Since our purpose herein is to discover the fundamental causes of marital erosion and divorce, it seems appropriate that we continue to look closely at fami

Chapter Ten

Victims of Affairs: A Dialogue

Since our purpose herein is to discover the fundamental causes of marital erosion and divorce, it seems appropriate that we continue to look closely at families that have experienced this tragedy. If a medical scientist wishes to understand the effects of typhus or emphysema or ulcers, he carefully examines patients who are afflicted with those diseases. Accordingly, we must focus our attention on marriages that have been invaded by the “bacteria” of interpersonal conflict—the most infectious disease of our time.

Toward that end, I invited four intelligent, highly verbal people into our Focus on the Family radio studio to talk about their experiences with infidelity. Each in his or her own way is a victim of an affair, having been betrayed by an unfaithful spouse. What follows in this chapter are portions of the transcript from that intense two-hour conversation involving three women and a man (comments have been edited for clarity and grammatical accuracy). Their stories are symbolic of millions in the Western world today and will serve to illustrate the principles I’ve tried to address.

May I suggest as you read these personal accounts that you attempt to correlate the details with our discussion to this point? Our purpose is not to embarrass the anonymous participants, of course, who have graciously given me permission to present their cases. Rather, we want to learn from them. Therefore, I hope you will look for common mistakes and errors in judgment, especially in the early stages of infidelity. Watch for panic and appeasement as the participants weave their way through their stories. Ask yourself if long-suffering and tolerance were successful in healing relationships. And finally, postulate your recommendations for those who are currently enduring a trial by fire. I will provide a commentary on the discussions in the following chapter.11

DOBSON: I’d like to begin by paying special tribute to the four of you who’ve joined us in the studio today. It won’t be easy to talk about the breakup of your families, but we can profit from what you learned as victims of infidelity. It goes without saying that this topic is a heavy one. Only this morning I heard about a woman whose husband left her. She cried almost incessantly for twelve months, and last Thursday, her thirteen-year-old daughter tried to commit suicide. That is where infidelity sometimes leads. But then, who would know that better than the four of you?

Let me begin by introducing you to our radio listeners. You’ve asked that I not use your real names, so we’ll call you Sue, Jean, Mary Ann, and Mike. And I’m going to ask you, Mary Ann, to begin by telling us your story.

MARY ANN: All right. Shortly after George and I were married, we lived at the beach, and I taught school. My husband was unemployed and had too much free time on his hands. He obviously had a lot of female friends I didn’t know, because in the evening he would get phone calls from these other women. I would ask him about the callers, but he would never respond. Of course, I was feeling so much pain because we were married but not living in a marital relationship. We were living as roommates, due to, I’m sure, the guilt he had over his affairs.

DOBSON: How long had you been married?

MARY ANN: We had been married for about six months when this began. Our divorce occurred after three and one-half years. It was very painful.

DOBSON: Do I understand that you tolerated what you knew to be blatant infidelity for that period of time?

MARY ANN: I knew it in my heart but—

DOBSON: You didn’t really want to know it.

MARY ANN: Yes, right, exactly. I made a decision to say, “No, it’s not really happening.”

DOBSON: Was your husband unemployed by choice?

MARY ANN: It was by choice. The beach was too alluring. And the beautiful girls out there were, I’m sure, even more alluring to him.

DOBSON: Just how obvious was the infidelity? Did he ever bring women home with him?

MARY ANN: No, he didn’t. He was very discreet. It was just that he didn’t want to touch me or have anything to do with me. That was very painful. When your husband shows no interest, you feel like you have no worth and that you’re very unattractive.

DOBSON: Did you and your husband share the same values before you were married? Did you think he was a Christian?

MARY ANN: My former husband and I dated eight years before we married!

DOBSON: Eight years!

MARY ANN: Yes. My parents had been divorced, and I wanted to make sure that I was not getting into a bad marriage.

DOBSON: And you still got a surprise?

MARY ANN: I was—

DOBSON: Blind?

MARY ANN: Very blind, I guess. You know, I really believed that he loved the Lord. Now I know that he was living a double life during all those years we dated. But I had no knowledge of it. He was the first person who really loved me, I thought. I didn’t get love from my home. I was twenty-four years old and I was educated and had my profession, so I really felt like I knew what I was doing. I really thought I knew this person. But, a month after we were married, it all came apart. The difficult thing, of course, is to try to go back and relive that decision. We had met at a Christian college, and I believed in him. He believed in himself. There certainly wasn’t any suggestion of danger then, nor did anyone else perceive it. Then when the affairs began, I would go back in my dreams at night, what little I could sleep, and reexamine my decision to marry. I was committed to God; I wasn’t out of fellowship with Him. Despite my caution, I made an enormous mistake.

