I am a 70-year-old professor of history. My husband died in January. After his horrible cancer death I found out that he had a long affair with a 27-year-old girl. Thirty-three years of marriage, love, trust – gone. Now I don’t know who he was, who I am. My personal history proved wrong.
I will not contact the girl, a student of my husband. She is not important for me. She is not the one I am interested in. I am sure she is nice.
I have always loved my husband, I have always been loyal to him, I have always helped him when he needed my help in many ways. My son is my witness. He knows how loving I was towards my husband. And even my husband in his last days said so.
What can I do to survive? I can’t burden my son too much. There are very few friends to whom I could talk. I don’t want to go to any therapist. Do you know of any literature of such a case?
Eleanor says: I want to be very careful here. I know so little of you besides what you wrote to me, and you know so little of me besides whatever I will say here. I’m not a grief counsellor, nor any formal relationship expert. I tend to think my most useful function here is to point out what a letter writer has already said, often as simple as “I’m in pain”. The hope is that the person who wrote to me – and any reader in their position – will find relief and clarity in hearing the thought presented by a mind that isn’t theirs.
In your letter, though, this strategy is beset with risk. If I echo your anger, the part of you that loved this man for decades might feel unheard. If I try to honour the cathedral that was your marriage, the part of you that could turn his skin inside out might seethe from having had the point missed. It seems to me that your experience right now is intolerable precisely because hearing either position seems to silence the other – and both are desperate to be heard.
I stress again that I do not know the details of your situation. I do know that not all affairs are alike. All are expressions of disregard for the betrayed partner. Some are proof of a manipulative and callous soul. Others are far more boorishly pedestrian, testifying to someone’s inner juvenilia or adolescent desire to be flattered. Among this second set, many turn out to be ultimately compatible with love, forgiveness and the rescue of some of your shared history. But your husband has compounded his injustice by leaving you uncertain which scenario you’re in! He shuffled off before you could read him the riot act, have him explain, or force him to be honest about whether he adored two people or none.
Which is why I’m going to beg you to find a therapist. When you wrote to me you didn’t put your question in the language of healing, or of resolving your memories; you asked how you could survive. When that feels like what’s at stake – as it does, in acute betrayal and grief – willpower and reading are not enough. I know therapy can feel hokey, and perhaps, for a professor and an intellect, like it’s beneath you. I personally spent a lot of time thinking it would insult my experience to consult a junior who couldn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. But it would be intellectually irresponsible to imagine we could teach ourselves to cope, alone, from first principles, in a crash-course, while living in the depths of pain.
Please believe me that knowledge of how to survive is like knowledge of any other kind in that there are experts, and insisting on learning in solitude without those experts only complicates and slows the work. I recommend this, but the primary insight is a warning: it’s Sisyphean to try to recover alone when our only resource – our mind – is precisely what needs to recover.
Your husband has left you alone twice, once in grief and once in betrayal. Please don’t force yourself to be alone again.
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Guardian Australia’s advice columnist Eleanor Gordon-Smith is a writer and ethicist currently at Princeton University
