Hi! Freya here, the editor of Tough Love. Just a quick reminder that I’m hosting an Ask Me Anything in The Free Press Forum at noon ET today. I’ll be there for an hour, so if you have questions about what happens behind the scenes of Tough Love, please come along and share them! —Freya Sanders
Dear Abigail,
Almost 20 years ago, when we were relatively newly married, my wife and I moved overseas, so I could go to graduate school. She was miserable there, and I was one cause of that misery; I worked too much, and I didn’t spend enough time with her. Ultimately, she decided she needed to go back to the States for her own happiness, to which I agreed. In her absence, I had an affair with a co-worker, which continued until I came back to the U.S. a year later. I didn’t tell my wife.
Since then, my wife and I have had three wonderful daughters. (They’re now 13, 11, and 6.) Until recently, we were both happy in our marriage. I felt guilt and shame about my misdeeds, but I tried to channel it into being a better husband. Then, 18 months ago, my wife asked me point-blank what had happened when I was in graduate school. I confessed everything to her and begged for her forgiveness. I also confessed to my priest and did penance. We have each been seeing a separate therapist ever since the disclosure, and have also been attending couples therapy.
I’m writing because all these months later—despite my earnest and often desperate commitment to both the advice we have been receiving and what my wife says she needs from me—she hasn’t been able to forgive me. She is frequently miserable around me, seems constantly plagued by obsessive thoughts about the affair, and suffers from insecurity because of what I did. She frequently rejects my sincere expressions of remorse, love, and commitment, leaving me in despair. Not infrequently, she lashes out loudly, often within earshot of our children. They don’t seem to have caught on, and they continue to be happy and well-adjusted, but I’m constantly worried they’ll hear my awful sins recounted in one of her outbursts.
I still love her deeply, and at times, I can still see glimpses of the happy couple we used to be. She has always said she believes she will eventually be able to forgive me. But we’ve been struggling for so long, and I honestly don’t know if we’re making any progress. She becomes angry whenever I beg her for forgiveness, because she feels judged for not having granted it yet. She says she is working through things with her therapist and that forgiveness is a “journey.” But I look at where we are now compared to a year ago, and it’s not clear that this journey is going anywhere good.
I am determined to be the husband she deserves, which I wasn’t before. But it seems clear that I make her miserable—and how can I love her if I make her miserable? I’m really in a bind here, and I don’t know what to do.
Sincerely,
Hopeless in the Midwest, 44
Hopeless,
What is the ideal romantic relationship? What sort of marriage do you want? I’ve now interviewed over a hundred young people on the subject, and they invariably recite some version of this: two people, each completely happy and fulfilled in their own pursuits, coming together to face hard times without ever sacrificing their independence.
They strive to avoid “codependency,” as uncountable TikTok influencers and Instagram therapists advise. They see dependence as pathological, signaling an unhealthy or even “toxic” relationship. They don’t realize they are importing a term from addiction recovery and misapplying it to all close, interdependent romantic relationships. They don’t know that organizing your life around each other is often a telltale sign that you are in love.
You and your wife did well when your lives were knit tightly in interdependence—when you rejoined her after grad school and built a family. You fell apart each time you behaved as our culture insists you should: like two totally independent people, each with private goals and needs, pursuing them sometimes together and sometimes apart. That’s the deepest problem here, Hopeless. Deeper even than the affair, because it created the conditions for it. At critical moments, the two of you behave like you aren’t married at all.
When your wife moved overseas for your graduate education, your first job was to build a happy home with her. Instead, you poured yourself into your program while she languished. When she felt miserable enough to want to leave the country, you let her go. I can’t just abandon my program, you said to yourself, or something like it. But I can’t stay here, she thought back. So she picked herself up and went—and you let her!—like travel companions parting at Grand Central when their plans diverge.