DOBSON: Sue, I understand you thought you married a Christian, too?

SUE: Oh, I would have staked my life on it. And in fact, I did. We had been married, let’s see, probably fifteen years before I ever knew he was playing around. At that time he was an administrator in a Christian college where I was teaching. He was also chairman of a moral action committee in our church, which is very ironic. When I learned he was involved in an affair, I could say nothing to anyone because our pastor, our college president, his colleagues . . . were all my friends, too. I just couldn’t ruin his reputation with them. It was a terrible time.

DOBSON: How long were the affairs going on before you knew?

SUE: I’m not sure. I was very spaced out until I finally faced reality. After that, the affairs were continuous until finally the marriage was dissolved. That was a period of six years.

DOBSON: Like Mary Ann, you knowingly tolerated your husband’s infidelity for six years?

SUE: Yes. As a Christian I just committed myself more strongly to the marriage; I was determined that if there were any way to make it work, with God’s help, I was going to do that.

DOBSON: But you lost it anyway?

SUE: Yes.

DOBSON: Looking back on the experience, would there have been any way to have saved your home?

SUE: I don’t think so. And, of course, by being patient I was able to give my children their father for six more years. They loved him best of anyone in the world and still have a good image of him. I wouldn’t change that.

DOBSON: Mike, tell me your story.

MIKE: Well, I had a very successful marriage until my wife had a severe accident and a concussion which left her totally incapable of functioning from January to the end of that school year. She was a teacher, and during that lengthy period of time where she could not function, I took over most of the responsibilities of the home. The next year the doctors felt that for her own self-image, she needed to return to teaching, which she really wanted to do. But she was not emotionally or physically ready. She needed somebody to lean on. That somebody happened to teach next door. Their friendship just evolved from there.

DOBSON: Could you see it coming?

MIKE: At first I couldn’t, but during the next two years, I sensed that she was drawing away from me. When we would try to talk about it, we just went around in circles and never seemed to come to a conclusion. I couldn’t figure out what I was dealing with. I had trusted her implicitly for seventeen years. We had had a happy marriage and to even imagine that she was unfaithful was unthinkable.

SUE: It’s almost impossible to believe you’ve been betrayed when you’ve committed your life to another person.

DOBSON: Especially in the Christian context.

MARY ANN: Absolutely.

DOBSON: You all were involved in churchgoing families—

SUE: Yes. In fact, the worst part of the experience for me was the loss of my spiritual leader. I could handle the rejection and the treachery better than I could deal with the implications of James’s sin.

DOBSON: Jean, let’s hear your story.

JEAN: I identify with what Sue just said. That loss of the person that I looked up to spiritually was the hardest part for me, too. My husband was a career churchman, so I not only lost my mate and the father of my children, but I felt like I lost my spiritual leader.

DOBSON: That’s interesting. Both you and Sue experienced the same thing.

JEAN: Oh, it was my whole lifestyle. Divorce is different than just losing a person; you lose your way of life.

DOBSON: How did it happen to you, Jean?

JEAN: Well, I feel like the senior member here. We lost our marriage after thirty-two years, which is really a tragedy. In fact, that’s why I’m here today. If you go through a tragedy, you ought to be able to use it to help someone else, and I hope my story will do that. The reason I was so attracted to Maury (and, in fact, I still am) was that he was the most moral, sincere kind of boy that I had ever dated. We married when we were both nineteen, and we had children right away. He had his first affair, a short little one, when we had two children. I was very upset about it, naturally. I confronted him, and we decided to treat this like modern people would do. So the four of us, two husbands and two wives, sat down and talked about it. Maury was terribly sorry about the whole thing. He really was. It was not the kind of thing that a man with his background would want to do. And so, all was forgiven and the matter ended. He also had another little encounter, just a little kind of an evening thing, at a party one night, but that blew over, too. Right after that, Maury began his career, and we went along as a very normal, happy family. Then about ten or fifteen years ago, I guess, I found out that he was involved in an affair with someone else. I was ill at the time, and Maury is a very sensitive man. He said he was lonely and needed another woman to do what I couldn’t do for him at the time.

DOBSON: Did you buy that?

JEAN: At the time I did. Yes and no. I wanted to believe him because he really was such a good man. But his extramarital activity continued. He had a long-term affair where he saw a woman regularly for nearly two years. It was not a sexual affair. But it was just as painful to me.

DOBSON: An emotional affair?

