How Did We Get Here?
To explain an affair is not to excuse it. Three maps for reading a relationship backwards.
A year after the discovery, Rhea and Sameer spread a long sheet of brown paper across the dining table.
Their counsellor had asked them to draw the line of their marriage. Years along the bottom. Happiness up the side. Every major event marked where it belonged.
They began with the easy ones. The wedding, high up. The flat they bought. Their son’s birth, which Rhea placed near the top. Sameer, after a pause, placed it in the middle. “I was terrified,” he said. “I never told you.”
Then the harder marks. The year she was promoted and he was passed over. His father’s death. The long stretch when they spoke mostly through a shopping list. And, eighteen months after the funeral, a small cross in his handwriting.
Rhea looked at the page for a long time. “It did not come from nowhere,” she said. It was not forgiveness. It was the first time the story had made sense.
To explain is not to excuse
Can you look for the reasons without handing out a pardon? The psychologist Shirley Glass insists that you can, and that you must.1 Adding to the problems in a marriage is not the same as causing an affair. Two people shape the climate. One person decides to deceive.
So why look back at all? Because the betrayed partner’s deepest question is, “How do I know this will not happen again?” No promise can settle that. Understanding what opened the door can, because it tells you both which doors to guard.
Glass gives couples three maps to read.
The dance between you
Glass calls the fixed routines couples fall into dances. Each partner’s step produces the other’s, and after years nobody remembers who began.
One pursues closeness and the other retreats from conflict. One manages and the other is managed, until someone outside the marriage treats the managed one as a capable adult. One criticises and the other learns to do things out of sight. Secrecy becomes a habit long before there is an affair.
The first of these dances has been studied closely. In one study, couples were filmed discussing a change each wanted. When the wife pressed and the husband withdrew, the wife’s satisfaction had fallen a year later.2
Glass adds a warning about the pursuer that many people find chilling. While she is still complaining, she is still invested. The dangerous moment is when the complaints stop. The house goes quiet, her partner relaxes, and the marriage is in more trouble than ever.
What one person carried in
Some weak spots would have travelled with a person into any marriage. Glass groups many of them under a phrase most adults know at once: running on empty.
Affairs often begin near a loss. A parent dies. A career stalls. At home there is grief. Somewhere else there is a room where none of it exists. Glass notes that the death of a parent often sets off a reckoning: is this the life I want for the years I have left?
Then there is the hungry ego. Glass observes that affair partners are generally no more attractive than the spouses they compete with. What they offer is a mirror. In their eyes you are fascinating and desired. For someone who feels overlooked, that reflection is very hard to refuse.
And there is what you tell yourself. One of Glass’s clients described his inner brake in three levels.
The company you keep
This is the map people forget. Glass writes that you are more likely to be unfaithful if the people around you are. A friend glowing about a lover makes an affair sound like self-discovery. A workplace that looks away lowers the barrier. A parent’s affair can teach a child that this is simply what adults do.
A Dutch study found the same. What people believed their friends actually did predicted their own willingness to stray, along with their own attitudes.3
None of it removes responsibility. All of it tells a couple where to build fences.
What the paper showed
On the brown paper, three things stood out once Rhea and Sameer knew what to look for. A pursuer and a distancer who had gone quiet. A man grieving his father alone, because he did not want to burden his wife. And a Thursday-evening group of colleagues, two of whom were having affairs and joked about it.
Each finding became a change. A fixed hour together every Sunday. Grief counselling for Sameer. A different crowd on Thursdays. None of it was dramatic. Together it closed the route the affair had taken.
When this is not enough. Looking back can bring up old grief, as it did for Sameer. If it does, that grief deserves its own help, from a counsellor or clinical psychologist. Need to talk to someone now? Tele MANAS is free, day and night, on 14416.