Can your marriage survive infidelity?

Lutheran, The, Mar 1999 by Nettleton, Pamela Hill

You can heal a broken heart

When Peggy asked her husband about that cellular phone bill with the mysterious phone number he called 11 times in one week, Rick blushed and then turned pale. Peggy's chest tightened, and she found it hard to breathe. Could this really be happening to her?

"I met somebody," said Rick, tears welling in his eyes. "But it's over. I'm sorry."

Does one night of passion automatically ruin 20 years of marriage?

This national debate, sparked by President Clinton's serial infidelities, asks whether marriages can survive infidelity. The surprising answer from both experts and couples who have lived through it is "yes."

Love, intimacy and even trust can be rebuilt after the devastation of infidelityand often into a better, stronger union. Though we might assume that an affair signals a call to a divorce lawyer, the opposite is true, claim therapists and experts.

"An affair doesn't mean the dissolution of the marriage," says Paul A. Tieman, a licensed marriage and family therapist and ELCA pastor on the staff of the Samaritan Institute in Wilmette, Ill., an ecumenical counseling center. "It can even be a signal that pulls people back together."

But "pulling together" may not be what you want to do the moment you discover your spouse has cheated.

"Murder was more my first impulse," Peggy confesses. "How could he have done this to me? To our children? To our life together? I was hurt. I was angry."

That initial fury is understandable, Tieman says. "This hurts, and it's easy to turn your partner into your enemy," he says. Instead of polarizing on opposite sides of the war zone, Tieman urges couples such as Peggy and Rick, whose names were changed for this article, to use the affair as a way to open a door to deeper intimacy.

"Rather than blaming each other, you have to understand the meaning of the affair," he says. Tieman calls affairs a sort of planned exit-sometimes temporary, sometime permanent-from a marriage.

"We all have `affairs,'" Tieman says. "A wife may have an 'affair' with her job. A husband may have an 'affair' with the television. These are temporary disconnections from the marriage that everyone takes once in a while. But a sexual affair is a catastrophic exit."

To heal, couples must work together to understand what was happening in their marriage before the affair. "Chances are, they were no longer meeting each other's needs," he says.

When that happens, a marriage can be ripe for an affair.

"Some couples can't talk and are afraid of conflict, so one of them will act out their problems with the marriage by having an affair," he says. "It's a nonverbal attempt to get attention."

Other couples drift into an affair after the children leave home. "We call these `empty nest affairs,'" Tieman says. "A couple is married 20 years, they haven't shared much in the bedroom for a long time, and this is their version of a midlife crisis."

Still others have addictive personalities. They are connected to one affair after the other, rather than to a relationship. "It's a way of filling an emptiness, of filling some inner pain," Tieman says. "They use sex as a tranquilizer to numb feelings of abandonment. These people don't change easily, and this kind of affair is hardest to heal."

Couples often want to believe that an affair was the problem, rather than a signal that another problem exists in the marriage.

"The couple has to understand that this is a longterm process," says L.W. McCallum, professor of family life at Augustana College, Rock Island, Ill. "It won't take just weeks or months or even a year. Men, who are more often the transgressors, are often ready for this to be done and over with: `Let's get back to normal life, joking with each other and having sex again.' It takes longer for the woman. She has to know he has recommitted himself to her."

Healing is possible, and even probable, say experts like Tieman. For Peggy and Rick, repeated visits with a marriage and family therapist helped heal the hurt and begin the reconstruction of their marriage. In therapy, Rick felt safe enough to let Peggy confront him with her hurt feelings. As Peggy's anger eased, she could explore with Rick the places in their marriage where they could build closer connections.

"It's not perfect yet," Peggy says. "But we're better friends now that we're more honest. And we have a plan for making our marriage better."

McCallum suggests a somewhat unromantic way of looking at the long-term value of commitment: "Treat marriage like the stock market. It goes up and down. You don't bail when it takes a plunge. You know it will come back."

Tieman says, "We can get hung up on moral judgment until the cows come home. Let's not do that. We're human, we're not perfect. We make mistakes, but we are still lovable."