Dear Sugar,
I’m twenty-nine-year-old woman who is engaged to be married to a man I’ve been with for about two years (we’ve lived together for one). I’m very close to my sister.
She’s much older than me (fifty-three) and she’s technically my “half” sister (we share a father who had one marriage very young, another quite old). My sister and I have always been close, but because of our age difference she’s been more like an aunt to me, though over the past couple of years our relationship has shifted and we’ve become more like equals. Recently, we went on a weekend trip together, just the two of us, and I learned things about her life that make me feel…I don’t even know what the word is, Sugar. Sad? Uncomfortable? Angry?
Disappointed? A mix of all four. That’s the reason I’m writing to you.
My sister has been married for twenty-five years. I love my brother-in-law almost as much as I love my sister. I’ve always considered them to be my “role model couple.” They are still in love after all these years and still best friends. Everyone who knows them, including me, thinks they’re the perfect couple. They are proof to me that happy marriages are possible. Or at least, they were.
You see, what happened is that while I was away with my sister I asked her what the “secret to marriage” was and during our long talk about it, she revealed things that surprised and upset me. She said while it’s true she and my brother-in-law are happy to be married to each other, there were several times over the years she doubted they’d make it. She confided that both she and my brother-in-law have cheated on each other. Several years ago, my brother-in-law had a full-blown affair that lasted a few months and at another point my sister had a brief, “technically unconsummated fling” that she opted not to tell her husband about (she figured why hurt him when she’d “learned her lesson” and wasn’t going to break up her marriage over it). Together, they eventually repaired these breaches, but it wasn’t easy.
I know they’ve been happy too. They’ve raised two kids together, traveled, and shared many interests. It isn’t as if everything I’ve seen in them is a façade. I understand that. But I can’t help but admit my picture of them has changed and I’m having a hard time with that, as I plan to have them walk me down the aisle at my wedding. I know this might sound naïve and maybe judgmental, but I’m shaken and bummed and now I don’t know if people who cheated should play such a big role in my wedding.
I know couples have to work on their relationships, but my position on infidelity is that it’s a deal killer. My fiancé and I have agreed if one of us ever cheated on the other it would be automatically over between us, no conversation required. When I told my sister about this she actually laughed and said we were being “too black and white,” but, Sugar, I don’t want to think that in twenty-five years I’ll be saying that there were times I didn’t think my husband and I would make it. I want healthy love.
From reading your column, I know you’re married and I wonder what you think. It seems to me that you and Mr. Sugar are a perfect couple too. What’s the secret to a good marriage? Have there been times you didn’t believe your relationship would make it? Isn’t infidelity a deal killer? Can my sister and brother-in-law still be my role model couple now that I know they’ve failed to keep their vows at least at some points along the way? Should they walk me down the aisle? Why do I feel so let down? My heart feels heavy with the fear that marriage can’t work for anyone if it can’t work for them. Is marriage this horribly complex thing for which I’m ill prepared? Am I being stupid to ask why two people can’t just love each other?
I’d be grateful if you’d answer me soon. My wedding is at the end of August.
Signed,
Happily Ever After
Dear Happily Ever After,
One day about a year after Mr. Sugar and I moved in together, a woman called our house and asked to speak to Mr. Sugar. He wasn’t home, I told her. Could I take a message? She hesitated in a way that made my heart beat faster than it had any right to. When she finally said her name, I knew who she was, though I’d never met her. She lived in a city thousands of miles away, where Mr. Sugar occasionally went to work. They weren’t exactly friends, he’d told me when I’d inquired about her a few weeks before, after I’d found a postcard from her to him in our mailbox. Acquaintance was a better word, he’d said. Cool, I’d replied.
And yet as I held the phone, I got a funny feeling, in spite of my internal scoldings that I had no reason to feel funny. That Mr. Sugar was crazy in love with me was entirely apparent, both to me and to everyone who knew us, and I was likewise crazy in love with him. We were a “perfect couple.” So happy. So meant to be together. So utterly in love. Two people who leapt from the same pond to miraculously swim down parallel streams. I was the only woman he’d ever called the one. And who was she? She was just a woman who sent him a postcard.
So I surprised even myself when, that afternoon as I held the phone, I asked in my gentlest, most neutral voice, while everything inside of me clanged, if she knew who I was.
“Yes,” she replied. “You’re Sugar. Mr. Sugar’s girlfriend.”
“Right,” I said. “And this is going to seem odd, but I’m wondering about something. Have you slept with Mr. Sugar?”
“Yes,” she said in a snap. He’d come to her apartment the month before, when he’d been in town, she informed me. They had an “intense sexual attraction,” she said with a breathy puff of pleasure. She was sorry if that hurt me.
“Thank you,” I replied and I meant it.
When I hung up the phone, I remember very vividly staggering around the room as if someone had shot me in the heart with an arrow that would forever be stuck in my chest.
Mr. Sugar and I hardly owned anything then. In our living room there was nothing but two ratty, matching couches we’d been given as a hand-me-down, each one lining an opposite wall. We referred to them as the dueling couches because they sat in an eternal face off, the only things in the room. One of our favorite things to do was recline on the dueling couches—him on one, me on the other—for hours on end. Sometimes we’d read silently to ourselves, but more often, we’d read out loud to each other, whole books whose titles still make my heart swoon, so powerfully do they remind me of the tender intensity between us in those first years of our love: Charlotte’s Web, Cathedral and Other Stories, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke.
All of that was a pile of shit now, I realized as I collapsed onto one of the dueling couches. By going off and fucking the woman who sent him a postcard and then not telling me about it, Mr. Sugar had ruined everything. My trust. Our innocence. My magical sense of myself as the only woman he could possibly desire. The pure and unassailable nature of our perfect coupledom. I was shattered and furious, but most of all I was shocked. How could the man who’d meticulously pried the Made in Argentina sticker off the bottom of the bathroom sink and used it to make a card for me have done this? The one who said you don’t have to be broken for me?
When he walked in the door an hour later and I told him what I knew, he crumpled onto the dueling couch opposite me and we had the duel of our lives.
I didn’t think we’d survive it. I was pretty sure to do so would be kind of sick. I wasn’t the sort of person who took crap from men and I wasn’t about to begin doing so now. I loved Mr. Sugar, but he could sincerely go and fuck himself. I’d been true and faithful to him, and in return, he’d broken the deal. The deal was killed. Even being in the same room with him felt humiliating to me.
But there I was, nonetheless, crying and yelling while he cried and apologized.
I told him it was over. He begged me to stay. I told him he was a lying, selfish bastard. He agreed that’s exactly what he was.
We talked and talked and talked and talked and after an hour or so my rage and sorrow subsided enough that I went silent and listened while he told me everything: exactly how it went down with the woman who sent him the postcard; what I meant to him and what the woman he’d slept with meant; how and why he loved me; how he’d never been faithful to any woman in all his life, but how deeply he wanted to be faithful to me, even though he’d already failed at that; how he knew his problems with sex and women and intimacy and trust and secrets were bigger than this one transgression and rooted in his past; how he’d do everything in his power to understand his problems so he could change and grow and become the partner he wanted to be; how knowing me had made him believe he was capable of that, of loving me better, if only I would give him another chance.
As I listened to him talk, I alternated between sympathizing with him and wanting to punch him in the mouth. He was a jackass, but I loved him dearly. And the fact was, I related to what he said. I understood his explanations, infuriating as they were. I’d been a jackass too, given to failings of my own that hadn’t manifested themselves in this relationship yet. When he said he had sex with the woman who sent him the postcard because he got a little bit drunk and wanted to have sex and it didn’t have anything to do with me, even though of course it ultimately very much did, I knew what he meant. I’d had that sort of sex too. When he looked me in the eye and told me he was sorrier than a person has ever been and he loved me so much he didn’t even know how to say it, I knew he was telling me a truer truth than he’d ever told anyone.
I’m going to guess this is the sort of crossroads your own personal perfect role model couple was at a few times in their incredibly successful and loving decades-long-and-still-going-strong relationship, Happily Ever After. And I’m going to guess if you manage to live happily ever after with your honey you’re going to be there a time or two as well, whether the precise issue be infidelity or not.
This isn’t a spotless life. There is much ahead, my immaculate little peach. And there is no way to say it other than to say it: marriage is indeed this horribly complex thing for which you appear to be ill prepared and about which you seem to be utterly naïve.
That’s okay. A lot of people are. You can learn along the way.
A good place to start would be to let fall your notions about “perfect couples.” It’s really such an impossible thing to either perceive honestly in others or live up to when others believe it about us. It does nothing but box some people in and shut other people out and it ultimately makes just about everyone feel like shit. A perfect couple is a wholly private thing. No one but the two people in the perfect relationship know for certain whether they’re in one. Its only defining quality is that it’s composed of two people who feel perfectly right about sharing their lives with each other, even during the hard times.
I think that’s what your sister was getting at when she revealed her relationship struggles in response to your question about the “secret to marriage,” sweet pea. She wasn’t trying to bum you out. She was actually trying to tell you the secret. In allowing you a more intimate view of her much-touted but flawed marriage, your sister was attempting to show you what a real perfect couple looks like: happy, humane, and occasionally all fucked up. I can’t imagine anyone more fitting to walk you down the aisle on your wedding day than your sister and her husband, two people who’ve kept their love and friendship alive for more than twenty-five years. That you’re doubting this after learning not all of those years were easy, tells me there’s something deeper at work here that has nothing to do with their marriage and everything to do with your own insecurities and fears.
You appear to be focused on infidelity as the “deal-killer” that you believe would compel you to “automatically” dissolve your own future marriage, and that’s fair enough. I understand the icky place in your gut where that impulse lives. There is probably nothing more hurtful and threatening than one partner breaking from an agreed-upon monogamous bond. A pre-emptive ultimatum against that allows at least the sense of control. But it’s a false sense.
Painful as it is, there’s nothing more common in long-term relationships than infidelity in its various versions (cheated, pretty much cheated, cheated a teeny bit but it probably doesn’t quite count, came extremely close to cheating, want to cheat, wondering about what it would be like to cheat, is flirting over email technically even cheating? etc). The letters in my inbox, the stories of many of my friends, and my own life are a testament to that. I’m not suggesting everyone cheats, of course, and I sincerely hope that you and your husband will never have to confront this issue. But if you really want to live happily ever after, if you honestly want to know what the secret to sustaining a lifelong “healthy love” is, it would be a good idea to openly grapple with some of the most common challenges of doing so, rather than pretending that you have the power to shut them down by making advance threats about walking out, “no conversation required,” the moment a transgression occurs.
