the stuff I want to write about. Because you don’t see it anyplace else.

Encompassing a larger view of what happened to place beside your deep trauma wound: I don’t see a whole lot of that.

That’s why I write about it, instead of retelling the betrayed spouse’s story that real betrayed spouses tell so much better than I do.

Because if you are going to heal your relationship, you won’t do it without that ability.

There are those who write comments to the effect that unless I get cheated on, I simply cannot ever understand. Personally, I doubt that.

I think I’ve read so much about cheating and heard from so many people on all sides of the story, I don’t think I would spin into unthinkable agony that lasts years if I got cheated on.

(Of course, I never will because I am too old and fat to ever attract another relationship, and because I AM so old and so fat, I am just working on learning to live life alone from now on because I understand that is the way it is going to be. Ageism. Lookism. All that.)

But, if I were, in fact, cheated on:

I would understand that, even if the person didn’t cheat, something else would have happened. Probably he would have died, which I’ve also been through, and that teaches you not to make someone else the bedrock of your life.

Because whatever you love, you will lose. And ultimately, all you have is yourself.

And that self needs to get its head around other people’s problems.

Why did that person cheat?? That’s what I’d want to know.

If I made a mistake understanding the other person and my relationship, I want to know what that was. I want to know what reality really is, not be so crushed by the fact that it turned out to be other than what I thought it was that I’m forever and ever crippled.

Actually, I struggle with that in other ways in my life.

You can be crushed by more than just cheating.

I spent my youth thinking I was a “great fiction writer,” and I was going to have a career doing that someday with my great fiction writer husband.

Only my great fiction writer husband couldn’t even achieve a career himself even though he was very talented, because that is the way of this world — so what chance would I ever have, then?? — and then he DIED and I was left with no close loved ones at ALL …

… and then I found out I’m a shitty fiction writer and even the people who were supposed to be my support group in writing couldn’t support me.

So, my whole life fell completely apart, and I need to find another way to live and can’t.

I just struggle in that with fate, instead of with another person in relationship.

All the same … I still need to find another way to live. And I recognize that. And the person with the problem that I can’t do that is me.

And I am the person who needs to grow and change such that I can coexist with reality in a better fit than I currently do.

Since fate is not a person, I can’t rail against it the way some do a cheating spouse.

You can tell a cheating spouse, or you can believe it deep within your heart, that they were supposed to show up in such a way as to keep you happy and feeling safe and more comfortable, such as not shattering your dream that they would never want anyone else.

But I do not get to shout at fate that it was supposed to show up in such a way as to keep me happy and safe and comfortable, such as not taking my husband through brain cancer, or making other people like my writing so I could have a life that didn’t force me to painfully stretch and grow.

I have no choice but to painfully stretch and grow, and there’s no one I can point to who should have been a different person so I didn’t have to change.

I have to change, and that’s the end of it. Period. When your spouse cheats and upends your whole life, you get a short “out” from coming to that conclusion. You get to blame him or her for disappointing you, and to tell yourself that if it hadn’t been for that person fooling around with another person, you wouldn’t be going through this.

But, chances are, you would be going through this anyway. The unresolved tensions in your marriage would just be coming out another way. They would still have to be dealt with, and you would still have to change. It just would have taken years and years longer, and perhaps ended with an emotional divorce under the same roof. At, like, age seventy.

This is the point of all life.

We think it’s one way, and: SURPRISE!!

It’s not. And we can’t undo it, and we have to change.

That’s why movies are popular. Romantic movies are where we get to pretend that life is supposed to change instead of us.

I was destroyed when my ex-AP decided he’d better stay with his wife. I had a lot of learning to do around that.

What did I think the relationship was, and what was it really? Who did I think this person was, and who was this person really?

Just like my mentally ill mother. Who did I hope she was, and who is she really?

That’s the key. Because when you truly understand who the other person was and W-H-Y they did what they did …

… all that searing horrible oh why did they do it I’m so destroyed I’ll never recover pain isn’t there anymore.

Because it is replaced by your understanding, and you are large enough to encompass the reality, and to know that person didn’t mean to hurt you, and that they were doing the best they could, and sometimes you just have to give up on people. People have limits.

And those limits don’t have anything to do with you.

I feel sympathy now for that tiny unloved child I was who grew up to have such needs and desires and expectations of other people, that they must love me and support me in these and those ways. I didn’t get to have that as a child, and I never will get to have that. It’s a very, very hard life. While around me I see people having a much easier life and a much easier, happier time.

But there’s nothing I can do about that. Other than understand it, which leads me to know that other people are hurt, too, and they did the best that they could.

My silly child’s dreams will never be fulfilled because the people I built them around are limited, but we go on living anyway.

How we do that is up to us.

The fact is, there are a few spouses that don’t care a flip about their partner who ended up cheating, and I’m not surprised with some people’s behavior that they ended up cheated on, given the backstories of some cheaters I have seen.

I know it’s hard to believe, but there are some cheaters who have been treated as badly as most cheated-ons.

I write about that because nobody believes it. Or cares.

I write about healing from cheating because many people believe it is impossible, or at the very least, ill-advised.

I write about understanding the various reasons people cheat because we, as in “humanity,” need to understand all of them. Instead of just clinging to our prejudices and tropes that make us feel (self-righteous and) better, and thinking that’s all there is to know.

And I can’t always preface this with a long diatribe about the hurt of the cheated-on spouse.

So, from now on, I’m prefacing what I do write with a link to this piece instead.

I hope people understand that I really do care about the cheated-on spouse, and that I don’t write to take anything away from their experience.

But I also want people to understand that, around every instance of infidelity, it isn’t only the person who cheated who needs to grow, to be “fixed up” and “straightened out.”

It’s everyone involved. Including the person who was cheated on, and all of society.

So, if it isn’t written about much, I’m writing about it.

And I’m leaving the part of the story we already know in our bones to others.