They don’t want you to know
All those bitter women, the ones that didn’t get their way in marriage.
I’m here to tell you their ending isn’t the only ending. For some of us, the gamble of staying after cheating is worth the risk.
Don’t get it confused. I’m not one of those that clasp my hands to the side of my face, giggle, twirl my hair, and say, “I’m so glad we went through it. We’re so much closer aren’t we, Pooky?”
Pooky looks away disinterested. Or maybe not and it’s all candy canes and rainbows for them. I don’t know.
I DO know that my insides cringe at such a response.
Am I glad we went through what we did, my husband and I?
Fuck, no.
Would I change it if I could?
Well, again, no.
What I did worked for this scenario. I don’t know that we would be together if we had gone through anything else. To top it all off, we’re happy. So, reality works for me. Do you know the odds of couples who are together after 20 years and are genuinely happy together? In fact, I’m not sure you could properly gauge such a thing.
Marriage is full of issues: two humans choosing to coexist. Some of you have read my memoirs. For those of you who haven’t & for the purposes of saving time, I have been with a man who cheated on me for about 7 years. 2023 will be our 20-year anniversary. I’ve known him for a total of 22. You could say we’re close.
Things slip through the cracks even in intimate relationships. If you have kids, you have a decent grasp of what I mean. My husband’s transgressions, the list is long, and I can’t lie and tell you that I have the wherewithal inside myself to do them. The short list? He cheated on me with many women while we were married & even became engaged to one.
Yes, while married.
The truth here is too Sally Jesse Rafael to leave out. I can look back and giggle a little. After what for many would be a soul-crushing failure of life, my husband dusted himself off and came back home. Our home has always been us together. We are 15 years away from infidelity.
I remember the talk. The one where he says “sorry.” I was on my mother-in-law’s couch. I brought our newborn daughter there a month after I had her. My husband refused to pay our rent 5 months prior. Now, he was back in the States from Iraq. His fiance? Long gone. She had been blessed with a new laptop, a trip to Nebraska, and a fixed car out of the relationship. I have loan paperwork to prove it. I paid them off with my tax return.
Laying back, light off, baby girl sleeping, I listened. It was the typical apology with the graveling sound in his voice, “I’m shit on Satan’s shoe, worthless. You deserve sooo much better. I will never do it again. Can I come home, please? We need to heal. I love you.”
I hated that moment, that talk. It was like realizing my bad habits had turned me into another superfluous statistic and I wanted to hate him for it. Hating loving, loving hating.
All, I could think was, “Hmmmm.”
So, instead, I said, “Okay. Come home, don’t do it again, and we’ll work it out. I love you too.”
Healing is for when you have time to stop. I wasn’t about to start licking wounds. I was prepping for round two and I didn’t plan on losing. I had made it this far.
I thought I knew hatred before the infidelity. I have had breaks in life. Don’t we all? Things that were gifts that we didn’t deserve. I grew up in a lower middle-class Air Force family, was molested repeatedly at four, and had a father who roughed me up but mostly my mother from time to time. It wasn’t daily, more like a six-month cycle: honeymoon phase, numb eventlessness, building tension with my father isolating himself more than usual, yelling matches between parents, and then a period of physical explosions would ensue. Thankfully, my brothers were shielded from much of it. They were so little.
I’m not sure that my experience validates or justifies my hatred, but hate indeed I did.
Was it my father I hated? Mother, perhaps? Was I angry with God for my confusion with life?
Well, yeah, sure, and “no” at the same time. It’s complicated. Hatred isn’t always active. Sometimes it settles symbiotically. Sometimes you live with something without seeing it for what it is.
What I can tell you is that experiencing betrayal feels like an out-of-control response to a calculated act of faith expressed through trust. I think a piece of my naivety died that day, the part of you that thinks good always wins. I had done all the right things to tame my beast and I still lost. In its place, anger with no end was born.
I hate what my husband did. I don’t see that changing any time soon and it happened years ago. His infidelity was the pain of adding his story to mine. I didn’t make him do it. I didn’t inspire him.
He used to ask me in the first years when we were working out being together after his sleeping around if I knew he loved me. In the beginning, I couldn’t even look him in the face. As the years passed, I grew from cold to the issue to entertaining the idea. Then, finally, investigating it. After 15 years, I feel love from someone who broke all of what I considered to be the rules of love. If you cheat on someone, you don’t love them. Define cheating. If you lie to someone, you don’t love them. Define lying. If you say you don’t love someone, you don’t love them. Define . . .
I’m not talking about forgiveness here. I forgave him a long time ago. I don’t hold it over my husband’s head. I don’t mention it whenever my argument is weak and could use a trump card. I don’t use it to manipulate. Some would argue the validity of this point.
I don’t need amnesia to forgive. Forgetting is not a requirement. I learned from our experience. There are certain scenarios where I will forever behave differently due to my husband’s actions. Forgetting would put me at a relational disadvantage. My teeth are sharper now.
Love is the greatest prize and that is why I say I would go through it again though I wouldn’t choose it. Once you have felt real love, especially when it is outside everyone else’s box, you realize how rare and precious a gift it truly is and that it can vanish as if it never existed leaving only a memory residue. Tim doesn’t ask me if I feel loved anymore. He doesn’t have to.
Infidelity brought me another gift, respect. Many people have considered me a doormat. I was ostracized at church when people discovered that my husband was actively cheating on me. The women would step between their husbands and me, as though I were a virus that would leak onto them, a contagion. It’s similar to death. People feel defensive or just don’t know how to respond. Funny. You learn to live with the aftermath of infidelity much like grief. It never truly leaves you. It wouldn’t be right.
Some people will still treat me that way when they find out if they get close enough to my husband and I. Thankfully, we are not short on friends. People wanted to tell me God was carrying me through, that the Holy Spirit would give me peace when we were separated, and that I was like Job and just needed to keep carrying the faith. Oh, how they wanted to make my husband’s return home a product of my faith and my prayer life.
God didn’t do the hard work. He may have died on the cross but he did not stay up sleepless nights waiting for my husband to come home safe. He didn’t keep my husband from snorting percocet, or cocaine, or drinking. Oh, but how much worse a thing could have happened, Jennifer, if not for God. Oh, stuff it. How much worse a thing?! How much worse, you say!!!
Worse was my husband’s friend getting blown up in the driver’s seat while out on a mission, and instead of my getting his upset phone call, his fiancee got did. Worse was another affair and then another. Worse was repeated STD tests while married with children. Worse was another failed rehab stay. Worse was considering not putting my husband’s name on my daughter’s birth certificate. Worse was the desperation of ultimatums. Worse was counseling the women he had sexual encounters with. Worse was my entire life falling apart. Worse, you wanna talk about worse with me? After infidelity, death doesn’t seem like a worse option if you get my drift.
Tim and I did the hard work to bring him “home.” We did that. He stopped cheating. God didn’t make him. God didn’t make me choose to love him and keep doing it in such a way that inspired him to come back, that wasn’t a miracle. It was my choice, free will and all. If God is in the luck of the draw for this scenario for me, then God doesn’t play fair & values us very little. If I were to believe in a God, I would hope he would be more considerate than that. For now, the dichotomy of chaos and control fit the paradigm we live in much better.
I’ve said it before, and I will say it again, Tim could leave me tomorrow. After what we have been through, I am thankful for this moment right now. I may not get the next. I am grateful for the short time I have experienced it, real love, and I can answer the question, “Is it worth it?”
Is it worth it for you?
What price would you pay?
Did you stay after a partners infidelity?
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