This article is a companion to “Why My Affair Recovery Has Stalled,” where we looked at a very common stumbling block couples healing from infidelity face after some time has passed: signals of impatience from the partner who was unfaithful. Specifically, impatience for the betrayed partner to put the affair behind them, to cease needing to talk about it, to “just move past it.”
Early remorse often gives way to frustration with the betrayed partner
It’s common for the partner who had the affair to be genuinely remorseful early on, and therefore to be unusually patient with their partner’s line of questioning and intense need for reassurance. For many couples, that dynamic shifts as time passes, eventually giving way to the unfaithful partner expressing annoyance or frustration with their mate’s healing process.
While this obstacle on the road to affair recovery is quite common, it is not inevitable. Momentary lapses of impatience are to be expected in every relationship that has been devastated by infidelity, but not every relationship goes through a protracted phase of frustration or intolerance.
A husband’s impatience re-traumatizes a betrayed wife
In the previous post related to this topic, Maricela discussed where she was in her healing journey one year after her husband’s affair. And though she’d made much progress since discovering Arturo had cheated, his impatience with her as the one-year mark drew near felt re-traumatizing to her.
What follows is Arturo’s perspective on where they are as a couple nearly 12 months after the affair ended.
To Maricela, Arturo’s behavior was fueled by frustration with how long it was taking her to heal from his betrayal. As we’ll see, there was more to it than that.
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I was terrified Mari would leave me when she found out about the affair (her sister left her husband when she discovered he’d cheated). I meant every word when I swore to her that I wanted to save our marriage.
I ended the affair right away. Mari and I went into counseling and I really tried to be there for my wife, even when we’d be up all night while she vacillated between calling me things I’d never dreamed I’d hear coming from her (and I’m not saying I didn’t deserve them) and asking questions that made me want to cringe with shame and run and hide.
But she had a right to know, and my shame felt like small potatoes compared to the depth of her pain.
Time, patience, and therapy brought much healing
And then, slowly, slowly, things felt better. It was so gradual that rather than have the thought “wow, things are good now,” one ordinary day I noticed that I was whistling. For a millisecond, I hadn’t known where the whistling was coming from! And then I realized I hadn’t been feeling so scared, so uncertain about the future, so burdened by my stupid choices that led to the affair. And Mari hadn’t asked me one of the cringe-inducing questions for a few weeks at least.
Another milestone in my eyes: my wife and I had been intimate again, in what felt like a healthy way — without it culminating in Mari crying — and we’d started doing things together more often. We took a class to learn how to make sushi. She started helping me learn French along with an app on my phone, devoting time each night to our lessons. We both laughed at my clumsy pronunciations. We planned a trip to Quebec.
Not only did I hope we’d made it through to the other side, I really believed we had.
So imagine my dismay when all that progress seemed to dissipate like a mirage.
Something reminded my wife of the affair and I was powerless to undo it
One night Mari didn’t come home from work and didn’t answer my increasingly frantic texts and calls until she was “good and ready.” She said she needed some space and was getting drinks with friends.
That night she was cold with me, aloof, and I was so confused. I asked, “Did I do something wrong?” and she laughed bitterly and said the fact that I could even ask that in that way showed how clueless I was.
When I pressed her for an explanation, saying I wouldn’t give up ’til she told me what was going on, she burst into tears and said: “I met her!”
“Who?” My heart was in my throat. I didn’t think she meant who I feared she meant. Mari knew the identity of the woman I had the affair with — when I promised her transparency in the trust-rebuilding process, I meant it — but she’d said she never wanted to be in that person’s actual presence.
Mari went on to tell me that she’d met — for the first time in person — the author whose novel she was translating into English. “And the author looked so much like ‘you-know-who’ that I felt queasy in the conference room. For a second I thought it was her, even though I knew that was impossible!”
I tried to comfort her by putting my hand on her shoulder, but she shrugged it off. Her voice came out in a hoarse whisper. “I loved that book before, but now I can only see you and her together when I work on it.”
But we’re past the pain of betrayal . . . aren’t we?
I tried to remind Mari of how far we’d come, how good we were doing, how it’s already been a whole year, how we could choose to move past it.
That made everything worse. For Mari, and then, for me.
Now that we’re not in that good place where we were just a couple of weeks ago, it’s opened the door to so much in me that I had wanted to keep pressed down.
Mari tells me I’m frustrated with how long it’s taking her to heal, but it’s not just that. She has no clue how frustrated I am with myself. She sees my impatience with her. And yes, maybe her fresh pain when I thought we were beyond that is the catalyst for what’s going on inside me at this moment. But the true frustration is me for me.