This will require a rethink about your own dark capacities, as well as those of your future husband, and the members of various couples you admire. Most people don’t cheat because they’re cheaters. They cheat because they are people. They are driven by hunger or for the experience of someone being hungry once more for them. They find themselves in friendships that take an unintended turn or they seek them out because they’re horny or drunk or damaged from all the stuff they didn’t get when they were kids. There is love. There is lust. There is opportunity. There is alcohol. And youth. And middle age. And twelve-day-long writers’ conferences in rustically genteel settings that give one the impression that the world one left no longer exists. There is loneliness and boredom and sorrow and weakness and self-destruction and idiocy and arrogance and romance and ego and nostalgia and power and need. There is the compelling temptation of intimacies with someone other than the person with whom one is most intimate.
Which is a complicated way of saying, it’s a long damn life, Happily Ever After. And people get mucked up in it from time to time. Even the people we marry. Even us. You don’t know what it is you’ll get mucked up in yet, but if you’re lucky, and if you and your fiancé really are right for each other, and if the two of you build a marriage that lasts a lifetime, you’re probably going to get mucked up in a few things along the way. This is scary, but you’ll be okay. Sometimes the thing you fear the most in your relationship turns out to be the thing that brings you and your partner to a deeper place of understanding and intimacy.
That’s what happened to Mr. Sugar and me a couple of years into our relationship, when I learned of his infidelity, and told him to go fuck himself, and then took him back. My decision to stay and work it out with him in the aftermath of that betrayal is way, way far up on the list of the best decisions of my life.
And I’m not just grateful that I decided to stay. I’m grateful it happened. It took me years to allow that, but it’s true. That Mr. Sugar cheated on me with the woman who sent him a postcard made us a better couple. It exposed a wound that Mr. Sugar finally, in the course of his relationship with me, opted to heal. It opened a conversation about sex and desire and commitment that we’re still having. And it gave us resources to draw upon when we faced other challenges later on. The truth is, for all the sweet purity of our early love, we weren’t ready for each other in that time during which we loved each other most sweetly. The woman who sent him the postcard pushed us down a path where we made ourselves ready, not to be a perfect couple, but to be a couple who knows how to have a duel when a duel needs to be had and emerge from it, hand-in-hand.
I hope that’s what you get too, Happily Ever After. A bit of sully in your sweet. Not perfection, but real love. Not what you imagine, but what you’d never dream.
Yours,
Sugar
119 responses
As always, very wise advice, Sugar. I, probably, once felt the same way Happily Ever After does, but life along the way has shown that the sully and the sweet do coexist very well. And that’s the way of it.
Brave and realistic advice, Sugar.
Wedding is a process, whether one actually does the legal stuff or not. It’s all about knowing this other, wonderful, mysterious alien being and investing in an unknown, unmappable, exciting, and scarily foolish enterprise. For better or for worse. That is, not just when everything is rosy and beautiful, but also when it’s been raining for weeks, there’s nothing in the bank and the cupboards are empty. It’s the hard times that prove the value of the relationship. Some couples part when things get tough. Some are cemented together in deeper, better ways.
No one should put up with anything and everything just on principle. That’s the fast-track to being abused. But wisdom, like you and Mr. Sugar have, makes all the difference.
NAIL. ON. THE. HEAD.
Is it strange that this article feels like one of the most romantic pieces of writing I’ve ever read in my life? Scarlet and Rhett, Darcy and Elizabeth, Benedick and Beatrice romantic? Five, three, even two years ago, I think I would have been horrified to realise that ‘the perfect couple’ of Sugar and Mr Sugar weren’t actually perfect. Now that realisation moves me to tears, because I think – and this post brings that feeling to perfect clarity – that is is only in the acceptance of imperfection that perfection is to be glimpsed.
If I ever get married I’ll credit it to you, Sugar. Thank you.
This response is a compassionate, honest snapshot of relationships, love, and how challenging it is to stick with it. Love and Peace do not fall in our laps. They are the most difficult things to attain. It takes courage to admit it, and much more to be capable of it. Thanks so much, Sugar. You rock.
Oh, Sugar, you’ve done it again. Thank you for addressing the letter writer’s naivete. It doesn’t seem like she’s prepared for the complexities of an entire lifetime of marriage, but, like you said, she can learn. May I recommend that in addition to reading ALL of your columns, she might also want to check out a back log of Savage Love, which makes some pretty compelling arguments for why monogamy isn’t always as easy or practical as we might like to believe.
I love the phrase “a bit of sully with your sweet.” So honest and real.
Yup. Sugar is right, again. And says so in an eloquent way, with truth and honesty. My parents had the ‘perfect relationship’…I’ve held that up on a pedestal and expected it. I now have two marriages behind me, one of which I did need to leave for abuse, but the first? Maybe not. Maybe I left because it wasn’t “PERFECT”. Now, of course, there is hindsight, and I wouldn’t change a thing.
But had I known this going in? Perhaps I would have looked a little harder, waited a little longer, to rush in to what I thought was Dream Come True, Happily Ever After. Perhaps I would have chosen differently because had I known this, I would have been able to dig deeper at my fears and insecurities that both of these marriages have illuminated for me, getting me closer to Who I Really Am, and What I Really Want.
Instead, the work of it for me WAS the two marriages I left…and the aftermath, and each relationship I engage in pushes me down that path. I do know now, however, with complete conviction, that when I want to leave is usually the time I need to stay.
Damn Sugar! You are one courageous woman. Honest and real.
Ideas about love and relationships are supported by so much mythology.
My own marriage survived infidelity, but was later able to dissolve with both pain and love. Big love that allowed us to continue in a close friendship that includes our current partners.
Thank you so much for helping us to truly understand that love can survive that which we believe will destroy it. And it may even make it better.
Thank you.
Behind every perfect couple, there is a huge amount of hard work, understanding, and forgiveness. There is also a huge amount of heart swelling, breath taking love. Wishing you all the best in your marriage, Happily Ever After!
Thanks again for sharing yourself, Sugar. I love how you always say so beautifully what I know but cannot express. (Often when I didn’t even know that I knew it.)
I once said I would leave the man who cheated on me. Without conversation, meaning without listening. Listening is the hardest thing to do when you are hurt. Thus far I have not faced infidelity in my marriage but my “Mister” asked me recently whether or not I would leave him if he had an affair. I answered I thought I probably wouldn’t and was he thinking of having one? He said no. So in response I asked if he would leave me if I had an affair and his reply was “Instantly”. And for us that felt like the right answer.
Wonderful column Sugar. An idealized view of marriage can be a “deal killer”. Ultimately, we are all human.
Amen sister.
Amen.
🙂
Perfect is the enemy of happiness, actually.
This is truth told so beautifully, brazenly, thoughtfully. I hear in this reader’s letter this fear: “This isn’t going to happen to me, right? Right? Right?!!?”
As you point out so well, every relationship is vulnerable (because we are all flawed and vulnerable). Our culture’s obsession with weddings sometimes lets us forget about what happens after the wedding (the marriage part, the life part that takes lots of years in which people make mistakes and are people).
When I was really young, maybe 6 or 7, I once asked my mom, “You and Dad won’t ever get divorced, right?” And she said no, of course not, and promised when I asked her to. They did divorce six years later, but she didn’t know it at the time that I asked her this, and neither did my dad. I understand this letter–she’s asking you like I asked my mom.
We just can’t control what will happen. But we can make decisions and follow what we actually want (as you did in your response, realizing that you actually didn’t want Mr. Sugar to get out of your life forever, although there is a lot of support for this idea as a measure of protection).
So right on, Sugar.
Thank you, Sugar.
QFT.
When we first started dating in college 12 years ago, my now-husband told me he would “dump me in a heartbeat” if I ever cheated on him. He was normally so gentle, his sudden vehemence on this subject terrified me and I spent years as frightened of potential cheating as I was of potentially getting pregnant. Like it could accidentally happen and I would blow the best thing in my life.
When it finally did sort of happen (we were drunk, we only kissed, she was bi too) 6 years later, and when I finally told him several years after that, I did not get dumped. There were discussions and I had been feeling terrible and there was a lot more to it, but there was more to US by that point, and breaking up didn’t even enter the conversation.
The reason, I think, is that marriage is a mindset that you have to semi- or fully-consciously keep yourself in all the time, like believing in gravity. In a healthy relationship, I think you just get to a point where you think “We’re married, period,” and when you have problems as a couple you don’t think “I could just leave.” When you remove that option from your thinking, it’s amazing what problems you can overcome.
Thanks so much to you, Sugar, for allowing us in to all the dark spaces of your life, in order to shed a little light.
Thanks also to Mr. Sugar. Knowing that you’re going to reveal yourself soon means that this detail about his life will soon also be public knowledge. I appreciate that he is brave enough to let this dark moment in his life be a wonderful lesson for all of us.
Good luck, Happily Ever After. It’s a hard mountain worth climbing.
Sugar has the courage to say and live out the the things we know are right. The things that our pride and our pasts have a hard time confronting. Bravo!
Perfection exists. But it’s not perfect.
So TRUE.
Wonderfully written, and very kind. I loved it.
I too used to believe I would definitely, absolutely, no question leave if I was cheated on. Until I was cheated on. And of course, it hurt. But what hurt most was confronting the fact that I didn’t want to leave, that I could find exception to this rule, when I had proclaimed it and believed it so fervently before. We emerged sullied but also much sweeter. Well put, Sugar.
You can’t have a deep relationship without dealing with some muck together. That’s when you really learn about each other. And often that is when someone decides they can’t take it or doesn’t want it and splits. Are more people scared of the muck itself or that it’s often a trigger for the end of that relationship?
After a major trust has been broken how the offending party handles it is key. Mr. Sugar wanted to be the kind of man who could be faithful AND did the *hard* work to become a better person. That is how you rebuild trust, by showing in your actions how you intend to not hurt the other person in that same way again. The desire to change (or do things differently) if often not enough.
Exactly what Amanda just said.
Why did Mr. Sugar give his address and home number to Ms. Postcard? Continued contact feels more indiscreet than the original indiscretion. Sounds like he wanted to be found out.
This might be a good companion piece to Sugar’s excellent advice: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/03/magazine/infidelity-will-keep-us-together.html?pagewanted=all
Oh, Sugar. There is no one like you. (SIGH) (swoon)
Happily Ever After: I would let your sister and husband be a part of your wedding, and I would toast them and celebrate them. They ARE Happily Ever After. What it *really* looks like. The real deal.
Perfect advice in an imperfect world of deliciously messy relationships.
William Blake wrote: “What are the gates of paradise? Mutual forgiveness of each vice, such are the gates of paradise.”
One small suggestion for Happily Ever After: make sure, when you get married, that you are in front of your best and closest friends and family, including of course your sister and her husband.
