Quick Links: Infidelity summary * fidelity 101 * fidelity 108 * fidelity 2 * fidelity 3 * fidelity 4 * begin mending * forgiving
Last edit 30/11/06
Anything you invest your energy in will become your 'truth' for a time. Ziji
Self deception is the itch our partner scratches. Rabbi Ari Harman
Out of 7,000 cases in 39 years, I’ve seen only five established first marriages ending in divorce without somebody being unfaithful. Every year I think I’ve seen the sixth, but I wait and sure enough the other man or woman surfaces even though they deny and deny and deny. Frank Pittman
We thus have three principal forms of marriage which correspond broadly to the three principal stages of human development. For the period of savagery, group marriage; for barbarism, pairing marriage; for civilization, monogamy, supplemented by adultery and prostitution. Engels
3.0 Secrets and privacy
Girls bond by sharing secrets, boys by sharing toys.
A clandestine and sexual affair provide both - delivering a hormone rush directly into the brain of both genders.
Our almost limitless capacity for self-deception will kick in to protect the flow of hormones? Well, that's one explanation. Choice is a more useful explanation for human behaviour in my map of the world. Hormones merely raise the likelihood that under certain circumstances certain behaviour will occur. Quote: 'The Female Brain' by Louann Brizendine..
Secrets are opaque - they allow neither communication nor love through the no go zone that surrounds them. The very lack of illumination indicates that something is missing, something cloaked, which the secret holder is careful to steer the inquirer away from. Accountability vanishes with a secret - that is the choice point and the reason they are so cruelly guarded in both private and public domains.
An equal partnership has democratic ideals of openness and accountability. These don't fit a culture of secrets. Witnesses at commitment ceremonies are sometimes asked to support the sanctity of the couple's relationship. Despite those solemn vows and public appearance of togetherness, it is sometimes the ideal couple who reveal to their shocked friends the secrets that have undone them and involving one of those witnesses.
Some friends just don't want to hear that stuff and you're dropped off their dinner party list. Others, being more righteous stay to judge and to 'help'. Both are dead wood that gets pruned in the resurgent growth of recovery from betrayal.
It is surprising and heart warming to meet those who come out of the woodwork in profound, equal and non-judgmental support and those who share their own pain of recovery from intimate betrayal. They are not always the closest friends or family and that is in the nature of re-growth after a good winter pruning. There is grief and celebration in that discovery as well.
Couples recovering from betrayal rarely support a culture of secrets. Sometimes they even want to open out to the world, transparent in the wounding and the healing like showing the stigmata of resurrection from the ashes of betrayal.
Sometimes they do this to test the social support in their network for truthful, secure relationships. This is especially so if the betrayed are still excavating the friendship/family circle for others complicit in the cover up. Best friends sometimes do not want to blow the whistle and feel responsible for destroying their friend's marriage and to be fair, sometimes the best messengers are cruelly shot for speaking the truth.
Practiced keepers of secrets like the couple below, can finesse the interface of potential disjunctions in conversation with such seamless skill that the interpellator can feel foolish imagining their loved one or best friend, for example, would ever deceive them. They may even apologize for asking about the 'phone calls that drop out just after I say hello'.
3.1 Open secrets in sanctioned affairs and polyamorous arrangements
Adrian and Dominique were a compatible couple. They never spoke about it but both knew what the other was up to in their secret lives. Theirs was a consensual non-monogamy. It's hard to say how it started, it would be a bit like separating squabbling children and trying to find out who hit whom back first. Perhaps it began when Dom's parents were asked to remove the pre-teen from a series of schools for her 'inappropriate interest' in physical relationships and for Adrian when around 10 he had taken to following older girls home from school and sometimes into their bedrooms.
There's was a spontaneous flowering of precocious sexual interest without prior conditions and they both managed to explore it despite parental and community concerns, simply by building a secret life. 'It was great training in deception?' They both agreed. They were canny, rebellious, promiscuous teenagers who ate life with a passion. The sort of kids you couldn't help but warm to, marvel at and be troubled by all at the same time.
