Step one: acknowledgment
In the initial disclosure, I think it’s good to just give space for the open wound.
CW: infidelity, religious trauma
“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” - Anne Lamott
“You have no credibility to talk about morality. If people knew, they wouldn’t take anything you have to say seriously.”
Years later, looking back on his words, I don’t think he’s entirely wrong.
It’s hard to reckon with the hurt I caused him. It was trauma heaped upon trauma upon trauma that he already held, largely from the Church. And then I, the Catholic writer, gave him more.
Early in our relationship, he told me how he’d been cheated on in a past relationship. I remember feeling so angry when he told me. I didn’t understand how someone could cheat on him. And then I did.
I’ll never forget the day he found out. The day he found out for the first time, that is. He heard a ring and found a phone in the bathroom that he didn’t recognize. I lied. I said I was using it for the rental unit I was managing. It was actually a burner to talk to some guy that I never met and had no plans to meet but who was offering me something I didn’t understand. The lie lasted for a whole ten minutes.
He asked me what kind of calculated person would do that. I wasn’t sure. Except I was. Because I did.
He’d had his suspicions. He’d come across a chat on my Instagram with another guy that had disappearing messages. I told him that the guy had used disappearing messages because he was sort of closeted and wanted advice. It was a lie. The guy had struck up a conversation that turned into flirting and then turned into more.
At work, I had my team do an exercise to gather feedback from those we support. We took feedback from a partner team on where we could have improved. That partner team told us that some of our processes were too slow and too complicated. When I brought this feedback to my team for discussion, one of them heard that critical feedback and responded, “Well they (the partner team) also complicate things because they often don’t follow the right process.”
I responded, “Ok, that’s good to know. And I think we should address that. But I’d like to have that as a separate conversation. So let’s note that down and we’ll have another time to discuss how that team could improve. But I want that to be a separate conversation. I worry that discussing both things will cause us to lose sight of what we could do better. So let’s focus this conversation on how we can improve, and we’ll come back to what other teams could do better later.”
I feel similarly about the mistakes I made in the relationship, which are hardly limited to cheating. Sure, he did things too. But, whatever he did, he didn’t force me to cheat. If he had issues that were impacting me in the relationship, then I could have brought those things up, set boundaries, made clear the conditions under which I could be expected to show up as a faithful and committed partner. But I didn’t. I could have left the relationship. But I didn’t. Instead I chose to stay and to betray him.
In that choice, I was also choosing to betray myself.
He had gone through so much. We had gone through so much. We faced the trauma of him losing a dream job over our relationship. We had suffered through the pandemic together. We faced the trauma of me losing some of my closest relationships over our relationship. He had been hurt by the rhetoric in Christian communities to which I remained tied. My religious views and commitments confused him at times and added to the heaviness that already felt crushing at times for both of us.
I imagine, in some ways, that I had felt like a stabilizing force through much of that. I had supported him through that job loss, through the anxieties of the pandemic, through his own struggles of faith. But at the same time, I was operating as something that would be revealed as a destabilizing force. Underneath the support there was a layer of betrayal. I imagine it’s similar to the religious trauma faced by so many I have spoken with, where the Church appears to offer love while undermining that love with deep hurts.
Neither of us expected this to happen. Our relationship was complicated from the start. Very complicated. But it was so good in the beginning. It’s strange to look at how good things were, when I look at how bad they became.
We took our issues to couples therapy. I have always been a problem solver. I quickly learned that was part of the problem.
I wanted to talk about how this could have happened and work on things that needed to change. The therapist saw this and said, “I see you wanting to jump into problem solving. But the thing is, this is a traumatic event. There’s an open wound right now. And we need to at least bandage that wound and stop the bleeding before we can take a look at the deeper issues.”
That was hard. He was so angry, hurt, confused. He was grieving. I wasn’t sure I had the capacity to receive it all. But in a way that didn’t matter. He didn’t have the capacity for it either. No one in that situation does. If I felt the weight of my betrayal was unbearable, how must he have felt? Even today, I am still working on building the strength to hold all that.
Looking at those initial stages of facing the hurt, the question of “why” I did it now feels less relevant than the fact that I did it. I can talk about “contributing factors.” But in the end they are the contributing factors to my choice. They might set the pathway for a decision, but at the end of that pathway, one still makes a decision. Maybe my upbringing, my community, my Church had set me up for failure. But it was still my failure. I did something he did not want me to do. I did something that I knew would hurt him. And then I hid it from him. And then when he found out, I tried to lie about it.
Making excuses is one of the surest ways to prevent making changes.
After all of that comes out, after so many conversations and couples therapy sessions and even the ending of the relationship, he tells me: “You have no credibility to talk about morality. If people knew, they wouldn’t take anything you have to say seriously.”
I tell him, “Do you want me to write about all that? Because I will. To be honest, I’d rather do that.” I’d rather just get it out, own what I did, accept that my self-righteousness must have its limits.
He says, “Are you kidding me? You think I want to have you write about this where you’ll end up looking better?”
I’m at a loss. I leave it at that. I keep him–I keep us–out of the stories I tell. I get where he’s coming from. Of course the story I’d write is the story of how I make sense of it, what I learned, how I’m trying to move forward. What else could I do? There is no resolution between how I would write about this and his fear about the horrible things I’d done resulting in a praise for what I’d learned.
Years later, we don’t talk. I’m in a new stage of life. I’ve been very open about all this with my friends. But I haven’t written about it here, not really. I wrote about some things that happened in our relationship, things that challenged me, that forced me to confront myself. But I kept him out of it. Because he’d asked me to keep him out of it.
I later hear of him reaching out to other Catholics I’d wanted to work with. He gave a warning about working with me, offering to reveal the truth about who I am and what it’s like to be close to me.
I reach out to some friends. They had seen both sides of our relationship and helped both of us process hurts. I tell them about what he had done. It makes them angry. They remind me how the relationship ended years ago, how I’d worked hard to take accountability and change, how he had his own stuff in the relationship, how frustrated they are that now that I’m in a more happy and more honest stage of my life, that he’s directly trying to undermine my work.
But why shouldn’t he?
Here’s the thing: I did those things. I have a story to tell. But so does he. If I wanted him to write warmly about me, I should have behaved better.
I don’t know why he did that. I have my thoughts. But I’m not sure it matters for the purposes of what I’m sharing right now. I hurt him. I hurt myself. And he’s right. What credibility do I have to condemn others when I look at the history of my own life? What do judgments I might make about others mean when I look at my own actions? My expectations for others’ accountability shouldn’t be higher than the expectations I have for my own accountability.
My motives for writing this are not entirely pure. I’m not sure I really believe in pure motives when it comes to writing about one’s life. Autobiography always involves apologia.
My life has gone through a lot of change over the last decade. This is a big part of that. To make sense of the change, maybe it’s time to unpack this.
Future parts of this story, if there are future parts, may sound and feel very different. But in the initial disclosure, I think it’s good to just give space for the open wound.
And to say I’m sorry.
