Dear Coleen
I’ve been with my husband for 15 years and we have one daughter. We met when we were 25 and got married eight years ago. Apart from the usual relationship ups and downs, I’ve always thought of us as happily married and thought the love between us was strong and not easily undermined.
However, I found out that he had a short-lived affair with a new colleague at his work.
I discovered it in the usual way people do these days – he was careless with his phone and I saw the texts.
We’ve talked a lot about what happened and why. He says since we had our daughter, who’s seven, he’s felt we’ve grown apart and taken each other for granted, and he was drawn in by this other woman because she made it obvious she liked him and paid him a lot of attention.
Here’s the thing – he’s done a lot of apologising and crying into his beer, but he acts as if this absolves him of any wrong-doing and I think he expects me to feel sorry for him!
It’s like he believes that saying sorry and providing an explanation means it’s all done and dusted, and we can just go back to normal.
I can’t – I feel like my heart’s been ripped out and everything I believed about our marriage was wrong.
Please advise.
Coleen says
Well, acknowledging what he did and expressing remorse is a start but, of course, it’s not enough. Being open about it now doesn’t take away the fact that he made the choice to have an affair and he also made the effort to hide it from you.
He’s betrayed you, he’s lied to you, and he’s broken your trust, so that takes a lot of work to come back from.
If you want to stay together, you have to accept it’s a process and it’ll take time.
You have to turn your focus to the relationship now and talk through why it was vulnerable.
As I’ve said many times in this column, an affair is often a symptom of a relationship that’s broken or struggling rather than being the actual cause of your problems.
So you have to be honest about that – you say you thought the marriage was strong and happy, but your husband obviously didn’t feel the same way. I think if he had been truly happy, he wouldn’t have got involved with this woman.
If you can’t talk to each other honestly, then think about relationship counselling.
But it’s not your job to make him feel better and relieve his guilt – he needs to own it and prove through his actions that you can trust him again.
