Dear Prudence: My Husband Isn’t Having an Affair After All. Can I Divorce Him Anyway?

[minoanmiss]

Q. Cheater, cheater … awesome fella? For the past six months, my husband has been distant, secretive, and impatient with me while also being in frequent contact with his cousin’s wife. I assumed there was an affair, but it turns out that he was helping her to leave a domestic abuse situation, and she had sworn him to secrecy. They both swear that nothing happened, and I believe them.

The problem is that it doesn’t help. For the past two months, in my head, I’ve been emotionally on my way out the door. I’ve talked to lawyers, investigated my options for rentals closer to work, and been unhappy but ready to leave. Now that I’ve discovered I was wrong about my husband, I still feel ready to go. He doesn’t understand, since he was actually doing a really good thing. Which he was, but at the same time he lied to me and let me feel terrible—and he knew I thought he was cheating—in service of this good thing. In addition to being emotionally divorced already, I’m quite angry too. I know it was for a good cause, but I still feel like he reverse-gaslit me by letting me believe he was a cheater and then doing the “Ha, you misjudged me!” reveal.

My mother and sister think I’m being ridiculous and that he’s a hero. My dad thinks that your spouse’s well-being should come before anyone else’s and I am better off without him. I don’t know. It feels ridiculous to leave someone because you found out they’re not cheating. I know the answer is going to be couples therapy, but I want to know if I’m in the wrong or not before we go in there. I’ve felt “ganged up” on a lot recently, with everyone saying how good a guy my husband is. I mean, he is—but maybe not a great husband?

Oddly enough—because this sounds so unique—I answered a question about almost the exact same situation about two years ago on the podcast. You might find that answer helpful. In the meantime I’ll just say that you are entitled to feel hurt and upset about the past six months. You don’t have to determine whether your husband is a hero or not; all you have to do is identify how your experience of the past six months made you feel. Would it really have been impossible for him to say, “I’m helping someone I care about leave a very dangerous situation and I’ve been sworn to secrecy until after they’re out. If it were my story to tell, I’d share it with you in a heartbeat; since I can’t, I just want you to know the broad details so you don’t feel confused or abandoned”? And did helping her really mean that it was appropriate for him to get impatient and distant with you?

I think it’s probably a good idea to spend a little more time with the question of whether you two can repair your marriage before deciding to file for divorce. (You are, of course, allowed to if you want, even if other people in your life disagree—they’re not the ones who are married to him.) But if he can’t acknowledge that you have a right to feel hurt, that he essentially disappeared on you for half a year without a word to reassure you, then that says a lot about his priorities.

Comments

I'm honestly not sure what to think about this one

[minoanmiss]

Several of my rules are crashing into each other here, ahaha.

1) Help people get out of an abusive situation if one at all can.
2) Don't make someone married promise to keep a secret from their spouse.

Obviously these collide here. I can see why someone escaping an abusive situation must control who knows.

1) People have a right to their feelings [with caveats]
2) There are things that people do that are not done *at* another person.

But on the third hand, how he managed the secrecy from his wife is something he did *at* her (to mangle English a bit) and how he did so hurt her.

1) People have a right to their feelings [with caveats]
2) It is possible to need to do something that hurts someone.

I find I really sympathize with " I still feel like he reverse-gaslit me by letting me believe he was a cheater and then doing the “Ha, you misjudged me!” reveal." but OTOH I want to know if this is how she feels about the situation or if this is something he said. OTOT, if the husband couldn't manage this without hurting his wife I don't think his reaction to her hurt should be "I did something good so you don't get to be hurt". Maybe, "The secrecy was necessary. I know it hurt you, and I am sorry it hurt you, and now that the situation is over I want to work on rebuilding your trust in me," would be better.

And so on. I honestly don't know how I'd advise LW if I had to.

Re: I'm honestly not sure what to think about this one

[jenett]

I'm sort of at "What was he doing to make it clear to his wife that she still mattered to him during this time?" Because if he'd been busy at weird times, but also very aware of the implications, making it clear it wasn't something about her, etc. I feel like that would have come across rather differently, y'know?

(Or even saying "I know I'm really preoccupied right now: I can't tell you why because it affects someone else's safety." which might cover a lot. Or even the first part, with a "It's important to me, I hope you can trust that I'm doing the right thing, and I'll tell you more about it when I can."

