The Marriage Book (35 page)

5. If your cheating husband is frequenting any dating sites, create a fake profile on-line of someone you think your husband would be attracted to and then start flirting. Many wives have successfully used this technique.

6. Be careful of your cheating husband’s close friends who may cover for him because of loyalty feelings. Even if they don’t approve of your husband’s cheating ways, they may still cover for his cheating by providing an alibi for him.

7. Set booby traps in your house. If you think your cheating husband may be bringing someone into your home while you are traveling or out, set some traps. Put on a clean set of sheets and then place a crumb on the bedspread. Make sure that a dog or cat doesn’t move it. Then check to see if the crumb is still in the same place after your return.

8. Get your girlfriends to help. Sign up a willing acquaintance or girlfriend to hit on your husband at a pre-determined location to see if he will bite. It is helpful if she carries a tape recorder in her purse so you may hear him.

9. Monitor your husband’s driving habits for a month. Watch for increase in gas receipts and monitor the car’s odometer to see if there are extra unexplained miles on the car. Monitor the time he leaves for work and the time he comes home. You should be able to establish a pattern by keeping a calendar and noting the times. If your husband claims to be working late, check paycheck stubs to verify his overtime. If your husband explains a late return home as a result of having to drive out of town on business, yet the mileage on the car indicates less than ten miles driven, you’ll have caught your cheating husband in a lie which may be due to his adultery.

10. Paper signs of a cheating husband can include unexplained receipts, more frequent ATM withdrawals, and unexplained credit card charges. Note any strange dates and times. Is there a restaurant charge when he should have been at work? Check his business deductions if possible.

If you have
tried some of the above tips on how to catch a cheating husband and have been unsuccessful, try playing your poker face. Pretend like you know something and give him 24 hours to come clean or else. However, only resort to this after you have tried all other means because if you accuse him, your husband will know you are on to him, deny any wrong doing and cover his cheating tracks better next time.

WENDY PLUMP

“A ROOMFUL OF YEARNING AND REGRET,” 2010

Wendy Plump originally wrote this article for the
New York Times
’ “Modern Love” column. Her book on the same subject,
Vow: A Memoir of Marriage (and Other Affairs)
, was published in 2013.

Not long ago, the friend of a friend spent the night in a hotel room, which is sometimes what you do when you find out your spouse has been having a yearlong affair. His flight was sadly predictable—it’s all many of us are capable of after discovering such a betrayal—though I am sure he now realizes that mere movement is not a fix for that kind of agony.

I know this for two reasons: No. 1, I have had an affair; No. 2, I have been the victim of one. When you unfurl these two experiences in the sunlight for comparison, and measure their worth and pain, the former is only marginally better than the latter. And both, frankly, are awful.

I recently offered my cheated-upon view of things to my acquaintance, who has returned every night for a week to that hotel because he cannot bear to look at his wife. A couple of years ago I offered the other side to a friend when she was considering having an affair.

Start, I suggested to her, by picturing yourself in the therapist’s office with your betrayed husband after you’ve been found out (and you will be found out). You will hear yourself saying you cheated because your needs weren’t being met. The spark was gone. You were bored in your marriage. Your lover understands you better. One or another version of this excuse will cross your lips like some dark, knee-jerk Hallmark-card sentiment.

I’m not saying these feelings aren’t legitimate, just that they don’t legitimize what you’re doing. If you believed they did, your stomach wouldn’t drop on your way out the door to your lover’s. You wouldn’t feel the need to shower before climbing into the marital bed after a liaison. You wouldn’t feel like a train had struck you in the back when your son asked why you forgot his lacrosse game the other day.

When
you miss a family function because of work, you get over it. When you miss a family function because you were in a hotel room with your lover, you feel breathless with misery.

The great sex, by the way, is a given. When you have an affair you already know you will have passionate sex—the urgency, newness and illicit nature of the affair practically guarantee that.

What you don’t know, or perhaps what you don’t allow yourself to think about, is that your life will become an unbearable mix of yearning and regret because of it. It will be difficult if not impossible to be in any one place with contentment.

This is no way for an adult to live. When you’re with your lover, you’ll be working on your alibi and feeling loathsome. When you’re with your spouse, you’ll be dying to return to your love nest. When you are at home, everything in your life will look just a little bit out of register—the furniture, the food in your refrigerator, your children, your dog—because you’ve detached yourself from your normal point of reference, and it now belongs to a reality you’ve abandoned.

You will be pulled between two poles, one of obligation and responsibility, the other of pleasure and escape, and the stress of these opposing forces will threaten to split you in two.

I met the man I cheated with early in my marriage. He was the beautiful twin brother of a friend, something like a young Errol Flynn. I was entranced. My husband traveled a lot and I took advantage of that, finding myself at my lover’s apartment often. But at home with my husband during those ragged months, I was anxious and ill at ease. I should have been focusing on our new house, our new jobs, but my inability to resist the pull of the affair ruined all of that. I could not concentrate on our coupled life and frankly did not care to.

I knew I needed to stop it, but didn’t have the will to do so on my own. I had to enlist my husband, to tell him so that we could battle this together. So I admitted to the affair one evening after dinner.

Almost 20 years after that confession I can still remember how the whole world narrowed down to the two of us sitting there, that new truth congealing between us.

Once the affair is out in the open, you will strive mightily to justify yourself. You will begin many sentences with the phrase, “I never meant to—” But one look at the hollow-eyed, defeated form of your spouse will remind you that such a claim is beside the point. You can both get over this, yes. But the innocence will have gone out of your union and it will seem as if a bone has been broken and healed, but one that rain or cold weather can set to throbbing again.