Because there likely will come a time in your marriage, even if you’re lucky and brave, when something dire will happen, and you’ll doubt the wisdom or the possibility of maintaining that bond with your husband.
And that is when you need your friends and your family. They were there. They bore witness. They heard the promises you made about sickness, health, richer, poorer, all that in what whatever language your vows will be written, and they will be able to remind you why you married and why it’s worth the infinite trouble it takes to maintain a commitment in an imperfect and very human world.
Just celebrated my 25th anniversary and it has taken both luck and courage to be able to have shared so much with another person. And it took my friends to help me get here.
” …attempting to show you what a real perfect couple looks like: happy, humane, and occasionally all fucked up. I can’t imagine anyone more fitting to walk you down the aisle on your wedding day than your sister and her husband, two people who’ve kept their love and friendship alive for more than twenty-five years. ”
And here’s another thought as you age into a marriage . What about the really BIG values -not monogamy to ME but
dedication to some common goal with an eye on this small planet and all beings on it….
Here’s to a fabulous August Wedding and all that comes ( happily) ever after .. and toast to Sugar at the ceremony!!
Something most people don’t know about me is that my husband and I were married before, years ago, to each other. I was the cheater, and he left immediately as previously agreed upon, which at the time was the right thing for him to do. Our old friends know, of course, and have witnessed the work I’ve done on myself in the intervening decade and all the years we spent trying, on opposite sides of the country, to break away from each other and failing. That’s the long version.
Occasionally, not often, I will let the short version slip to new close friends because eventually they’re going to come over and see the side-by-side pictures of wedding one and wedding two on the wall. We were too young, I say, and stupid – now we know what we’re doing. When I mention this to younger friends who are still on the dating market, they sometimes react with confusion and pity – how desperate must we have been to take each other back as damaged goods? Don’t you know you’re supposed to dump people who hurt you and never look back? Those are the rules!
When I tell older friends, or not-newly-married friends, and especially older married friends, they say “That’s the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard.”
Sugar is so very right. Life is messy and humans are complicated, and partnership means a lot more than I ever thought it did back when I embarked on this long weird road.
@West: That is awesome that you have pics of wedding 1 and 2 next to each other! Much better to honor your path than hide it because people might not understand.
Beautiful. Thank you.
I never thought about infidelity as a deal buster, I was focused on domestic violence swearing if he ever hit me or our kids I would be so out of there and press charges. I was wrong.
Sugar, you are (as always) a kinder being than I am. In this case, kinder to the letter-writer. Her smug superiority and complacent condemnation of her sister made me want to scream. Here’s a story for the letter-writer: Many years before I was born, my Aunt got married to a wonderful man. They’re still together. But, just before the wedding, it was discovered (gasp!) that they had slept together before the marriage. My grandfather was incensed. Pre-marital sex violated his moral standards. Because of this, he refused to walk his own daughter down the aisle, and also threatened to cut off any of her siblings if they agreed to accompany her. He wanted her to walk down the aisle alone, so that everyone could see her shame, and witness her failure to live up to his image of the “perfect daughter.”
In the end, she and her husband walked down the aisle together. But the rift that this caused in the family lasted more than thirty years. My aunt never again felt fully loved and supported by her own parents, and her husband -my uncle- avoided all contact with my grandfather until quite recently. A whole bunch of wonderful, loving people felt very angry and unloved for a very long time.
What you’re doing to your sister is the same thing. Casting her out of your wedding party because of her perceived “failure” will cause a rift that will take years to heal. It is also (and I say this as kindly as I can) an very unloving thing to do.
Your sister reached out and shared the intimate details of her marriage as a gesture of love, and you reacted to this with censure. Although you want your marriage to be more “perfect” and more loving than hers now appears to you, in this moment *she* is being the more loving of you two. Meanwhile, I think Sugar is right: you’re putting up all these boundaries and ultimatums as a way to protect yourself from getting hurt. But you can’t, dear letter writer, because getting hurt is just one of those things that happens. You can’t control it, and constructing walls to keep hurt out will only end up hemming you in. We all do this sometimes: construct boundaries to keep pain away, and keep love in. But they do the opposite. And, as Sugar illustrated, the only way to love is (paradoxically) by letting the walls around your heart be blown apart.
In short: love is dangerous. So love dangerously.
As always, Sugar, your response is wise, knowing and loving. I am divorced. It was not over infidelity; it was over other smaller things. Well, maybe not smaller. Who is to say what is big or small in a relationship. It was lack of a physical and emotional intimacy. It was snapping over money. Tt was feeling that he didn’t think I was “good enough” for him. But it all came down to being unable to discuss what went wrong, so it all was brushed under the carpet and festered and rotted. The fact that Sugar and Mr. Sugar could talk about the infidelity is HUGE. Without that they would not have grown and moved on. It sounds cliche, but it is all about communication. So to say that infidelity would be the “deal breaker” and the marriage would end without communication is saying, up front, that there is no chance if something goes wrong. To say that it is the deal breaker is all about control. Things were so controlled with my former husband that there was no room if anything went out of control (whether lack of emotional intimacy, or lack of physical intimacy, or conversation, etc.) If you and your husband-to-be insist on control and predetermined outcomes if something goes wrong, you have closed the door on being vulnerable. Marriage takes being vulnerable. Being in control is the opposite of being vulnerable. I agree with Sugar — sister and brother-in-law are absolutely the loving role-models you want to be walking you down the aisle. Sugar: as always, you are incredibly wise. Other readers and commentators: I am always amazed at the wisdom in your comments on Sugar’s columns. If only such wisdom were the norm in our society. But, reading your wise and reasoned words gives me hope for our world. Mari,
P.S. I know it was my problem that I felt that he thought I wasn’t good enough for him. I realize that now. I had a mantra in my head saying, “What’s wrong with me?” I didn’t even realize that it had become a mantra and that it was seriously unhealthy for me to keep repeating it to myself until AFTER we separated. And I realize that communication is a two way street. Our street had road blocks in both directions. So, I hope and pray for another relationship in my life in which I will have an opportunity to be the stronger, much mores self confident person that I have become (and continue to work on) being in the context of a partnership and marriage with open avenues of communicaton. I hope letter writer and finance get it right in this, their first marriage. Wishing both of you a happy wedding and long, loving years to you! – Mari
Incredibly personal columns like this make me worry about your coming out. If we knew who you are and who Mr. S is, would you write the same piece and would we read it the same way? I think your anonymity is powerful and makes you the Common Woman. I would love to read your other stuff, but I found Sugar without knowing who you are, so I’m willing to find your other stuff that way too. On the other hand, I abhor secrets on principle, and support coming out in general. And I support you in whatever you decide.
Dear Happily Ever After,
I hope you print out Sugar’s, and all of the other amazing responses to your letter, and put them in a safe place. On those occasions when the tempest inevitably blows in your marriage, take these out and read them. These comments, all of them, are a treasure trove of wisdom and insight that will hopefully keep you anchored to your husband and your marriage. I wish you the best, but know that at some point, your faith and ideals will be tested. How you and your partner decide to communicate (which as Sugar so wonderfully reminds us also includes LISTENING with the heart) about your dreams, fears, desires, and failings will ultimately be what determines whether you live happily ever after.
Best wishes to you AND your loving sister.
When my hubby and I first got together seven years ago, we said the same things, “you cheat, we’re over” done deal. Then, after time, that conversation has changed, as we’ve grown into wiser, more committed, and stronger people. Now, I tell him, “If you have a one time deal, DON’T LET ME FIND OUT. I’m better off not knowing, but if it’s a full blown affair, I don’t know how I’ll handle that.” And that’s my honest answer. I know in my heart I could battle the war with a one night stand…but a full blown affair, I truly don’t know how I’d handle that. There all sorts of grays in the world, and those grays are different shades for different people. There are things that have happened between my hubby and I that I never would have “dealt” with when we were dating. But as the years go by and you grow closer together, you realize that forgiveness is the hardest, but most important aspect of your relationship. And we talk TO each other so often. We keep our relationship in check. We’ll talk for hours about where we were seven years ago, where we are now, how we handled past mistakes, how we plan on handling future mistakes…and I truly believe that has been the glue that keeps us together…that we take the time to talk to each other about each other. I really can’t imagine any circumstance that we couldn’t work our way through and I know that we still have more tough times ahead of the ones we’ve faced before and now, but I think, the fact that I can’t even think of a reason that I would leave him, that says a lot.
I hope for you and your soon to be hubby Happily Ever After that the road of your marriage is long and bumpy…because a flat long road is pretty damn boring.
Oh, Happily Ever After, you sound so much like a child who just learned one of her parents isn’t really perfect. There will (hopefully) be a day when you respect and love your sister even more for having the courage and grace she’s shown in her marriage and in telling you the truth. Marriage is hard. That’s why wedding vows say “in good times and bad.” Please think seriously about what those vows mean before you say them because they acknowledge the universal truth that we come to marriage with bad habits and dark urges and the capacity to be unbelievably selfish. That doesn’t mean we don’t love or can’t also be selfless. Marriage (a true, loving, good marriage) is worth the pain and the hard work. Your sister has learned that. I hope you do, too.
Don’t marry a human and expect fidelity. It’s not possible. Get a dog instead. We are too easily bored and too easily distracted, and love has nothing to do with it. Best wedding present you can get for your partner is a pack of condoms with an endless shelf life. Rather than say, “You cheat and it’s over,” better to talk about at least making it through the honeymoon years until mature affection is established and not exposing you to disease. We expect way too much of each other, but then, youth is like that. You also have to remember that biologically, men are programmed to have many partners. Women are programmed to have one. There are reasons for this having to do with continuation of the species and the number of young who die in the wild. Look it up. We ask too much when we ask them to exercise their brains over their bodies. Great column, Sugar.
I agree that many marriages can (and do) survive cheating. Fidelity, however, is not a “one-size-fits-all” issue, nor do I believe it is naive for someone about to be married to expect it. Happily Ever After’s problem seems to be her judgment of her sister’s and brother-in-law’s indiscretions, which seems natural (not naive) considering how shocking this news was to her. I don’t believe this warrants excluding them from walking her down the aisle, but her disillusionment is understandable.
I wonder if her sister’s marriage would have survived if the sister had the full-blown affair and her husband had the “technically unconsummated fling†– and chose to hide it from his wife. My wife and I agree that men and women react differently to infidelity. Generally, men tend to view sexual affairs as a greater betrayal (“Did you sleep with him?”), while women are hurt more by affairs of the heart (“Do you love her?). The level of pain and betrayal may dictate whether or not the marriage can be repaired.
