Dear Amy: I do not believe that you truly agree with “Been There in Boston,” who wrote to you concerning her “emotional affair.” Your response lent support to her misguided idea that full disclosure and complete openness are not required in a secure, trusting relationship.
You could have given her some helpful guidance on how to rebuild trust in her relationship and address the full disclosure/openness issue. She is dead wrong to want to keep things private from her husband.
Full disclosure and complete openness are prerequisites to the relationship-rebuilding process. Without it you are rebuilding on sand instead of the bedrock of trust that is required.
I cannot begin to imagine the thousands of people who felt as if they had received a blow to the stomach. Nor can I imagine the thousands of people who might have been led into falsely believing that complete honesty and openness might not be required to rebuild a relationship (secrets are OK?).
– Disappointed in Conn.
Dear Disappointed: Thank you for writing. Other readers were similarly disappointed. “Been There in Boston” claimed that she and her husband were successfully healing their marriage with the help of a counselor; she disagreed with the idea that couples need to be completely transparent to heal from an affair. She wasn’t advocating keeping secrets or not being honest, but maintaining the privacy of her communications. And, at least according to her, her marriage was healing.
I believe that the wounded party should be able to dictate whatever he or she needs to recover from infidelity. If someone requires total transparency, then he or she should have it. Trust is a choice that successful partners eventually choose to make.
The best book I have ever read on this subject is “Not Just Friends,” by psychotherapist and researcher Shirley Glass with Jean Coppock Staeheli (2004, Free Press). Glass eloquently describes a marriage partnership as a series of walls and windows. A healthy couple builds a wall around their relationship, keeping it exclusive. During an affair, the offending partner opens a window and lets someone else in, eventually walling out the spouse.
Glass, by the way, makes a strong argument for complete transparency.
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