In their twenties they surprised everyone - each settling into a serious relationship. Both had been living with that someone else for a number of years when they began the affair that turned into their marriage, children and a mortgage. They maintained their secret lives without discussion or overt conflict and with a few well tried, unspoken rules - never at home, never in the family/friendship circle, never at work, never to know the other's secrets and always in balance with each other. This was their unspoken, moral contract. It was understood as binding.
As a psychologist I thought for a while their version of history was a whitewash - who comes to see a shrink with a happy childhood? I've come to expect precocious sexual interest associated with unhappiness or abuse.
Now, mid-life with teenage children of their own, Dominique was tiring of the complications of extramarital affairs but Adrian wanted to keep going. The imbalance was intolerable to them both and threatened to betray that rule of their unspoken moral contract - to always be in balance with each other's affairs. They had little practice in dealing with incompatibility or conflict in an overt, intimate and transparent way. They first had to learn to speak the unspoken rules, which was confounded by the rule not to know each other's secrets. Almost as if there was a rule at another level - do not discuss the rules.
The key to successful polyamorous relationships are rules, but they need to be discussed, explored openly and mutually agreed without duress. An open marriage without rules and regular reviews of rules is a one-sided recipe for anguish and betrayal. In the view of one writer: 'Being faithful to one's married partner while allowing a kind of extramarital sexual licence that will not be allowed to destroy the relationship - three words: good freaking luck.' I share that view.
- Monogamy and morals: 'Thoughts, like fleas, jump from man to man. But they don't bite everybody'. Stanislaw Lec
- 'Puritan tradition, combined with Christian management of adolescence, has converted the sexual life of civilized men and women into a neurosis.' Robert Briffault
- 'We owe to the middle ages the two worst inventions of humanity -- gunpowder and romantic love.' Andre' Maurois
- 'Sex without love is an empty experience, but, as empty experiences go, it's one of the best.' Woody Allen. (Above quotes from memes of love, sex & marriage)
3.20 The 'other woman'
The other woman is the more usual syndrome of heterosexual affairs, both in extended and brief liaisons and more likely than a single 'other man' with a married woman. The subject is well covered in the books and web sites listed at end of this section. They provide support for the third party, often scorned, dehumanised and abandoned. The other woman in the office romance is also the one more likely to leave/lose the job after the affair ends. Ultimately, these affairs devolve into the power imbalance in which they were ill conceived.
Extra-marital affairs are triangles, each one more complex and intertwined than those who judge them will allow. It takes a big broken heart to know the good in all the players and include them as people, just like us, with broken hearts as well. That willing compassion makes strong, clear, robust boundaries an absolute necessity for de-triangulating a committed relationship. This is not for the faint-hearted.
It seems easier to blame the affair for a break up and for subsequent damage to the children from a divorce. Then we can treat the 'other woman' as we do refugee non-persons in Australia. However, in my experience it is rarely that simple.
The isolation, pain and anguish of a sincere, committed other woman or man is every bit as challenging for them, their friends and family as it is for the primary couple.
Many an unstable marriage with children and on the brink of disaster, has passed through to the other side intact because of the sexual and emotional support of a secret, third party. Affairs for better and for worse can become the third leg of an unstable marital table. The other woman or man knowingly support that wobbly table. For some that is a freedom. For others a prison, a tyranny.
Some hope s/he will leave him/her, but in my experience marriages formed out of an illicit affair are haunted by their beginnings in betrayal. Particularly when they move into the challenges of everyday life and of step families, could one betray the other again?
3.21 Some third parties are predatory, with many scalps on their underwear. The more likely heterosexual predator is a workaholic, cheater avoiding intimacy at home whilst offering intimacy in the affair, which will always be conveniently compromised by the juggling act of work and home. Little changes when the lover succeeds in poaching him/her from their spouse.
Moultrup's therapy is based on the assumption that the role of an affair is to create emotional distance in the marriage. He emphasizes that the critical principle is to consider the possibility of unconscious emotional benefits gained by the uninvolved spouse.
The goal of therapy is to resolve the intimacy problems in the couple relationship so that an affair will no longer be 'needed.' This model does not consider the possibility of accidental affairs nor those that arise out of individual pathology or habit rather than relationship difficulties.
