A Marriage Therapist's Blog
Thoughts on Marriage Counseling
Posts Tagged ‘Infidelity’
- New York City
Approximately 30% of the couples who begin marital therapy do so as a result of an extramarital affair. Usually when a couple comes to see me for the first time the affair has been revealed within the past week or two. Obviously at that point the wounds are still very fresh.
These days spouses often discover their partner is having an affair by finding emails, cell phone calls, or text messages to or from the third party. It can be hard to cover your tracks these days. (Of course, some people want their affair to be discovered. But that’s a whole other article.)
Inevitably the question in therapy becomes: how will the wife get over what has been done to her? (For this article I’ll assume the husband had the affair since that is more common). As I’ve written about before, it’s not unusual for the man not to want to talk about it. He has apologized and now he thinks his wife should “get over it.” Of course, he typically feels guilty and embarrassed about what he did, so it’s not easy to talk about it. I normalize this.
Usually the wife wants to know why he did it, how could he think it was OK to do it, and details about where, when, and how often. It’s common for the wife to ask these questions over and over again during the months that she is recovering. One of my jobs is to convince the husband that this is normal and that it’s in his best interest to patiently answer the questions as many times as necessary.
The recovery process is long and difficult but it can be worth effort. My goal as counselor is for the couple to end up with a relationship that is stronger than it had ever been before.
- Dolphin, Kauai
Here’s the latest news on infidelity, according to recently published studies:
- Older men are cheating more than they used to. In 1991, 20% of men over age 60 said they had been unfaithful at some point in their life. In 2006, the rate increased to 28%. (These data are reported by Dr. David Atkins at the University of Washington Center for the Study of Health and Risk Behaviors.)
- Younger women are now cheating almost as much as younger men: For people under age 35, 20% of men at 15% of women say they have been unfaithful. These numbers are up significantly from 1991. The increase is blamed at least partially on Internet pornography and women working more and travelling more.
Of course, it can be hard to determine what percentage of people are unfaithful, because not everyone who has cheated will admit it to a researcher. That’s why researchers now use anonymous computer questionnaires to compile their data.
One more thing: those high rates of cheating that you see in the surveys done by some women’s magazines are not accurate because the people who take the survey are not a random cross-section of the population. Instead, they are the ones who choose to respond to the survey, and they are more likely to say they have been unfaithful.
- Extreme Skateboarder
One of the more interesting defense mechanisms is projection, which was first described by Freud. In projection, one attributes his/her own unacceptable or unwanted thoughts or/and emotions to others. In other words, whatever you unconsciously don’t like about yourself is what you really despise in other people.
All defense mechanisms serve to reduce anxiety, and projection is no different. Projection reduces anxiety by allowing a person to express unwanted subconscious desires without letting the conscious mind recognize them.
In couples therapy projection can crop up in a very interesting way. Someones I will work with a couple in which one partner has severe “trust issues” and constantly suspects the other of cheating, even when there is absolutely no evidence of it. On more than one occasion, it has turned out (surprise!) that the overly suspicious partner is the one who had cheated! The unfaithful partner felt guilty about his/her own cheating, and so projected it onto the innocent partner to reduce anxiety.
Yesterday I wrote about how some men want to minimize and not talk about their affairs (whether emotional or physical). As a real-life example, I give you John Edwards.
Last night Edwards, the ex-senator and former presidential candidate, finally admitted to having had an affair, after denying it for months. This pretty much shatters his carefully-cultivated image of the loyal husband standing by his wife while she battles incurable cancer.
I noticed several interesting things in the television interview that Edwards gave and in the written statement that he released. All of them seem like attempts to minimize the damage.
- The timing was no accident. Fewer people pay attention to news on Friday evenings since it’s the beginning of the weekend. Also, a lot of people were tuned into the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. Finally, Russia’s invasion of Georgia was another distraction.
- The words affair and cheating were never used. He spoke of having had “a liason” and making “a serious error in judgment.” (You think?)
- He said that his had been “99 percent honest” while denying the affair for the past year or so. That’s just laughable.
- But he did say somthing that I find very credible: “in the course of several campaigns, I started to believe that I was special and became increasingly egocentric and narcissistic.” Ah, narcissism, one of my favorite topics. Remember that narcissists believe that they are special and that the rules don’t apply to them. Yeah, that fits here.
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