What I've Learned Since My Husband's Affair

[heartwhole2]

I learned about the affair in the spring of 2015. It lasted about six months and was mainly long distance with one short trip taken together.

Those early days were a blur where up was down. The betrayal made me physically ill and hurt like hell. But I am a rational person (I'm an INTJ to my husband's ENFP) and I wanted to try to see if we could stay together for our young children (not even in elementary school yet).

What I didn't realize is that while opposites attract, we had vastly different strengths and weaknesses when it comes to communication. We would have a disagreement (if it could even be called that), and I'd explain my reasoning, and it seemed like we agreed and moved on. I didn't realize that my husband found disagreeing so stressful that he was agreeing only to make it stop. He wasn't agreeing; he was storing up resentments.

And of course it was one of those perfect storms. I was sick when pregnant with our last child and never recovered. Because I had an invisible illness with no clear diagnosis, I worried that maybe I just wasn't trying hard enough to be well (certainly didn't help that one of my parents had a weird relationship with illness and always tried to guilt me into "sucking it up" when I felt ill growing up). My husband latched onto this unspoken fear of mine and was anything but supportive. He treated me like I could control when I was sick and that was quite the vicious cycle.

In addition he'd just been recruited to a new workplace with a ridiculous sum of money which surely made him feel virile, successful, and of course a bit entitled. And then he met the OW through friends, a single woman who had aged out of the dating pool in the conservative part of the world that she's from. Friendly and charming as always, he struck up a friendship with her and then she confessed her feelings for him, hoping she'd follow in the footsteps of her sibling who had married a divorced person with kids in another country. Except, you know, the small technicality that we were not divorced.

On Dday he was too cowardly to confess to a PA, and due to the vast distance between them I believed it. But things just didn't keep adding up and two weeks later I charged up his old phone and discovered that it was a PA. I have no idea how I would have reacted if I'd known that on day one. It took him a few days (when I still thought it was an EA) to go fully NC and he was a mopey, condescending person during that time, complaining that it was hard for him to give up someone he'd grown close to (I heard a tiny violin playing in my ear).

We did MC right away for maybe a couple of months; she was a counselor I'd seen for a prior trauma, and she was better for that. The one bonus of MC was that she was obviously disgusted by my husband's condescension and self-centeredness, and he had to accept that he wasn't a poor victim with a wife who didn't try hard enough. Eventually he entered IC with a therapist old enough to be his father and that's where he really started growing up. In the meantime, I started accepting my illness and setting up expectations about how to make things more fair and equitable between us. I expected compassion and respect. I remember viewing those early months as "empathy bootcamp" where sometimes I'd have to interrupt my husband and say, "Hey look, you just did it again. You asked me about my day and then the second I started talking, you interrupted me to talk about yourself." I remember thinking that he'd started out as a 2 out of 10 on the empathy scale, and I remember when I thought he was up to a 4. On one hand, how sad that I was excited about a failing grade. On the other hand, the growth came from actual hard work, and it continued on until it became second nature.

As I often say, affairs are just a culmination or a symptom of issues of self-awareness, (lack of) conflict resolution skills, poor self-esteem, poor impulse control, etc. Basically, they are generally signs that we have more growing up to do. 

The reasons I stayed are, number one, love; wanting our children to have an intact family *if we could do it in a healthy way; believing in redemption and second chances; seeing enough good qualities and progress in my husband to make the wager that he could do the work. But as much as I tried to make sure it was a rational decision, it also had to be an emotional one. We wanted to stay together.

Figuring out the communication piece was tough. We went from never really disagreeing to real heated arguments for a few years. We're in a much better place now where I think the work we've done on ourselves to be self-aware and to be considerate of each other really changes the tenor of disagreements. He's still the person who doesn't love conflict -- just this week we were working through how to tell something disappointing to his mom. He wanted to give her excuses to let her down gently, but I pointed out that people always try to trouble-shoot your excuses when you do that. So we just skipped the excuses and said we felt more comfortable this way. But in another situation, I had friends counseling me not to be too direct and critical when turning someone down. It's good to learn how to moderate your knee jerk responses and meet in the middle. We can complement each other.

And the other issues that seemed like a big deal were mainly failures of communication. I know my husband felt that I didn't support him in the ways he wanted to be supported. Again that was a vicious cycle because an ill person who isn't being supported herself doesn't have anything to give. So we have been able to work through issues as they come along. The ENFP in my husband loves newness and change. He is constantly adopting new hobbies, starting new businesses, and making new best friends. I have tried to increase my tolerance for the change and to have a more adult attitude about it (instead of internalizing it as a rejection of me or blaming him for wanting too much, as long as other areas of our lives don't suffer -- though we're currently maxed out of bandwidth for big changes at the moment). And he has been supportive and accepting of my needs as well. For many years after the affair he limited his travel and social time considerably and has only increased them when I have been comfortable and felt safe.

I believe in forgiveness as a practice. I don't think there's any way to simply turn off feelings of hurt. You have to accept them and honor them. But I do think it's possible to accept your partner's humanity, to reject bitterness and to choose healing.

I was thinking recently about one thing that made me sad about the affair. We were each others' "first and only" sexual partners. And I had imagined that maybe someday I'd share that with my kids as we talk about safe sex. But I was thinking about it recently, and I don't want to teach my kids to have only one partner anyway, just to be safe and to consent wholeheartedly to whatever you do. And I even felt detached enough to think, hmmm, must be nice psychologically for my husband not to have to wonder if he'll regret only being with one woman all his life since he is someone who loves newness so much. To be clear, I am not advocating affairs. If you want to go have sex with a third party, do it with your current partner's consent and knowledge. The point is just that I didn't feel panic or outrage thinking of the PA in that context.

I think some predictors of our success were that we were fairly young and open to growing and changing, that my husband was always a bad liar (he tried really hard just to redirect or omit, and when he did lie, he looked like someone holding in a fart, haha), that he (half) confessed when I asked, and that while I couldn't yet see all the ways that I allowed him to take up all the space in our marriage, I had an animal fury that propelled me towards making things right (and that pride would have made me end the marriage if he had continued the affair or refused to change).

We'd been together 15 years when he cheated, plenty of time for the shine to wear off. But in the 6 years since, we've been really passionately in love. Now I'm the realist in our relationship, so I don't expect feelings of that intensity to remain forever. But I do think they are a testament to the work we've put in and the compatibility that our marriage was always based on. If you gave me a magic pill that would erase the affair but keep all the good things that have come since, sure, I'd be tempted. It's one of the hardest things I've been through, in part because it's so lonely. I told several good friends and had good support, but when the person you run into at the coffee shop every day asks how you're doing, you have to keep this whole horrible trauma that you're going through to yourself, and that impacts your ability to become closer. It means there will always be secrets between you and your children, your parents, whoever you didn't tell. That's hard for me because I'm just an honest person. I think that being honest helps you live your best life because you know you will be holding yourself accountable (BTW my husband always tells me I'm the most "self-actualized" person he knows . . . and it's not an accident; it's because of the choices I make). But I understand that in the grand scheme of things this is just, well, the messy stuff of life. This is what it means to be in relationship with other people, with all the hurt and all the joy that comes with that. Because sure, I could completely control my environment and be alone, but then I'd miss the point of my short time on this earth. Letting other people in comes with risk. But it's worth it.