An aside: as a man who has been married for thirty year (and never cheated), I feel sorry for Mr. Sugar. You shared a deeply personal marital secret with your readers, many of whom probably do know your real identity, and his. Would you have done the same if the transgression had been your own?
Personally, David, I’d rather be in a marriage with “infidelity” than one in which we sit around formulating gender stereotypes. But, to each his own.
You feel sorry for Mr. Sugar? Is this the first Dear Sugar column you’ve ever read? Sugar has said in other columns that Mr. Sugar is one of the only people who read her columns before she publishes them; I have no doubt this one was vetted the same way. She also discusses her own “transgressions,” as you call them, in this very column and in others.
I think once people have gotten past the frail idea of perfection in marriage, they’re less cagey about their secrets, because they know that every marriage has its secrets, and if people were more open about what marriages are REALLY like, young fiancees like Happily Ever After might have a better idea of what they’re getting into, and be stronger and better prepared about how to navigate real marriage.
Sugar, as always, your honesty brings so much dignity to the messy bliss of human relationships. Thank you.
Well, of course! Sugar nailed this one. I’m coming up on being married for 30 years. Nothing real is easy.
Julie, my wife and I don’t sit around “formulating” gender stereotypes; I was reiterating what studies have shown about how infidelity affects men and women differently. For example:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/homo-consumericus/200906/men-and-women-experience-sexual-and-emotional-infidelity-differently
Obviously, marriage is hard, messy work, and there is no such thing as a “perfect marriage”. Call me old fashioned, but I don’t believe a newlywed should “expect” infidelity to be part of that work. Yes, people make mistakes and straying from one’s spouse might be one of them. If they’re lucky they will overcome the pain and anger and perhaps their marriage will be stronger for it. I hope Happily Ever After never has to deal with this particular struggle.
This is the first Dear Sugar column I’ve read. My wife is a fan, and asked that I read this one because she wanted to talk about it. She doesn’t recall Sugar ever having discussed cheating on her current husband. Also, she knows Mr. Sugar (I do not), and was surprised by this revelation.
David, thanks for the link to the research. That’s far more compelling than opinion. It’s fine to be old-fashioned. But let’s also look at the research on infidelity, which suggests that it might indeed be more sensible for a newlywed to expect infidelity than we might want to believe: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080908185238.htm
Others point to the reluctance of people to actually admit to infidelity:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/28/health/28well.html
This is not to say that Happily Ever After is doomed to suffer infidelity by her husband, but to say that modern marriage would do well to face the facts of human behavior, and find a way to deal with it compassionately and honestly.
Good articles, both. I’ve seen similar, more recent studies. (And yay for the mention of us seniors!) But your last few words struck me: “compassionately and honestly.” This brings up another issue: Happily Ever After’s sister chose to keep her “technically unconsummated fling†from her husband because “… she figured why hurt him when she’d ‘learned her lesson’ and wasn’t going to break up her marriage over it.” What lesson did she learn? Her husband had a full-blown affair and they worked through it. Did she not trust him to be as forgiving? Was she afraid their marriage couldn’t survive another indiscretion? Was her husband too fragile to handle the truth? This lie of omission doesn’t seem very compassionate or honest. It seems self-serving and patronizing, and more about fear than love.
I mentioned this in my other post, but since it’s being brought up again, I thought I’d reiterate my take on one aspect of cheating. I have explictly, repeatedly told my husband of six years that if he were to have a one-night stand and just that…a circumstance that is far too common…please, please, please DO NOT tell me. There truly are some things that a person is better off, that a relationship is better off not knowing. The hurt and the pain I would suffer by his great confession of a one night stand, to me, is hurt and pain that I should be spared…because he loves me. Why do people admit wrongs? For most, it’s to relieve themselves of guilt but they convince themselves it’s because they want to be honest and not have any secrets. I’m not saying that we should contantly omit truths…but sometimes…it truly is best. I honestly, 100%, deep down in my gut, would rather not know of a one night stand. What good comes out of that? If my husband made a genuine one time mistake…what am I gaining by knowing that? What positive is there in that? Because ultimately, more would be broken than fixed. So I think that Happily Ever After’s sister was probably thinking like I do. I think it was the opposite of self-serving…I think she was truly thinking of her husband’s feelings first. I think it shows more love than fear. My best friend is in a relationship now and during the first year, her boyfriend had a one night stand. They broke up at first, but then she forgave him and they got back together. Just a couple months ago I asked her to answer this honestly: “Do you feel, now, that you wish you never found out?” Her answer: “Absolutely.”
Beautiful, brave, important column, as usual Sugar. Thank you.
Also, David and Shelley and others, I agree with Shelley that there are rare situations in which honesty is not the best policy. I think Sugar said it quite well in this column, in which she agreed with one of the letter writers that sometimes a lesson learned is best left as a lesson learned:
https://therumpus-production.mystagingwebsite.com/2011/03/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-66/
Shelley, what if it was more than a one night stand? What if your husband had repeated contact with another woman? What if he professed his love for her? What if he told her he was ready to leave his marriage, but she wasn’t comfortable with that? Would you feel differently then?
Brilliant response. I’d just like to say this to the letter writer. A relationship changes and evolves. Cheating in the early stages is not the same as cheating later on, when you’re in a solid relationship. Why? Because it is now a DIFFERENT SITUATION. I’m not arguing for or against anything… only making the point that, as the situation changes, the rules might change too. After all, that is the way we approach every other area of life. No one expects to apply the same rules when the situation has moved on. This sounds more relativistic than I would like (because I’m not a relativist), but perhaps the underlying principle that needs to be adhered to is more complex than “you shall never have sex with anyone else.” Say for example (God forbid) one of you became paralyzed and couldn’t have sex. Then what would you do?
I feel like a total nerd talking about this (as opposed to my own personal experiences here), but I’ve been fascinated by the infidelity – if you want to call it that – in the marriage of former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. She retired from the Court for many reasons, but among them, to spend more time with her husband, who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, and during that time, her husband forgot her and fell happily in love with another woman at the facility where he was getting care for his disease. That could not have been easy for her, but if it meant happiness for your spouse’s last days, is it so wrong?
cheating, infidelity, affair. I think as I learn more about relationships, especially long-lasting ones, these seem to me to be such small small words to describe something so much larger and more complicated.
I actually answered your question David in my original post. If my husband had a full blown affair and he was ready to leave me…then the relationship obviously isn’t worth saving, is it?
Another long-time married person, also saying Thank You Sugar, and wondering where this “perfect couple” meme came from. We need to beat this thing out of the interwebs, it’s no good for anyone. My personal opinion after 21 years of marriage is that people expect too much of the damn thing. They plant a sunflower, expect a forest and burn it all down when they don’t get what they want. No one can make you happy but you, in or out of a relationship, old or young — not your kids, not your spouse, not your parents. Be at peace. Oh, and Happily, while we’re giving advice — for your reception? Spend your money on booze and music, not food. You’re welcome. 🙂
While I’m pretty sure that I’m one of those people who has insecurities and fears so that I couldn’t work through an affair, your advice is beautiful and right on. I so love that you pointed out that the idea of a perfect couple either boxes someone in or shuts people out. In the end, your happiness in your relationship is about you, not about what you can or can’t expect somebody else to do for you.
Let’s just sum this up nice and simple, OK?
Monogamy and marriages fail more often then they succeed.
Does that mean that we as humans are failures, or that our expectations of relationships and marriage need to change?
I think the latter. So do lots of others.
So go into your marriage with honor and good intentions but do not be surprised if you face the same issues of infidelity and eventual divorce than a lot of other people do.
Or think about other ways to accommodate the inevitable temptations and impulses that will arise in every marriage.
I think that one of the mistakes that people make is to feel like they’re special. “how he’d never been faithful to any woman in all his life” and yet you married this man and expected him to be faithful to you. And were so shocked when he wasn’t. People cheat for their own reasons – being a good, faithful partner doesn’t make you any less likely to have a spouse who strays. He gave this “one time fling” his home address. And home phone number. And kept in touch.
People tend to romanticize infidelity. They’re condescending to people who don’t want to cheat and who don’t want to be cheated on. They say that people who expect fidelity just don’t have a firm grip of “being human”.
“And the fact was, I related to what he said.” This, for me, is the key. You understand it because you’ve done it yourself. But what about people who haven’t? How do you say that it’s unrealistic when they’ve done it for years?
It would help all of us if there were some realistic yet encouraging portraits of marriages in literature. I tried to do it, but it’s not very glamorous….
Each marriage is unique and the terms between partners are also unique. It’s OK to expect fidelity. It’s OK for that to be a dealbreaker in your relationship. I have been married for 27 years and neither of us has cheated. Because of issues in our lives before marriage, my husband and I hold honesty and faithfulness in the center of our relationship. If we cheat, it’s over. That’s what we both agreed to.
Yes, relationships are messy, people screw up, forgiveness is the Great Lesson. (There will be plenty of opportunities for forgiveness no matter what.) And faithfulness may seem old-fashioned. But we are adults and I think we should act like adults. We gave in to impulses and lapses in judgement while we were growing up. We had too much to drink, we crossed the flirtation line, we checked up on old flames, we two-timed. Those relationships in which we cheated or were cheated upon were part of learning what we are made of and what we value. They were steps to creating a whole, committed, faithful, growing relationship with our chosen soulmate. It’s not easy. It requires discipline. It is soul work. The rewards are wonderful.
That’s the way it works for us. As I said, each marriage is unique. Happily’s sister and her man worked through their issues, and bravo to them; Happily and her husband-to-be get to create their own terms. If faithfulness is a dealbreaker for her, so be it.
What a wonderful, wonderful response. Thank you!
I confess I was unacquainted with this advice column. This column was linked by Dan Savage, and it’s one of the most impressive advice columns I’ve ever read. You have nailed this. I’ll be back.
Happily Ever After, I think if I were in your shoes right now, the comments to the column this week would scare the crap out of me. People make it seem like it’s absolutely inevitable that your future husband will cheat on you some day. Frankly, I think that’s not fair. We don’t know you nor do we know your future spouse. There is a good chance that you two will never be unfaithful to one another.
But there’s a very good chance that one of you will hurt the other one very deeply at some point in your marriage. And how you cope with that is vitally important.
When I married my husband, I not only made promises to him, but I made promises to myself. I promised *myself* that I would stay through good times and bad. And in an effort to stay true to that, I made a silent promise to myself that, if something terrible happened to our relationship, I would try marriage counseling with my husband before I would divorce him.
That promise came into play this year shortly after our 6th wedding anniversary. I won’t say what happened (the story is too long and complicated). I will simply say that my husband betrayed me. It was DEVASTATINGLY painful for me. The horror of it … my god, it was almost too much to bear, but a couple of loving friends stayed by my side and, frankly, kept me alive for 2 days until my husband returned from a business trip.