A small number of my single clients have been in long term and stable affairs. Each says it allows them to make a significant contribution to the world without fearing lack of intimacy or a sense of belonging. Others are in both stable marriages and in 20+ year extra-marital affairs. Some get to know their lover's children as they become aware of their parent's other life, usually but not always as they grow into adulthood.
Whilst respecting the significance of those affairs, and the wisdom with which they have been navigated through many life changes of their married lovers (including divorce and re-marriage to another partner), I am always left with concern for those involved who did not choose it as a part of their life. If they had been asked most would have withheld their blessing.
Secrets push accountability out into the distance, sometimes until after death. Posthumous discovery of long term affairs by spouses and children, for example, going through the deceased's personal belongings, can be completely overwhelming at a time of mourning.
Some third parties feel entitled to attend the funeral, sitting at the front as a member of the family. This is especially ugly if their lover died in their home, their bed.
With the protection racket having passed its use by date, others feel freed to talk more openly about what they had known for years. This really is the pits for the family of the deceased philanderer.
Yet, I have met some adult children who on discovering their parent's long term affair after death, breathe a sigh of relief and say, 'Thank god s/he had a life, because mum and dad were never that happy.' And I have met some widowed, who have finally accepted the third party and the children conceived in an affair some time after a bereavement. And there are some who will never do that.
'The trouble with the world is that we draw too small a circle around family.' Mother Theresa
3.22 Other resources
For women and men whose partner is married to their job, their extended family or their ex-partner and children, the experiences described by mistresses in the following may not be so unfamiliar.
- The Other Woman web site - 'to speak freely and honestly with others who experience the same highs and lows you do.'
- A lively discussion on 'being the other woman' regularly takes off on one of the marriage builders forums, sometimes a bit like entering the lion's den
- Don't have an affair with a married man on the manhater's site - the reasons they love men are touching
- A raunchy poem at sistapower in praise of the other woman
- Victoria Griffin covers it well in her book 'The Mistress Histories, Myths and Interpretations of the ''Other Woman''' here is Chapter One on line
- 'Slow Motion : A True Story' Dani Shapiro's touching memoir describes her journey into and out of being the other woman
- 'This affair is over!!: Essential reading for any woman involved with a married man'. Nanette Miner explores the lines, excuses and promises endemic to this situation
- 'The Single Woman-Married Man Syndrome' Richard Tuch, describes the progress of these relationships for all the parties in compassionate detail. The patterns of intention and behaviour are recognizable with a progression that is predictable, almost never leading to marriage, he says. I could tell him there are more than a few exceptions in my part of the world.
- The 'Manual On How To Cheat On Your Wife', a collection of signals, excuses, and tricks men and women use when having an affair, download whilst its free. Funny and painful reading without the pro-affair agenda implied by its title.
- In 'Secret Lovers - Affairs Happen .. How to Cope' Luann Linquist draws on her interviews with people in these long term liaisons.
3.3 The 'other friends'
'Is autonomy a principle of non interference? In the case of the adulterer and the snitch, withholding information from the wronged partner is also a lack of respect for autonomy (especially if you’re friends with both).' Discussion on crooked timber
'It seems obvious to me that snitching is generally condemned because, in practice, the moral problem involved in the snitching is more complex and difficult than the moral problem involved in maintaining trust. Put another way, betrayal of trust is easily recognizable (and overwhelmingly a bad thing) while appropriate betrayal that serves a higher moral purpose is far more difficult to identify and is generally controversial.' Discussion on crooked timber
Should I tell my friend or relative that their partner is cheating? The closer a friend you are and the more you know about their family the harder this is. But, if you know it's on and your friend/relative doesn't, then you are part of a malignant system that supports infidelity with silence. However, are you sure you're part of the solution? It's a time bomb and everyone who 'knows' or thinks they know has a finger on a detonator and you may wonder if you are the one to set it off.
There are probably no innocent bystanders to an affair, BUT if you have decided to intervene you are about to enter a web of lies and loyalties with which you may have had little experience. You may become a target of vilification or blame for breaking up a family. Your friend might want to have nothing more to do with you. They may not thank you for snitching, not only because you may be crashing through their carefully constructed system of complicity and denial but also because your evidence may be insufficient to counter the absolute faith and trust they have in their partner. Despite their own doubts, they might put loyalty to partner ahead of belief in friend or relative.
