Infidelity in marriage is like this three-headed statue you see.
All three people, whether they know it or not, are fused together by the related personal issues that lie within each of them.
They came together for this express purpose. They’re trapped in the emotions of the affair situation until they learn what the affair had to teach them.
You can see this if you look deeply into the childhood of each person. The psychology of each person has woundings and immaturities that reflect and complement the same in the other two. (Even their astrological charts will reflect this!)
That’s pretty hard to hear when your heart is broken and you’re sobbing your eyes out. But, it was true in my situation, and it’s true in yours.
Here’s where everyone rises up to throw stones. “How dare you blame the innocent victim?!”
Blame is ugly. Blame is pejorative. Blame says, “You did something horrible and unforgivable, you are a globally bad and incorrigible person, you deserve to be punished, and we are going to punish you.”
Blame even carries the feeling, “I hate you.”
Blame is inspired by anger and used like a torch to sear revenge into someone else’s feelings. Blame says, “I am better than you because you did this and I didn’t,” and then seeks to deliver pain equal to one’s own.
Blame happens because people are angry, hurt, and ashamed, and it causes the blamed person to feel angry, hurt, and ashamed in turn. In this way the three affair partners “pass the buck,” pointing out each other’s culpability while sidelining their own.
Responsibility says: “Looking back at this, I can see that my contribution to this situation was this, this, and that. Now I see it, so now I will be accountable and repair this.”
Where is anger, hurt, shame, or hate in any of that? Instead, there is just a request for a person to be accountable. There’s no global condemnation and no casting of anyone as a “bad” person.
Rather, asking for responsible accountability is to acknowledge that none of us are born perfect, that we all have issues, flaws, and problems, and that leaving shame out of it as we try to perfect will increase understanding and fellowship between people.
It will certainly move the processes of personal growth and the smoothing of relationships along much faster!
Hopefully, everyone can see that pointing out that there is responsibility to account for, and asking people to accept the responsibility they do have, is not the same thing as blaming them.
The last person to find out there was an affair is the one left crying their eyes out. Their world has been shattered. Everything they thought was true, wasn’t. They felt dependent on the world they thought they had … and now, it isn’t there.
It’s almost as if someone died.
Everyone feels badly for this person. Everyone puts themselves in this person’s shoes. Everyone rushes in to comfort this person. Everyone is angry at the person who lied.
Now it becomes a sort of grunting ape situation: You — bad! You — good!
Sounds like the communication style in Tarzan: Me Tarzan. You Jane.
Simple, right? That kind of communication, that kind of thinking, is very simple.
And, oh, how humans love simple.
But simple leaves out an awful lot of truth. Truth that, if we want life to go better from now on, we might be better off looking at.
Because it is the only power we have.
I guess we do have the power to blame. But, you know … blaming isn’t really power at all. If you spend the next ten years blaming your spouse for ruining your life, what power do you have?
The power to spend the next ten years agonizing and miserable, that’s what.
We do have the power to punish. We have the power to ostracize. And, man, do we love to throw stones!
Throw your stones for as long as it makes you feel better.
But, if you want relationships to go well, it might be good to rest your sore arms after a while and look at a little truth.
Let’s look at the simplest case, in which one partner was narcissistic and ran around on another partner despite their looking above-average, providing sex two or three times a week, and no real issues in the home.
It’s tempting to blame the cheater in this case. And, realistically, you could, because this person probably has an entitled viewpoint and a sad lack of empathy for the spouse and any children they might have.
If you want to, you could feel a kind of empathy for such a person. After all, they do have some sort of organic brain problem, or a profoundly neglectful childhood they didn’t ask for. It takes a big person to be able to do that.
But even if you can, you’d better not stay married to them. After all, we may feel sorry for a rabid dog, but nobody wants to stick their hand in the cage and be bitten.
It’s pretty obvious what the culpability of the cheater and the affair partner is in this case. But what about the betrayed spouse?
The spouse may be blameless, but still this person bears some responsibility. How did they pick such a person? Maybe they don’t have any accountability to the cheater, since they acted in good faith and gave the cheater a good experience in the marriage, but still, they need to be accountable to themselves.
How is that?
It’s never true that this was a great person when they got married and suddenly midlife came along and the person went crazy.
People believe that fable because they lack understanding.
Affairs begin in childhood, where this person was born with some brain quirk or some faulty parenting that influenced them to become this narcissistic. And they always give off clues.
What were the clues? How did the spouse miss them? Usually the spouse had some faulty parenting themselves, and the way they grew up and the way they pick partners needs some close inspection.