I’m telling you this to shake you out of your au courant mindset:
When your wife wants to leave the country because she’s miserable, you don’t just let her go her own way. You treat it as an emergency in your marriage. You do everything you can to keep the two of you together. You change housing. You change your course load. You beg the university to let you continue the work from afar. You move together somewhere she can be happy and commute from there. Or you take a leave. If none of these is possible, you rearrange the universe in some other way.
That is your wife. She is your life. Her misery should move you like nothing else can, to change course together. Not to shrug sadly and wave: “See you next year.”
Maybe she hoped you’d chase after her. More than likely, she wanted to know whether her distress pained you. It didn’t—or not nearly enough. Not enough to prompt you to rearrange circumstances for the two of you. You stayed because you thought: This is where I need to be. Because the thought of where you needed to be was not bound up in her.
And so she left, behaving like a free agent—perhaps because she already felt abandoned. Maybe you didn’t understand that.
That’s the hardest part of early marriage: learning to feel what your spouse feels—even when her distress makes no sense to you. Even when you doubt it should hurt that much.
When you returned to your wife after the affair, the two of you built a contented and fruitful marriage—until the moment she asked what happened overseas, and you opened a trapdoor beneath her feet. Only you can know whether she truly forced the disclosure. Did you leap at the chance to unburden yourself, dropping a live grenade in her lap?
Of course she’s struggling. Learning of a one-night stand is hard; you had a full-blown, yearlong affair. Which means, each time you called your wife during that period of your marriage, you were lying to her.
Now, she’s ruminating with her therapist, stuck in a whirlpool of humiliation and betrayal. She replays the last 20 years of your marriage like a detective scanning the video feed of a crime, looking for clues that your entire life together is a lie. That you never loved her. That you never really cared. What else, she wonders, did you lie about?
How many marital intimacies was your girlfriend privy to? Your wife looks back on that period like a test subject on the wrong side of a one-way mirror, the two of you on the other—laughing at her or pitying her. It doesn’t matter if that’s accurate. It’s what she imagines.
You feel rotten right now. But imagine the haunted house that cabins her mind as she relives the revelation, anew, at every therapy session. For you, the affair is almost 20 years old. Ancient history. For her, it began only 18 months ago.
You beg her to forgive you. Stop it.
Stop asking her to do one more thing for you. Don’t you see? You’re still thinking principally about your pain. You’re asking her to make you feel better while she continues to writhe.
That’s the taproot of your failures as a husband: that you can cause your wife pain, see her in pain, and then treat it as her burden to manage alone.
But the first order of business is your daughters.
Tell your wife she cannot rope them into playing jury to your marital conflict. She must refrain from venting her anger or litigating your marriage in front of them. Not for your sake but for theirs. She doesn’t want her daughters entering the world of dating with the belief that all men cheat and women are fools to trust them. She doesn’t want to shatter the security and peace of their childhoods.
Now, you.
There is no reason to be “hopeless” over the grief you caused. There is no excuse to become helpless.
When the woman you love walks out, follow her, for God’s sake. Whatever it takes. However much the flight costs, however many nights of good sleep you must lose, however many hours you must spend on the train. Whatever darkness she’s traversing, hold her and be there for it. And if you want to stay married, stop thinking like a “partner” who meets with her regularly to review the accounts payable. Stop behaving as if the pain she feels is her private burden.
I believe this woman still loves you, Hopeless. She frequently wishes she didn’t—but she does.
If you love her, don’t just stand there dumbly while she heads out into the rain. Make sure she knows—and maybe for the first time in your marriage, let it be true—that her suffering is yours.
That’s how you fight for her. You don’t just watch her go.
Onward,
Abigail
This has been Tough Love with Abigail Shrier. Click here to write to Abigail for advice—and she might reply to your letter next!
Last week, Abigail wrote to a reader who says his girlfriend is, “objectively, the best partner I’ve ever had,” but wants to know: “Why do I always feel so exhausted after we hang out?” Catch up here.
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