Friends with the 'best' intentions can nevertheless pick the worst time to drop a bombshell, for example, just when the couple are coming to terms with an affair which he disclosed voluntarily months ago but with significant omissions or just after she miscarries the baby of the affair, which the husband believed was his. If despite all these concerns you intend to go ahead, then can I slow you down a bit and ask you to examine yourself very closely as you consider these issues:
- How will you benefit by revealing what you know
- have you listed the costs and benefits of telling
- are you acting without duplicity, moral judgment or righteousness
- are you doing this with the support of your own partner or is it a secret in your own situation too
- from all your previous interactions with the couple, are you and are you seen to be an ally of both and also of their relationship, rather than of one partner or one point of view
- can you stand in both their shoes and empathise with what each is about to go through and has been going through
- are you willing to draw deeply on your own experiences of shame and betrayal and share them when your honesty is confronted
- have you tried role playing this disclosure to iron out the problems in your plan, preferably with some friends who are out of the loop
- practiced disclosing in your role play, to each of them separately and to them together at the same time
- are you willing to stick with them both, support them both and hold them both equally with a tough love that they will need through a long journey you are about to join, and finally
- is your own life in good enough shape to make that offer and deliver it without harm to you or your family?
If you were the one whose partner was cheating, there may be other questions that you would want a whistle blower to have sincerely asked themselves before telling you. What are they?
The final hurdle is the evidence. What evidence would you want if it were you? Second hand or hearsay is rarely worth the pain you are about to inflict. Most betrayed want hard evidence that is why they go through the hell of looking for it themselves, stripping everything out of the family car, out of the cupboards, in the weekender anywhere to find anything, which they can hang on to.
Even having taken all that care with your friend, they can still attack you when you tell them the truth.
3.4 Remaining friends with the lover after affair has ended
It is possible to remain friends after the extra-marital affair ends but how do you keep it from harming the committed, primary relationship when emotions are involved?
Many openly and some secretly work for this outcome by finessing both the truth and the promises of changed boundaries. It is hard work and can twist you, your partner and the lover into knots. If it can be negotiated, it can only work with a win-win-win outcome that plays strictly by agreed rules, with very clear sanctions if the agreement is broken.
The distress would have to be worth it before even considering this as an option.
Betrayed partners usually find the presence of a continuing friend or business relationship after an illicit affair has ended (or of even suspecting that desire in their partner) is out of integrity with the stated intention of fidelity and healing. It is still a triangle even if we're 'just friends'. Remaining friends can keep hope alive for one or the other. In the stages of grieving, this is called bargaining.
Divorce or separation rarely follow an affair that has ended. But some of us believe a loving and inclusive solution must be possible, especially with so much religious hatred and blood feuds in the world that grow from schisms born of circumstances like these.
Some of us want a solution in which we are all just friends and not a solution that evolves into an open marriage or a polyamorous family. In my view, the only time that kind of inclusive reconciliation is absolutely necessary, though not always possible, is when it involves one of the 10 - 15% of children who are conceived in extra marital affairs.
In that case the best interests of the child are paramount. Various jurisdictions decide on those best interest differently.
The other time where it may be necessary, is when the third party is a member of the immediate family.
One of my clients had an affair with his partner's younger sister when the latter provided baby sitting for them. This involved complex betrayals of the partner and their family. A very sticky process ensued, which required an inclusive resolution to free everyone in the family from twisted loyalties. My sense is that the issues hung around for years like a bad smell. Particularly difficult were family occasions like christmas.
Another family rang me and asked if I would work with the aftermath of an identical situation that arose 15 years ago and still had them in knots. Eight members of that family wanted to attend! It's a family system that has a life of its own, fed by the game of chinese whispers.
How does someone betrayed go on with their primary relationship when their partner continues in the affair?
Affairs can last from one night to 25+ years, so you will need an excellent support group and a bloody good reason to continue supporting your partner two timing you. Otherwise you commit a crime against your own wisdom and that leads inevitably to ill health for you and your family. The infidels freedom bought with your health is also a lousy deal especially when the cost of it is in part born by others, such as children, who have no choice in the matter.
