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.

Perspective

DB’s ex blames me for their divorce. Of course, she blames DB, too, but she describes him as “emotionally lost,” a compromised state of which I somehow took advantage. In truth, if he was emotionally lost, it was because she emotionally put a burlap sack over his head, beat the crap out of him, shoved him in the trunk of her car, drove around for 14 years, dumped him in a ditch in the middle of the Everglades at night, then sped off. Rather than owning her piece of the responsibility for the fact that DB was abjectly miserable in his marriage before I got anywhere near him, it is much easier to think he had a mid-life crisis, and that he never would have had such a crisis had I not arrived on the scene. It’s an interesting perspective.

I’m not saying DB was justified in cheating on her because he was unhappy in the marriage. I’m not saying DB wasn’t responsible for his contributions to the sorry state of his marriage before I came along. I’m just saying that he didn’t stray out of the blue, and she had a large role in creating the circumstances under which a good man did a bad thing. He didn’t lose his mind or his senses. He had simply had enough, and after multiple rounds of marriage counseling and realizing things were not going to get better, he became severely depressed at the thought that he was serving a life sentence. When we found each other, it was like a prison door opening. I didn’t tempt him. I didn’t have to.

The only things that had kept him in the marriage were his love for his children and his sense of duty. He never stopped loving his children, and he continued to do his duty. He picked up his son from preschool, he made dinner for the family, he unloaded the dishwasher, he did the laundry, he installed baby gates, he pruned the hedges, he gave time-outs, he went to the grocery store, he took the dog to the groomer, he made the coffee every morning. I know that he did those things, because now he does them for me. My ex didn’t do any of that. I did it all, and held down a full-time job, and took care of two small children. I would have been thankful every day if I had had a husband like DB. I am certainly thankful that I have him now. I would be bitter if I lost him, too, especially if I had spent so many years making him feel like a deadbeat and then realized only after he was gone that I was never going to have it that good again.

As for his children, she accuses him of having abandoned them for me. What really happened was that she took them. One day not long after he told her he wasn’t interested in fixing the marriage, he came home from work, and they were gone. No note, no message, luggage, clothes, toys, gone. And then she gave him an ultimatum: return to the marriage or lose his children (he cannot relocate to where she moved with the children – it’s complicated). This was the moment that I knew what kind of person she really was. She thought she could force someone to love her, and that if they didn’t, they deserved to be punished, no matter the cost to her sweet, beautiful children.

DB decided that the psychological effects of living with her in daily misery would detract from his ability to be a good father far more than not living in the same house with them, which I take as a testament to how unhappy he was. He also believed that engaging in a lengthy and acrimonious court battle to keep her in the state was not in the best interest of his children. He decided to go the peaceful route, and he is a cooperative and involved co-parent. He talks to them every day. He sees them as often as he can. When they are with him, he makes sure they brush their teeth and go to bed on time and use their nice voices. When they’re not, he misses them terribly.

Whenever she wants to slap him around, she says that he chose to be away from his children, which truly baffles me. He chose to cheat, but he never stopped loving and taking care of his children. He didn’t want her, but he will always want them. He did not choose me instead of his children. He is not with them because she took them. That was her choice. Not his, not mine, hers.

Look, she can be angry that he cheated, obviously. But I didn’t marry her; he did. I didn’t seduce him. She lost her husband a long time before he found me; she just didn’t know it yet. I didn’t lead him astray. He was already astray. She played a big part in that.

Supporting DB through this emotionally wrenching situation sometimes robs me of all objectivity and sends me into protective mama-bear mode. When I can calm down, I try to view her with compassion, because she was wronged. I know her life is harder now. Financially, she is fine (great, actually), but she is finding that moving thousands of miles away from the one person who would have provided her with regular time to herself was not such a great idea, after all. She chose to move off in a huff, but she didn’t choose to have her world yanked out from under her. She is doing the best she can. She is upset and confused and angry, and she has every right to be. She just doesn’t have the right to hold me responsible for it.