Infidelity Articles By Katie Lersch

By: Katie Lersch: I sometimes hear from folks who are very confused by all of their spouse’s questions and demands in regards to their affair. Often, their spouse is demanding to know the entire truth about the infidelity as well as all of the details. But when they try to comply and offer their spouse more information, all they get is a very angry reply.

I heard from a wife who said: “I had an affair with my old high school boyfriend about seven months ago. It was a huge mistake. I am so sorry for it. I am doing everything I possibly can to help my marriage and my husband to recover. However, even seven months later, my husband is constantly asking me questions about my affair. We have already gone over the basic details about how it started, why I did it, how I carried it out, and what I did with the other man. My answers don’t seem to satisfy my husband though. He constantly asks me for ‘the whole truth.’ I try my best to tell him what he has asked me. For example, the other day he asked me what was so special about the other man that I couldn’t let him go. I wasn’t sure how to answer this and I hesitated. At that point, my husband repeated his mantra of wanting to know the truth. So I told him that I’d always felt the other man understood me and that we had a special bond that only first love can give you. Well, my husband hasn’t spoken to me since. I feel like I’m caught in an impossible situation. He demands the truth from me. But when I give it, he gets so angry and then I know that I’ve hurt him even worse. Does a spouse mean it when they ask for the truth about the affair?”

These are very good questions. And I have a couple of insights that I can offer. As the spouse who was cheated on, I intimately understand what the faithful spouse wants to know. With that said, I hear from a lot of unfaithful spouses on my blog who are really struggling with this situation. It’s clear that offering up the wrong type of information in the wrong way can sometimes cause more problems than it solves and only brings about more pain that must be overcome. So in the following article, I’ll tell you my take on this and will offer some suggestions on how to offer the truth while still sparing your spouse some pain.

Your Spouse Wants To Feel Like You’re No Longer Being Deceptive: It’s probably a fair bet that while you were cheating or carrying on an affair, you weren’t completely honest with your spouse. This is one of the things that hurts the most. Often, it’s very painful to know that your spouse successfully fooled you and carried on with someone else while you thought that everything was fine.

So, it’s probably relatively easy to understand why they your spouse is demanding nothing but the truth right now. They have seen what type of damage and pain that lies can cause. So, they want to know that you are not going to continue to lie to them, no matter what the cost. They would rather be told the painful truth than to hear pretty lies. With that said, there are ways that you can tell the truth that  still allow your spouse some healing and some dignity. I will discuss this now.

Always Look For Ways To Be Truthful While Sparing Your Spouse Pain And Insecurity: I would never advocate lying to your spouse right now. Restoring the trust after infidelity can be quite difficult. So with every lie that you tell your spouse, you dig a deeper and deeper hole so that your spouse continues to doubt what you tell them, even when you believe that you’re being truthful.

That’s why it’s important that you do tell the truth. But at the same time, you can be careful to be as gentle as you can. Let’s take the above scenario as an example. The husband asked what was so special about the other man that the wife was willing to risk her marriage just to be with him. The wife tried to be brutally honest because this is what the husband said he wanted.

But, although her response was truthful, it was also very painful and it encouraged more insecurity. She told her husband that first love was essentially too special to overcome. Do you see how this might leave the husband worrying that she was going to eventually cheat again with the same man when she missed that “first love” feeling once again?

The better response might have been something like: “I will try to give you the most honest an answer that I can, but I honestly don’t completely understand why I was so impulsive that I put our marriage at risk. I think that part of it was that I was feeling nostalgic for my youth when I used to feel more carefree. I was chasing feelings of being understood and feeling special as a younger person. I should have turned to you to satisfy those needs but I didn’t because I felt like chasing my youth was silly. I was basically chasing a fantasy that had passed me by and it was stupid because no one person can give me back my youth. I understand this now and I won’t make this mistake again, but I want you to understand that it wasn’t about the other man.  It was about the memories and the feelings of youth that the man was associated with.  I hope that you can see the difference.”

Why Your Spouse Wants A Hopeful Version Of The Truth: To answer the original question, yes, your spouse wants to hear the truth. But they don’t want to hear details that are going to make them feel worse. You don’t want to tell them that you found the other person more attractive than them. You don’t want to place any blame on them. You don’t want to complain that they weren’t an understanding spouse so you had to get your needs elsewhere. You want to show them where you were wrong, not where they were wrong.

Always bring the answer back to yourself. For example, “I was feeling lonely and I should have approached you,” is a much better explanation than “I had to seek out someone else because you never have time for me.” Both statements express the same idea but the first places the blame on the cheating spouse (where it belongs.) And it shows that you take responsibility for your actions.

I admit that I put my husband in this situation after his affair.  I would demand the truth and then be furious when I got it.  He would then get defensive and we would lose any progress that we made.  It took a while for us to learn how to handle sharing information about the affair.  It wasn’t an intuitive skill, but we eventually found our way and save our marriage.  If it helps, you can read the whole story on my blog at http://surviving-the-affair.com

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