3.5 Truth, lies and ambiguity
Philosophy games with the truth show how a liar can play on ambiguity. When a fact is questioned they can later say, 'what I meant was ....' and nuance another ambiguity for the next time you return to doubt.
Vagueness is another over used tactic for cloaking deceit. Prevarication or equivocation is another. You can come away from those conversations sensing something doesn't add up and years later replay it and beat yourself up for not pursuing your doubts more aggressively. You will forgive yourself for the expectation that you ought to have been smarter in the dark, but you can feel so damned stupid at the time.
We all hope that the truth is transparent. We believe the truth doesn't need to be remembered nor truth fear its trial; that it stands on its own, naked and unashamed; that the body doesn't lie; that our instincts are not wrong and that we can rely on our intuition.
That set of common sense beliefs about the truth are not always correct. The trauma of betrayal leaves those beliefs useless for navigating life without radical modifications. Core beliefs either adapt as a sane response to trauma or the healing cannot proceed. We then remain frozen around the injury. Naming and claiming the injury begins its healing but that is not always the common sense response - silence is.
'Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.' Albert Einstein
Skillful liars defeat lie detectors, truth serum and interrogation. Security organisations train their staff in every form of dissimulation and deception. Hiding the truth for a very long time is a skill anyone can learn. It is a matter of how you live with the guilt and shame. Some folk don't feel either guilt or shame.
Would Pinocchio's eyes have revealed his lies?
Truth is not simple and yet it is. Intimate betrayal takes us around the circle from being simple and naive, through the confusing contradictions of postponing confrontation and the self-doubt of discovery and then back through some kind of resolution to simple, skillful and wise. As if the journey was constructed like a Beethoven symphony.
Getting to the secrets takes time, patience and willingness on both parts. Open ended questions, which avoid yes and no answers and include soft eye contact with joining and empathy skills, tend to work better than interrogative, closed questioning.
You might learn from the techniques therapists use - there is great power in being listened to and taken seriously, even if the listener's 'understanding' is partly an illusion. But therapists too are betrayed and betray and like any one else, may use those techniques at home and work for good and ill.
3.6 A policy on secrets
'In the last analysis, we see only what we are prepared to see, what we have been taught to see. We eliminate and ignore everything that is not part of our prejudices.' Jean Martin Charcot 'De l'expectation'
As a consequence of the impossibility of extracting a secret from the unwilling, it helps to begin an intimate relationship with an agreement on privacy rights and obligations and what, if anything constitutes justification for unilaterally canceling those rights and obligations.
As well it is important to agree early to a sign that signals when the unspeakable is present, a problem-solving method to deal with that revelation and how to signal STOP in the fight that follows so that it can continue later when each have rested.
In harmonizing conflict it is not the content but the tactics people use to manage it that most damages trust.
Privacy is an issue early in relationships and one transacted around toilet doors open or closed, private telephone calls, in laws, sexual fantasies, past relationships, money and finance. Is it okay to look through your partner's private journal, overhear their conversations, track their visits on the net or investigate their mobile phone use and credit card transactions? Does betrayal make it so?
It does not matter so much what the policy is, as long as it is reciprocal, understood and agreed to voluntarily. In my experience, however, once an illicit affair is reasonably suspected, confronted and denied all agreements tend to be thrown out as if one betrayal justifies inflicting others.
The High Court of Australia found in the Magill case, that the former Mrs Magill was under no legal obligation to disclose her affair. A husband cannot sue a wife and recover damages for deceit within the marriage. Transcript of the case - 72 pages.
3.7 The unconscious relationship and deep democracy
Deep democracy in this context is commitment to a relationship process that is non-violent, transparent, inclusive, reciprocal and self-reflective, with a playful curiosity about difference and conflict that is neither deferential nor judgemental. Secrets struggle to thrive in that social ecology. A young couple are highly unlikely to arrive at those understandings and commitments in the first decade of a relationship. In this there is much forgiveness for our failings to meet the ideal of equal partnership early in life.
Almost the entire population of the world is born to young and inexperienced lovers and that is the culture we imprint in our patterns of intimate bonding. From that family foundation we trial intimacy with the passions of adolescence whilst struggling with the inherited imprint of our young parents model of intimate bonding. Later as grandparents they are likely to be very different in their capacity for intimacy than when they were our parents.
