How do I handle the hurt from a lie?

[slmill1987]

My 3 year anniversary was May 12th of this year, and it was one of the hardest days as my husband said he wanted a divorce because he felt like I was not trusting him or forgiving him of the rocky past in the beginning of our marriage. Two months after I married him, I found messages between him and a friend that were not appropriate. I forgave him quickly as I believed he meant it was a joke. A month later, more things unraveled and I learned he was emotionally cheating on me and he did so off and on for a year and half. He became an open book to me by allowing me to see his private things such as social media, email, and text messages. I grew to forgive him and trust him. A year and half of rebuilding trust, I still occassionally gave myself reassurance by asking to see his phone or going through his social media accounts. Unknowingly, I was giving him the feeling that I was not trusting him. But I felt I was reassuring myself.

This led to our biggest and most difficult fight on our 3 year anniversary. My husband came clean that he had apparently been feeling unhappy for a period of time because he felt distrust from me. As I was completely unaware he was feeling this way, I of course did not take it so well. I was completely torn and wanted to fight for what we had for 3 years of marriage, and a year of dating. For two days, I felt empty and helpless as I had no idea what would work to work through this. But it turned out, we would work on the marriage if only I could truly forgive him and trust him by his words. He felt a year and half was plenty of time to trust him again.

A few days ago, I found out he lied to me during that time, and was having a sexual conversation with a female friend who he told me he was seeking advice from about how to start a process on a divorce. I lashed out and became extremely angry at him and her as well. He believes she was in no wrong and it was not a form of cheating since he told her he wanted to divorce me. I look at it differently, and no matter what I say, we don't see eye to eye on it because the experiences were different. I believe the conversations between the two were way out of line, was cheating, and did not have any help to him making his decisions whether to be with me or not. I felt she was his back up plan when I was out of the picture. As he has told me it was a mistake and he was sorry, I do forgive him, but I need to forgive her myself for my husband and I by being able to confront her too. My husband disagrees and thinks I do not have a reason to speak with her. He has told me they do not talk anymore, but I can't help but feel uncomfortable if they were to talk again because of how far their conversation went.

I could have handled this much differently, and went against him and said something any way but I respectfully want to ask him to allow me to do so in a respectful and fashionable way as a Christian should do, so that way I know for myself and for my husband that I truly forgive them both of this behavior.

I need to know if I am in the right, and how I should handle this. Please help me to be a better person for what has happened.

 

[Matthias Rose]

Being "in the right" is a kind of trap here. Reality is much more complicated and subtle than we like to think, and when spouses start arguing about who is right, both lose. (Even if one is a lot righter than the other.)

In reality, it's time to get very practical.

According to your story, your husband has not been fully open with you. Discussing the prospect of a divorce with a friend rather than with you is a very serious withdrawal of himself from you. There are a lot of different ways to understand what he has done over the past three years: in some stories, he may be a lying, deceiving, emotionally cheating partner. In others, he may just have a different understanding from you as to what healthy boundaries look like. But those stories don't really matter much. What does matter is that he has pulled away from you on at least one occasion, and if he had gone so far as to really be seriously contemplating divorce, than probably on other occasions as well.

So, let's say we didn't turn this into a debate as to who is right.

Let's instead ask whether you want to be in this marriage, and also whether he does. (This assumes that in your faith tradition, divorce is an option.) The answers to these two questions are probably not clear. There is probably a lot of confusion in each of you, and miscommunication between you.

And this is why, the standard answer comes back to: see a marital counsellor.

Find a good one. Find one who can work with you both in your place of faith, your place of hurt, and your place of hope.

The two of you are going to need to get really clear about what you need in your marriage. You are going to need to agree on what healthy boundaries are. You are going to need to rebuild trust. You are going to need to learn new communication skills. A qualified marital counsellor will help you with these things. Without getting help, your chances of figuring this out on your own are not as good. (Although I generally recommend the book Non-Violent Communication, by Marshall Rosenberg as one place to start.)

With a good counsellor, you may find that what you want and need from a partner are things that your spouse is unwilling or unable to give, and your choice becomes one of divorce or a lifetime of not having your needs met. That's a tough road, and some who reject the possibility of divorce choose to take that path as a sacrifice to God. I don't believe that is a necessary road, but I do honor the faith of those who choose it.

But you may also find that there is more common ground than you think, and by healing trust and finding the right boundaries and (both of you) opening your communication to be much more loving, compassionate, and honest that the bumpy start to your marriage is simply that, and that the road gets smoother and more beautiful as you go forward.

 

[JohnNess]

Trust is a tricky thing: takes years to build, seconds to destroy. Was it perhaps wrong of you to keep wanting to check up on him? If you had no real evidence that anything was going on, then yes. Yet it doesn't seem he was quite the open book you thought he was.