JEAN: That’s right. I felt a greater sense of disloyalty over that, picturing him sharing himself, than I would have if he had been sleeping with her. He had other affairs as the years went by—some occasionally with women of the street. I’m not sure you would call that kind of thing an affair.

DOBSON: You knew about each involvement?

JEAN: Yes. Sometimes a long period of time would go by before I found out. But I always found out.

DOBSON: Mary Ann, didn’t you tell me earlier that God revealed your husband’s infidelity to you?

MARY ANN: Yes, he did. I had attended a Christian seminar, and on the way home, I experienced a horrible grip of fear. I just knew I was going to go home and find my husband in bed with another girl. Then I said to myself, “Mary Ann! What in the world is wrong with you? That’s ridiculous!”

DOBSON: You had never caught him before?

MARY ANN: No. That’s why I condemned myself. Nevertheless, I confronted my husband when I got home. He became very angry and made me feel like I was really off the wall. But he was involved at the time, and it was God’s way of preparing me for what was to come. The Lord is so gentle in the way He deals with His children.

DOBSON: Looking back on the first revelation, the moment when each of you first became aware that you had serious problems on your hands, how wisely do you feel you handled the situation? Was there anything you could have done that would have helped? Is there anything you’d do differently if you had those years to live over?

MARY ANN: What I did wrong was that I didn’t pray about the very thing I wanted so desperately. I reacted with anger. Instead of saying, “Lord, show me what kind of wife George needs,” I was always so spiritually dogmatic that my husband had to be the way he was. You know it takes two to make a marriage work, and some of my actions didn’t help accomplish that. My husband probably ran from the very thing I wanted him to do because I was so strong.

DOBSON: How is that?

MARY ANN: I was a very self-righteous Christian at that point, who loved the Lord with all her heart, soul, strength, and mind.

DOBSON: How can you blame yourself for that, Mary Ann?

MARY ANN: Well, nothing is wrong with that, but I handled it wrong. I would say to him, “Please read the Bible to me.” You know, sometimes I’d be into the Word of God, and really wanting to seek after Truth, and he’d try to distract me. I remember making a comment I’ll never forget. It’s the worst thing a woman can do. I said, “You’re a tool of Satan!” It was horrible. So there were many things I did wrong that God has revealed to me over the years. I thank the Lord that He only revealed them to me very gradually.

SUE: The main mistake I made was becoming very cold, sexually. My husband was so cruel and rough, and I had gotten to where I just couldn’t respond. But the moment his infidelity was revealed, I was able to be warm and loving again. I asked his forgiveness immediately. That was my first response when I got the news. I think that’s why I became suicidal. I felt so guilty; I knew I had caused the affairs. But then when I did everything I could to make up for those mistakes and the infidelity continued, then I didn’t feel as guilty. But that first year after learning about his unfaithfulness was awful. I cried every day for twelve months. I’m sure I was a wonderful blessing to my husband during that time. By then we had five little children, and it was so hard to manage the home and be a professional person as he wanted me to be. I wish I could have stopped crying, but I didn’t know what else to do. And there was no one in our environment to whom I could turn. The church counselors were his friends. There was no one. I couldn’t talk to his parents or mine. It was terrible.

DOBSON: Sue, that says so much about your character . . . about who you are. Your primary concern was for his reputation, even when your own pain took you to the threshold of suicide. You had every right to seek counsel from someone!

SUE: Yes, but I was afraid that whoever I talked to would come back to the school and then his reputation would be ruined.

DOBSON: Well, that shows the extent of your courage. But I would not have advised it.

SUE: I did call his mother a few times that spring, but my husband said, “Don’t you ever talk to Mom about this again.” So I honored his orders. I said I would not.

DOBSON: Jean, what mistakes did you make during the time of crisis?

JEAN: I was angry and my ego was hurt and I handled it terribly. There were many confrontations and demands that the affairs stop. But it was all wrong. After Maury and I became Christians (we were baptized holding hands), our marriage stabilized and there was a long period of time, maybe fifteen years or so, before there was any other instance of infidelity. I always thought it would never happen again, you know, because he was so sorry. We would talk about his unfaithfulness, and he would be so sorry. Usually, he would only get in trouble during times when his career was at a really low point. I felt I understood why he did it. I didn’t like it, but I understood him; I concluded that he was a man who wasn’t very verbal, and he couldn’t talk about the pain he felt about his career and where he fit into the world.

SUE: My ex-husband had that problem too.

JEAN: So I felt that he went and looked for another woman to kind of give him a little boost.

