Many couples dealing with infidelity tell themselves that the hardest part of recovery is the period immediately following the discovery of the affair. While it’s true that the shock may be the worst the betrayed partner has ever felt — it can truly feel like everything you’ve counted on has been upended — many people are dismayed to discover that the pain doesn’t end when the shock wears off.
Indeed, how a couple approaches long-term healing is key to long-lasting affair recovery. And patience is one of the crucial elements in healing. In this article, we’ll be exploring the importance of patience in the partner who was unfaithful.
What follows is the experience of a wife a year out from the discovery of her husband’s affair. Although it is written and imagined by me, it is informed by my years working with couples hurting and healing from infidelity. So many of them have been surprised by this very common stumbling block further down the road of affair recovery.
Maricela discovered Arturo’s affair a year ago when a text she couldn’t make sense of came in while she was cleaning the family’s phones with disinfecting wipes. At first he denied it had anything to do with him — he swore it was a wrong number — but eventually he admitted he’d been having an affair with a coworker, vowed to end it immediately, and agreed to start couples counseling and try to save the marriage.
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I know every conflict in an intimate relationship has two sides, but lately I feel like the only side that matters in my marriage is my husband’s. As we approach the one-year mark of when I first discovered his affair, he seems to think I should be feeling “so much better” than I was a year ago.
It would be one thing if he’d keep those thoughts to himself, but lately he’s been impatient with me, asking “How many more times do we have to travel this road, Mari?” and “Will you ever get to a place where you can forgive and forget?”
Early on, Arturo was really supportive. Open and accessible. He was patient with the questions I had, the ones that I’m sure he didn’t love answering. Questions about the specifics of the affair. When, where, how long. “Did you do that with her?” “Did you say that to her?” “Did you take her there too?” He seemed genuinely remorseful and he was kind with me, gentle.
Affair recovery is a spiral, not a line
Our couples therapist explained that healing isn’t a line, but rather, it’s a spiral. Recovery doesn’t necessarily happen along a predictable timeline. I may get three steps ahead and then slip four steps behind when something triggered me. Arturo seemed to get that when we were in counseling — and accept it — but apparently there was an expiration date to his understanding.
“Mari,” he says so often, “I can’t apologize any more emphatically. I can’t keep doing this. It’s been a year. I can’t keep reassuring you that I love you and not her, that I won’t see her again. It’s all feeling too much for me now.”
But what he doesn’t seem to understand when he says those things in that exasperated way, with his eye on the calendar, is that his impatience itself is re-traumatizing me. The pain is still here, is still with me, even though it’s different than what it once was. Yes, it’s lighter and therefore easier to carry, and yes, sometimes it’s not with me at all and I can engage in life without thinking about it.
But then something will remind me — a song on the radio, a drive past a place he told me they’d rendezvous, a glimpse of a blouse in my closet I remember wearing in those early days — and then it comes crashing back. And Arturo’s exasperation, his rush to get me to be fully okay now, makes the crashing back feel all the more intolerable.
Basically, for better or worse, for true or false, his frustration with the duration of my personal affair recovery is sending me the following messages:
My healing process is flawed. The “should-bes” are coming in loud and clear, even without him uttering the word “should.” I should be further along the path toward “letting this all go.” I should be stronger and more secure nearly 12 months out. I should be able to trust him just like I used to before the affair.
But as close as we were before his infidelity, and as close as I’ve felt to him at times during the past year when he’s made himself vulnerable with me and when he’s felt open to my vulnerability, he can’t know what this feels like for me. He can’t fully put himself in my shoes. And therefore he shouldn’t be driving the process or setting deadlines for me.
Yes, I still love him, or I wouldn’t be working this hard to forgive him and continue our life together. But I don’t love how his frustration is hijacking my healing process and trying to make me think there’s a one-size-fits-all template for affair recovery and I’m not fitting inside it.
It’s dangerous to go to him with my feelings
When we first started couples counseling to heal from the infidelity (some days that feels like a lifetime ago, other days, like last week), I needed to learn the language of where I found myself. A translator by trade, words are important to me, and I found myself in so much pain and in such an unfamiliar world, that I didn’t know how to define myself anymore. That felt disorienting and frightening.
At first I thought of myself as a “victim” of my husband’s affair, but our therapist gently suggested that I try on “betrayed” if I needed a temporary label for myself. That felt better. Even though Arturo’s affair undoubtedly affected me, me seeing myself as a victim only made me feel far worse.
But lately, I am feeling like a victim . . . a victim to Arturo’s impatience. When I’m triggered now, I find myself shutting down in order to contain my hurt, fear, and anger. I no longer go to him with my feelings, since he doesn’t feel supportive of me any longer when I’m feeling them.
The pain of loneliness is mine to bear
In those very early days after my husband admitted he’d been cheating, I remember feeling so many things — anguish, wounding, fear, rage, confusion, devastation — but I don’t remember feeling especially lonely. I think that’s because Arturo really mobilized around me back then, he seemed to want to save the marriage. And in that I didn’t feel alone.
Now, with his impatience for me to “move past it already,” I feel more alone than ever. I’m not bringing all of myself to the relationship. I’m compartmentalizing, stuffing down parts of me that will trigger his impatience. So in a sense I feel like the real me is in the shadows somewhere, unseen and unwanted.
I feel like a hostage to his impatience
I’d be lying if I said I haven’t worried about Arturo cheating again. I wouldn’t be able to guess how many times that fear has popped into my head over the past year. Even with the news that his affair partner moved to another city a thousand miles away, I worry that maybe that “once-a-cheater, always-a-cheater” thing I’ve heard is true.
My fear is that if I don’t adjust my moods and behaviors to fit his frustration, he’ll become vulnerable to infidelity again. Like he’ll be so miserable at home that he’ll justify a new affair.
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Clearly for their healing journey to be jumpstarted again, Arturo needs to hold a space for his wife’s pain. But to simply tell him “you need to be patient” might be missing the mark for what is fueling his overt frustration. In a follow-up article, we’ll explore the underlying dynamics that are causing Arturo to shut down when Maricela needs him the most.
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Rich Nicastro, PhD is a clinical psychologist based in Austin, Texas. Dr. Nicastro has twenty-five years of experience working with individuals and couples, as well as offering psychodynamic supervision/consultation to other therapists.
He offers online individual and couples counseling (teletherapy) for residents of Texas.
**In addition to Texas, Dr. Nicastro is now offering teletherapy to people residing in Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, and Washington, DC.**
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