As a cheater you may or may not feel any pain regarding the affair. If you are one of those who are not experiencing pain, then what I am about to say may not mean much to you. If you are one of those in pain, it may help you in understanding yourself, your spouse and your marriage.
The pain may be keeping you from telling your spouse what happened. There is a no-win dilemma where if you do not tell them, you hurt and they don’t. Since you do not like pain, you may even put it off for a while. When you do tell them, it will bring pain into their life, bring some relief and open up communication.
Telling your spouse will not make the pain go away, it only changes what kind of pain you are dealing with. Choosing not to tell them also brings pain of a different sort (I often call this the pain of living in a fantasy that ain’t so). There are issues associated with choosing not to deal with the affair.
When you tell them what happened, they often want to know MORE. This is where things get dicey. If you tell them all, with details included, it often leads to even more hurt and them having a hard time working through things. One of the problems with sexual related matters is that not everyone can handle hearing the facts about such matters. Since your spouse is in pain, you will have to be careful about how much you share.
You may have to consider a gradual process so that the two of you can work through each disclosure before more is revealed. Some spouses can handle it this way, and for some it is excruciatingly painful to handle things in this manner. The bottom line is that there is no easy way. There is no painless way. There will be pain, and it will touch both of your lives.
You will need to consider your spouse, what they can handle and “how big your God is”. I mention this, since it will take faith. You will need faith in taking risks. If the God you put faith in is not big enough to handle your pain, you may need to revisit this area.
If you tell them only that you had an affair and no details about it, there is another type of pain that is filled with uncertainty. They may even consider you cruel for not telling them what they are wanting to know. There does need to be enough disclosure for the two of you to work through the issue of the affair AND what led up to the affair.
Your affair changed things. With your marriage relationship being changed, the two of you will need to build a new relationship. You can not go back to the ‘way things were’. You also can not choose to never talk about it again or assume that it was something just between you and the lover. When you stepped outside of your marriage, you made it an issue that involves your spouse.
There is also the pain of you not forgiving yourself. How you begin forgiving yourself is an issue that will take a series of posts. I mention it here to acknowledge that you are not only in pain, there are many types of pain inside. With the many types of pain, you may experience some confusion. You may have even tried numbing the pain rather than working through it. The pain may have even progressed to the point of physical maladies. The pain will come out one way or another. Hiding it or running from it only prolongs the suffering it brings with it.
Best Regards,
Jeffrey Murrah
4 Responses
Amen! AND the ‘complications’ that continuing deceit brings….ask my husband …his OW …the children they had together purposefully who are now simply treated as ‘inconveniences’ and pawns….and then there is all of us …his wife , children and the many MANY people who have no idea what my husband was capable of ….including his family of origin..
The hidden and continued hiding of sin always brings destruction multiple times what the initial confession and life changes would be….I know HE wishes he had not done any of it ..The life he had and could have had is GONE….and that is a lot of regret…
Hope your readers take this to heart…..mostly those who cheat though are not readers of such site…sadly.
Zaza,
There are always consequences to choices. Many cheaters assume that they are so smart that they can avoid the consequences or that somehow the rules do not apply to them. As Moses said “Be sure your sins will find you out”.
When I mentioned the pain of the CS in an earlier comment to you I was speaking along the lines of the pain they were living with before the affair began. Â I have never shared any details of my ‘story’ and am only doing so here for clarification. Â I feel that in certain scenarios the CS’s pain is important.
Looking back on the years leading up to the affair, I know that I could have been more supportive of my H. Â It goes without saying that the same could be said for him, but since I’m choosing to focus on his unrecognized pain I’d prefer not to get off-topic. Â Now, it’s easy to recognize those times when he was silently asking me for my help but, of course with me not being able to read his mind, it wasn’t forthcoming. Â I am by no means excusing his decision to have an affair, but it saddens me to realize that he was hurting and he didn’t feel safe enough with me to take that extra step. Â It would be easy to brush it off as being a male thing, not being in touch with his emotions, or needing to fix it himself, but the fact remains; he didn’t feel safe, he didn’t think I cared. Â It isn’t even as if he, himself, was totally aware at the time of each occurrence…they just accumulated. Â There were other things happening in the background, outside the marriage, that added to his sense of failure. Â They just fed off each other.
I had no idea of all that was going on in his life. Â In fact, I had made a point of pulling away from helping him in any way with one of the businesses he owned. Â I had never been actively involved with this business, but after a joint company Christmas party incident which revolved around his future AP, I refused to extend any help whatsoever. Â He eventually quit asking and over the course of the next few years the company started declining. Â As late as one month before the start of the affair he had an opportunity to attend a seminar on selling the company and he asked me to go with him. Â I said-no, I didn’t own it and I didn’t care. Â (That wasn’t easy to write.) Â He didn’t make a fuss about it, he just went alone. Â He had never ever received any help from his business partner. Â Whatever the problems were, my H carried the burden. Â Now- everything was falling apart and he was quietly feeling all alone. Â That saddens me a lot.
Ironically, three weeks into the affair, he again asked for my help with problems within the same company and for some reason, this time I complied.  In hindsight, we both agree that this was a subtle turning point in our relationship even though the affair continued to intensify  without my having any knowledge of it.  She had been gone from the company for months before the affair started, but she still managed to convince him that she cared deeply about it, him, and her former co-workers.  All of this was untrue.  A relationship with the owner was merely a handy vehicle for her revenge.  He literally fell into her lap, an easy target, someone who she admitted to me was going through a “weak” period in his life.   (I realize this probably sounds overly dramatic and simplistic without the details, but it actually took a lot of digging to unearth the dynamics that made the affair seem innocent for him.)
In the aftermath of the affair, while I was so mistrusting of him, he began trusting me to help him turn the business around.  He repeatedly  praised me and thanked me for my help.  I adamantly refused to take credit for my part until a few months ago when I was finally able to admit that my input had been a huge factor in it’s success.  Today it is really thriving and we are once again on the same side.
I wanted to share this to explain how we manipulate actions/decisions to come to conclusions about our spouse’s affair. Â Initially, I was unaware that this woman was no longer employed by this company…that is how much I had pulled away from it. Â When I discovered the affair I remembered the seminar he went to and concluded the reason he wanted to sell it was because she no longer worked there. Â He told me over and over that he didn’t think that was true. Â When she turned in her resignation he said he made no attempt to get her to change her mind and stay so he didn’t believe she was a factor in his decision to sell. Â I refused to believe this, of course, because it wasn’t what I had decided was the truth. Â I have since determined that ‘truth’ is subjective and when people state “the truth will set you free” that chances are they really do not know what truth is. Â
blueskyabove,
Thank you for sharing your story. Affairs do not happen in a vacuum. They often begin with problems in the marriage, as in your story. The problems are not an excuse for the cheaters actions. The cheater often uses an affair as a solution to the problems. Their solution, due to its visibility then becomes the focus. Many couples make the mistake of thinking that the affair is the ‘whole’ problem. It is often not the problem, but rather a misplaced solution and a symptom of other issues. Men do not always tell you what they want or need and many wives expect their husbands to know their needs without telling them. The situation in either case leads to unrealistic expectations developing and often are not talked about until after the affair is over.
Once again, I am glad that you shared your story. You may have to tell others your story several more times before all the healing is completed. Telling one’s story and being able to listen to the cheaters story, without interrupting them are two of the signs that a couple is on their way to healing.