Question: I have discovered that my husband of 25 years has had an online and telephone relationship with another woman. He works away from home and what began as chat soon developed into sending explicit texts and making phone calls (not sexual, he says). While he is distraught and swears that it will never happen again, I am overwhelmed by the sense of betrayal. How can I rebuild my trust in him?
Answer: While your husband may well be telling the truth about the fact that he and another woman exchange sexually explicit texts but prefer to chat about the weather when they use the phone, I can understand why you might doubt the veracity of his story.
Whenever a person hides an intimate relationship from his partner he or she is being unfaithful. However, a recent survey by Divorce Magazine suggests that when it comes to infidelity gender differences apply. Sexual exchanges over the internet do not count as adultery according to 54 per cent of the men in its survey. I suspect that 100 per cent of those men would change their mind if they caught their wives logging on as “Sexy MILF looking for naughty fun”.
Do not underestimate the impact of your partner’s deceit. It can take up to two years to get over infidelity.
Research into the reactions of betrayed spouses shows that they resemble the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder — the most severely traumatised are those, like you, who had the greatest trust and were the most unsuspecting. No matter how penitent your husband is, in these early stages, expecting him to make you feel better will only make matters worse. You need to talk to a counsellor or a friend who can listen in a supportive and non-judgmental way. It is crucial that the person offers only comfort and avoids validating knee-jerk reactions because right now you are too emotional to make decisions that are in your best interest.
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It sounds as though your husband is prepared to abandon his affair and work at the marriage. That is important because unless both parties are equally committed marriage-guidance counselling is hopeless.
Rebuilding your trust in him will not be easy. First, you will need to identify his motivations because unless the underlying cause is addressed he is likely to do it again. You also need to be told the whole truth about what happened in the relationship. He may be reluctant to do this for fear of hurting you even more, but concealing the details will leave questions unanswered and that will prevent you moving on. During this process of unravelling it is possible that you will hear some harsh truths about the state of your marriage, but infidelity is not necessarily an indicator that a relationship is troubled.
Unfaithful partners will always argue that they were not getting enough from the marriage but it is often the case that they were not giving enough either.
Your husband does not sound like a philanderer, but the fact that he works away from home has given him the opportunity to stray and often that is all it takes. In the past 15 years the anonymity, disinhibition and accelerated intimacy that internet exchanges allow has created a crisis of “unintentional” infidelity that has now been fully commercialised.
There are even websites designed for married men and woman who want to play away from home. They find each other at the click of a mouse and, unsurprisingly, the number of divorces triggered by online affairs is now 33 per cent and rising.
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Several factors influence whether a couple can survive an affair, but the most important one is the quality of their relationship before it, because this determines their level of commitment to repairing things. Good communication is also important, as is a willingness to seek help in the form of individual (www.bacp.co.uk) and couple counselling (www.relate.org.uk).
The good news is that couples who survive infidelity often find that they develop a stronger relationship because they are forced to examine what went wrong with their relationship in the first place. I hope this helps in some small way.