I could have left. If one of my old boyfriends had done this, I certainly would have. But marriage changes things. I stayed. I stayed because of my commitment, because of the promises – not just to him, but to myself. I knew that I did not want to throw away something that I had loved so dearly for so long. I had to try … and give him a chance to try, as well.
It has been 4 months since that terrible day. My husband and I are, indeed, in counseling (individual for him, plus couples counseling for us). Just as in Sugar’s case, we’ve discovered that a lot of my husband’s problems are due to bad lessons learned in childhood as well as false assumptions learned in previous relationships. Another major issue was the depression he fell into after being laid off twice last year. He has voluntarily put in a lot of effort towards making himself and our marriage healthy again. Bit by bit, he’s recovering. Bit by bit, I am seeing his sweet old self return to me.
Marriages are not bulletproof. But I think that with genuine, conscious effort, couples can avoid the biggest, most heart-breaking betrayals. frankly, I think the best way to avoid the most painful problems that can arise in marriage is to remember that your spouse is your best friend. Talk to your best friend. Freely confide in him – even about the scariest things. Have fun together. Be honest. Don’t let irritations and resentments fester in silence. Confront the hard stuff together. Nurture that bond. Expect great things by doing your part to make great things happen.
Your life is a series of choices. You can choose to make your marriage amazing. How you define “amazing” is up to you and your husband (and its definition is likely to change a lot throughout the course of your lives). But a great time to talk about it is now. Talk about how you define a successful relationship. And agree to keep talking – no matter what.
It’s a shame that somewhere along the way people started looking at marriage as some kind of competition. Some people’s were perfect, others’ were not, and you have to do what the perfect couple does. What a ridiculous perspective. Those of us who have marriages need to tell people what it’s really like, so they’ll be better prepared for it when they get there. It takes more work than anything you’ve ever done before.
It’s also problematic that the letter writer is so hung up on the wedding. People need to spend a whole lot less time worrying about who is and isn’t at a wedding, and a whole lot more time thinking about the marriage that comes after.
Great advice Sugar, as always.
I think this is sound advice Sugar, but I do bristle at the notion from some of the commenters here that holding fidelity as an important value in a marriage is somehow naive. I can honestly say that if my husband had sex with someone other than me, it would absolutely crush me, and if that makes me naive, so be it. It doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t forgive him (depending on the circumstances), but the fact that fidelity and sexual monogamy are important to me doesn’t make me some pathetic sap. Sex and emotion are two things I have never been able to separate. My husband feels similarly about it. Thus, a physical transgression would almost by definition be an emotional transgression as well. It would take a long time to repair that breach.
I am sorry about what happened with Mr. Sugar. That must have been very painful. I am not sure I’d have taken my husband back had he done that to me in the early stages of our relationship. You took a chance on love, and that is admirable.
Sugar, just a quick note of thanks because I read this column aloud to my hubby and we had a great discussion afterward. I feel thankful that we have talked about this topic a lot, and your column helped us dive into the breach once again. I think your writing is amazing and your candor blows me away. Your words are a treat for the soul and mine is grateful.
“… we made ourselves ready, not to be a perfect couple, but to be a couple who knows how to have a duel when a duel needs to be had and emerge from it, hand-in-hand.”
Yes. This. Thank you.
Sugar, that advice was awesome. But I must chime in on one point in the comments. The claim that women are biologically compelled to only have one lover is absurd. I’m the one who cheated. Twice. And our 24th wedding anniversary was last month. We had our dueling couch moments over my infidelity and came out the other end. We re-negotiated and continue to re-negotiate our marriage vows to ensure the contract is fair to both parties as our needs change. For us, it includes non-monogamy. That won’t solve it for everyone, but it’s been a blessing for us. He knows he’s the one I come home to every night. But I’m the one who needs to go out, and I’m the woman. So sweeping generalizations about which gender needs to stray are as useful as a hand broom in a lumber factory.
You know, I have made exactly the same deal with my boyfriend as the LW: infidelity is a deal-killer. The thing is, we have worked out a private definition of “infidelity” that works for us. Each one of us will, very occasionally, sleep with someone else. We have some rules: we have to ask and be granted permission first, we have to be completely honest about any and every part of the encounter the other person asks about (and we always ask), we are not to develop a “dating relationship” with any of these people (i.e. it’s about the sex), and we must always be assiduous about making sure the new partner is clean as well as using protection no matter what. Infidelity means breaking any of these rules.
We both consider ourselves quite possessive, but discussing this and making these rules means that his encounters with other people are part of what I possess about him. The thing that seems to bother people the most about cheating is the dishonesty, knowing that someone hid something or lied, knowing that there is a “secret” part of your loved one’s life that this other person can access but you cannot. That I know he’s following these rules when he goes out, that I know about the encounters ahead of time and that when he gets home he will tell me every detail, means that the other person isn’t a threat. She’s not taking anything away from me, in fact she’s giving me several things: the knowledge that even though my boyfriend is totally sexy to other people he’s always coming home to me in the end, the validation that comes from him saying things like “she was an ok kisser but you are phenomenal,” the knowledge that because he has this outlet he’ll never have to lie to me, the knowledge that on the few occasions I tell him “no, you don’t have permission tonight” he’ll abide by it because he’d want me to do the same and he’d be stupid to jeopardize the whole arrangement – the list goes on. And, of course, that’s just the things that derive from his excursions. I’m less likely to take advantage of the arrangement, but it’s really nice, every once in awhile, to flirt and play with another person – with some of the same thrill that might come from cheating, but without any guilt.
I’m not saying this exact solution would work for everyone, but it works really well for us, and I think the reasoning behind it is sound: if you make a safe and well-defined space for you and your partner to “make mistakes” – and I think this works in most realms of a relationship, not just sex – then those mistakes can turn into fun things and/or opportunities for improved communication, as well as delineating the things that are truly, absolutely unacceptable.
This answer brought tears to my eyes. Thank you, Sugar. You’ve hit the nail exactly on the head.
To the (recent) commenters who are bristling at the idea that fidelity means something different to Sugar and to Happily Ever After’s sister (and pretty much all of the initial commenters) than it does to you, I think the sister said it best: you are being “too black and white”.
Maybe your relationships could not survive infidelity. Maybe you don’t want them to. Maybe (and this is more likely than anyone wants to believe) your relationships have already survived it, because your partner did something that they immediately recognized as a mistake and decided that you and your relationship are more important than anything else.
All of us, at some point in our lives, need to decide whether we value a relationship with someone we love more than an ideal, whatever that ideal is, because all of us are human and imperfect. Happily Ever After’s choice is whether she wants to get married if the “secret” to the success of a long-term marriage is going to be forgiving something she couldn’t bring herself to forgive now. The accepted answer in our society is that broken vows mean divorce. Sugar has presented a different answer, one that’s not widely talked about. Perhaps if it were we would have fewer divorces.
M and writ, I completely agree. There’s nothing naive about expecting someone to keep his or her promise to you, particularly when you yourself are keeping that same promise. Nowhere in her letter did the writer say that infidelity in her own marriage was IMPOSSIBLE – she’s worried that it is possible. I don’t think that worrying about the state of marriage, particularly in this day and age, is particularly naive at all.
I think that some people cling to the notion that fidelity isn’t possible as a way of escaping 100% responsibility for their actions. Rather than just say that it was their failing (for whatever reason), they would rather think that it’s a “human” failing or a “genetic” failing or a failing of their “hard wiring”. It’s much easier to parse out blame between a lot of really vague concepts than to just accept that you made decisions that were hurtful to someone you care about.
The fact that life is messy doesn’t give you the green light to make it even more messy.
Sugar’s response is so true. I don’t think it’s making excuses for infidelity, just stating many important truths. Both my husband and I have had to grapple with this and so far we’ve survived and are growing into each other. I had a full blown affair before we were married and we dueled through it, he had a technically unconsummated fling after we we’d, and we came through too, after a brief separation. We were not prepared but our friends helped us along the way. We both base our approach on the Bible – in the case of infidelity you have the right to leave, but you can choose to forgive. Thankfully, God’s still working on us.
Maybe the zealous lovely love Happily Ever After and her partner feel is what keeps marriage alive? Like the warmth and smell of a baby keep (some of) us having them?
Maybe it says something about the rates of infidelity when so many comments mention it. I don’t know. I’ve been married for 22 years, together for 25. Life gets mucked up and fucked up. It’s the commitment to each other, the willingness to wade through the muck that pulls us through. I’m not sure I’d have believed someone warning me about the muck before the wedding. I have learned staying together and working it out are not always the easiest paths, but it’s been our path, and I’d choose it again.
I agree – I think it’s more about HEA accepting her sister/brother-in-law as humans – imperfections and all – along with facing the unknowns of marriage.
Dearest Sugar, just when i think I couldn’t possibly feel any more resonation with one of your columns, you write another one leaving my soul shaking and standing up to shout “Amen!” Thank. You.
When I was 18, I got engaged. My mother sat me down and proceeded to tell me that when she and my father decided to get married, they weren’t in love. The liked each other, respected each other, knew there would always be something to talk about over the morning coffee. This is important, she said, because in a marriage, you will fall in and out of love with each other hundreds of times. What matters, is not the being in love, but the liking and respecting them enough to stick it out during those times you are not in love.
She then said, I’m so glad you found him this soon in your life. The man you like and respect enough to stick it out for when you’re out of love.
I didn’t marry him. I was in love. I did not like nor did I respect him.
This column brings that philosophy on marriage to mind. It’s one I have lived by and it has served me well.
I have a perfect marriage!! I am so in love with my husband and I feel like we truly understand each other, support each other, and admire each other. We have a great sex life, even after eight years together and a kid, and we are just so happy.
Both of us have cheated.
Here’s the big secret, the secret we don’t talk about: forgiving each other was, actually, not that hard. Because we are in a perfect marriage, we had lots of coping skills: good communication, honesty, compassion and mutual respect. Infidelities break other couples apart, but for us, it was a breeze! What can I say? We’re just so perfect!
Happily Ever After thought her sister was in a perfect marriage, and she is right. Not all marriages survive infidelities, Happily Ever After. It takes a rare, strong connection, to stick it out through the hard stuff, and obviously your sister and her husband have that special bond. I wish Happily Ever After luck in her upcoming marriage, and hope that she can also forge that kind of bond with her husband, cheating or no cheating.
Beautiful as always, Sugar. Reminds me of what Stephen Elliott said in The Adderall Diaries: “How much forgiveness it must take to love a person, to choose not to see their flaws, or to see those flaws and love the person anyway. If you never forgive you’ll always be alone.”
