I know how desperately you want it to work, Amy, but all the ultimatums in the world won’t stop a cheat CHEATING
Emmerdale actress Amy Nuttall has taken her unfaithful husband back — as long as he follows a strict set of rules. But, warns a fellow betrayed wife, it’s doomed to fail...
her too and ask yourself over and over again what she had that you didn’t.
In the best scenario, he feels like a despicable rat for getting carried away and feels guilty.
One hopes so. But even the guiltiest, sorriest person resents being under 24hour supervision. My ex said it was like living with the Stasi, being questioned, being second-guessed, having to show me his phone. This is not conducive to a happy reconciliation.
Despite all my manoeuvres, the mobile phone was coded and the other woman was in there — under a man’s name. When I made the wedding anniversary discovery that the affair was real, despite all the denials, there was nothing left to save.
Looking back, I see that we had a really happy marriage in all the ways it could be happy, and a really flawed, difficult one in all the ways it didn’t work.
In the end, there was no saving it — and there were huge faults on both sides; I played my part.
That’s not to say the Nuttall-Buchan marriage is anything like mine or that there’s any blame to be cast on the person who was cheated on.
To suffer something so publicly and have everybody, including me, the poster child for failed marriages, know your business then try again is brave. Still, I can see the desperation in laying out all these rules in order to go forward and try to save the relationship and I do hope they work.
I know those straws we clutch at in order to try to get our lives back on track, to control the uncontrollable, to feel that, if we can only make laws and obey them, then everything in the end will be OK.
But feelings don’t obey rules. They are disobedient, contrary, childish, selfish things that burst out of you with volcanic force. Going on a date night once a week will not magically erase them.
Finally, there’s the other woman. She is not going to spontaneously combust, more’s the pity. She’s always going to be there to remind you. My husband and I are still close — we have four children, after all, and have had to find a way to communicate — but the other woman is now his partner and mother of his child.
I still can’t look at her without thinking, ‘You came into our marriage knowing I existed and that he had children’ and I resent her still.
Three years ago, she sent me a text, telling me that, while she wasn’t sorry she and my ex were together, she was sorry that she had caused me pain.
MY BLOOD ran cold. I was having a perfectly nice evening in my new house, with my new partner, leaving the past in the past and, suddenly, I was right back in it with the sorry-not- sorry text crashing into my life. I thought about the kids, how much it (and continued to affect) them and wrote straight back.
‘It’s just as well you aren’t apologising,’ I said, ‘because I’ll never forgive you, either of you. But, it doesn’t matter because we are here now and we just go on, making the best of it.’
And in the end that’s what we all do — and what Amy Nuttall will have to do too — setting rules, breaking rules, hoping, struggling, and going on. Trying our best.