Dear Carolyn: Last month, I found out that my husband of four decades had an “emotional affair” for the past year. He is 60, and she is a 32-year-old at his workplace. After I questioned her frequent calls, he would always blow me off with one excuse or another. When our (grown) daughter questioned the appropriateness, he started deleting calls and text messages. I checked our bill and discovered hundreds of calls and text messages between them.
I printed out several bills and confronted him. He stated the we’re-just-friends excuse that cheating husbands often use. I was so full of rage that I became obsessed with checking the times/dates of calls and texts. This from a man who can barely stay on the phone with me (or his kids) for five minutes!
He has apologized many times, swears there was never anything “physical,” and says he was stupid for being flattered that a 32-year- old would spend time talking to him. He called the week I found out “the worst week of my life” — and I have to say, “Good!” Perhaps he was only upset he had been caught?
Since then he has called me a lot more, been more attentive, but I still do not trust him while he’s at work with her. He’s been true to his word that there were no more calls/texts after I found out. He keeps saying he wants to stay married and she is nothing more than a friend, but I am still full of anger that he would allow this intrusion into our marriage.
I have seen a therapist to figure out how to deal with this. Do you think I will ever be able to trust him again? How do I get over my anger?
— Anonymous
Dear Anonymous: I realize what I’m about to suggest is counter to everything your feelings are telling you right now, and is likely to offend your sense of justice: Please consider regarding your husband with sympathy.
I’m not minimizing his betrayal. In fact, he made a huge mistake that caused huge damage to a huge element of his life — you — and it’s in this very hugeness that the potential for sympathy lies. Why does someone starting his seventh decade of life and fifth decade of marriage, who is well-established in a highly respected profession, who has raised children and apparently hasn’t strayed before, abuse his cellphone like a teenager with a woman half his age?
Because he’s a person, and people are fools. We’re especially moronic when a little harmless-looking thrill ambles by after a long stretch of dependability, predictability and high performance in service of revered institutions.
Your anger is justified. You’ve served your institutions, too — where’s your juvenile fun? That’s why it’s so important for you to find a way to face it, break it down, and purge it from your home. Good counseling will help, since you can unload at will there and bring a more reasoned self to bear on your marriage.
His response — and, specifically, your reaction to it — defines this process. Do you believe him that he felt flattered then, feels stupid now, wants to stay married, and sees the extra attention toward you as show-his-love versus save-his-butt? If no, you go.
If yes, that’s the root system for trust. If your husband wants back in, then the question you need to answer is, what do you need — from him, from yourself — to forgive the weakness in him?
E-mail Carolyn at tellme@washpost.com, or chat with her online at noon Eastern time each Friday at .
