Infidelity Articles By Katie Lersch

By: Katie Lersch: Some people have ended their affair, but want to save their marriage.  They are now wondering how many details of the affair they should disclose. In fact, many don’t want to disclose any details about the affair (or even its very existence) because they know that all this is going to do is to cause pain.

Someone might explain: “I think my husband knows deep in his heart that I’ve been having an affair. He has asked me repeatedly and I have denied it. But I think he knows I’m lying. The thing is, I know he is going to want all of the details and it is the very details that are going to hurt my husband the worst. The other man is one of his very good friends who he trusts. And I’ve lied about taking trips with my girlfriends when I’ve been with this man. There are many details like this that I don’t want to tell my husband. Should I just continue to lie? Because if I don’t, the truth is going to hurt my husband and ruin my marriage.”

Lies Will Often Come To The Surface Anyway: These are tough questions. But I typically feel that outright lying will often come back to hurt everyone in the end because lies always seem to have a way of being exposed eventually.  The fact was, this wife’s husband already had strong suspicions about an affair. So, it might have been only a matter of time before he put some resources or time into finding out the truth. And when he pursued the existence of an affair, he was also going to find out the identify of the other man.

So, I believe that there are some details that are pretty much impossible to keep a secret. And when you become caught in lies, it just makes an already volatile situation that much worse. Trust is already a huge issue to overcome when you are trying to rebuild your marriage after an affair. But when you continue to lie to your spouse, then you erode the trust even more and you only make your problem worse.

Every Detail Doesn’t Always Need To Come Out: With these things said, I don’t always think it’s the best idea to tell every painful detail that is related to the affair. For example, your spouse probably doesn’t need to know the pet name you might have had for the other person or the gifts that you exchanged or the code words that were just between the two of you.  There’s a fine line between giving your spouse the truth that they deserve and then spilling those intimate details that don’t really do anything but hurt them more.

I do understand that many people want to spare their spouse the truth in order to spare them pain. But, when someone suspects that they are being cheated on, they are often unwilling to just drop the subject. They are often going to keep digging until they get the truth. So being able to keep or maintain this lie isn’t all that likely. I think that the existence of the cheating relationship and the identity of the other person isn’t often something that you can, or should, keep under wraps.

But the little intimate details that surround that relationship often don’t serve to do anything other than to hurt. To me,  there’s a difference between lying and just not volunteering information that hasn’t been requested of you. So to answer the question posed, I think that it’s rarely a good idea to outright lie to your spouse about an affair, even if your motivation is to spare your spouse pain. Because you will often get caught in your lies anyway and these lies are going to hurt your spouse anyway and erode the trust.

So while I wouldn’t blatantly lie, I do sometimes see the reasoning behind keeping some things to yourself. Some mental pictures that your spouse develops of you and the other person are going to be very hard to overcome. So if you can avoid giving them those details that will be so hard to forget (without lying to them,) then I don’t necessarily see a problem with that, as long as your motivation for these omissions is to spare pain rather than for your own gain.

I definitely would not have taken it well if my husband had continued to lie to me about the affair.  I respected him more because he was willing to tell me the truth.  However, I also know that he ommited some of the details.  This infuriated me at the time, but today, I understand his motivations and I’m somewhat glad I don’t have those details on which to dwell.  Because I dwelled on many things for a very long time.  At the end of the day, though, healing is much better than the dwelling.  If it helps, you can read about some of the things that helped me heal on my blog at http://surviving-the-affair.com

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