My Husband Won't Tell Me Details About His Affair
The repeat answer of "I don't recall" leaves a betrayed spouse fearing the worst.
Hi Lauren,
I have been following you daily and find encouragement and perspective in each of your posts. I found out two years again on Christmas that my husband was having an affair. I know it sounds like a Lifetime movie but it was anything but. Since then, it’s been constant gaslighting, stonewalling, and trying to decipher what is the truth. It took my husband a full two years to share certain details of the affair with me.
The intimate times they had occurred right under my nose, and at times in my own home. I always had a feeling something was off with this girl, but my husband had me so convinced that I was “crazy” for ever thinking something like that. He would repeatedly say that if I thought that he was capable of infidelity then I should divorce him.
I used to have reoccurring nightmares of him having an affair. I realize now it was my subconscious telling my conscience what it didn’t want to acknowledge. I am still at a point where there are details that do not add up. There are things she has stated that my husband did and said that are really hurting me. I want him to take full ownership of his actions and be 100% transparent with me.
Am I wrong to want to know the details? In his mind I know he had an affair and that should be enough. In my mind the details tell me the true nature of their relationship by understanding their interactions. I feel it necessary to note that we had a happy marriage. It truly rocked my world. I thought we were best friends. This female is 15 years younger than me, and it has really damaged my ego.
Do you encourage your patients to share the details? If my husband still will not be open with me is my marriage with saving? His go to line is “I do not remember”. To me that is a safe answer.
Sincerely,
Seeking Disclosure
Dear Seeking Disclosure,
The answer to your question “do you encourage your patients to share the details” is the perhaps unsatisfying “it depends.” Is full disclosure necessary and helpful? Not always. Sometimes details are best not known, because once you know something you can never un-know it, and the traumatic details may truly be too much to recover from when what you want is to be able to preserve the marriage. It’s a deeply personal and delicate balance to know how much truth is enough, and how much is too much or would be more harmful.
In your particular case, let’s hone in on the most important statements from your letter and unpack each:
“The details do not add up.”
If they don’t add up, then you’re left to assume that he’s lying to you or omitting truths that would make facts align. Are you able to live with the worst case scenario if the details that ‘don’t add up’ were to be what you fear they are? Without needing to actually tell you, you still can ask yourself what would you need to work through with your husband if the worst case scenario, the one he won’t disclose, were to be true.
When details don’t add up, and we’ve been gaslit in the past to conceal the affair, as you have, we have to make decisions that reflect a renewed trust in our own intuition — not that reflect the omissions or evasion of the person who previously gaslit us.
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