A Long Time Ago

Dear Reader: Did you ever read a story and not like the ending. Well, I did recently. Here is what I think is a better ending to a story about marital infidelity. Not much sex here – just trying to figure out how two people got their heads a little straighter after one of them is unfaithful.

It is always exciting to start a new case. I never know what to expect and I always hope for something unusual and different – something that is a challenge. I think I am a strong woman and I enjoy challenges. Unfortunately most cases that marriage counselors see are routine and repetitive. Over and over I have to listen to "she fucked another guy" or "he fucked another gal" and then the marriage starts that slow circle around the toilet bowl. I'm supposed to stop a flushed commode from flushing.

Well, maybe this couple would be different, but that was unlikely because the schedule book had the brief note "infidelity" under their names. As is my usual procedure I met first with both husband and wife to outline how our meetings would proceed.

"I'll meet with both of you tonight but starting next week I'll meet with you separately so I can understand your individual views. When I think I understand how each of you sees the situation, we can schedule some meetings where both of you participate together."

"Why do we have to meet separately?" The husband asked.

I smiled. "Because my experience has been that as soon as the husband says one thing the wife says he's wrong. And when the wife starts explaining something the husband says she's wrong and we end up with an argument. I want to hear how each of you sees your problem so I can guide your discussion."

I explained how we would proceed and emphasized how important it was to be truthful. Better to say nothing than to lie. They seemed to understand and then I asked questions about how long they had been married, their work, family, and so on.

By the end of the half hour session I had a good understanding of their situation. Thirty years of marriage! And a good marriage it would seem. That's unusual at this age. Infidelity usually develops much earlier, often when there are the usual routine hassles of childcare.

A week later the second session produced the shocker! I was right. Infidelity usually occurs early in a marriage after the glamour and sexual satisfaction of the first few years have worn off and a couple has to work at being married. And that's exactly when this couple's infidelity occurred.

In the seventh year of their marriage the wife had had a three-year affair starting right after their son's third birthday. But the husband did not discover the affair until he stumbled on a package of letters and photographs and keepsakes that the wife had hidden away.

He described the pain he felt as he read the letters, which gave explicit details of his wife's sexual relations with her lover. He became physically ill and it was clear to me that he was torn between his natural jealousy and the sick knowledge that for almost twenty years his wife had lived a lie.

The affair had ended, not because the wife or her lover wanted it to, but because the lover had been killed in a tragic accident. Hubby had learned every detail of their affair over many days while his wife was on vacation with friends. He had not confronted her until over a week after his discovery.

In my session with the wife I asked her the logical questions and her answers revealed a complete lack of understanding of what had happened to her. Theirs had been a happy marriage. They had experienced exciting sex during the first years of their marriage and when I asked for details she was explicit.

But, she could not explain what had prompted her to begin the affair. She seemed not to understand the vulnerability of a mother with routine household and childcare chores trying to hold down a job all at the same time. She admitted that sex with her husband had become routine.

Strangest of all, she stoutly maintained that she loved both her husband and her lover equally and gave each 100% when she was with them. Then she made a startling revelation without seeming to understand what she was saying.

"The sex I had with him was so exciting. We spent hours in bed trying all sorts of techniques and getting satisfaction in a lot of ways," she said. And then she proceeded to provide explicit details of their lovemaking.

This was almost exactly what she had said about her sex with her husband early in their marriage and I immediately shifted from her lover back to her husband and asked her to tell me again about their sex in their early years – the same question I had asked earlier. The answer I got was exactly what I expected. It was different!

"We have a wonderful marriage and we have sex several times a week. It is enjoyable to us both and it has been enjoyable for all of our marriage. We are very compatible sexually."

When talking about her lover, she seemed not to recall that fifteen minutes earlier she described sex with her husband in the same romantic way during their early years. What she was doing was clear. With her lover, she saw herself as a newly wed. With her husband she was a happy, settled, married lady. Of course she loved them both.

It was almost as if she saw her lover as the same man she married ten years earlier. But her lover's death froze him forever in time as her newly wed lover. She still saw him that way in her fantasy, even twenty years later, and she still loved him that way. That's why she'd kept the letters that she knew would probably destroy her marriage, if discovered.

I didn't want the session to end. That's unusual in this business – counselors are usually praying for clients to stop talking. I couldn't wait for the next session.

At my next session with the husband I explored the ways he was responding to the horrible revelations of his wife's betrayal. Understanding the mind demands careful listening for hidden clues and he gave me one such clue when I asked him to describe his feelings. The words of his suffering just flowed and flowed and then suddenly, buried in the middle of his ramblings, he said it.

"She said she was sorry she hurt me but she never said she was sorry."