I agree that the letter writer is wrong to judge her sister and brother in law this way, to the point of not wanting them to play the same role in her wedding. She’s also naive to expect that a lifelong marriage can occur without any serious difficulties or struggles. However, I don’t think she’s naive for not wanting to tolerate infidelity. Sugar’s story is very moving and I’m glad that she and her husband were able to work through what happened. However, that doesn’t mean what happened to her is typical, or should be typical for marriages. Each couple has to determine those boundaries for themselves.
I agree with KT, writ, and wylee’s observations about fidelity. It is possible, it is a worthy goal, and people shouldn’t be judged negatively simply because they prize and enjoy it. I don’t understand this: “Maybe (and this is more likely than anyone wants to believe) your relationships have already survived it, because your partner did something that they immediately recognized as a mistake and decided that you and your relationship are more important than anything else.” I wouldn’t consider that to be a relationship that survived infidelity; rather, that’s a relationship that survives because of a lie, and that could be undone if the lie comes to light. I know there’s controversy over the facts, but I’ve seen no convincing evidence that most marriages involve infidelity. Some do, and some don’t. Why are people naive or wrong for wanting their relationships to be free from that problem?
“No conversation required” is the biggest mistake the writer could make. There is very little in any relationship that requires no conversation; I hope that HEA learns quickly how important conversations are. No wound can be healed without it.
I really enjoyed this column — thanks be to Sugar — and the conversations that ensued, especially the one between David and Julie. It raises a few questions, which will probably never get answered (but I can hope): does Sugar feel like she now trusts her husband not to cheat again? And what if he did? Another: Is an avoident attachment style (from Julie’s article) a “wound,” something to repair (of the kind Sugar believes her husband suffered from), or can it just be an interpersonal style, something one is born with and which probably won’t change, like a sexual preference? I find it interesting that Julie didn’t respond to David’s last question.
Finally, I’m all for compassion and understanding. We all keep failing all the time. We’re animals with heavy brains. The trick is to love in spite of it all. Sounds trite but I think it’s true.
Great letter and great response, as always.
I disagree completely that anyone is saying that fidelity isn’t a worthy goal, or that it is naive to want it. What IS naive is– thinking you can say ‘never!’ so early in a relationship, when you have no idea where life will take you. Thinking you can have ‘no conversation’ when things get rough and the unthinkable happens. Thinking you or your partner aren’t flawed humans who make mistakes or change your minds about things over time. Thinking that a fairy tale perfect couple exists who aren’t doing some hard work and renegotiating or have some socially unacceptable ways of making it all work.
Those of us who have been married for a while know that things will get hard– so much harder than HEA can possibly imagine right now– whether it’s infidelity or a dozen of other issues– and as Sugar loving urged her, be ready to deal. I also think life has a poetic justice way of dealing you the hand you most dread or most swear off as NEVER.
I wish HEA a joyful wedding day and many happy times ahead… and the wherewithal to deal with the inevitable crap life will dole out.
Perfectly said. I’m bookmarking this so I can make all my friends who are considering marriage read it, and sharing it on Facebook to remind all my fellow married couples about the personal growth and increased intimacy that can come out of the liberal use of honesty and empathy in a relationship. Thank you so much for this.
I have to wonder if he would have been as forgiving if the tables were turned.
I also have to wonder if he truly hasn’t cheated on you again, or if he took your forgiveness as permission to cheat again.
My wife and I have agreed that if either is tempted to ‘cheat’, to tell the other. It’s only cheating if it needs to be hidden. If it’s out in the open and agreed upon then it may be painful but it’s not cheating.
So far this hasn’t been tested. I have no idea whether it will be.
Hi Alma True. I’m also enjoying the comments and fascinating discussion. I left David’s questions unanswered mostly because I don’t think anyone can answer the whys or the hows about other people’s marriages. I once heard someone say that marriage is “like a rare cheese that’s loved by the connoisseur, but to everyone else it just smells like feet.†I know so many people who have “cheated,” and so many who entered their marriages in the first place for such a wide variety of reasons that any of us might consider strong or shaky. Among my closest friends are people (mostly women) who’ve cheated and told, cheated and been caught, cheated and kept it hidden forever, and still others who’ve openly discussed their attractions to other people with their spouse before anything happened, to discuss what that attraction meant, why it was happening, and why it was important. I also know women who’ve told me explicitly that they do not want psychological or sometimes even sexual intimacy with their husbands. Go figure. People make their decisions for so many reasons that may be hard to understand from the outside.
But from inside the marriage, trying to understand is, in my view, the whole point, and the real adventure of strong love. The couples that I’ve known who worked through infidelities were closer for it, at least in part because they understood each other better—and Sugar’s experience is just a kick-ass example of that, right down to her gratitude to the postcard woman for being hers and Mr. Sugar’s catalyst. That they’re still in a continuing conversation speaks to the reality that trust isn’t something you can achieve once and then set to autopilot—it’s a beast (for me at least) that must be nurtured and tamed and respected on both sides.
So David’s questions are definitely important ones, and the “lie of omission†would never fly in my world (but then, I’d never know…ugh). But they point to so many other questions, too, like: What’s the root cause behind all the cheating and lying? Why is (traditional) marriage an environment in which we feel we must be more punitive or secretive than curious and thoughtful about each other’s attractions and what they mean? Why do we only see attraction to other people as a threat to our union or our own self-worth, rather than an expression of the broader mysteries of the person to whom we’re married, of their needs, their flaws, their personal truth? Can we be strong enough to bear the truths that “infidelity†may reveal about the gaps in our marriage, and then deal with those gaps?
I would not have asked those questions when I was in HEA’s shoes 14 years ago, looking for a model for good marriage. But a beautiful thing about being with one person for a long time is that your heart can expand to hold possibilities you might have thought you could not bear, and that the landscape on which your marriage exists can become broader and filled with room for who you both really are.
I really enjoyed this column, and I believe a lot of people can learn from this. Life is not a black & white thing, we are humans and we are varied and unique and very, very grey when it comes to rules (and breaking them).
And excuse my opportunistic addition, but if you are a single Jewish woman in the New York area, who agrees with Sugar’s response above, and who feels she is as mature and intelligent as Sugar is (especially in this case), and you’re between the ages of 28 and 35, then here I am, a mature and intelligent Jewish male who has been waiting for you all his life, to start a family 🙂
Don’t come out, Sugar, you’re just fine as you are.
I don’t think the letter writer was ‘smug’ or ‘complacent’, she just hadn’t come across all this yet. Fair enough.
This column gives a lovely balance to the one a few months back on “if your heart says ‘go’, then just ‘go’ “. Both are true. If you have to go and it doesn’t feel right – then go. If it is right, then hard work, love, respect and commitment can get through pretty much anything. Good to know.
https://therumpus-production.mystagingwebsite.com/2011/06/dear-sugar-the-rumpus-advice-column-77-the-truth-that-lives-there/
Dear Sugar, you speak the truth!
Hi Julie. Thanks for writing. I think you are a wise lady: “Why do we only see attraction to other people as a threat to our union or our own self-worth, rather than an expression of the broader mysteries of the person to whom we’re married, of their needs, their flaws, their personal truth?” My instinct is that total honesty (the kind where you admit all your desires for other people to your spouse or partner, all your “cheats” — however minor) is probably just narcissism of a kind. Those “broader mysteries” need to stay intact — I don’t believe there’s much desire without distance … but maybe I have an attachment issue?
A couple of things:
* As always, Sugar nails it with heart and wit and intelligence.
* I wonder how many of the sympathetic respondents on this list castigated Hillary Clinton for staying with Bill back in the day, for not “standing up.”
* Happily Ever After doth protest too much. I wonder if her fears are more projections of her own battered trustworthiness.
* Marriage is not for the weak of heart. Go big or go home, as the kids like to say. Strap yourself in, Happily Ever After.
On Saturday my wife and I celebrate 23 years of marriage, which is about 23 years and 4 months since our first date. “Been there and back” doesn’t begin to cover it. Wouldn’t change a single line.
@Alma True, we all have something, don’t we? The impulse to divulge everything could be narcissistic, or maybe (or also) a desire to be known, to be intimate. But what about the impulse to know the other, to want to know every detail? I sometimes think it’s a lot like Charles Lindbergh wanting to inspect the German Luftwaffe before World War II, to see how well equipped they were to blow his world to smithereens. I tend to fall in that camp–and yet the result is really knowing each other better. Though it’s true that Lindbergh was ultimately wrong about the German air force. I think you’re right that we have to live with some mysteries, and hopefully not be undone by how fragile that might make us.
An utterly fantastic piece of writing masquerading as love advice.
I think it’s rather sad that HEA posted that she didn’t want a marriage like that, that she wanted “healthy love”.
I sat back and thought about why that upset me and it comes down to our understanding of healthy. What do healthy people do? Do they never suffer or have to put in a great amount of effort to maintain their health? Or course not. They suffer all the time; they work out an refrain from unhealthy habits. It’s like being a master sculpture or actor. Hours of laborious and tedious work. It’s a fact that the most precious things in the world require work to attain–and maintain.
Health is not easily attained, especially in terms of love.
And only after a person works, and suffers through those difficult hours can they then claim that they are healthy, are a master artisian, or blissfully in love. And at the end of the road, who did not look back at some point and say, “I almost gave up there”? Our difficulties should be celebrated because they prove we had the strength to overcome–to love better and more than what we previously could.
Look at children, most are healthy, energized by life and curious about everything. Children are like the first sweet years of love, unmarred by selfishness and lust. I want HEA to know that though that young love is a healthy love, it is not a love that will be all-prevailing and all-enduring. We cannot give an average healthy child 50lbs to lift and expect them to do it just because they are healthy. They would be ill prepared for the task.
I also want to point out the comment about being unprepared for marriage. Who is prepared for it? Unlike emergency fire or tornado drills, there are no drills people can run in order to better equip themselves for the many hurtles marriage throws at them. So take comfort in this, HEA, though you may be unprepared, everyone is–even your sister was. I’m sure on her wedding day she wasn’t thinking about how ready she was to deal with a future affair. She was thinking about her love for her husband and hoping, with every ounce of her being that it would be enough to help her pull through the best and worst of times. Which is really, all any of us can do in the end.
So here’s to you, HEA, and your love, that it may prove to be strong enough to carry you through your darkest of hours. Best of wishes.
Great advice Sugar!
