My Husband Had a Decades-Long Affair.

How do you move forward when an affair shadows two out of three decades of marriage?

Dear Lauren,

My husband and I have been married for 34 years and have three grown sons. 10 months ago it was revealed by my husband that he has been in a relationship with another woman for the past 23 years.

We have been to individual and group therapy. We both felt our marriage was a happy, successful one but something led my husband to go outside the marriage. (He also had two other brief affairs.) He is unable to articulate the how and the why and wants very much to reconcile. He is doing everything that you advise and what is expected of a spouse who has betrayed their spouse.

Sadly I am unable to equate the love in our marriage with his outside behavior. It does not align with what I perceive as love. I have searched high and low to find your response to an extremely LONG affair (most of our marriage) and/or anyone out there that has discovered their spouse living a dual life.

Sadly our family has been devastated, I experienced a heart attack three days after DD and feel emotionally paralyzed. Maybe more today than I did when I first learned of this deception. We are presently filing for divorce as I see no way out. Im so broken and would appreciate your help. Thank you in advance.

K.

K’s letter strikes at the heart of the ripple effect of an affair’s revelation in a marriage. It’s perhaps the most profound part — how the affair reaches back in time and robs us of our perceived past, in addition to our imagined future.

Affair discovery launches us into the instant, unexpected and gut-wrenching death and ending of our spouse as we knew them and our marriage as we knew it; replaced with confusion, disorientation, and destabilization. It begins the revisionist history of the life you thought you were living. What was real about what I believed, versus what was really going on? a betrayed spouse asks, catapulted into a space of endless hindsight inventory. For K, this hindsight inventory consumes 23 of her 34 years.

After affair discovery, as is true for all couples, there’s her work, AND there’s her husband’s work AND there’s the couple’s work. This week’s coaching response helps break down K’s work, explores why her marriage feels irreconcilable to her, and also seeks to help K resolve her fragmented past memories so that she can move forward with some hope for personal cohesion.

As most of you know, I lived a version of this story, and it led me to the work I do today. Helping other betrayed spouses through the immediate devastation of an affair, using all the tools I sourced myself in my own time of desperation, was the motivation behind creating "The Betrayed Spouse Survival Guide." This 6-page guide is packed with proven techniques to help you stabilize your life while navigating the initial crisis, from understanding your emotions to caring for your basic needs. It’s the first in a set of materials for Betrayed Spouses that includes the Gain + Loss Guide for Betrayed Spouses and From Survive to Thrive, my masterclass for Betrayed Spouses. These are the resources I wish I’d had so many years ago. And, I hope they can be a lifeline for you, now.

Also, please consider coming to my live Love Within mindfulness and meditation session this Thursday, January 30th. I’ll share with you how I harnessed the energy of love to heal my heart and truly change my life, inside and out.

Thank you for being a paid subscriber, I’m so grateful for your commitment to learning and growing together here. And, if you’re not yet a part of the Letters to Lauren subscriber community, I hope you’ll become one today. In addition to each full weekly coaching response sent right to your inbox, paid subscribers also gain access to all of the letter archives, and to the community chat where advice and support flows freely. Your subscription makes all of that possible!

Now, let’s dive in to help K find her path through this situation.