It would seem his behavior is repetitive; perhaps counseling would help you both. A lot of people are more open in front of counselors than they are to each other. If he's willing, maybe you could meet with a pastor or other Christian counselor and talk about your past, the ways in which you've each tried dealing with it, and how you've felt about the other's attempts to deal with it.

I just get the feeling that there is a little more going on here, and maybe it's something neither of you are aware of, not on a conscious level, at least. I'm a firm believer that the more honesty there is in marriage, the better. And my wife and I try (sometimes we fail) to keep God first, which helps us not only honor Him, but to love each other better.

 

[slmill1987]

I appreciate your fast response, and to be clear from what I feel and know, is that since the incident almost two months ago, my husband has proved to me that he does want this marriage to work, as do I. I really read your first sentence about being right, and once I did, I had a much more deeper understanding. And I appreciate you opening up my eyes in this. Marriage counseling has been a process we have been through, but it was harder as my husband felt he was ganged up on throughout the sessions, and really did not want to be there. I wasn't ready to quit, but I did so to prevent further damage. We don't see eye to eye on a lot of things because of past experiences. And that is understandable, but compromise is hard for us. We both said in the early stages before getting married that we did not want to end up divorced. I still do not want to end up divorced, and I believe he does not either. I just want to know how we could handle this last situation where we both are comfortable in moving forward, unlike before where I held back things.

 

[Matthias Rose]

If your husband felt ganged up on in counseling then it probably wasn't a very good counsellor.

I would still recommend giving counseling another try, perhaps with a counselor that he researches and chooses. If you both are very committed to being in this relationship, then the way you heal from this involves steady work of openness, authenticity, honesty, clear and compassionate communication, and deep understanding of your needs, your wants, and your boundaries.

There are other things you can do to deepen trust, such as deepening your physical intimacy, learning and practicing your love languages, and the like. But if there is lack of clarity on what your healthy marriage is going to look like, then it is all built on sand.

Your concern about forgiveness of and contact with the other woman, and your husband's response is an interesting one.

Your husband's best answer would have been: by all means, do what you need to do. You are first in my life, and I support whatever you need to do to restore your trust and your balance.

However, both your desire to contact her and his desire for this not to happen indicates fear (on his part) and a deeper lack of trust (on your part). You may or may not have gotten to the heart of this onion yet. You may or may not want to.

There are lots of possible stories here, but ultimately, if your husband has reached his own personal clarity about his wants and needs, and believes that your marriage is where those lie, then it is time to be practical about healing and building the marriage you both want.

Part of that is you getting honest with yourself about what you need in order to feel safe, to feel cared for and protected, to feel loved, and to trust the man you have given your heart to. And communicating that to him, as lovingly and gently as you can.

There is one other thing I want to say, slmill1987 -- and that is trust your instincts. I have a hunch that you are a somewhat jealous person by nature, and there is nothing wrong with that. You want all of your husband's love and devotion, and why shouldn't you? But when there has been a breach of trust -- even if that was based on misunderstanding and miscommunication rather than betrayal of actual vows -- one party (you) becomes highly sensitized to further breaches. The other party has a choice of being extra open, or not. You say he felt like the problem was your lack of trust -- but had he actually been trustworthy? Had he earned that trust?

This is a deep spiritual matter, slmill1987 -- this is where openness goes much deeper than sharing cell phone logs.

Yes, he needs to be able to feel that you trust him. And he needs to earn that trust with his completely loving transparency.

I want to tell you something from my own experience: I was a man like your husband. I was not fully trustworthy, and a loving woman trusted me. I broke her trust, and it created spiralling patterns of hiding myelf from her. One breach of trust, "gotten away with" led to more. I have always been an independent and private person, and I used that quality of myself to justify (to myself and to my wife) the privacy that allowed me to "get away with" bad behavior. I put this phrase "got away with" in quotes because I didn't get away with anything. I was only hurting myself, and the woman I loved.

This ended in divorce. It was not a one sided problem: I did the wrong thing, on many occasions, but there were ways in which I was seeking what she withheld from me, also. So even though she was "in the right" and I was in the wrong, it was a complicated tangle of unmet needs, unspoken wants, and unacknowledged fears.

Subsequently, I have married a woman in which there is complete openness. I have nothing to hide, and I do not desire to keep anything private. I have no need. I share my whole heart with her, and my whole life. When I find I have a desire to keep something to myself, it is a warning sign to me that I am withdrawing from her. It becomes an opportunity to explore why that might be. Sometimes it is for no good reason. Othertimes, there may be some resentment that I wasn't quite aware of manifesting as a desire to pull away from her as a form of punishment for something that I wasn't even fully conscious I was upset about.

But by returning -- repenting -- again and again, and re-committing to complete openness and honesty, so I now have the relationship that I wanted, even when I did not know what I wanted.

I hope all this helps, and I hope you can find a good counsellor!