The letter writer is why weddings are community/family events–young couples often need the people in their lives who love them to tell them when they need to be willing to work on and fight for their marriages and when they need to reconsider the commitment they’ve made or plan to make. Often times the heat of the moment or immediacy of the wounds we are feeling cause us to want to retreat or lash out. Sometimes we are able to recover and gain perspective, sometimes we need others to pull away our blinders and help us do it. Sadly, so many young couples don’t have that network and support system who are willing to step it, but it sounds like the letter writing does. Instead of being angry and disillusioned with her sister and brother-in-law, she should look at what they’ve been through and what they have to day and be grateful that she and her fiance have someone who can show them how to weather whatever storms will inevitably come their way.
Another absolutely beautiful and insightful letter. Thank you Sugar.
Absolutely spectacular! Thank you Sugar.
My marriage suffered for many years as my wife saw us surrounded by perfect couples who never had any problems. We struggled and while there was so much joy in the beginning, that, after a time, was lost. What remained was all we were not. Over time, every other good friendship that appeared to hold good will, became a threat to the marriage. It was perceived and experienced as infidelity.
I found myself escaping the home to have conversations, many of which took on more importance as I heard again and again that they had more importance because they were not conversations I was having, with her.
While we were dating my wife and I loved Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. His reminder that lovers were to be “two solitudes that bordered and protected each other” was something that inspired us early on. No one reminded us of that when we struggled. If they did, they didn’t stay with it long enough. No one came with courage and encouraged us to turn to the other. That’s what we needed.
There was a lot that was wrong with my marriage, yes. And things became very complicated after we had kids. We’re now divorcing and the one thing I wished had happened that never did, was for our friends, who listened to our complaints, to root for our marriage and not for the well-being of our individual selves. I can’t help wonder if we would have landed in a different place if they did.
Right on the money. Here’s an unusual response for you: I’m in an *open* marriage, and, to keep things brief, at a point in time not too long ago my spouse betrayed me, not by loving someone outside the marriage but by breaking up with someone we were both dating, badly and spectacularly. (It wasn’t the breakup itself that was the problem – I’m fine with not all dating someone at once – it was the execution of it, which caused drama and hurt feelings on all sides.)
The advice in this column frankly is true to what I have experienced in my situation, even though the particulars are so different.
Eventually, partners do things that hurt each other, without meaning to cause so much pain. Forgive and move on. Don’t forgive without moving on (people should genuinely improve their behavior – something I’ve spent this last year being tetchy about, but I’m getting easier on the trigger finger over time) and don’t move on without forgiving (either by breaking up without trying to solve things, or by pretending it’s water under the bridge while holding a grudge – both great ways to keep from moving past issues or arriving at a smooth, happy personal life.)
@Julie — hilarious (because surprising) analogy between lovers and Lindbergh and the Luftwaffe… Just a thought– a good, smart meditation on marriage and mystery ( not of the self-help kind, really) is Can Love Last? by Stephen Mitchell. Ever heard of it?
@Alma True, That sounds like a fantastic book (just read a review on Salon–hadn’t heard of it). I’ll check it out!
I dumped my husband because he’d not only slept with dozens of women (some prostitutes) but he’d also made tapes of those encounters — which I found. Had our marriage been awesome otherwise, I might even have been able to overcome that; but the truth is, he had no desire to spend time with me or with our children, and it had been that way for many years. In a way, it was a relief to have a reason to leave.
I took back someone who cheated on me. Although it didn’t work out in the end, I learned so so much. I found out that unconditional love is tricky, it’s taken for granted, I stop pretending in it, and when all the romance is over, sometimes your not even the same person anymore.
Amazing response, Sugar. Thank you! Happily Ever After, having a sister who has shared so honestly “the secret” is truly the best wedding gift you could possibly receive. Believing in love AND forgiveness is sometimes really confusing — they don’t always seem to actually “go” together, and yet they go together more completely than any two things. Having the support of someone close to you, should you one day struggle with the “shades of gray” in your relationship, is so precious. There are many ways to betray a partnership, and fidelity is just one of them. Having a role model and friend who understands that love and forgiveness are part of the same thing will not sully your marriage, it will provide strength when you need it.
People either have been touched by the wicked kiss of infidelity in their relationships or not. You can’t know how you will be until you’ve been touched. So let it go. And try your best not to get touched.
My husband cheated. I took him back.
I stayed in therapy, he went to 3 sessions.
He cheated again. We were trying to get prego.
Now we are divorced. Ugly. Horrible. Nasty divorce.
(This feels like a weird poem)
Wylee says:
“People tend to romanticize infidelity. They’re condescending to people who don’t want to cheat and who don’t want to be cheated on. They say that people who expect fidelity just don’t have a firm grip of “being humanâ€.”
WHAAAT?
Who enters a marriage wanting to cheat or wanting to be cheated on? Talk about naive /and/ condescending.
It’s exactly that sort of attitude that puts you in a ripe position to learn what you clearly do not understand by experience. Why do I make that statement? Because I lived it.
Married to my high school sweetheart in my early 20s, we didn’t believe for ONE SECOND it could ever happen to us. I was completely blindsided because I had unrealistic ideas about what a long-term partnership and true fidelity really mean. We had the same “dealbreaker no discussion” attitude “Happily Ever After” has. We both felt very secure in our positions because both of us believed fidelity was a simple matter and that cheaters were a “certain kind of person”. The kind of person that neither of us believed we could possibly be, of course. As great as sex is, how could it ever be important enough to cheat on your spouse?
*laughs bitterly*
I found out the hard way that the reasons for infidelity are myriad and the moment when things turn can be indefinable. My ex-husband and I, unable to deal with the underlying problems in our marriage that I now understand led to the affair, fell apart, and rightfully so. Our ideas of what love and marriage are “supposed” to be were childish and poorly formed.
Oh, and the affair? It was me. I fell in love with a co-worker. Fell in love long before we ever so much as hugged. Fell completely head-over-heels and did not realize it until one day when we did hug. And then kissed. And then … yeah. It was complicated and messy and totally fucked up.
And I never saw it coming.
Thank you for this! My husband and I went through the same thing a little over 3 years ago and it was the most painful experience of my life. My best friend at the time viewed us as the “perfect couple” just like Happily Ever After and I am sad to say that she is no longer my best friend because she did not agree with my choice to stay. I always thought that I would be the black and white person who left the second I discovered the infidelity, but when I discovered the affair, it didn’t even cross my mind. I had built a life with this man and he broke my heart. It is a pain like nothing I have ever felt, and the only one able to repair the damage was him. We are still in recovery, but things are looking brighter each day. Thank you for opening up and showing me that this can happen to others. One of your readers was right in saying that if more people shared their experience, young people would not be so quick to marry and jump in expecting clear skies and perfect weather. Thank you!!!
I’m amazed at the judgement of so many commenters, and the implication (not from Sugar) that there is a moral highground in working through cheating. Happily Ever After and her new hubby get to set the parameters of their marriage and set the boundaries around what is acceptable and what is not, based on what works for them, based on their values and needs. Most research indicates that 12-25% of married people cheat, which means that a vast majority do not cheat.
My story involves a husband who cheated on me early on; we sought counselling and worked through it. However, after 10 years of marriage, on the day I found out about his second affair, I ended the marriage. That was truly the right decision for me and if cheating ever happens again in one of my relationships I doubt I would ever again choose to work through it; that is what my experience has taught me and I am content with that lesson. There are few things that are not acceptable to me in a relationship, and this is one of them. It is ok to have that boundry. If cheating ever happens in Ever After’s relationship then maybe she’ll walk away and maybe she’ll stay and work through it, but it is ok to have hopes and dreams for herself and to seek to meet her own (actually realistic) standards of what she wants for her relationship. Yes, everyone messes up sometimes. No, not everyone cheats when they have committed not to.
WOW! I have recently been reading the love advice columns, hoping that although I am an older single woman, that my love-life is not over. Of all of them, this is the most honest, profound advice I have ever heard. I want to send it to my children, my ex, all my friends I ever had, everyone I know. I think the real problem with blips in the marriage contract are when it gets to be a re-occurring problem, when it isn’t just one time, or even one other relationship, but when that person is so unsatisfied she/he has to keep looking for love somewhere else. Obviously Sugar, you and Mr. Sugar have made your relationship stronger from one blip. Let me say, you have a gem there. My experience is that most men have no interest in the kind of deep introspection and willingness to share with you what he found in his dark-side, but I think that is partly because I am older. I have recently spent 7 years at college and think the younger men are so much more in tune with who they are and willing to do what it takes to have a real relationship with a woman who wants the fairy-tale. Obviously, they both have to work on it, it is never a one-way street. Both will have issues that rub the other the wrong way. Thank you Sugar for giving me some hope, and to all of you out there searching for the right one, wounds don’t have to kill us and a scar is a stronger piece of our skin.
I urge the LW to read Dan Savage on the concept of the monogamish relationship – a marriage that is “just a little open,” based on the understanding that, like most animals, humans are not biologically programmed to be monogamous (women, if anything, less so than men – the book “Sex at Dawn” on evolutionary history is quite enlightening on this topic).
I confess that this makes a lot of sense to me and is a framework I’d like to adopt if and when I marry. However, Savage’s point is emphatically NOT that everyone can or ought to be nonmonogamous or that lifelong monogamy is not a worthy and rewarding relationship model when both partners desire it. Rather, the point is that our cultural assumptions about how natural and easy monogamy is are damaging and untrue.
Polyamorous people put a lot of time and energy into communicating about their emotional and physical boundaries, and working out an agreement with their partners that can respect those boundaries while still meeting everyone’s needs. People in poly relationships are pushed into doing this because there is no “default setting” for them to adopt without having to think about it – but many will say that even if they didn’t like all the Communication at first, it ended up being the most valuable part of being poly for them because they truly saw each other’s full beings that way. Well, there is no reason that people in monogamous relationships should not engage in the same kind of deep communication about boundaries and needs. (For one thing, they may find that each partner’s understanding of what “monogamy” means is subtly different, especially when it comes to relationships that are emotional but not physical.)
So I think that this is where some people are finding a “moral high ground” – NOT that breaking a commitment is OK, but that when couples have been failing to communicate about their true desires for years, finally doing so can feel liberating and deepen the relationship, even at the expense of great trauma. Obviously, it is far better for that conversation to occur voluntarily rather than as the result of a betrayal. Just because you have a desire to have sex with another person doesn’t mean you have to act on it. But you are more likely to refrain from acting on it if you’ve had a conscious, respectful conversation with your partner up front about how to get those underlying needs met within the framework of your marriage, instead of founding your relationship on the myth that monogamy is natural and easy.
Probably the best gift my parents have ever given me was letting me in on the fact that their marriage was far from perfect.