More on site in how to parent.
This is part of the unconscious relationship that comes into awareness in order for us to mature into equality. A cartoon of two smitten lovers in a melting gaze and the caption above them, 'oh you are so divinely disturbed'.
One of my friends had a very critical father who wounded her self esteem repeatedly as a child. The first words he spoke when he entered the house were critical. Anglo-celtic, her own limits became like a tyranny for her but she turned that weakness into a strength through high achievement. In her thirties she found love with a 'gorgeous Mediterranean creature' who she describes as having almost bloated self-confidence and esteem. Opposite to her own - irresistible!
And unlike in her own family, her lover's father had lived like a carefree child and set no limits for anyone, least of all himself. No doubt her mother had him as another child rather than as a partner in life. Both of these girls identified with their fathers, identified with where the overt power lay. One father modeled few useful limits and the other cruelly, too many. Opposite and yet the same. Can you guess which one had the emotional affair and couldn't accept the other feeling betrayed?
In truth it could be either - the first to shake off the imposed limits and the second just because she could or in order to find the limit of her lover. But in my friend's life it was the second one who cheated and just doesn't get it. In this way the lovers take their parents to bed. In every bed are the unresolved relationships with our parents who first taught us how to love or not. That can make for a crowded bed!
We are attracted to lovers who, out of our awareness connect us deeply to parts of our family history that we might think didn't have much effect or that we are 'so over' that we discount its influence in the present day. Like the fathers above, until the sand paper of intimacy rubs the hidden stuff in our face. Committed intimate relationships are confronting personal development workshops - we can't get away from our blind spots with a lover feeling, watching and listening to them so closely and with our parents in bed with us.
It takes decades for an intimate relationship to shape response-ability for intimate, deep democracy. Those who manifest it in less time are rare and gifted communicators. They are not always from happy or intact families. For the rest of us it comes through painful trial and error, no matter what the promises were at the outset. We grow into the love of transparency and inclusiveness through a hard won intimacy. Few of us are born into it and all around we hear democracy espoused and then violated.
More on my pre-commitment education pages.
3.80 Climate of secrets
Where we first come unstuck with non-violence is with ourselves, in putting ourselves down with negative self-talk. It is a challenge to wholeheartedly accept all that we are and to be fearless, respectful and kind with our wants, desires, failings and successes. Some of our wants and needs and the actions, thoughts, and feelings that attempt to meet them are automatic.
They are inherited unexamined from our families and can be outside of our day to day awareness. These are a kind of secret kept from ourselves until we are ready to welcome them in. It takes time to soften our ignorance and to welcome into our self-concept those wants and needs and then finally to expose them in our primary relationship. That is the vulnerability in which intimacy grows. In a conscious relationship and an intentional marriage 'you are actually safer when you lower your defences than when you keep them engaged'.
For example, sometimes we feel a little ashamed to admit to ourselves and to our partner what it is we want. It feels very edgy to come clean with a part of ourselves such as an unacknowledged desire to feel special. Feeling special may be something that never happened as a child, but as an adult it can be met through a great welcome every time you come home and a longing goodbye when you leave; candle lit romantic evenings, or just a long loving gaze into each other's eyes for minutes on end; to eat dinner without the TV, or to be heard out to the end of a thought or feeling.
Lack of acknowledgement about this stuff can drive both self-deception about our real motivations and willful denial of who we are - 'I would never do/feel/say/want that' or 'that's not me' or 'I don't need to feel special' or 'how could anyone believe that of me' or as another of my clients put it 'introspection is not my thing'.
3.81 Unawareness is persistent. It can drive looking for awareness outside of the relationship to meet those wants and needs in a clandestine, unaware way. Almost accidentally, it seems, we bump into what we need. Conceived in secret, it gives birth to secrets even from oneself. 'I didn't go looking for it! I never meant to hurt anyone', said one of my unfaithful clients protesting their innocence.
Maybe not consciously, but it came looking for you and somewhere you had a kite flying, which said 'AVAILABLE'. So they offered, you accepted and forbidden sparks flew. Unbelievably, some of these affairs develop out of a pattern of people pleasing. Some think about leaving their marriage because the lover needs them more.
