Why I'm forgiving my husband for falling in love with another woman
By Karen Williams
Updated: 05:13 EST, 16 June 2010
There have been a number of high-profile celebrity affairs making headlines over the past few months that previously would have elicited from me only a cursory voyeuristic glance.
Yet now I find myself increasingly drawn to each revelation, and the resulting online discussions about what a wronged wife should do in such circumstances.
The most recent stories concern cheating pop star Ronan Keating and his wife Yvonne. This week, the pair appeared to be attempting to make a fresh start by moving into a new family home.
Difficult time: Ronan and Yvonne Keating are having to work through the fact that Ronan has had a prolonged relationship with another woman
This follows Yvonne's comments last week that she's finding forgiving 'an emotionally attached' affair - as opposed to a one-night stand - extremely difficult.
And from personal experience, I can tell you it is difficult.
I know some will think me weak, or in possession of very little self worth, for sticking by my husband - a man who has lied to me, betrayed me and broken our marriage vows.
But I am neither. Until faced with such a situation, let me tell you, it's impossible to predict how you will react.
I believe that you can forgive an affair that has gone way beyond a 'drunken one-night stand' (not that this scenario is any less painful), but to do so takes a great deal of work, and pain along the way.
It means facing up to some harsh truths about your relationship, and accepting that maybe you are also partly to blame.
Before you flinch at that, until a year ago I would have thought I'd show a philandering husband the door without a second thought. The problem is that theoretical situations don't equate to the reality of a shared 20-year loving and affectionate history, and the bringing up of children together.
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I was 22 when I met my husband at the public transport company where we both worked. We started going for drinks after work, and I quickly fell for his intelligent wit and shy demeanour - attributes that I'd almost entirely forgotten by the time I found out about his affair.
It was last October that, like Yvonne Keating (and probably many others), I stumbled across emails and texts between my husband and a ghost from his past.
My suspicions had been aroused over the previous months by his increasingly furtive behaviour and almost pathological addiction to Facebook. He took advantage of my disdain for the social networking site - a site that, in my view, thrives on 'living-in-the-past fantasy' situations - to rekindle a friendship with a woman he had known 25 years previously.
The woman in question was known to me as the same one he had admired from afar during his lovelorn teenage college years. We had openly discussed our past loves, or in his case 'never-had-beens'.
When he mentioned in passing that he had 'found' her on Facebook, I dismissed the warning light that instinctively switched on in my head as unfounded paranoia.
At that point, I trusted my husband implicitly and probably took our relationship a little bit for granted.
But over time, I did start to resent the time Facebook was clawing away from me and our 18-year-old son and nine-year-old daughter. When I pushed him to explain his changing behaviour, he talked ominously about depression and suicidal thoughts.
Crucial: A friend advised Karen that keeping her husband in the family home was of the utmost importance. Yvonne Keating had Ronan build her a new one
I was horrified and, if I'm honest, intensely irritated. I felt he was acting like some victimised drama queen.
So I ignored his growing despondency and resentment over his daily commute to an IT job he no longer liked, conveniently forgetting that I had been the one to instigate a move from London to the South Coast several years before.
The result was that my husband became more introverted and increasingly difficult to live with. In response, I became more shrew-like and began going out more often with female friends.
At the time, ironically, I thought I was being magnanimous, giving him time and space to work through a typical midlife crisis. But looking back, I realise it was self-preservation.
I was feeling bewildered and lonely, finding his preference for online communication and pursuit of solo sports (he was running and swimming every day), rather than spending time with the children and me, hurtful.
The way it came into the open was typically us: me proactive, him passive. Suspicions heightened, I had signed on to Facebook solely to be his 'friend', so that I could view his profile.
It took a week for him to accept me as a friend - plenty of time to clear his Facebook account of any incriminating emails or posts. And therein lay his undoing.
When I eventually perused his backdated posts, there was only one benign one from her, dated April. It was then September. So I questioned how he knew so much about her current life: single parenthood, son's name, illnesses, current location etc, which he couldn't help intermittently dropping into conversations.
If there was no open Facebook contact, as he insisted, the only possible explanation was private communication. He, naturally, denied this. But it took only a few clicks into his email account (being a man, he hadn't changed his password for years) to reveal impassioned outpourings between the two of them.
My first thought was disbelief. I couldn't accept that the Jane Austen-style prose criss-crossing the Ethernet came from my self-deprecating, slightly cynical husband. It was like some historically displaced love affair, full of repressed 'I want to but I shouldn't' type yearnings.
And when I finally confronted him, his instinct was to lie. Indeed, the confession was piecemeal and protracted. Each time I put forward another piece of evidence (train tickets showing his trips to her town, or emails between them), he admitted a little more, very reluctantly, usually with me screaming and crying, and him stonewalling.