You see, I grew up in a household that my friends referred to as “brady-bunch” (mainly because we ate dinner together every night at 6, and I wasn’t allowed to answer the phone from 6-7 to talk to friends) and because my parents seemed incredibly happily, like goofy in love, sincerely desirous of each others’ company (as friends). Most couldn’t relate, so while my household became know as “brady-bunch,” my parents’ relationship was eventually dubbed “perfect.” I internalized this. Growing up, I thought my parents’ relationship was perfect.
Then, In my late 20s, when my friends started marrying and some of my friends’ parents (who _I_ thought had a perfect marriage) were divorcing, my parents began to answer my questions about soul mates, unconditional love, marriage, etc. to reveal that marriage was hard work and after 30 years, it remained hard work for them. They laughed at some of my naive, romantic notions but in a way that made their love and fidelity no less miraculous. (Just a little less Disney.)
I lived for 18 years with these two people, and like most children, luckily was oblivious to how difficult relationships are (including theirs) until after college. Like Sugar says, only the two people actually in the relationship can say if their relationship is truly “perfect.” Not even the most intimate of relations outside of it really knows.
My advice? Take the plunge regardless. It’s called “the plunge” for a reason.
It has been 18 months since my husbands emotional affair and I will never be the same. Part of me died.
I don’t think your advice is good. You seem to imply she should allow cheating. This can be dangerous and she could get aids, hpv or herpes. Some women are bitter, they were cheated on. Don’t take it out on young couples. It didn’t work for you, your monogamy bubble was popped, it doesn’t mean she doesn’t deserve what she needs, ( trust and monogamy). The worst thing a wiser person can be us bitter. You told a newlywed to expect to be cheated at to let if happen. It seems sickly twisted. Yes she needs to know it will be work. You don’t need to take a dumb on the sanctity of marriage. Because she hasn’t been betrayed like you, doesn’t mean she deserves your pain. You don’t know her, I hope she had a real, marriage, that is work, with great rewards. Thank god you or theses commentors will not be at HER special day.
I don’t know how I stumbled upon this article, but it saved my relationship. Beautifully written. Thank you.
i agree with the previous person that said this article romanticizes affairs. ‘he had an affair but the conversation we had afterwards brought us closer together.’ i’m sorry to break it to you, but i am almost SURE that mr. sugar has cheated on you since then.
people are so warped about what they want- they aren’t honest with themselves so they aren’t honest with others. they hide in their little bubble ignoring all the signs of cheating. monogamy is bullshit and for a VERY small percent of the population. for everyone else, they are just PRETENDING to not desire what is natural to them. most of us don’t choose to have one friend yet we are supposed to have one lover that fulfills every one of our many varied needs- best friend, hot sex partner, repair man, and everything in between. if your husband was honest with you, he’d say- “i’m attracted to other women. i don’t love you any less, but yes, i want to fuck them.” either he is someone who believes he deserves to sleep with other women, or he isn’t. newsflash- he is.
When I found out about my husband’s affair, the marriage was over. We stayed together. 49 years. He told her the same lies he told me. He is a liar. You can’t “love” a liar cuz you don’t know him. He is a sad man, always trying to live up to his image of himself. As I have said here before, I only need to be okay with me. But in my fiction, they always love enough, always work through it, always make it better. So obviously I am not “okay” with my life. A person is only ever what he seems to be to you. When you find out who your partner or friend “thinks” you are — well, that is what you have to come to grips with. And the monogamy thing? Believe what you are comfortable with. There is research supporting all the theories. And I do not practice what I preach.
Thanks for this, Cheryl.
Today, sadly, this particular column became relevant for me. I knew what to search for to help me deal with the pain, as I regularly read your column in the past. Sure enough, here it is. Your advice is spot on, and though the healing will take a while, I’m hopeful my wife and I will be able to patch our broken hearts back together.
Congratulations, on your success. It’s nice to see one of the good ones get her due.
Thanks again.
Wow. I don’t know how to thank you for this piece. About 6 months ago, my partner (a beautiful man I’d been with for 5 years who treated me like gold) revealed that he’d been unfaithful to me. I’ve been looking for answers ever since. After witnessing some pretty bad examples of relationships growing up, I’d developed a sort of “code” for myself (what I’d accept in a partner, what I wouldn’t) and it felt like I was going against my own code to stick it out. It didn’t fit into my picture of the perfect relationship. So, I’ve been trying to figure out how to reconcile this… I felt like he’d betrayed me, and that I’d be betraying myself to stay. But also that I’d be betraying myself to leave this incredible relationship we’d cultivated together, the best person I’d ever met. I’ve just felt so lost and stuck in limbo.
I’ve been desperate to just hear some stories, of real people, who’ve been through this and come out the other side (it’s not exactly something you ask about on Facebook). So this article blew my mind. And made me realize how naive my ideals were. I can see that I have a lot of growing up to do, and I’m thankful to have seen this article before making a massive mistake and walking away.
Thank you Sugar, and everyone else, for sharing so openly. Honestly… game changer.
I remember reading this post a couple of years ago and thinking to myself how lucky I was to be in a relationship with someone in which our communication was so good that if/when extra-relationship attractions came along we would be so ready to talk it through.
We got engaged almost exactly a year ago and our wedding is in three months. Well, it was going to be anyway. My girlfriend cheated on me, with a friend/work acquaintance who lived far away. They talk regularly and had developed a writers’ friendship outside work. We saw this woman together a few months back when she was crushed by a breakup and I invited her to come visit our sweet little home. I voiced my suspicions about this person and her general personality that made me uncomfortable (fake was, bad boundaries, minor manipulations) but told my partner I trusted her. And then at then end of this woman’s visit, my partner cheated on me when they were at a sort of work retreat.
I am devastated. And not sleeping. At about 2:46 am this morning I remembered this post and I looked it up. It reminded me how hard I’ve worked to live my life as a compassionate person with an open heart. It doesn’t comes easily to this Scorpio, let me tell you. My girlfriend/fiancé was the first person I have ever fully trusted, my family included, for most of my life anyway, which is a longer story. I love the shit out of my girlfriend.
I spent the last few days in a cabin, hoping to clear my head, and Cheryl’s advice hit me so hard. I came back home today and yelled and cried and punched the sofa where that woman’s shitty perfume somehow still hangs.
I cancelled the wedding. That I am sure about.
But tonight my former fiancé-now-girlfriend opened up in a way I’d never seen her do before. She told me some challenging things about her past, her way of lying to hide the uglier parts of herself. She’d never lied to me before, and for some reason that’s the only thing I wholeheartedly believe out of her mouth today. I was shocked to find that I didn’t want to leave her completely. Shocked. I know I’d be fine without her–sad for a long time, but ultimately fine. I do fine on my own. But the truth is, while I think she is as fucking stupid as Mr Sugar was, I also the she is every bit as sorry. And she is saying all the right things about how she plans to regain my trust, even nothing can right the wrong.
I got up and made a sandwich. I thought, ‘I should make her a sandwich, too.’ And I took out more bread. And I then I put the bread away and cried. And then I took out the bread slices out again and knew that if I could just make her that fucking sandwich that I wouldn’t leave her today. Maybe tomorrow, but not today.
This is all to say that love is way more complicated than I ever dreamed and might include being willing to make yourself vulnerable to something truly terrifying. The easy thing for me would be to walk away and toss a match over my shoulder at the far end of the bridge. I am very skilled at that. Yet, here I am. Alone in my house while my former fiancé is sad and remorseful at a hotel. But with every bit of me, I am here.
Thanks so much for your column. I loved it, and I read all the replies. It’s so encouraging to find so many people who’ve had experiences similar to ours.
My wife and I have been married for 22 years. We started therapy before we got married, because we agreed that marriage was not going to involve a white picket fence and happily ever after, but rather would be a challenge unlike any we’d encountered in our lives. We were not wrong. Over the years we’ve faced very difficult challenges, including cancer and the discovery that I have Complex PTSD. We stayed together because neither of us were willing to give up. That’s what we promised when we married, and so far we’ve kept our promise. It’s so encouraging and such a pleasure to learn that other long-married partners have stayed together by working on the hard things that inevitably happen.
One thing that’s been hard at times, but has never been a make-or-break issue, is sex with others. About 8 years ago we agreed to become non-monogomous. We tried swinging, but found that for us, it was unsatisfying. Since then we’ve found ourselves moving toward polyamory. We have lovers and FWB outside the marriage, always openly and honestly disclosing to each other what’s happening. So far our polyamory has caused some aches and pains, but it’s never been a serious cause of contention, much less breakup.
What strikes me, having read the comments, is that it’s so common to assume that sex with others is cheating. Cheating, to me, is doing something dishonest. Sex with somebody else, if everybody knows about it, is not dishonest. I liked a t-shirt I saw at a swing party that said, “It’s not cheating if my husband’s watching!”
I believe that fidelity is being in integrity with your partner or spouse, especially when that’s difficult to do. Sex outside of marriage can fit within that definition of fidelity, as long as we’re honest with each other.
I’m a big fan of marriage, precisely for the reason so many couples have described here. Marriage can work, if it’s a shared determination to stay together and weather the hard parts. And staying together can be very fulfilling, empowering and entertaining!
To Happily Ever After I would say, “Best of luck! I hope that as you grow into your marriage, you won’t be too upset by the inevitable challenges, and that you will take them as opportunities to learn and grow.”
I am nearly 50 and divorced from a serial cheating husband. I’ve come to realize that the reason women are repetitively cheated on by husbands is because we constantly take them back. For the most part if a woman cheats on a man he tells her to pack her crap and leave giving her no room to do it again and break his heart twice or more.
I think women could learn something from men in that regards. Women take back cheating man in far bigger numbers than men will ever take back a cheating woman. Women spend more time convincing themselves that all is now right with the world since their husband has been confessed to being a lowlife.
I think women take back their cheating man so frequently is due to several factors all of which I am too familiar with. Men typically earn more than women. Although I have my own career that pays just fine and I have multiple college degrees my ex-husband still earned more. I also think from a social standpoint women feel the need to have a man at their side whereas men are given more social acceptance to play the field. I’m not saying I agree with this social standard I’m just calling it for what it is.
But whenever I hear or read an article about a woman talking about her unfaithful husband I can bet you that nine times out of 10 it’s going to end with …. but I took him back and all is now right with the world.
Having been married to a serial cheater I will tell you if he cheats on you more than once it ain’t going to stop. And if he cheats on you only once remember that’s the one time you found out about…. And I don’t care how you try to decorate the broken glass after it’s been shattered you will never look at that picture the same again.
Because even though you forgive them …. deep down inside of you is that nugget that says I will never fully trust him the way I used to. If you can live with that nugget in the pit of your stomach for the rest of your marriage … Main together. But I’m willing to bet my career it will happen again and this time you can’t say you didn’t know.
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