SUE: That’s exactly my experience too. My husband could be open with me when he was emotionally up, but in those low times he needed to go find someone else to get high with, I think, because he was so nonverbal and it was very hard for him to open up.

DOBSON: Mike, looking back on your trials, what mistakes did you make?

MIKE: Well, finally when I found out about the affair, it did not come as a surprise. I confronted my wife and she denied it. Then I got in touch with the wife of the man that she was involved with, and it was confirmed.

DOBSON: How did you react?

MIKE: I waited six days before confronting her. Then I said that I knew what she had told me the previous week had not been true.

DOBSON: Why did you wait so long to confront her?

MIKE: A friend advised me not to react the night I got the news. He told me to think it over and seek God’s guidance about how I should deal with the problem. It’s probably the best advice I got. I’m convinced that that is the best thing I could have done because I got myself ready to accept and face whatever I needed to deal with, realizing I loved her. But my mistake was in not recognizing sooner what was going on. When I would say, “I love you,” and I did not get a loving response back, that should have been my clue. I should have asked her if she loved me.

DOBSON: If she wouldn’t admit her involvement when she was knee-deep in an affair, would she have confessed no matter what you said or did?

MIKE: At one point she might have. I remember I told her I loved her, and she looked at me and said, “Mike, you have a very confused wife.” I dropped the subject. I felt like she didn’t want to talk about it, but I should have pursued it with her.

JEAN: It is hard to know what would be helpful.

MIKE: That’s it. You question everything.

Note the next comment. It is significant to our discussion.

SUE: Another mistake I made was in not knowing how to confront. I now think I understand what might have been a better approach. My sister went through a similar experience. Neither she nor her husband was a Christian. She had been very soft-spoken and passive, but she became stronger overnight. She asked her husband to move out and get an apartment, which he did. Within a year he decided his family was most important and he came home. I looked at that and wished I could have found a biblical basis to do something similar.

DOBSON: Sue, I have seen that happen more times than I can count, where loving toughness and confrontation brought responsibility in marriage in the same way that they do between a parent and a child or in any other relationship in life. There is a place in marriage for one partner to say to the other, “Rick, I love you. We married one another of our own free will; no one forced us to become husband and wife. We dedicated ourselves to one another exclusively, and it must continue to be that way. If you can’t be faithful to me for life, then I’d rather separate right now. I cannot be one of many lovers. It must be all or nothing. If you choose to leave me I will be severely hurt, because my love for you is very deep. Let me say it one more time so you will understand exactly how I feel. I want you as my husband more than anything in the world, and if you can pledge yourself to me for the rest of our lives together, I’ll do my best to forgive and forget. But if not, then there’s no better time than right now for you to leave with one of your girlfriends.” Do you understand the wisdom of a firm stance like that? Does it make sense to you?

JEAN: Oh, yes, I understand it now. At one point toward the latter years of our marriage, Maury got involved with yet another woman that he didn’t tell me about. She called our home and I found out they were meeting. I was a stronger person at that time than I was when I was younger, and I said to Maury, “All right, I will give you a divorce, and you can pursue the relationship.” He said, “No, I don’t want you to divorce me; I just want some freedom to see where this relationship is going.” I said, “No, that won’t work. If you go with this woman, I will divorce you.” He said, “I don’t want that,” and he cut off the relationship.

DOBSON: That is precisely my point. If when you were younger, you had been able to apply that kind of toughness after the first act of unfaithfulness, instead of years later when the damage had been done, you might have saved your marriage.

MIKE: Later on I realized that I should have been tougher. But I struggled with guilt for a long time. My father-in-law is a minister and I love him very dearly, but he contributed to my self-condemnation. He wanted so badly to see the marriage continue because of his own pain. He wrote to me listing all the Scriptures that said divorce was wrong. I agreed, but I had no choice in the matter! I eventually saw that it wasn’t my fault.

SUE: Oh, I felt so guilty, too. I felt that maybe it was all my fault, and if I had been a better wife, he wouldn’t have looked somewhere else. If I had been more understanding, if I had been more perceptive—all of these things. So I forgave him time after time. I have to say I still feel married; I feel like a married single. I don’t know whether time will dispel that or not.

DOBSON: Did all of you deal with bitterness?

MARY ANN: Oh, definitely.

SUE: I was bitter initially, but I forgave immediately. Then James got involved again. So I thought, okay, if I am like Christ and absolutely sacrificial in my love, perhaps that will be attractive to him. But it wasn’t. I mean I can say I was absolutely sacrificial for six years!