When asked why he couldn't just own up to the whole affair immediately, he said that he 'hadn't wanted to hurt me any more than necessary'. It was laughable.
What followed is still much of a blur to me, but in the first two weeks my weight plummeted. The thought of them together made me feel physically sick, and I couldn't eat.
I contacted the other woman twice by email. What I couldn't understand was how a woman, herself a single mother, could possibly want to break up someone else's family. She, of course, did not respond.
'He attempted to elevate what was essentially just a seedy mid-life crisis into some cerebral destiny by saying their connection was 'like a Victorian love affair'
I turned to my amazing network of female friends. Their reaction was unanimous: while acknowledging that my husband had behaved idiotically, they all thought our relationship was worth fighting for.
One friend, who had been through a similar situation years before, advised me that I should try to keep him in the family home, even if it was in separate rooms for a time, as geographical distance would exacerbate the emotional distance. These turned out to be wise words.
It goes without saying that there were many arguments, and each day another piece of crockery took the brunt of it. I kept telling him to go and live with her if he felt like that, and even threatened one night to call the police to have the locks changed; but he refused to go. Deep down, I was glad. I knew how destructive it would be to us to separate when so much bitterness and resentment remained unresolved.
Instead, after three weeks of little sleep, I told him that he 'owed' us at least the six months he had spent wooing her to see if we could get our relationship back on track.
Initially, he paid this lip service, but I knew he was still in contact with her. He tried to make me out to be unreasonable for requesting that all contact stop. I really think he thought he could still have it all - me at home with the kids and the family support network, and her as his lover and 'muse'.
If it wasn't so tragic, it would have been laughable. Actually I do remember laughing several times, not through humour but hysterical incredulity - especially when he started to talk about it being 2009 and people having 'all sorts of alternative living arrangements'.
I think, initially, I had tip-toed around a little, not wanting to push him out with ultimatums; but after six weeks I took a stand. He had to cease all contact with her, or pack his case and leave permanently.
Two days later, he told me he had phoned her and explained this. Although he didn't go into detail, he said her reaction was bitter. Understandable, I expect, if she thought somehow she was on a promise.
But where did we go from there? First, I got him to agree to come to Relate.
It was there that he told me that he had always been in love with her - which was probably the most painful thing I have ever heard.
In another session, he attempted to elevate what was essentially just a seedy mid-life crisis into some cerebral destiny by saying their connection was 'like a Victorian love affair'. My derision knew no bounds.
Couples counselling turned out, by mutual consent, to be a short-lived thing.
Instead, we decided to meet in a coffee shop or pub once a week to talk through what we thought had gone wrong, and whether we thought we could resolve it. We were still living together, but it meant we could air our thoughts in a neutral place. There were one or two sticky moments to begin with, usually when I made some sarcastic remark about his behaviour, or her, but I soon realised that my looking for a fight didn't move things on.
I had to face up to the fact that I haven't been particularly supportive over the past two years in regard to his job dissatisfaction. And dealing with his resentment made me reassess our relationship. The other woman (late 40s, so no clichéd young starlet here) offered a sympathetic ear away from the 'daily domestic daily grind'.
I think now that through a gradual osmosis, rather than the daily picking-over-the-pieces that we started with, we have built up some mutual respect and compromise. He accepts that bringing his stress about work home brings us all down, so he tries to leave his work baggage at the door, and I, in turn, try not to get too narked when he is occasionally withdrawn.
As for the children, our 18-year-old son knows all the facts and has behaved maturely. His view is that we should do what makes us happy. Our nine-year-old daughter knows nothing (although, admittedly, probably sensed a lot), but I feel that us remaining together is of benefit to her.
At the same time, my husband has made an effort to become more involved with their lives. He returns home earlier occasionally to spend time with them, and I no longer feel like I am, to all intents and purposes, a single parent.
Now, eight months on, we're not entirely out of the woods, but we do spend more time together. He leaves his laptop at the office and we talk, eat together, and share our social time - and as a result we connect more. We have even been able to resume an affectionate, physical relationship.
After a lot of painful honesty, there is definitely less bitterness. While I don't feel the same about him in terms of his integrity, which I mistakenly believed was unimpeachable, I am now more accepting of his flaws.
Naturally, I have moments when I panic and think 'Is he still in touch with her?', especially if he's working late or out in London with a friend, but I have to accept that trying to restrict his movements would only be regressive to us both. And as we become more emotionally reconnected, I worry about this less.
Forgiveness is not an easy thing, and full trust may never come back. But, for now, we both seem prepared to keep working at it - and I like to believe that we will get through it.
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