Infidelity Articles By Katie Lersch

By: Katie Lersch: Much of the time, I hear from people who are trying very hard to pull the details about the affair out of their cheating spouse. Often, this is very challenging. Because once the affair is found out, much of the time, the cheating spouse will clam up, either in an attempt to keep from hurting their spouse or in an attempt to lessen the impact of the affair. It’s pretty obvious as to why this happens.

Occasionally though, I hear from someone who has the opposite problem. Their spouse is blurting out details in a matter of fact, detached tone that has them quite confused.

An example is the wife who says: “it may be quite naive of me, but I never suspected that my husband was cheating on me. I did notice that he went to a certain bar all of the time, but I honestly thought he liked the food. Turns out, he was cheating on me with a waitress there. I have told him that I want all of the details. I expected him to balk at this. I expected that he would honestly be embarrassed to spill everything. But no, it has been just the opposite. He takes a deep breath and he just starts talking in this monotone voice. He talks as though he is talking about someone else and as though he is describing a scene in a novel or something. And then he recounts every details, from conversations to sexual encounters. He doesn’t show any emotions. He just says all of this in a very matter of fact way. What does this mean? Does this mean that he doesn’t care about hurting me? Does he not care how I receive this information? Is he proud of his exploits? I ask because when my best friend’s husband had an affair, it took him months and months to finally tell her everything. He didn’t want to hurt her and he didn’t want her to react to this hurt by divorcing her. ”

I know that this must be painful and confusing. But any answer that I give you is only going to be a theory. Only your husband knows his reasoning, but I think that a few things are possible here. I’ll go over some of them below to see if anything strikes a cord with you.

He May Just Want To Get The Details Over With. And The Matter Of Fact Delivery Is A Way To Mask His Emotion: Your husband may know that there is no around telling you the truth. He may know you well enough to know that you are going to accept nothing less than every detail, so he may have resigned himself to the fact that he may as well just get it over with.

And part of getting it over with is just coming out with it. But that is very difficult. Imagine just for a second if you were the one having to give all of the details. It is not easy. It’s common to become overly emotional because this is very embarrassing and shameful information. One way to get through it is to emotionally shut down. That is why you see the flat tone of voice and the matter of fact delivery.

Does this mean that he doesn’t care? Not necessarily. In fact, it could mean just the opposite. He may know that what he says is going to make you very emotional so he is holding his own emotions back for the fear of making things worse. Of course, I don’t know this for sure, but I think it could be possible.

Actions Are More Important Than His Verbal Delivery: Honestly, you and I could speculate all day. You probably aren’t going to know more about your husband’s intentions until a little time goes by. Quite honestly, you will often learn more about his motivations as you watch his behaviors. Words can easily be lies. But it’s very hard for him to lie with his behaviors .

A man who doesn’t want to hurt his wife ends the affair and then does what he needs to do in order to help her to move on in a healthy way. A man more concerned about himself becomes defensive, continues to be secretive, and pulls away from his wife when she needs his support the most.  It is pretty easy to tell the difference between the two by observing.

His delivery and the words that he uses aren’t as important as how he acts and what he does. His matter of fact tone is likely meant to just help him get through what he has to say. But the real deal will come when you see how he acts moving forward.

I know that his monotone words are hard to hear.  But there is some positive news here.  Many wives have to wait months and months to get to the truth.  You’ve already gotten that out of the way.  Now, you can start observing and healing.   You can read more about how I navigated life after my husband’s affair on my blog at http://surviving-the-affair.com

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