Affairs and Blame

Man, do we LOVE that word.

Photo by Slim Emcee on Unsplash

I once received this comment on a piece of mine:

My problem is explaining why someone cheats in a neglected or sexless marriage can start to sound like excusing it. Now, I can see how repeated dismissal and deliberate emotional distance may make an affair feel understandable but understandable isn’t the same thing as justified. And a great number of people are of the firm opinion that cheating is always a separate breach regardless of the context, anyway.

Hard marriages create pressure but the decision to cheat is still a separate choice and we can argue that once we blur that line, we inevitably remove responsibility from the person who crossed it.

As comments go, this one is actually pretty reasonable. No name-calling or rotten egg-throwing, perfectly reasonable points.

And yet, as Meaghan Ward points out, everyone wants to punish the other woman — no one wants to ask why he had an affair.

The fact is, no matter how much we want to point our finger at some guilty party, when there are two (or more, in some cases) relationships going on at one time, and one or more parties are being acted for and lied to, mistakes were made by all. If we want to assign fault, there is some to go around for everyone.

It does make people feel better, when we are angry, disillusioned, disoriented, hurt, scared for the kids, and terrified for our futures, to point at someone and scream, You did this to me!

And, I was owed better!

Every stunned and spellbound onlooker wants to do the same, because instantly we visualize ourselves as the injured party in our own worst nightmare: What if my husband or wife cheated?

Human beings seem completely incapable of holding any kind of complexity in their minds. Everything must be at one extreme or the other. If obesity is bad, then an Ariana Grande level of skinniness must be the extreme of good. If socialism is communism and communism is bad (a level of ignorance that is staggering in itself), then we have to go all the way into Trumpism because the extreme opposite of bad must be the only thing that’s good.

And heaven knows, we must never, ever, ever “blame” the devasted victim who finds out their husband or wife was sleeping with someone else. So we must vilify the other two parties to the same extreme that the spouse must be prescribed tranquilizers so she can sleep at night after the stunning shock of betrayal.

We humans simply can’t handle anything else.

Yet the most basic facts of the extramarital affair run as follows:

1. Somebody was unhappy.

2. Someone else missed it.

3. And two somebodies took advantage of that.

If we want to understand what happened, we have to ask three questions, not just one.

But the only question we want to believe has any merit is the one implied by the third fact. Why did those two people take advantage of the first one?

Yet, that will never tell you The Whole Story.

And without The Whole Story, all parties involved are likely to repeat the same situation in the future.

1. Why was the straying person unhappy enough to cheat?

Sometimes, this person experienced a moment of weakness in an otherwise happy yet humdrum marriage.

Sometimes, this person is an addict of some sort. Addicted to porn, addicted to adrenaline, addicted to adventure and chase and risk. Some of these people have pathologic issues with their ability to feel empathy for their spouse, their kids, and the “other” person.

Sometimes, this person is a caregiver to an ill spouse who cannot be a spouse anymore in the true sense of the word.

And sometimes, there’s a deep distance in the marriage, with longstanding unhappiness the straying spouse finally learned to just shut up about.

If you’re the betrayed spouse, and you picked an addictive personality, especially one who cannot feel empathy, you had better figure out how the fuck you missed that when deciding to marry this person.

Otherwise, you could very well end up reeling from your third cheating spouse and just chalk it up to “all men” or “all women.” I see this attitude a lot, and it is unfortunate.

Many people see a therapist write that “some people who cheat actually have happy marriages at home,” and their minds jump right to: “Esther Perel says that all people who cheat are really happy at home, so nothing is wrong in the marriages of people who cheat!” and “Anybody who says different doesn’t really know what they’re talking about,” and, “Of course he’s lying! They’re all really still having sex with their wives!”

This is a great way to discount everything cheaters themselves say about their relationships and the reason they cheated. All cheaters are liars. Just don’t listen to anything they say.

But we do that at our peril. Accept that without thinking, and you could throw away a marriage that had potential, and hurt children who didn’t have to go through their parents’ divorce.

Many people see a therapist write that “some people who cheat have addiction issues and some of these people have problems feeling empathy for others,” and their minds jump right to: “Dr. Psych Mom says that all people who cheat are sex addicts and abusers!”

Again, same thing. Accept that without thinking, and you could throw away a marriage that had potential, and hurt children who didn’t have to go through their parents’ divorce.

What I’m trying to say, here, people, is that affairs require thought.

Deep, complex, insightful thought.

And blame is the opposite of thought.

2. Why did the person who missed the unhappiness of the cheater, miss the unhappiness of the cheater?

Sometimes, it is because that person was utterly determined to cheat, and utterly determined not to get caught. I’ve read about a guy who put a GPS on his wife’s car.

Now, that’s dedication. That guy probably falls into the addict, low empathy, and abuse categories simultaneously.

But that doesn’t mean all cheaters do.

That would be simplistic and jumping to conclusions, and affairs require thought.

Sometimes, a person who cheats has been unhappy for a long time. They’ve brought problems to the spouse … and brought problems to the spouse … and brought problems to the spouse.

Or perhaps they don’t. Some people just withdraw in silence. This is the kind of marital deterioration Becky Whetstone Cheairs writes about here.

If you had a non-talking spouse, that’s easy to miss. Yet, somehow, everyone confronted with a “sudden” divorce or the “sudden” revelation of an affair claims to have been the perfect spouse, had the perfect marriage.

“This person just freaked out on me and went crazy all of a sudden!” The series of pieces on Medium written by The Adulteree details exactly that situation.

But how, how, how many pieces have I read by people who cheated — and by people who divorced! — detailing the many, many, many attempts they made to reach a tone-deaf spouse to beg them to listen to how unhappy they were and what they needed to stay in the marriage?

The people who announced a “sudden” divorce finally made the hard decision that a divorce was worth being free of that relationship.

The ones who cheated went, “Oh, the children, the children!” or, “I can’t survive on my own!” or, “I am afraid of divorce, I just can’t face it!”

And then, desperately lonely and sad, and also very angry at their spouse, they made the decision to outsource sex and emotional closeness somewhere else.

Did you miss any of that?

Come on, be honest. Did you miss any of that? Just didn’t want to hear it and pooh-poohed it off?

If you have forced your spouse to outsource sex and emotional closeness in your marriage, especially if they were coming to you with problems and especially if they have asked you for marriage counseling, you do not get to outsource all the blame.

Because those who do are essentially saying that once the ring is on, their spouse is obligated to be there doing whatever you want them being there doing, no matter how you treat them, and that is not okay.

Actions have consequences, and showing your spouse that you don’t care about their needs and feelings has some pretty big ones. One of those consequences might be an affair.

You can put it on them all you want that they should have divorced you instead … but you wouldn’t have been happy with that, either. And those spouses who are completely deaf to their cheater— and they do exist!

Well, that cheater only had two choices. When they can’t stomach divorce, there’s only one left.

3. As for the third party, they’d better look at the reasons they chose to take advantage of a married couple’s distress, otherwise they could throw ten years of their life away. (As someone who did that over a stupid website lurker for ten years, I know whereof I speak.)

The real problem with blame is this:

We can go around and around with blame and who is most at fault, and humanity has done that for centuries, but ultimately the only part of the problems that happened that we can do anything at all about is that section of the problems we own.

We can’t do anything about the people who chose to cheat except wise up and pick better next time.

That next time could be a far better marriage with our old spouse, when we’ve both done the work, or with a new and better spouse, if the betrayed does the work after leaving the cheater. But it’s wise to use our heads when it comes time to make that decision.

And that is why affairs require thought. Not blame.