I Can’t Seem To Be Myself Around My Husband After His Affair

By: Katie Lersch:  Most people know that when attempting to build a healthy marriage, it’s best to be authentic.  When you plan to spend your life with someone, you want to be able to be your true self.  Imagine how exhausting it would be if you could never let your guard down.  How hard would it be to know that you could never be spontaneous or authentic without the fear of rejection?

When your marriage is going well, it is easier to be authentic.  But when you are facing serious marital challenges, like an affair, it can be much more difficult.  Because you can fear that your spouse is always watching, always evaluating, and always on the verge of rejecting or judging you.

Even if you are not the spouse who cheated and you know that you have done nothing wrong, you can still be on edge.  You can still feel limited to how much of your true self that you can show.  Someone might explain: “ever since I found out that my husband had been cheating on me, I have shut down. I have drawn into my self.  I feel as if I am only a shell of my former self.  I don’t want a divorce.  But I’m not sure if we will ever be happy again.  My husband is telling me that our marriage needs to change.  Therefore, I feel as if I am always walking on eggshells.  I feel as though I can’t let him see my worries about this.  I feel as if I have to act happy and optimistic all of the time even though that is not the way that I am feeling.  Honestly, before all of this happened, I was a genuinely happy and optimistic person.  But I no longer feel that way anymore.  And yet, I feel trapped in that persona because it is what my husband expects of me.  If I were able to be myself, I am sure that my concerns and my worry and my disappointment would show.  But of course this would be a major turn off to my husband, so I just have to hide how I really feel.  And this feels like a huge burden.”

I understand.  I felt some of what you are feeling.  When you’re limping through your marriage after an affair, it sort of feels like you are on display.  It feels as if you are always being evaluated and critiqued.  However, looking back on it now, I believe that my husband felt the same way.  So what we had were two people who were afraid and who were just sort of tip toeing around one another. We were both pretending.

It took me too long to realize that in order to have the kind of rebuilt marriage that I wanted, I was going to need to let my husband “see” me.  And I was going to have to be vulnerable.  And he was going to need to do the same thing. Why? Because you can’t have real intimacy without either of these things.  And true intimacy is necessary for a strong and secure marriage.

Sure, you can play it safe and keep yourself closed off, thinking that as long as you keep your true self locked away, then your husband won’t object to your fake, vanilla self.  But that takes a lot of work.  And the resulting marriage will be just as fake as your persona.

I learned it was best to be who you are – warts and all.  Does this mean that you walk around miserable and afraid all of the time?  No, that would be as exhausting as hiding your true self.  But it does mean that you want to be honest about any doubts or worries that keep cropping up.  That burden is too heavy to carry alone.  If you’re in counseling, simply bring it up at your sessions and leave it there at the end of the hour.  This frees you up to feel less burdened during the week.  If you are not in counseling, then discuss it at the set times you and your husband talk about your marriage.

I’d like to make one more point. I know that right now it feels as if your true self has changed.  You may believe that you have gone from an optimistic person to a pessimistic one.  I felt this way also.  But, it could be that you are only reacting to your circumstances.  It could be that the optimistic person is still in there and will come back out once she starts to heal.  I think that it’s a mistake to assume that you have lost the best parts of yourself because of one bump in the road (although the bump is admittedly a large one.)

I found that I started to get myself back as I started to heal.  And this didn’t always relate to my husband or my marriage.  I no longer carry that pessimism and that worry with me today.  But if I did, I would be honest about it.  Your spouse can’t work with you to address the issues if you aren’t honest about them.  And hiding your true self at the time is the enemy of intimacy, which is desperately needed for that security that we all want so desperately after an affair.   There’s more about how we got that intimacy back on my blog at http://surviving-the-affair.com