He had learned something that I had detected early in my first interview with his wife. She was sorry her husband was hurt but she was not sorry for her betrayal – indeed she seemed to feel that her continued statements that she loved her husband were evidence that she had not betrayed him at all and had no reason to be sorry. Hubby had a vague understanding of this, but I wanted him to see it more explicitly.

"You mean she never said she was sorry about the affair?" I asked.

He nodded. "She never told me what I did to cause her to have an affair. Or even why she had the affair. She just said she fell in love with him but still loved me. That doesn't make sense! Does it?"

"It makes sense to her,' I said. "We need to find out why it seems so natural for her to believe that. And why she hasn't said she's sorry."

The husband was not the complex person in this relationship. He was a man in love who had been betrayed and who couldn't understand why his wife felt that she had done nothing wrong. He kept waiting for her to say she had done something terribly wrong and she was sorry and could he possibly forgive her. That was the usual starting place for cuckolded husbands. I already knew she was never going to say that, until she saw her actions as wrong. I pursued this question in our next session.

"Tell me again," I asked, "what made you begin having lunch regularly and then dinner with a strange man and never telling your husband about it. The sex had not begun then had it?"

She looked genuinely puzzled. "I don't really know. It was a long time ago. I just enjoyed being with him I guess."

A long time ago! She finds it hard to remember. Yet details of first oral sex, first anal sex, and a myriad other thing just poured out when I asked her. I would be guessing at this point but it was hard for me to avoid the thought that she was pursuing him to escape the absence of romance so common at this stage of a marriage. He offered excitement, affection, and the possibility of future sex.

I changed my approach. "Can you describe a typical day in your life when your son was three or four years old?"

Pay dirt! It was all there. Routine – routine – routine. It was in the tone of her voice and the repetitive nature of her descriptions of delivering her son to the childcare center and picking him up and getting to work. But when I asked how she fit her new friend into this busy day her whole demeanor changed – her voice – her facial expression – everything changed. The day became exciting when he was a part of it – even a small part like lunch.

Before our next session I spent an hour reviewing my notes, sitting at home and sipping a smooth, aged single malt. I thought I was almost ready to lead them in understanding at least a part of their problem.

Hubby was the easy one to understand – the typical wronged spouse. He was hurt and angry and his entire relationship with his wife was disturbed. Each time he looked at her he saw images of her legs wrapped around the back of her lover or kissing him or performing oral sex on him. When he reached out to touch her one of these dirty pictures flashed into his head. He was twenty years too late in thinking about it but his feelings were exactly the same as they would have been at the time.

Our problem was to see how he was going to work all this out in the end. Would he want to suffer with her in silence or suffer away from her in silence? It was his decision. Time would heal him of course but for a man in his fifties his options with another woman and another life were somewhat limited. And, clearly, I felt that he was not yet ready to decide if he wanted to try again.

But the loving wife! Ah she was the person that fascinated me. I confess that I had never seen such a person in my entire professional career. She felt not one shred of guilt for her actions, but an awesome level of concern for her husband's welfare. She had a complete lack of understanding of why he was hurting and a total inability to help him. She had the simple belief that telling him she had always loved him would, somehow, make it right, if she said it enough times.

I sat there staring at my conclusions. I might never understand her but I thought I understood their problems. Should I lead them to a conclusion or follow their lead? I would start out and we would see what developed.

I began the joint session the next day with a question. "So what happens now? Where do we go from here? Both of you are suffering terribly. You can't remain like this."

They looked at each other in silence. Finally she said, "I am suffering because my husband is feeling so much pain and I don't know how to help him get over that pain."

I looked at him. "How can she help you?"

He looked at his wife and asked the same question he had asked her so many times.

"We were happy. Why did you do it? Was it me?"

"Darling, it wasn't you. You didn't do a thing. You were a perfect husband. I loved you."

She had said this same thing over and over for several months now to me and to her husband.

"Then why did you start an affair?" He asked, plaintively.

"I fell in love with him." She said impatiently as she had said so many times before.

"But you went out with him for months before you had sex – before you fell in love with him," her husband said.

He was asking the same questions I had asked and I knew he would get the same answers. I had covered this ground many times and tried to pull out of her an understanding of her situation.

"I don't know. I just did," she said as though it were an answer.

She remained blind to the pressures placed on her loyalty by the routine tasks of an early marriage. I had covered this ground repeatedly. It was a frustrating session for me because I had hoped my discussions with them individually had prepared them for a better understanding. Instead it was as though I had accomplished nothing. I began to feel like a failure.

Get tough, I told myself. "It sounds to me like you're still in love with him. Are you?"

She looked at me angrily. "I loved him. I grieved when he died. I remember him with love. Yes I'm still in love with him."