3.9 Climate of equality
Sexual, emotional and social equality is the premise of the democratisation of personal life. It is the next place we come unstuck. We have been socialized from infancy to act on the basis of inequality in each of those areas and we carry this through into our behaviour in courtship, marriage, child rearing, friendships, affairs and divorce.
Remember the very different ways people play with a baby in blue and the same baby in pink. Its outcome is a tendency toward physical but emotionally unaware boys and emotionally aware but unsystematic girls who both struggle with intimacy bridging those socially engineered preferences. 'Why won't he tell me what he feels, let me into his life' versus 'why doesn't she just get on with it instead of talking about it'.
Consequence: women continue significantly poorer financially but healthier after divorce, and men's health declines significantly without a partner, but their finance improves.
Sexism in marriage is not such a surprise but to come upon racism is shocking. It is so insidious and unconscious at times. Just think about the different smiles people of colour and white people get from behind service counters. Airports and poverty are staging grounds for religious discrimination that flow into suspicious glances in shopping malls and across the street.
One of my marriage clients fought out the black (him) white (her) divide in arguments and another the rich (her) and poor (him) divide. Every issue became a potential theatre for these huge societal stories that lie so painfully unresolved in Australia and in other countries.
In a sense we are so drenched in inequality and discrimination, it is so ordinary that we are unaware of its effect until it is clearly pointed out in our language or behaviour. Another flea and another itch to scratch and a source of readership for ridiculous books of gender prejudice like the Venus and Mars series.
3.10 Prescribed privacy
My grandparents were not subject to an expectation of equal inquiry into their personal lives. I know both my grandmother and grandfather kept significant secrets from each other and considered that the norm, and to some extent my parents inherited that meme. Some of my clients maintain that standard of privacy is valid today. Some argue cogently for the impossibility of not having secrets and of not having a secret life. Others claim an entitlement to secrets based on family history, class, gender, race, religion or personal anguish.
However, refusal to disclose reasonably suspected infidelity could derive from a supremacist belief that there is no injury if the other is kept in the dark; from an authoritarian attitude like the 'need to know', or as a result of a perceived right or privilege to veil one's shame because of age, gender, race, status and/or religion.
The standard of privacy is less important than that both are conscious of it, agreed to it and apply it consistently. Some couples like Dom and Adrian live at peace with an agreed right to a secret life past and present, but not a right to a double life where another's children are fed and educated. However, to get to any agreement requires a willingness to fairly explore the emotional, sexual and social climate one intends for a committed relationship or that latterly, one has discovered applies as a result of infidelity.
The right to explore our partner's secrets after betrayal derives from a principle of natural justice, 'I have a right to defend myself from the judgment that I was so lacking in intimacy skills that my partner could attack our promises to each other by going outside for it'. And of restorative justice following injury, 'I have a right to the security, trust and intimacy that existed before the betrayal'.
Some families don't celebrate those rights.
I don't like this intrusion of legal concepts into our personal lives, but those two aspects of due process became entrenched in our culture after the time of William the Conqueror in the 11th Century.
There are other rights and obligations that have wide support today and when betrayed tend to result in psychological trauma.
Trauma increases in severity in proportion to the intensity and duration of the human rights violation. 'Abused' in this context is best defined as the inability to defend oneself immediately after an attack.
3.11 Ultimatums to end the affair or coerce a boundary
'Ultimatum - a final demand made without intent of negotiation'
The only ultimatum that can work in a committed relationship is a mutually agreed one, discovered collaboratively and executed cooperatively. Mutual growth is the prize of a healthy negotiation like that. Mutual resentment is the poisoned chalice of a one sided ultimatum that fulfills it's purpose. Ultimatums, coercion and threats are a lose-lose strategy.
Resentment from forced compliance with an ultimatum is an investment in unfinished business for both people. It is likely to be carried for some years, whether you separate or remain together, whether the affair finishes or just completes another ending. Hankering for more in the after glow of an affair is a bit like an emotional addiction. Joint, non-coerced behaviour is more likely self-sustaining and regenerating in those tides of longing.
A win-win solution takes time and mutual respect to formulate and in some cases also with the help of a neutral third party or mediator who has been given the power by both to slow the proceedings and find a collaborative outcome. If the third party is not honoured with that gift s/he cannot help.
