Forgetting and Forgiving the Infidelity

The situation is familiar: a husband and wife who have been married for years seem to have the perfect marriage. They have very young children. In a strange mix-up of family roles, it is the wife who is the breadwinner; but because she has to go on maternity leave, the husband, who has previously worked part-time, has to do the major money earning around the house. Previously, he was tasked to take care of the house, take care of the children, and even cook. Now, he has new power on his hands: he works full time, he gets promoted – and he starts sleeping around.

If this sounds like something out of a Hollywood story, think again: the scenario is real, and it’s not just in one lovelorn, weeping letter to one agony aun. It is something that women can experience, and the betrayal can be all the more poignant simply because they were previously the ones working hard for the family, and understandably, they expect some sort of a reward. Perhaps a faithful husband wouldn’t be too much to ask?

The letter referred to gives more details on how things transpired, and how the husband ended up sleeping with a trainee at work. The husband even has the gall to complain to his wife: he says that their sex drives no longer match, despite the wife’s claims that she had to stay away from sex because she was pregnant, but once she had given birth and they had resumed making love, they did so a good many times, and with passion. The husband makes a promise never to make the same mistake again; the wife says she can probably forgive him, but can she easily forget?

The answer of Agony Aunt Deidre? It might be all too easy to see how the affair could have happened: the husband had not been employed in a full-time job for a good long while, and his entry into a place of employment that eventually promoted him as well gave him a boost to his ego; with his morale up high, he became the idol and authority figure to the people he was training. He fell for the bait of being up on a pedestal and adored by the impressionable young. Agony Aunt Deidre, however, does not explicitly condone the man’s behavior, and instead tells the grieving wife to talk to her husband.

Instead of weeping quietly in a corner, she asks the wife to talk to her man, to tell him that she wants to have a much stronger marriage – but he has to start from scratch and do a lot of the fixing. The man has to work harder in order to regain the wife’s trust. He has to court and woo her all over again.