Glass Houses

I never thought I would have an affair. I truly believed I was a better person than that. I didn’t realize that I was a setup for an affair long before I had the opportunity. I think that many betrayed spouses assume that the source of an affair lies solely with the person who cheated. They believe that the cheater is defective, either that s/he is a heartless traitor or weak and deluded. It’s difficult to admit how warped the structure of a marriage has to be in the first place for one partner to consider having an affair, and the extent to which both parties are responsible for that structure.

Happy spouses don’t cheat. If a spouse is not happy in a marriage, there is a reason for it. That’s not to say cheaters are justified in cheating if they’re not happy – of course not. But if your spouse cheats, and you’re surprised because you thought everything was great until that point, you have probably been ignoring some pretty key problems that pre-date the affair, often by years, and those problems are partially your responsibility.

In Elizabeth Gilbert’s (of Eat Pray Love fame - I know, you either love her or you hate her) book Committed, she summarizes Shirley Glass’ research on fidelity and affairs, which I now totally need to read (her book is called Not "Just Friends": Rebuilding Trust and Recovering Your Sanity After Infidelity). Glass posits that marriages are made up of windows and walls. Communication between spouses should flow freely (windows); the intimate parts of yourself and your relationship should be closed to the outside world (walls). It’s only natural to be attracted to people other than our spouses sometimes, but when it happens, we open a window on those feelings with our spouse, at the same time setting a boundary with the outsider and refusing to become emotionally or physically intimate with that person. This has the practical effect of avoiding temptation, but instead of pretending the attraction doesn’t exist, which is unrealistic, you use it to build intimacy in your marriage by talking about unmet needs and finding a way to meet them within the marriage. It makes sense.

I think the corollary, and maybe Glass talks about this, is that if you try to open a window during these times, and your spouse shuts you out, then you have still done a good thing by exposing some key problems in the marriage. Then you can figure out whether you can resolve them or not. If not, at least you know why the marriage dissolved, without the confusion and chaos of involving someone else.

In my own situation, the windows and walls were all wrong, and had been for a very long time. My ex made it clear what he wanted my role to be. I was there to perpetuate a lifestyle, a paradigm of what he wanted his life to be. My needs were dismissed, in large ways and small. I tried to talk about it, perhaps not in ideal ways, but I did try. I tried nicely, I tried passive-aggressively, I tried outright aggressively, I tried in bitchy ways, I tried while sobbing my guts out and begging him to consider me, I tried by asking him to go to counseling with me. It didn’t work. I was walled off. He implied that I was crazy and unreasonable, that I had no right to want anything he didn’t want. After running into those walls for years, I lost all desire for any kind of intimacy with him. I was marking time, getting through the days, serving my sentence.

And then DB came along, and suddenly there was a window, and I didn’t want to close it. Now, Glass’ theory is that when I realized how attracted I still was to DB (and always had been – I thought about him over the years far more often than was entirely healthy), I should have cut off all contact with DB, then spoken to my ex and told him I was feeling this attraction to someone else and it had made me realize that I had a number of unmet needs that we needed to discuss. Realistically, I know that would not have flown. My ex would have raged and/or convinced me I was nuts. I don’t believe for one second that we would have been able to save our marriage. But at least I would have tried. And then I would have realized what instead it took having an affair to realize: that my marriage never was what I thought it was. And I could have gotten out of it with a clean conscience. And if it was meant to be with DB, we would have eventually been free to be together.

I have no defense. She’s right. But that’s not how it happened. Admittedly, one key reason for this was that I was not willing to cut off contact with DB. I couldn’t stand to lose him. Like many people, I aspire to high-mindedness that I do not always actually possess.

For DB, one of the most galling things about all of this has been that his ex truly believes their marriage ended simply because DB cheated. But while that was the match that set the house on fire, the house was already doused in gasoline and full of frayed, sparking electrical wires. Still, I know he wishes he had gotten out cleanly, and it certainly would make our lives now much easier if he had. His ex would still be bitter and self-righteous, but she wouldn’t have such strong justification for it.

It is really easy to slip into an affair if your marriage is unhappy and you’re subconsciously looking for a way out of it. It happens to good people, all the time. People are complex. I think we are kinder, stronger people when we remember that.