The consequences of not reconciling in the years after an affair has concluded are not pretty. Like being haunted and hunted by the past. Truth, justice, mercy, and peace are the four critical components of reconciliation.
"Anyone can become angry - that is easy. But to be angry at the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not easy." Aristotle
3.12 Readers' questions with some web links and answers
- What is betrayed by an illicit affair and why does it matter? In order to navigate relationship we have a well tried mental map, which most of the time shows us where we have come from, where we stand and where we’re going. It’s okay to not know where we are some of the time and to be surprised by where we’re heading. However, in our most intimate relationship and in their sweet delights, it’s important to know that this intimate connection is home: the place where we rest, revive and celebrate delicious belonging. It’s like the in and out breath of recognition - feeling safe to take it all in and to let it all go. An illicit affair tears up the map and rips through the territory of that sacred belonging, destroying our trust, our belief in ourselves and the loyalty with our beloved. Betrayal throws us out on to a street bereft of meaning, no longer sure where we’ve come from nor where we’re going and the ground beneath us, treacherous. We hurt. We’re wounded, our heart broken open. And that’s a place we get to know quite well, sometimes for the first time learning to love ourselves for ourselves not because someone else is bound to us by ‘love’. However, if our beloved continues to betray our trust despite knowing we’re vanquished, then the hurting overwhelms our ability to cope and can turn into trauma. That’s a place few travel voluntarily and few come out of alone. Navigating the way out takes knowledge, support, love and healing. Sometimes we can’t do that with the ones who are hurting us. And so we begin to grieve all over again for the loss of those once so precious to us. We get to know our heart at an even deeper level, and arrive at a clearer space of letting go. Through this cruel opening, we begin anew, feeling the connection from our new found, deepest core and out to all those who suffer in a similar way - through their trust being betrayed. Sometimes our love can flow alongside those who’s love betrays, without any wish to re-engage them. This is a much bigger, kinder out breath and in breath. Embracing more than we would have thought possible when first our little heart broke open. And there at our feet embracing the earth, strong, soft and tender, our heart won, hand made map that will guide us to the next place in our journey home. And, this too shall pass.
- What have people learned from affairs and what would they change if they could start again? Shirley Glass covered this one in her Afterword.
- Why is lying so bad when it can protect my partner from a painful truth? Since we lie to the people most important to us, surely some lies are good for a relationship? A useful answer here on this site.
- Is infidelity a symptom of abandonment anxiety or fear of death, just your common or garden abandaholic looking for a fix?
- Is cruising porn sites considered infidelity? This is a question in the boundaries of masturbatory privacy in a committed relationship, of cyber sex and cheating. It depends on how the couple have jointly defined infidelity and privacy and when those defined boundaries are crossed. There are many web sites offering to match people up for liaisons and it is not hard to hide your marital status.
- Is it possible to have a marital agreement of open lover once a week? AArggghh - good freaking luck.
- Some affairs are continued with the intention of pushing the betrayed to end a marriage the infidel no longer wants but is afraid to leave or has no reason to leave. Few of those affairs end in another marriage and those that do are haunted by its beginning in betrayal.
- Will my lover leave home for me? True, some secrets are kept with the intention of separation and divorce. What people say they do and what they actually do in marriage are two different things. A full answer about leaving is here on netdoctor.co.uk - where this clip: the short answer is, not likely. Indeed some experts believe that if a married lover fails to make plans to leave home within the first three months of an affair then he or she will never leave.
- Why do people divorce? Summary here on psychpage.com
- Will having an affair with a married woman hurt my chances in politics? It's a joke question I hope, but worth an answer. It depends on how important integrity and publicity are to you. Will she be married when you reach the top of your political ladder and will she keep your secret if you adopt a position then morally repugnant to her? The higher you climb the more dirt is thrown. Why give them the stuff to throw? Part of an answer is here and here is an Evangelical view that doesn't yet apply in secular Australian politics.
On Fidelity 4 - The children involved, those conceived in an affair and how to help them cope if witnesses
How to heal a broken heart or begin mending a broken relationship
Navigation page for my pre-commitment Relationship Education study cycle
© Ziji Fox 2005, 2006 All Rights Reserved www.peterfox.com.au
