The seven stages of infidelity
From discovery to recovery
Anna thought life was good. The family had just moved into a beautiful house and her two daughters were doing well at school. Her husband Bill, 45, had a well-paid job, and they had been together since they were teenagers.
“Beyond a rocky patch when Bill was at university, we got on really well. After all these years, I thought we had each other’s backs,” says Anna.
So when she discovered a receipt for an expensive piece of jewellery in Bill’s pocket, she wasn’t suspicious. “Our anniversary was coming up. We didn’t normally celebrate, and I wouldn’t describe Bill as romantic, but I actually had an ‘ahh’ moment. I thought he was going soft in his old age.”
The date, however, passed with no gift, so Anna turned detective; uncovering nights at hotels, meals out and flowers.
“I still couldn’t believe he would have an affair,” she says. “He is too sensible.” But when she challenged him, Bill broke down and told her about a younger woman – in her 20s – who worked with him.
“The complete cliché,” says Anna. “When I asked him what was wrong with our marriage, he replied ‘nothing’ but that he had been thinking: ‘Isn’t there more to life than this?’”
What upset her the most was that Bill was willing to throw their entire family away for a bit of excitement. As the autumn nights draw in, stories like Anna’s might sound all too familiar to some.
Indeed, it has more than a hint of Doctor Foster – the BBC psychodrama about the fallout from a husband’s fling with a younger woman, which has just returned for a second series. September, meanwhile, is the biggest month for couples to file for divorce, post summer holidays spent trying to patch up crumbling marriages, and a significant number will cite infidelity as the cause.
After all, the opportunities to stray are greater than ever before and, according to illicitencounters.com – the UK’S “leading” extramarital dating website – 2016 was the biggest year ever recorded for affairs.
There are three common responses to discovering your partner has been unfaithful. The first is to blame yourself, forgive them and beg them to return. The second is to freeze them out, making them sleep on the sofa, or leave. The third – and perhaps the most titillating, certainly when it comes to making good television – is revenge.
As a marital therapist who has spent 30 years helping couples cope with infidelity, I have seen these reactions in spades. So what are the up- and downsides of each, and is there a “right” way to respond to cheating? The causes of infidelity are complex. I have a formula, which I apply to my clients: Problem + Poor Communication + Temptation = Affair.
The “problem” could be something that lies squarely with your partner: they lost their job or a parent died – a major life event they allowed to act as a trigger. Temptation is also something entirely in their control. But when it comes to poor communication, there can be shared responsibility. It is helpful to ask: why couldn’t my partner talk to me? To them, you might have seemed pre-occupied with children or work. To you, they might have made excuses, or hidden behind jokes.
That said, no one person should take all the blame. It might seem like the path of least resistance, but it only allows the unfaithful partner to
Revenge can easily become a race to the bottom. Who knows where it will end?
minimise their betrayal, which can leave you resentful.
When it comes to revenge, however, there is no danger of sweeping your feelings under the carpet. The advantage, especially if you only think about getting your own back, is that you allow your rage to bubble to the surface. It’s only when you act on it, that things can go wrong.
I had a male client who – when he discovered his wife had been unfaithful with her personal trainer – called the man’s employer and had him fired. Unfortunately, this only pushed his wife closer to her lover (she felt responsible) and made it impossible to save their marriage.
A wife I counselled threw her husband out for having an emotional affair. In case he hadn’t got the message, she hurled an ashtray in his direction. Believing his marriage was over, he turned to the “other woman” and was then physically unfaithful, too – which made it hard to rebuild bridges, and turned a straightforward infidelity into a rollercoaster that took 18 months in therapy to resolve.
Revenge can easily become a race to the bottom. Another client had a tit-for-tat fling to show his cheating wife that he also had “other options”. When he told her, she shrugged and said: “You’ve proved we can’t make each other happy” – not the outcome he had wanted.
In Doctor Foster, scorned wife Gemma has slept with their neighbour, broken into her ex- husband’s new house, and drunkenly interrogated their 15 year-old son. Who knows where it will end?
Arguably, a better approach is to freeze your partner out; the response, if you believe tabloid reports, of Coleen Rooney in the wake of husband Wayne’s drink-driving charge, after he was stopped in the car of a woman he met in a bar. This is clever, as it buys you thinking time and reduces the risk you will say, or do, something you might regret. Indeed, in an open letter this week, Lizzie Cundy (one of the original WAGS and formerly married to Chelsea player Jason), urged Coleen to give Wayne another chance, saying: “The biggest lesson I learnt? I should never have given up on my marriage in the way I did at the time.”
Freezing-out is also a very private reaction; where revenge is almost always public. This can be damaging for children, who might otherwise not have found out about an affair, or who might be drawn into inappropriate roles like peacemaker, or pushed into taking sides.
But whether you forgive, freeze or wreak revenge, each reaction comes from the same place: pain. And there is no magic solution to that, even if it feels like dousing your husband’s sports car in paint will help.
The key is to accept your feelings (“I’m hurting”) and challenge negative thoughts (“our marriage doesn’t have to be doomed”) in order to move forward.
And if you are the unfaithful partner? Don’t belittle what you’ve done, or hold back information to “protect” your partner – or more likely so you don’t have to face their full wrath – because getting the truth in dribs and drabs is infinitely more painful.
Simply, it takes time to go through the seven stages of recovery – in the box, left – and you will have setbacks. You will also learn a lot about yourself, your partner and how to communicate. That’s a recipe, not for putting a sticking plaster over your old marriage, but for creating a new and better one.
The key is to accept your feelings and challenge negative thoughts to move on