After the Affair - Modern Love WHEN the news broke about the Petraeus affair, my first thought was: "Here we go again. Another married man caught sleeping with a younger woman. My second thought had more personal resonance: "I wonder what will happen to his marriage?" When I was in my early 20s I thought my morals and convictions were set in stone and unshakable. I had rules in place for so much of my life. When we are young and starting out, we're more certain about how our marriage will play out: how we will raise our children, and how we'll handle our husbands having an affair. That was topic No. 1 with my girlfriends. I remember sitting around my dining room table with my newly married friends, drinking wine and asking one another hypothetical questions about adultery, like whether we would leave our husbands if it happened to us. They were unanimous in their outrage. "I'd make him beg," said one. Beg and beg, down on his knees, for days. "Oh, my God, I'd leave in a minute," said another. I couldn't stay with my husband if he slept with someone else. Lois, who had always been so quiet, slammed her hand on the table and announced: "I'd never trust him again. Every time he went out or went away on a business trip, I would suspect him of having an affair. I couldn't live like that. All of them were sincere, firm in their conviction of what was right or wrong. I, too, joined in, but with what I believed was a more nuanced view. "Well," I said. If it were a one-night stand or an overnight business trip, or a company party where everyone had had too much to drink, I guess I could forgive. But a sustained year of lying, sneaking around, and all the makings of a real affair? I'm sorry. That I could never condone or forgive. As with so many unexpected trials in life, we just don't know until it happens. Ten years later, when exactly that happened, when my husband carried on a yearlong affair with a much younger woman, I thought I knew how I would feel, but I didn't. When I got over my initial shock and found that I was still in one piece, still making dinner, still driving car pools, still going on with life, I wondered, "What happens now?" When I had to choose whether to abide by my strict rules, did I really feel the same way? At 23, my friends and I saw the situation only in black and white. We didn't see the grays: the subtle shifts in understanding that can muddy convictions and the gradual awakening to the real trade-offs and complexities involved. I had thought that something was not quite right for months. We were living at the time in Bucks County, Pa., with four children under the age of 10, a mortgage and a limited income, all of which conspired to create a prickly tension in the house. I had tried not to lay the blame on my husband, but my anxiety came out in little jabs, in finger pointing that was both subtle and not so subtle. Our friends were making big money, buying big houses, driving big cars, and I was wondering whether we could afford to send the kids to summer camp or hire someone to help clean the house. My husband's retail paint business was struggling, and I felt as if I were the only one running in circles trying to catch up. But my husband and I had fooled everyone. We were known as "the golden couple," the funniest, happiest people at the swim club we couldn't afford. So when the truth came blasting into my world, when he came home one night after being humiliated by the young waitress he had been seeing, he poured it all out to me as I listened in a fog, trying to hear what he was saying and process it like the mature woman I thought I was. He told me how he fell into it, how he had become obsessed to a point where nothing else mattered except seeing her. He even confessed to the most glaring betrayal of all: taking her to a friend's house to show her off. I barely listened past the first few sentences. I was already thinking of how I should respond. Should I cry? Scream? Take a rolling pin to his head? I just sat there, barely breathing. Do you love her? I asked, pain constricting my chest. "Yes, I think so," he said. I feel so good around her, but I think she's through with me. Do you love me? "Sure!" he said. You're my wife, the mother of my children. That hardly sounded contrite. What was I looking for? I ran to the living-room couch, threw myself down and sobbed. Even today, decades later, I can still see myself lying on that couch sobbing, waiting for an apology that never came. Judy Wachs is a writer and recruiter for Internet start-up companies in Aptos, Calif.