This isn’t the spouse’s fault, but unfortunately the responsibility for identifying what’s gone wrong and correcting it is something that spouse needs to be accountable for. If they don’t, they will be slashing the tires of their third unfaithful spouse somewhere down the road.
Why is this painful introspection the betrayed spouse’s responsibility? Because they’re the only one who can do it.
Anger, hurt, and blaming are understandable, but they’d better not be the only things that spouse does.
You know which ones I mean. The ones where both people have looked like sterling human beings for decades. This is that “perfect” couple everyone admires.
Then, suddenly, the news gets out: Somebody’s had an affair.
Again, everyone rushes to blame. Everyone paints the picture of a narcissistic criminal because they’re so shocked. Everything good about this person must have been a mirage, because they did this thing and lied about it.
And because: My church says.
Or: This is how I would feel if it happened to me.
Or: I’ve always had a very severe judgment about this.
Other people think they know the truth, but the fact is, often the two people in the marriage don’t know the whole truth about what’s going wrong between them.
They can even have a round or two of not-so-effective marriage counseling and still not know! Truth.
And, at least half the time, the adulterer has stepped out after years and years of a marriage not working for him or her. Years and years of a dead bedroom. Years and years of trying to reach the spouse with their pain about not feeling listened to, not having the companionship they needed, or feeling unloved, used, or disrespected. And sometimes all of the above at once.
You won’t know about any of this.
Being less than happy in a good-looking marriage with two good careers in a good-looking house with good-looking children carries a stigma. That person isn’t going to advertise their unhappiness to you. That’s probably a big reason they don’t want to divorce.
It probably took years to admit their unhappiness to him- or herself.
Look at stories like this one, or this one, or this one. Or even this one. These aren’t terrible people.
These are people who found themselves deeply, wrenchingly unhappy, yet didn’t want to end the marriage because they cared too deeply about the happiness of other people.
Which, sadly, is exactly what they will be accused of not doing the instant they announce they want a divorce or their affair is discovered.
They’re people who stopped pressing for their needs to be met because they didn’t want their spouse to feel bad about themselves for something they just couldn’t do.
These people aren’t narcissists, and they aren’t criminals. At worst, they’re very codependent. (Since when is that a crime?)
Looking very deeply into these marriages, we find childhood emotional trauma and neglect at work. He grew up with this set of lumps, and unconsciously they found each other because the holes in her head matched up perfectly. He married her because he was an emotional mess and she looked like she had her shit together; she married him because she got bullied in childhood and he was too nice and retiring to bully her.
Forty years later, “having her shit together” turned out to be a major avoidant attachment style. She feels lost because she was a stay-at-home mom on his good salary and never developed herself in important ways. They’ve been emotionally estranged and struggling for years. Can’t find rapport with the spouse; can’t leave because too many people will be upset.
Yet, when somebody finally has an affair, one person is all-good and the other is all-bad.
This is a comforting, but inaccurate, fantasy.
It’s true that one person handled the problem by having an affair and the other one didn’t. There’s been a lot of betrayal of trusts — didn’t both people trust the other to listen and care about their needs and feelings? But one betrayal is especially devastating, and only one person committed that particular one.
So did the person the adulterer cheated with. If that person knew a wedding ring was involved, that person is also culpable.
And, at the same time, the marriage reached such a desperate state — and if an affair is happening, the marriage is always in a desperate state — through the actions of not one, but two people.
How did the spouse contribute to the unhappy conditions that led the adulterer to consider an affair in the first place?
If marriages are to be saved and love rekindled, it isn’t only the adulterer and the affair partner who need to consider culpability.
That doesn’t mean we blame the spouse for everything the cheater did, but that we consider that the spouse bears some responsibility for how the cheater felt.
In almost no case, if you are the cheated-on spouse, do you get a free pass. The adulterer and the affair partner committed the most serious betrayals, but ignoring a spouse’s pain is a betrayal as well.
The only way to understand our marriages and ourselves is to own whatever betrayals we ourselves committed.
“Looking back at this, I can see that my contribution to this situation was this, this, and that. Now I see it, so now I will be accountable and repair this.”
Not only is that the only power you have, but it is also the best thing you can do, not only for the current relationship, but for any future relationships you might have should you ultimately decide to end this one.
And acknowledging that this is truth is not the same thing as “blaming the spouse.”
In order for a relationship to survive an affair, recognizing this fact is going to be necessary.
If everyone could come down off of all the high emotions enough to accept their own responsibility in a hurtful situation and work on only that, rather than refusing to see their own part while excoriating others for theirs, how much better things could go!
(And shooting any messenger who brings you this perspective? Not that helpful.)
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