He Cheated, She Stayed: One Woman's True Story of Getting Over Infidelity Part 1

What happened to her marriage made her come undone. Now, piece by piece, she's putting it all back together.

I have a black lace push-up bra left over from my days as a mistress. I was in my early 30s then, and fed up with relationships, fed up with falling for men who, the moment they noticed that I was sweet on them, would ask me to please stop liking them so much because it was making them feel claustrophobic.

Dating a married man who lived 3,000 miles away was different. To him, I represented the opposite of claustrophobia. I was freedom, excitement, possibility. To me, he was a kind of pause button in a dismal romantic life, and if I hadn't been feeling like such a misfit at dating I probably never would have gotten involved. I saw him maybe half a dozen times in five months. It never felt right—I worried more about his wife than he seemed to—and it was a relief to put an end to it when I met Sam (not his real name), the man who became my husband 12 years ago.

Sleeping with a married man taught me that an affair is mostly about carving out a little make-believe space in your life and then filling that space, helium-like, with passion. I also learned that sex occupies most of your hours together, and that preparing your body for sex occupies most of what's left of your free time. (I have never spent so long bathing and waxing, getting pedicures, and shopping for lingerie.) I learned that you regard someone differently when he is not a prospective mate; if he has an annoying habit—or an annoying personality, for that matter—so what? It's another woman's cross to bear. I learned that, in an affair, you are always on your second date, just about to fall in love, always witty and delightful and utterly uncomplicated.

It is tempting to romanticize that charmed bubble, especially when you compare it to the fatigue and frustration and bill-paying and child-disciplining and flinch-inducing touches and bad breath and underhanded jibes that fill the middle years of marriage. But an affair only briefly obscures the dark grief every spouse surely feels over the dwindling of marital love, while doing nothing to address what went amiss.

I knew all that, and I also knew (from People magazine if not from experience) that an affair can destroy a marriage. What I didn't know is that some marriages can withstand the damage. And that some might actually benefit from being broken open, because the breaking—however painful—opens the door to rebuilding something better.

It turns out that my marriage was—is—one of those.

In December 2008, nine days before Christmas, and barely four months after my husband, three small children, and I had moved to a new town where I knew not a single person, Sam came home from work, ate supper, sat me down on the sofa, and confessed that he had been having an affair for the past three years. I can still remember the way his face looked when he spoke those words—crumpled and terrified, it trembled and spasmed like a bird that has been hit by a car but is not yet dead.

Sam said the affair was completely over. He said he was deeply regretful, that he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that all he really wanted was us—me, our three amazing kids, our life together. He promised that he would not communicate anymore with Daphne (not her real name, either), and that if she tried to reach him, he would let me know. He called it a big mistake. He called it a bad choice. But he also said that he had truly loved and admired Daphne, whom he met working on a long-term project on the other side of the continent. He said she was funny, smart, and ballsy. That she was married with two small children. (How small? They met when she'd just come back from maternity leave. She had actually introduced Sam to them, and to her husband. And to her parents.) Oh yes, and he also mentioned that they'd neglected to use any birth control whatsoever, either of them. Ever.

I was...oh, Christ, I don't know if there are words enough in the English language to describe what all I felt over the course of the next few weeks and months. I was hurt, shocked, heartbroken, furious, traumatized, upended, terrified. I felt betrayed, violent, suicidal, humiliated, and unutterably sad. I injured myself—by mistake a few times but also on purpose, like a teenager, with a knife, and with coals from the fire. I was half wild with insomnia. For weeks on end, I slept maybe two hours a night, and ate little more than a hard-boiled egg and a chocolate a day. (I had never in my life lost my appetite so completely; this, at least, felt like a gift.) My mouth was dry and I was always freezing cold, shivering. I drank huge amounts of vodka and never felt drunk, as if my fury were burning off the alcohol the moment it entered my bloodstream. During the day, after Sam went to work, I dug through everything of his; it was the only activity I had the will for. At night, while he slept, I searched his laptop, cut his favorite sweaters to pieces, poured nail polish on his shirts, then woke him up, shouting, flailing, sobbing.

And yet there was one thing I knew right away: I was not ready to get divorced. In part this was simply because I realized I was too distraught to make a sensible decision. If I kicked Sam out in a rage, I might take him back once I cooled off, only to banish him again a few weeks later when more bad feelings hit. I couldn't do that to our kids.

But I was also reacting to the fact that I did not know who Sam was anymore; the person who had cheated on me was completely foreign to me (and to himself, as it turned out). I needed to find out who I was actually married to now. And whoever that person was, I knew (in my rare lucid moments) that our marriage must have stopped working for him somewhere along the way, and that fixing it was something we could only undertake together. I still felt attached to Sam—married to him, in my most random thoughts and habits, in my very blood and bones—and it seemed better to go through this trial with him than on my own.

The year following Sam's confession was wretched. I felt as if I were living forward and backward at the same time, excavating details about the past—ours and theirs—as I tried to figure out what came next: How could I keep our family on an even keel, and what could I do to fix our marriage, and was it even worth the trouble?

Sam went into therapy. I went into therapy. Night after night, we talked. I raged and called him names; he let me. I asked him questions and he answered, and although some of his replies will torment me forever (like, yes, they had sex in the bed in which we conceived our children), the mere fact that he was willing to talk made me feel safer and more connected, reassured me that he wasn't placing his memory of Daphne in a little private treasure box and pocketing the key.

Equally important was his willingness to apologize. "I'm sorry" is a remarkably powerful phrase when it comes from the heart.

"You can just keep on saying that," I told him. "Over and over, whenever you feel it." And he did.

There were moments when I actually felt a weird tender pity for Sam, who had come to our marriage with less knowledge of himself and less experience of the opposite sex than I had, and who seemed to have gotten in over his head with Daphne.

Weirder still, I was frequently (freakishly, it felt) turned on—especially in those first couple of months—and though I kept insisting to Sam that it was just break-up sex we were having (in the laundry room, guest room, car), I could not for the life of me understand why I was attracted to the jerk, let alone having the best sex of my married life with him.

I write this because no one told me what it would be like. When I called my closest friends in the city where I'd lived for so long (a place that suddenly felt very far away; I was unbelievably lonely that entire year) and revealed to them what had happened, I always wound up asking them if they knew anyone—anyone—who had been through this and made it out the other side, anyone who'd survived an affair and come out happily married. Because I wanted to believe it was possible, and to know how it could be done. What was normal? Was there a road map? How long would it take? None of my friends seemed to know such a couple. Other marriages might have survived an affair, but no one was talking.










Second part coming tomorrow night....