Last year I began an affair with a man I’d met when we were in our late teens. Back then we’d had a fling, but were both getting ready to leave home to start work and uni, and the time wasn’t right for anything serious. Last year we reconnected, when he was 20 years into a marriage that he’d been miserable in for half that time (I wasn’t the first person he’d had an affair with).
His wife found out about us and their marriage is over for her now too. He’s moved in with me while they work their way through separating finances and assets – real estate is costly and hard to find here; a place of his own will take time to arrange.
This is all fine, except my life relationship of 25 years, which ended six years ago, started the same way and went through the same messiness of watching him separate from his wife. Reliving that with someone else and seeing the guilt, ruined friendships and financial loss (all the usual things when an affair is exposed) isn’t pleasant.
At times I feel I’ve learned nothing from past mistakes. The moments of deja vu can be overwhelming and exhausting. I know full well what’s still in front of both of them in separating out their lives; it doesn’t happen quickly. How can I survive his separation?
Eleanor says: Part of this, I think, is going to be finding space for that guilt. You mention seeing the guilt, watching the loss and separation, and wondering how you can survive – but not how to deal with the feelings of shame or guilt yourself.
I’d bet a lot of recrimination will be coming your way. You’ll face not only anger for this particular affair, but leftover anger from other people’s betrayals, of which you are now a reminder. Most everybody has an Other Woman story – even when it was an Other Man – and for a lot of people that story is one of the dramatically upsetting moments of their life.
Importantly: some of this recrimination will be unfair. People might act as though the cruelty here was entirely yours, not his. They might think they can extrapolate from this that you’re an irredeemable person, or that your relationship has nothing to it outside of giddy secrecy. A lot of this will be false; obvious hyperbole borne of anger.
But the truth is, as you probably feel a bit too keenly at times, there is a fair point at the heart of the anger. There was a version of this that involved less pain. Not necessarily none – nobody likes to be left. But the relationships didn’t need to overlap. The hurt of rejection didn’t need to be compounded by deceit, or the unfairness of keeping his wife in a relationship that he’d already left.
It will be important for both of you, as well as your relationship, to be able to tolerate something between the 10/10 recrimination of others and the 1/10 of no recrimination at all.
It’s a well-worn trope that we can’t move on from the bad things we’ve done if we stay at totalising shame. “I’m a horrible person”, “I don’t deserve love” – the emotional equivalents of collapsing on a couch with a cold compress at the head.
But it’s just as true that we can’t move on if we don’t allow a certain amount of critical self-evaluation.
So there may be some additional questions to ask here. Things like, how can you be respectful of this friendship circle? What can you do that might make the ex-wife’s life even marginally easier? How can you self-examine so this won’t happen again?
If you can’t make room for that guilt or the possibility of its legitimacy, you risk getting stuck in an unstable vacillation between total shame and total rejection of criticism. It will get harder and harder to ask important questions, both of yourselves and within the relationship.
The origins of your relationship might rear their head later on in ways you want to productively address. Relationships that begin in secrecy can have trust issues later. Or you might worry about whether he’s privately blaming you for the ordeal of the separation.
Conversations around these things can turn very ugly very quickly if you haven’t each processed some regret. If we can’t feel guilt without either trying to block it or hurtling straight to total self-doubt, all guilt-inducing questions can feel like attacks.
If you and your partner can get the jump on processing the guilt here – which means owning up to pain caused, not just getting away from the shame – that might turn this period from raw unpleasantness into a productive chance to change.
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