So, now take the other side. You discover your cheating spouse, as I once did, and what you experience is not far removed from post-traumatic stress. It is a form of shock. As your mind struggles to accommodate this wrenching reality, you won’t be able to sleep or focus. Your fight-or-flight mechanism will go haywire. You will become consumed with where your spouse is at any moment, even if you see him in the pool with your children.

You will lose your appetite. Stress will blow out your metabolism. You will torture yourself with details known and imagined. You will fit together the mysteries of his daily patterns like a wicked puzzle. Every absence or unexplained late night or new habit or sudden urge to join a gym, for instance, will suddenly make horrible sense. You will wonder why you were so stupid.

But as the writer Paul Theroux says in one of his travelogues, “It is very easy to plant a bomb in a peaceful, trusting place.” That is what the cheating spouse has done. Then detonated it.

Sooner or later your illicit, once-beloved object of affection will become tawdry, wearying. You will come to long for simple, honest pleasures like making dinner with your sons or going out to the movies without having to look over your shoulder.

On the other side, your spouse’s philandering will cease to torment you and instead the whole episode will leave you disgusted and bored and desirous to get out. You will just want to be with someone who does what he says he is going to do, goes where he says he is going to go, and can be found any time you need him because he is not hiding.

I say all this by way of hope, believe it or not. Affairs are one of the adult world’s few disasters that can be gotten over, with a lot of time and kindness. It has to burn out of you over months and months, flaming up and then subsiding as you get used to the fact.

A great deal of comfort will come from your friends, many of whom will offer advice—hate him, leave him, move on—that you should listen to politely and then reject. After all, the
consequences of your decisions will be visited upon you, not your friends. They will be only too happy to amplify your confusion, listen to you cry, and then get into the car and drive home to their own intact families.

In the end your marriage may not need to be trashed, though mine was. The affairs metastasized in our relationship from the inside out. By the time all was said and done, there was little left to save. Our marriage had become like a leaf eaten away by caterpillars, where the petiole and midrib remain with some ghostly connective tracery in between. Not enough to hold even a drop of rain.

I look at my parents and at how much simpler their lives are at the ages of 75, mostly because they haven’t marred the landscape with grand-scale deceit. They have this marriage of 50-some years behind them, and it is a monument to success. A few weeks or months of illicit passion could not hold a candle to it.

If you imagine yourself in such a situation, where would you fit an affair in neatly? If you were 75, which would you rather have: years of steady if occasionally strained devotion, or something that looks a little bit like the Iraqi city of Fallujah, cratered with spent artillery?

From where I stand now, it all just looks like a cheap hotel room, whether you’re in that room to have an affair or to escape from the discovery of one.

And despite the sex and the excitement, or the drama and the fix of everyone’s empathetic attention, there is no view from this room that is worth having.

READERS’ COMMENTS

THE NEW YORK TIMES
, 2010

The vast majority of responses to Wendy Plump’s “Modern Love” column (above) praised the writing, the insights, and/or the frankness, and in general affirmed Plump’s views about the devastating effects of infidelity. Several readers, however, expressed opposite views.

“BELLA TERRA,” ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO

. . . An affair is not always—rarely is—a rejection of one’s spouse. Affairs happen because we are human. If a marriage is only about maintaining fidelity in the bedroom—maybe that’s a main problem with the marriage? I do have one caveat: if affairs are repetitive and/or blatant, it’s probably time to end the marriage.

“ANNE,” CALIFORNIA

. . . As well
written as this piece is—the “You Will” format is ridiculous. Every human being’s experiences are different. This is a fatalistic American POV. I had an affair with a man who had been unhappy for years with his wife. I was in a marriage where I was lonely and neglected. We had known each other since college. We left our partners. And have been happy together for years now. Was it expensive? Difficult? Yes. And worth every freaking dime and difficult moment. Call it selfish, but we may only walk this way once. Being happy is the most valuable commodity in our lives. And we owe it to ourselves to be true to that.

“JM21,” NEW YORK

Having an affair was one of the best things I ever did. It gave me the courage to leave a bad marriage and reminded me that I was worthy of love and would be loved again. I haven’t a single regret about my actions; however, I somewhat resent being told that I should.

CHRISTOPHER RYAN AND CACILDA JETHÁ

SEX AT DAWN
, 2010

A studious and comprehensive volume about human relationships,
Sex at Dawn
reexamined the long-held assumption that males—whether humans or other primates—have a greater tendency toward promiscuity than females because of the need to increase their chances of reproduction. The researchers found persuasive evidence that females are just as wanton as males, and that, for both genders, monogamy is a far cry from the natural human state that so many anthropologists, psychologists, and moralists have asserted it to be. Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá, a married psychologist and psychiatrist, relied on primate research and cross-cultural anthropology to conclude that humans—much like the bonobo, our closest ape relative—began as foragers who worked cooperatively and shared sex partners freely.

Recall that the total number of monogamous primate species that live in large social groups is precisely
zero
—unless you insist on counting humans as the one and only example of such a beast. The few monogamous primates that do exist (out of hundreds of species) all live in the treetops. Primates aside, only 3 percent of mammals and one in ten thousand invertebrate species can be considered sexually monogamous. Adultery has been documented in
every
ostensibly monogamous human society ever studied, and is a leading cause of divorce all over the world today. . . .

Think about that.
No
group-living
nonhuman primate is monogamous, and adultery has been documented in
every
human culture studied—including those in which fornicators are routinely stoned to death. In light of all this bloody retribution, it’s hard to see how monogamy comes “naturally” to our species. Why would so many risk their reputations, families, careers—even presidential legacies—for something that runs
against
human nature?