My Husband Is Having An Affair
“I suspected Tim was having an affair for along time,” snapped Ellen, 43, a petite redhead. Married 20 years, Ellen knows that, for the last few, she and Tim have been slipping away from each other. “He’s home less and less and seems pretty uninvolved with the girls - Kristy is 13 and Jenny is 9,” she says. “Whenever I try to talk to him, he barely gives me the time of day.”
Last week, she found incriminating evidence in his pocket - receipts from restaurants she’d never been to, a hotel she’d never set foot in and a telephone bill to an unfamiliar cellular number. “When I called, I recognized Denise’s voice - she’s an interior designer who rented the office space next to ours two years ago,” Ellen says. Denise is 30, recently divorced and has a 5-year-old son. Ellen immediately confronted Tim, who tearfully admitted he’d been seeing Denise for a year and a half. He even confessed that he might be in love with her.
“I feel like a fool,” Ellen admits. Though well aware that Tim was not as happy with their sex life as he used to be, “Is that reason to have an affair?” she asks.
Tim, 45, a tall, broad-shouldered man who towers over his wife, insists he’s still in love with Ellen. “That’s why I’m so confused about what I did and why I did it. Can you be in love with two women at the same time?”
Tim’s relationship with Denise “just happened,” he says. “She was going through a tough divorce and was lonely and worried about her son. I was literally the shoulder to cry on,” he explains. But when Denise came on to him, after lunch one day, Tim’s resistance cracked. “We’d meet whenever we could, usually at her apartment,” Tim says soberly. “I felt horribly guilty, yet I kept right on doing what I never thought I was capable of doing.”
Tim can’t put a handle on when things changed. “Ellen often says I don’t listen and I’m not unavailable. Maybe I’ve been too wrapped up in making the business a success,” he adds.
However, the fact that Ellen says no more times than she says yes probably plays a big part, too, Tim adds. “I’m a sexual guy. She’d tell me she just didn’t feel as interested as she used to. Well, I haven’t changed since the day we got married.”
Tim doesn’t want his marriage to end. “Ellen has always been my lover, my best friend, my anchor. But I’ve never been so mixed up in my whole life.”
Can you rebuild trust after an affair?
“Rebuilding trust after an affair is a slow and difficult process,” says Susan Heitler, Ph.D., a therapist in Denver, Colo. Still, marriages torn apart by infidelity can be saved - though it takes time, work and a deep commitment on the part of both partners to understand what made the marriage so vulnerable in the first place.
The trouble is Ellen is so wounded by her husband’s betrayal that a part of her wants to kick him out of the house and file for divorce. She’s also depressed by what she views as the hopelessness of her situation. Though Tim is remorseful, he’s also torn: New love is always more intense than old love, and the excitement of sex with a new partner is sometimes confused with love. Still, the reality that he was about to lose Ellen and his children hit Tim hard. He wanted to save his marriage - but he didn’t know how.
To rebuild trust, keep these points in mind:
1. Apologize, honesty and fully, for what you’ve done. For many victims of betrayal, actually hearing “I’m sorry,” can be a significant step. It shows that you willing to take a fair share of the responsibility for what went wrong.
2. Demonstrate real and significant changes in your behavior. To prove he was worthy of Ellen’s trust, Tim promised to let her know where he is at all times. He also makes sure she’s able to reach him at all time - either by phone or by pager.
3. Be honest with yourself about why you were unfaithful. Do you have a sense of yourself as the hero destined to rescue damsels in distress? Do you need to prove that you are attractive to women to boost your self-esteem? Or do you tend to think, “I want to do what I want to do.”
4. Don’t let ambivalence prevent you from working on your marriage. Right after an affair, neither you nor your partner will be 100 percent certain the marriage is worth saving. It takes time to reach that conclusion. The best you can do now: Make a conscious choice to try to get your relationship back on track.