After you have confronted him about the cheating, you may wonder what he is feeling. Since he has betrayed your trust in such a painful way, you may find it hard to believe anything he is saying. As someone who specializes in extramarital affair recovery, I want to tell you what I have heard many men say.
This is a truly complicated space. Men, so often, reflect after the affair with greater awareness. As a therapist in the space of helping couples heal from affairs, what I know is that these are the things I hear men say. They are often doorways to conversations and deeper healing if the couple wishes to try to stay together.
Since I have heard it repeated so often, I have come to believe these truly represent what many of them are feeling.
1. He had hoped that you would never find out about the affair.
In his mind, he may have thought he could get away with it and that he did not.
This may not be as hard to believe as the others though some men have not even covered up their tracks very well. Yet at least as men enter these relationships, they tend to assume that they can keep it under cover and not hurt you.
2. He wants you to believe he didn’t intended for things to get out of hand.
Many times these relationships move from a casual work experience together to a friendship over lunch to a much deeper kind of sharing. At the beginning, this truly may not have been part of his plan.
Many men do not imagine that you will experience this as an affair. Only when it becomes sexual do they recognize they have crossed the line.
At the same time marriage counselors tend to agree that most women are pained by the intimate sharing than men will recognize. For them, the openness especially if there is talk about how the marriage is not working, represents a betrayal of what they thought of what you felt should be “between us.”
3. He can’t believe that he has done this to you.
You may be totally surprised that this person whose values you have trusted could have such a breach of character. For many men as well they wake up out of the trance state of the “in love” relationship and can’t believe they have gone against their own values in this way. Not are their friends surprised but so will be your man.
4. He is blown away by how much pain he has caused you.
You are experiencing more pain than you have at any other time in your life. The tsunami of feelings will overwhelm you. Believe me here, men do not have categories to appreciate how deep the kick to the stomach is that you experience each time you think of it.
Here’s where good relationship counseling can help. Someone experienced in this area can help your mate appreciate that this is a predictable impact even though they did not expect it.
5. He wishes you could move beyond it and not keep bringing it up.
Over and over men will say to me that they just want their wives to more on and get beyond and focus on what could be built now. You may need to talk about in the middle of the night. He may have this profound sense of “Do we have to talk about it now? We are both too tired to talk intelligently about anything.”
6. He does not know what to say when you want to go over it again.
The problem is that you are feeling like a police officer who wants to go over the story many times to see if you have all of the details and if he changes his story. You naturally have doubts that you are getting the whole story when he had so much trouble revealing the full picture in the first place.
Most guys feel like they have tried to dredge up all of the details. They cannot believe that telling you anything more will help you feel grounded. Instead with each new detail, they imagine you will just feel more hurt, anger and rejection.
What they do not realize is that his having the courage to tell the whole story is a step toward helping you trust rather than continuing to protect the other woman.
He can see your pain but he like you may not what will lead to your feeling reassured. You have to look for that together.
7. He feels interrogated and wishes he could defend himself and knows he can’t.
On the one hand he wants to even blame you for some of what has happened. Yet he may recognize that any hint of taking full responsibility will look like he’s trying to deny what he has done and the pain it’s caused.
In the initial stages he knows he must constantly take responsibility for the step he has taken to reach beyond the promise of fidelity.
However, over time, you both need to put together a story of some of the many factors on both sides that made the marriage vulnerable to the possibility of the cheating. Otherwise you are clinging to a victim role rather than exploring the changes that can happen now in order to rebuild trust.
If you are in New York or in the Southern Westchester area, please feel free to give me a call to talk about your concerns and to explore the possibility of beginning therapy to help you heal from your spouse’s infidelity. You can reach me at 914-548-8645 or by emailing me at jimwalkup@gmail.com.
Updated: May 2022
