Advice: An Affair to Remember

She had an affair and he's making her pay.

By Hara Estroff Marano, published on June 01, 2004

My husband and I have been married almost 25 years. I’m now 46. When I was 27 I had an affair, and a child from the affair. She’s now 19 and grew up living with us. My husband and I also have four children together. The whole of our marriage, my husband has constantly kept bringing up the affair and the other man. He refuses to see a counselor. But he now verbally abuses me and has lost the respect he once had. He is chronically depressed. I financially support us all. He blames me for everything he does wrong. He is never there for me or the kids emotionally, backs out of everything. I feel I have been in this marriage only as a way for him to punish me for what I did to him. He constantly does the opposite of everything I ask of him, even with regard to the children. We’re all suffering emotionally. I have had to threaten him with divorce to try and make him understand the emotional pain of all this. I’m just wondering if staying in this marriage is worth all this.

First things first: safety and respect. You don’t ask your husband to stop abusing you. You tell him to stop. You say firmly, without anger: “You may not talk to me that way.” You are not responsible for the abuse, but you must erect boundaries that announce what behavior is acceptable and what is not.

It’s bad enough that your husband has not been able to let go of the need to punish you all these years. But you seem to have collaborated in his view by keeping yourself in line for whatever punishment he has felt entitled to mete out.

Dwelling on a wife’s infidelity for 19 years (I hope you can understand that the presence of a child of that affair can be a constant reminder) and acting and reacting negatively to everything a wife says is bound to make anyone depressed. By now it’s become a lifestyle and may not be easy for him to put aside.

But if there’s to be any change, it’s only going to come one way. You and your husband need to have the honest conversation you should have had 19 years ago. You must talk about the pain he has carried all this time as a result of your infidelity. And you must listen, painful as it may be. Infidelity is a betrayal, it shatters all the rules one thought one was living by, and that is a certifiable emotional trauma.

Hopefully you will have empathy for the deep hurt you caused him, and perhaps you can both express the sadness of that knowledge. If you can’t muster a sense of sorrow and compassion for the pain you inflicted, then there’s no way to re-establish a connection.

But if you can both recognize your transgression and the hurt it caused, and openly acknowledge the burden of pain your husband has carried all this time, this may help him give it up. Then you may discover the person you once loved. After all, he has been generous and helped raise a daughter not his own. There are definitely signs of substance there, if you can get beyond the pain that has ground him to a halt.