My wife keeps calling our current problem my “impatience,” and I guess it is, partly.
But it’s also:
Impatience fueled by fear/helplessness
My overriding fear is that we can’t put our relationship back together after all. I fear that my wife will always see me as someone she can’t trust.
Through therapy, I’ve come to realize the connection between my anxiety and underlying feelings of helplessness. I’m helpless to take away her pain. I’m helpless to undo the mistrust that I caused. I’m helpless to prevent the triggers — those psychological landmines that can ruin her day in an instant.
For me — and I would imagine for other men who’ve cheated — those feelings can feel totally overwhelming. And rather than sit with them, and feel even more intensely helpless (powerless to even trade my awful feelings for good ones!), I move into anger. And least that’s something that feels like doing.
Impatience fueled by guilt/remorse
I’m not saying I should be off the hook for guilt and remorse. Our counselor told us that guilt can be a good sign, can tell the person they’ve done something that doesn’t track with their moral compass and therefore they know they don’t want to do it again. So the guilt is me knowing I’m responsible for the pain of infidelity Mari has been coping with, and the remorse is me wishing I’d never strayed.
What’s surprising — and dismaying — is that the guilt and remorse can blindside me so powerfully, as if the affair happened last week instead of last year. And that makes me fear that I’ll never step out of guilt’s shadow, that it’ll always be dragging me down, even if I’ve proven myself to Mari — and to myself — for years and years.
Impatience fueled by shame
In counseling I learned that guilt is feeling bad about something you’ve done, whereas shame is feeling bad about something you are. It’s been hard for me to identify and admit that I’ve been ashamed, but for sure, I have been.
Before the affair, our marriage was good. Not that it would’ve condoned me cheating if it wasn’t, but even the unfaithful guys I’ve known who’ve said their wives or girlfriends clearly hated them at some point, or were so distant as to be unreachable, or they had their own affairs, wouldn’t have been able to so casually find something in how Mari related to me day after day that would make cheating understandable.
I think that’s where the shame comes in.
Mari and I built a solid marriage — not always easy, by any means, but it was home — and I came so close to wrecking it, just in the name of lust. To say I’m disgusted with myself is an understatement.
I can try to push that disgust aside, but when Mari loops back around to the same questions and needing the same reassurances she did early on, well, then I can’t hold back the shame any longer. I want to hide. Hide from myself and from her. And when I can’t, I lash out at myself and at her.
In all honesty, I don’t always know who I’m angry with. I realize it’s irrational to be angry with her, because she did not cause this. But in those moments, I can’t deny that the net of my anger sweeps her up too.
So yeah, I guess the only way she can read that is me being frustrated with “how long it’s taking to move past this.”
Impatience fueled by self-loathing
At the top of the pyramid of all the negative thoughts that keep assaulting me about myself is self-loathing. It’s like shame’s venomous, vengeful cousin. It makes me wonder how anyone could love me, especially someone as kind and sensitive as Mari. It even makes me doubt that her love for me is real.
When I feel unlovable, totally unworthy of love, I desperately want to escape those feelings. I don’t want to escape my wife, but I want to escape her reiteration of how my affair hurt her, because those feelings in her bring out the self-loathing in me that’s just beneath the surface.
Impatience fueled by mistrust
Mari wonders if she can trust me.
I gave her the password to my email, to my phone, for a while I was even keeping my phone on her nightstand at night so she’d know I wasn’t texting with anyone but my brother or my buddies.
Still, I know affairs aren’t just about the physical, about evidence. Which is why I’ve really tried to be transparent with Mari, to prove I’m trustworthy.
But what scares me most is the question that keeps swirling in my own head:
Am I trustworthy? Really trustworthy?
I mean, I know for sure I didn’t cheat on my wife before my affair last year. And I know for sure I haven’t cheated on her since I ended the affair. I haven’t even thought about cheating again.
But….
The fact that I did cheat in the first place, the fact that I brought so much pain in to the relationship, really scares and confuses me. If I did it once, will I do it again? Will I feel like two people again, one of whom I feel powerless to steer, but can only watch to see what he does next?
Maybe deep down I don’t feel I’m worthy of Mari’s trust, and that’s why I get so mad when I lose it. Because I don’t feel I deserved it in the first place.
And I wonder if I can trust myself.
Knowing all this — suspecting what’s beneath the surface for me at this later stage in our affair recovery — doesn’t make what we’re going through any easier. Maybe it’s a start, but if we can’t re-connect, the knowledge won’t matter one bit.
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A clinical psychologist with over twenty years’ experience, Dr. Nicastro offers online telecounseling sessions for individuals and couples. Click online therapy for a list of all the states where he conducts telecounseling.