"What would you two have done if he hadn't been killed? Would you have left your husband to go with your lover?" I was speaking in a strong, forceful voice on purpose.

She was getting mad at me now. "I would never have left my husband!"

"Then would you have your lover today – twenty years later?"

It hit her like a hammer. Her gaze shifted back and forth from me to her husband. I almost held my breath. Sometimes a single question can start a cascade.

"Would you?" I repeated harshly.

Finally she dropped her gaze and said, "I don't know. I just don't know."

It was the first time she broke into a human reaction. It was just as though a wall had come down. She got tears in her eyes and started to babble.

"He was so young and we were so happy. He made me feel young and free. He was like ... like ... "

She looked at her husband with love in her eyes. "Like my husband when he was younger."

Then she turned and looked at me. It was as though she remembered how I made her tell me this in our interviews.

She looked back at her husband. "Like you were darling. Only it was like when we first got married and had time together and had lots of sex together. And that's why I did it. I wanted to be free again and have sex again."

She turned to me. "I didn't want to work all the time and take care of the house and take care of my son and do my job at the hospital. I didn't want to be a married lady without love. I felt like I was getting old too fast."

I had been over all these things with her and I had thought in the interview that I had been wasting my time. It seemed I had not been. Points we had covered laboriously seemed now to make sense to her. Things she must have thought about in previous sessions seemed to bubble up to the surface.

Turning to her husband, she said, "I did it because you were not exciting any more. I loved you and our son and our house, but you were not exciting any more. I wanted a man who was exciting."

She was sobbing now but still in control.

I asked my question again. "If your lover had not been killed would you and he still be lovers today – twenty years later?"

She stared off into space for a moment. Finally she sighed deeply and said, "If he hadn't been killed we would have gone on. How much longer I don't know. But, I'm older now. I've tried not to think about it over the years. But, I'm wiser now – hard to believe but I am. I know now that he would have stopped being exciting. When your lover stops being exciting that's when the affair ends."

"So what does that mean?" I asked, sympathetically.

"It means I wasn't special. It means I wasn't in love like I wanted to believe. Like I kept on believing for twenty years, reading all those old letters. I was just a bored wife looking for excitement by fucking another guy when my husband got boring. That's not very special is it?"

I shook my head as she looked at me. "No it's pretty routine. I see it all the time."

"What do you tell your clients to do about it?" She asked.

"I tell them to start telling the truth," I said.

She looked at her husband. "I have never admitted this, even to myself. I didn't ever even think about it till I started these sessions. I'm sorry I wasn't stronger. I got bored with our life – all that routine. I was unfaithful to you because I was bored. You were a perfect husband. I loved you. You did nothing wrong. It was me. I didn't love him. I pretended. I just believed I did because if I didn't, it would make me a whore. And I didn't want to be a whore."

"But when I said I'd never have left you. I loved you. I loved our son. That's the truth. You have no reason to believe me but I hope you do. I kept those stupid letters because when I read them I could pretend to be special – pretend I was in love – not just a whore. But they always turned me on – maybe that's the reason I read and re-read them. Those letters were written by two silly lovers about sex to get long distance pleasure from reading about sex. They were not about love."

Then she looked at me. "All right Doctor. I told the truth. Now what?"

It was a better start than I expected, probably better than I deserved considering how I'd failed so long to get her to face what she had done. We had some sessions to do but they needed some time to digest this.

"Well," I said, "lets see where we are. We have a typical housewife who got bored with the routines of running a house and caring for a child and had an affair. We have a typical husband who found out and is pissed off and jealous. The barrier they face is that every time he tries to take her in his arms he gets dirty pictures in his head of her and her lover."

"She says she's sorry and her husband believes she is but that doesn't make the dirty pictures go away. If this happened twenty years ago there would be a child to worry about and money problems. But now there's no reason to stay together because of a child or money."

"There's nothing she can do about her disloyalty except say she's sorry. She can get rid of the dirty letters in the closet, but how can she get rid of the dirty pictures in her husband's head?"

I looked at hubby, "What do you have to say?"

He didn't smile, but almost. "I'm glad she's sorry. And I'm glad she didn't love him – not really – she just wanted to fuck him. But, I still see dirty pictures in my head."

I could hardly have expected a better result, considering what I started with. Maybe they should just percolate for a while.

"Why don't you two go home? Let nature take it course but don't get in a fight. Come back and see me in a month and let's see where you are. If you make any major decisions, please make an appointment to talk to me before you take any action. Any questions?"

They shook their heads no and I crossed my fingers as they walked out. I glanced at my schedule book. It said "Mr. and Mrs. Glenn Wilson – infidelity." Oh shit! Another one.