Carolyn Hax: Friend’s problems raise questions
Dear Carolyn:
A dear friend of mine recently found out her husband of five years has been having an ongoing affair. She has turned to me for support, and I am more than happy to offer her an ear and a shoulder.
The problem is I find myself feeling shaken in my own marriage. Our husbands have very similar personalities and both seem (seemed) like the types to never cheat. They both travel regularly for work (the affair took place on business travel). My husband has never given me a reason to suspect he is anything less than a loving and devoted spouse and father, but I feel myself looking at our relationship with a more critical eye.
What can I do to give my husband back the trust he has done nothing to lose, while still being a supportive friend?
– Anonymous
The natural impulse is to reassure yourself out of this existential crisis, but I suggest you do the opposite. Since you’re already questioning what, exactly, you can know about a spouse, keep going and finish off the whole concept of certainty.
Here’s what you actually know, at any given time, more or less: who and what surrounds you, what you’re doing, and how you feel. The rest is mere speculation.
Depending on how you handle these particular truths, they can paralyze you or liberate you.
If you fear uncertainty, and give yourself over to the dread of the many possible negative outcomes, then you’ll be as stuck in them as surely as if they had occurred. Take the person who fears a mate is cheating. The whole relationship becomes about infidelity – watching for it, imposing restrictions to pre-empt it, interrogating and snooping to discover it.
If instead you accept that you’re just as subject to surprises as anyone, and that your only recourse is to choose people well, love them fully and trust yourself to handle it if things don’t turn out as you’d hoped, then the possibility of cheating – or illness or job loss or whatever else can befall a family – may scare you when it crosses your mind, but it won’t own you.