MANY relationship roads lead to the train wreck of infidelity.
September 07, 2008 12:00am
MANY relationship roads lead to the train wreck of infidelity. But you can get back on track.
Extramarital sex is the bread and butter of any relationship therapist’s practice.
Lack of communication or intimacy, abuse, differing libidos, money conflicts, and the inability to commit rate highly and can cause enough toxins to result in a relationship failure, but the discovery of an infidelity is a relationship train wreck.
The good news is that it’s also one of the most fixable therapy problems. That is, if everyone wants the same outcome. If the couple is in my office, you’d assume they want to salvage their marriage.
There’s a process and order to things.
First, the guilty party needs to accept that they have inflicted enormous pain on someone they love, that they are a betrayer, they have shattered trust and broken the marital agreement; therefore they have to be prepared to be profoundly wrong.
Then they need to be empathic enough to connect with the betrayed partner’s pain. And finally they need to demonstrate that their remorse for having caused that pain matches the depth of the victim’s pain.
Misplaced guilt
The most annoying speed bump in this process occurs when the betrayer is male and his remorse is for the pain he has caused the rejected other woman.
Affairs always end in tears. It’s a triangle. By definition, someone has to lose.
If ultimately, the partner the man wants is the other woman, then it’s only his wife who will be in pain. If it’s his wife he wants, then he has two women in pain.
Both women have suffered rejection and his wife has been betrayed.
I acknowledge that there are a lot of cases where I have understood why the husband found his commitment tested.
However, the place to resolve that is in a counsellor’s office, not in another woman’s arms. So this is my offering on the anatomy of the other woman.
Same old, same old
The circumstances for the occurrence of infidelity are rife. I’ve never believed monogamy for men was “natural”.
So unless he’s made a decision to commit to a rule that will undoubtedly test his resolve, he’s available.
And as far back as Eve, women are the seductresses. What can prove her powers of seduction more powerfully than being sexy enough to poach another woman’s “property”?
However, it’s a mystery to me why someone would invest her heart when the risk of loss and suffering is built into the relationship even before she takes the handbrake off her emotions.
Almost always, she is a seductress who is also a victim.
To all you men who have had or are having affairs I ask: Did your affair partner tell you that she had had one or a series of disastrous relationships with men, who had told her that they loved her but had hurt her in the end?
Did she tell you that the reason she loved you was because you were different? Did this make you feel like a saviour, a protector, needed and valuable?
This would have made you feel special. But you also got trapped in one of the oldest manipulations in the book.
Now if you want to get out, you go from being Superman to just another bastard.
The husband is more loyal to the other woman, because all she did was love him, and yet his wife “won”.
Hence, the least he can do is defend the other woman’s role in the affair, while his wife gets branded a bitch for being so mean about her.
Wake up, gentlemen. You’ve just proved again that men tell women they love them but ultimately shatter them. It’s the oldest soap opera in the book. Turn the page and look after the real victim.
