Can I mend a marriage shattered by affair?
The way to get on with a girl/ Is to drift like a man in a mist/ Happy enough to be caught/Happy to be dismissed . . . FROM ADVICE TO LOVERS BY FRANK O’CONNOR (IRISH AUTHOR AND POET, 1903 – 1966)
DEAR Bel,
LAST summer my husband and I celebrated our 35th wedding anniversary. A month later, struggling with his mental health (as he has throughout our marriage), my husband told me he’d had a three-year affair with a work colleague that ended seven years ago.
Months on we are still together, but I’m lost and confused. I never knew; I didn’t see the signs and trusted him implicitly.
Because it wasn’t a recent affair, and because I didn’t know what was going on at the time, the man standing in front of me today is the same man I’ve always known, and loved. If he hadn’t confessed, I’d be none the wiser and we’d be going about our lives as we’ve always done. Why did he reveal it?
I knew the other woman well. We went to her wedding. She picked him up from home every day to take him to work. That bit still makes me really angry.
I’ve had some counselling which was quite useful, but we haven’t been able to have couples counselling due to his mental health. The counsellors didn’t feel he was stable enough, and both his elderly parents are ill.
Incidentally, only a very few of his friends know. He has told them he had a breakdown that hurts when I’m there too, particularly as he then gets lots of sympathy, and I get the ‘poor you’ look.
Bizarrely, we live each day as we’ve always done; we hold hands when out, go on holidays and on trips - as if nothing had happened. To this day I’ve not shouted, argued or asked many questions. I don’t know why. This year I’ll be 60 and don’t want to throw my toys out of the pram in the hope I can find a better life.
I know people can forgive and move on from affairs, and maybe after 35 years that could be us. But I’m not sure I’ve begun to process it yet.
I’ve always been strong but now feel like a bit of a doormat. I’ve been humiliated.
I look at all the family photos, go through the family calendar, and realise he was living a double life as we celebrated many special occasions. I’m not sure he’s lost anything - he actually probably feels relieved it’s out in the open. But I feel stuck and isolated. Friends and family can’t believe I’m staying.
PAT
YOUR email resonated with me in such deeply personal ways it felt uncanny.
So let me express my profound conviction before anything else: I firmly believe a couple can survive an affair ? and that they can grow, both as individuals and as a unit, because of - not in spite of - the struggle. Having said that, I also know that the process is very, very difficult indeed, and inevitably marked by highs as well as the gloomiest lows.
I can see just how much you still wish he hadn’t told you. A confession can make the sinner feel better about him/ herself ? you know: ‘I’ve told the truth so I’m a good, honest person now.’
But what the revelation does, of course, is transfer the misery, lock, stock and smoking barrel, to the wronged one. No wonder you were so shocked, after all this time.
No wonder you feel, with justifiable bitterness, that your whole marriage has been sullied. Your husband looks the same and sounds the same and the touch of his warm hand is the same - but who is he really?
My answer to that would be: the man you loved and who loved you in return for 35 years.
Now, wishing you’d never known, bewildered that the woman could have betrayed you and wondering what the future holds, it’s vital to understand the real meaning of ‘for better, for worse’.
Yet the process of enduring the ‘worse’ can even hold within it the promise of something potentially better than before. Because you are now both changed people. The shared task must be to make that change for the ‘better’.
Think of a Ming vase that’s shattered and then skilfully restored. Is it the same vase? No - impossible. But with all its new imperfections, can it still possess some beauty? Yes, it can.
Do you see what I’m getting at? The weak man holding your hand as you walk out together needs you to hold him up. You are not ‘humiliated’; he is. Far from being a ‘doormat,’ you are now in charge of the magic carpet that can fly you into a future where you - skilfully restored, the strong one, the stayer, the defiant wife - can call all the shots.
Some people will suggest you’re staying because you’re afraid of being alone in your 60s. Don’t listen to them. Nor is it any business of ‘friends and family’ whether you stay within your marriage, or leave.
Personally I think you should go to couples counselling, and doubt he is too weak for it. Why does ‘his mental health’ prevent him from talking with a calm therapist about the consequences of his actions and how you two can grow strong again? You love him and he loves you. Build on that.
have been out there.’ Our own Ardal O’Hanlon, beloved as Father Ted’s brainless novice priest, Father Dougal, replaced Marshall, knowing how hard it would be. Though his children were older, he felt it was asking too much of his wife Melanie to cope alone for too long.
‘Three big grown-up kids living in the house,’ he said. ‘She was finding it tougher as the years went on. It’s a tough old show in terms of being away from home for so long, and in terms of the conditions that you film in — the heat and the humidity.’
Those sweltering conditions, however, are part of the attraction for Death In Paradise’s many guest stars, who can get paid to acquire a suntan.
Murder victims and suspects over the 13 years since its launch include famous faces such as Gemma Jones, Colin Salmon, Sally Phillips, Levi Roots, Charlotte Ritchie and Michele Dotrice — to name just half a dozen. But even these one-off appearances are not without risk. Tony Gardner (one of the stars of Last Tango In Halifax) contracted the Zika virus after he was bitten by an infected mosquito in 2016, and suffered joint pain, swelling and a rash as well as painful sensitivity to light.
OF THE 250 or more British cases of Zika recorded in the UK by then, a significant proportion were crew members on the show, he said.
Hardly surprising, then, that Ralf Little has now decided enough is enough, even though by his own admission he doesn’t have another job lined up.
In Sunday’s unexpected ending, DI Parker literally sailed over the horizon with DS Florence Cassell (Josephine Jobert) after telling her: ‘All I want is for us to be together.’ Little rarely complained about the hardships of the job. He couldn’t say he hadn’t been warned, after all. But he confessed he found the snobbery around the show galling, and loathed its reputation as ‘a guilty pleasure’.
‘What is there to be guilty about?’ he huffed. It’s a high quality show and it looks beautiful. It is an incredible achievement, something I am very proud of.’
It’s one the BBC has no plans to abandon. Death In Paradise is one of its most profitable productions, selling in more than 240 territories worldwide, including major markets such as the US and Australia — and often topping the ratings.
Perhaps its carousel of detectives has turned out to be its biggest attraction. Like James Bond or Doctor Who, the show is constantly revived and reinvented by a new star. Death In Paradise might just prove eternal.