[oursin]

Okay, it was a secret he had to keep, but did he also have to be 'distant... impatient' with a wife to whom the situation already looked considerably sus? I am a bit reminded of those people who are always bailing on their nearest and dearest because they are performatively helping out somebody else, even if in this case it was a meritorious cause.

[julian]

So, as somemone who currently works in situations involving domestic violence, yes, of course, secrecy and attention to detail are important during these sorts of situations, but as Prudie says, you can be vague-yet-specific about what's going on.

And: distant, secretive, mean, impatient... Those are all *bad traits* in a husband and/or close relationship. Just because he's not hitting you and/or emotionally abusing you doesn't mean it's necessarily a good relationship, and the cracks that form while under stress are worth paying attention to.

And divorce is an extreme solution, but it's not like... verboten. I mean. Unless you're Catholic and it is, but LW doesn't seem to be.

Anyway, overall, Prudie's advice is OK to good, and I think her last sentence hits the nail on the head.

[xenacryst]

and he knew I thought he was cheating

There's a lot of ground between "I am sworn to secrecy and cannot tell you anything specific, but it's for a good cause" and "welp, looks like what I have to do might end my marriage" and your husband seems to be measuring that distance in millimeters. I get that he thought he was doing a good deed, but in doing one good deed he kinda did the opposite over here, and I'm not seeing you say that he's ready to acknowledge that. I don't think he's irredeemable, but I do think you should be very careful and firm if you want to take the road of trying to patch things up, and I wouldn't blame you if you didn't want to take that road. He's got a lot of learning to do.

[melannen]

I want to look really closely at the question of why the secrecy was necessary. As other people above said, he could have been vague but reassuring; he could have asked the person he was helping for permission to bring his wife in; he could have gone above and beyond to reassure her she was still loved; and it doesn't look like he did any of the above. Was he getting off on keeping secrets, or on the cousin being completely dependent on him alone? (In which case--- feeling like she was being cheated on is maybe not 100% inaccurate.) Did he not trust her to keep it secret from the people who couldn't know? In that case there's bigger problems in this relationship.

But also - the question she's actually asking is "I know we need couples therapy, but before I go, am I in the right or is he?"

And the answer to that is - knowing who was right and who was wrong isn't what you should be looking for in couples therapy. You will need to get past that if you want the therapy to help or the rift to heal.

[green_grrl]

Agreed, Husband was neglectful and shitty to his wife, no matter what he was doing.

Also stupid. A side issue with this whole situation with the way Husband and Cousin’s Wife set it up… Very often when someone suspects their spouse of cheating, they call the spouse of the affair partner and let them in on the secret. If LW had called abusive Cousin to spill (what she thought was) the beans, it could have gone very badly for CW and/or Husband.

[shirou]

I do not believe the LW is an unreliable narrator, but I do think her perception of her husband’s behavior was colored by her mistaken belief. Without that assumption, she might not have found him so distant and impatient.

I would like to know more about the state of the marriage six months ago. Did the husband’s distant and impatient behavior really begin then? If so, I think couples therapy is worth a try.

[mommy]

I firmly believe that when the trust is gone then the relationship is over. You can be married to the most wonderful person in the world and still end up with divorce as the best option. It's possible that marriage counseling could help but trust is hard to rebuild even when both parties want to fix things, and LW is already halfway out the door.

[lemonsharks]

Well, that's definitely not an awesome situation for anyone.

But also, I do not think the marriage was as solid as LW thought it was before all this started. And Husband absolutely handled himself badly.

(Like, he could have said, "wife, I'm promise I'm helping someone, not having an affair. if I tell you more than that they may back out and/or be in danger. I'll explain everything fully once it's concluded, but right now I need you to trust me and have patience with me when I'm more stressed than usual."

It might not have helped--LW could still have gone to the "he's cheating" place, because some people do that for everything, including "there was a traffic jam for no apparent reason". But it might also have ended with him not reverse-gaslighting his wife.

And who knows, maybe wife can't be trusted to keep confidences and telling her even that much would have busted the entire attempt to leave.)

[firecat]

I get a feeling that LW has been less than happy with the marriage since before this incident, and whether hubby’s behavior “justifies” leaving is a weird question to ask. “I don’t want to be married to you any more” is justification enough. I agree with the suggestion of couples therapy but I hope it will address the larger question.