DOBSON: Let me ask an important question. It has been my observation in dealing with people who have been through what you have experienced that the unfaithful partner typically tries to expunge his guilt by refusing the blame. He tells his spouse that their marriage should never have occurred . . . that he didn’t love her even in the beginning . . . that the divorce is really an act of kindness . . . that it wouldn’t have happened if his spouse hadn’t caused the problems . . . that their breakup is actually in the best interest of the kids . . . and that God Himself has approved of the divorce. Did your partners give you these phony messages?

SUE: Oh, all of them, especially the one about God’s approval. My ex-husband’s present wife, the one with whom he had an affair, is also a Christian college teacher. I felt the Lord wanted me to go to her and ask her forgiveness for my bad attitude. She had been my friend for twenty years, and it was extremely difficult to approach her, but I did and I told her I had forgiven her for what had happened. She then told me that she and my ex-husband had prayed about their marriage and received assurance from God that it was right.

DOBSON: That is the ultimate rationalization. It makes blatant sin sound sanctified, but only for a time. A day of accountability is coming.

SUE: Yes, I suggested to my friend that she look a little closer at what the Scripture says about keeping the marriage bed undefiled, and other passages. She said, “Oh, no, I don’t believe in reading the Bible too closely because it is subject to so many interpretations.”

JEAN: The real crusher is when your unfaithful husband says, “But I really love you, I really do. This affair is something that has happened outside of our relationship. It is irrelevant. We still love one another and shouldn’t let this problem affect us.” You feel at times like you are almost going insane because these contradictory messages are given back-to-back.

SUE: That is what caused me to have a serious breakdown.

DOBSON: You said you were suicidal, Sue. Were you, Mary Ann?

MARY ANN: Yes, I was.

DOBSON: Did anybody else think of suicide?

MIKE: Yes.

SUE: I had been a Christian since I was a preschooler, but I still was suicidal when all of this happened. My husband said, “You think God is so great; why isn’t He helping you?” I had sense enough to say that I knew He would if I could let Him, but I was hurting so badly I couldn’t stop shouting. I later read a book by C. S. Lewis called A Grief Observed, and he experienced the same inability to accept God’s grace when he went through the death of his wife. That really ministered to me. A number of books have helped me.

JEAN: Can I tell you something wonderful that happened to me? During my period of suicidal tendencies, my older daughter died from a terminal illness. She left a supply of her medication, and I looked at those pills and knew there were enough to take my life. I was at the end of my rope, and I was counting the pills when the phone rang. It was a friend who offered to come over. I didn’t want to see him and said I wouldn’t let him in. He asked what he could do for me, and I said, “Nothing, there is no reason to go any further.” He talked to me and prayed with me, but you know, I was so distressed that I couldn’t hear him. I couldn’t even hear the Scripture he read. After I hung up the phone, he began calling different people, some who knew me and some who didn’t.

Those people called me all night long. They either prayed with me or just talked with me every hour. That’s how I got through the night. . . .

MIKE: That is wonderful!

JEAN: It was at the same time the worst and best night of my life.

DOBSON: In listening to the four of you share your individual pain, I am impressed again by the willingness of loving people to blame themselves for things they couldn’t help. Each of you did the best you could to cope with irresponsibility and unfaithfulness in your spouses. Even though you made mistakes and were imperfect marriage partners, you were the ones who did everything you could to hold things together. Nevertheless, you blamed yourselves, felt incredible guilt, suffered low self-esteem, and even wanted to die for your failures. Doesn’t that seem a bit unfair to yourselves?

SUE: Yes, but that’s the way I felt. I had to work through it.

JEAN: Yes!

MIKE: I definitely felt like that. Another thing that makes you feel so terrible is that you are alone, but your unfaithful spouse is in the arms of another lover. You walk into the church you have attended for years with her, and you sit in the pew where the two of you used to worship. The building begins to close in on you, even though you are surrounded by people. You feel a kind of panic sweeping over you.

DOBSON: Mike, did you deal with bitterness?

MIKE: Oh, yes! I didn’t realize just how bitter I was. That’s why I couldn’t talk to my boys about what was going on. They had never heard their mom or me fight, and they didn’t know until the night before she left that she was leaving. Now I know why I couldn’t sit down and explain everything to them. I would have conveyed my bitterness to them. Then after my wife had been gone for about four months, I knew it was time to tell the boys the whole story. I was afraid someone at church would tell them if I didn’t. It needed to come from me.

DOBSON: How did they take it?

MIKE: Well, it was more difficult for the younger one. He had always turned to his mother. In fact, he had really been her favorite.

DOBSON: Did

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