P2YL | 32. If there are two sides to a divorce, whose version is likely to be more reliable?
At a shrewd guess: not the partner who was unfaithful
What's behind that claim?
One evening many years ago my then-husband said, ‘Some people I know from the sailing-club are passing through Oxford tonight and asked if I wanted to meet up for a drink. Would you mind driving me into town later and dropping me off?’
I couldn’t swim, didn’t sail, and hadn’t yet had the pleasure of meeting his nautical friends but was happy to oblige.
As I was driving him there, I had an idea: ‘I’ll park the car for a few minutes and come in and meet your friends.’
There was an ominous silence.
‘No, don’t do that,’ he answered hastily.
‘Why not?’ I said in surprise. ‘Just so I can say a friendly hello and they can put a face to a name whenever you mention me.’
More silence. I could see him searching for reasons, fumbling, stumbling, not coming up with anything till, ‘It’s just I don’t know who’s going to be there. It might not be appropriate.’
I was hurt and confused. Was he ashamed of me? It didn’t make sense. But I wasn’t going to impose where I wasn’t wanted.
As I drove home after dropping him off I puzzled over what could be the reason.
It was only many months later that I found out why.
Secrets and lies
An affair of course, with a woman, also married at his sailing-club.
Perhaps he thought that for his wife to meet his in-the-know sailing pals would be embarrassing.
Perhaps the woman herself was there that night. I shall never know.
Maybe you too have your own experience of being a cheated-on partner, while you yourself remained faithful.
I stand in sisterly solidarity with you and here’s why your side of the marriage-story is more likely to be closer to reality than his.
Deception leads to self-deception
Someone who allows himself or herself to get involved in the extra-marital affair trap and chooses to stay in it is someone who has to lie and deceive over and over again. And then over again.
As a result, they get very good at deception. And they begin to deceive themselves without even noticing it. Otherwise they wouldn’t be able to live with themselves.
Their whole relationship with truth becomes vaguer. Confused.
It takes a Real Man or a Real Woman — not ‘a mere bundle of self-indulgences’ as JB Priestley put it — to manage to stop something which has its roots in their own failure. Lots of people, heroes and heroines we never hear of, recognise this fact and do stop it. I salute them.
The ultimate betrayal
The rest carry on deceiving and betraying right up to and beyond what must be the ultimate betrayal: abandoning their partner for the sake of another betrayer.
They might like to deceive themselves with the thought that marriage to a new partner after betraying a former partner wipes the slate clean, but as one clear-sighted friend to people involved in such relationships observed:
'There is always something tainted about a marriage
that began in lies and deceit and other people’s misery'
A couple who betrayed and helped each other to betray the very people they swore to love and protect are unlikely to be completely credible guardians of honesty. In the final analysis, how can they be?
The media glamorises infidelity and then we wonder why so many marriages are broken
It’s weird. On the one hand we despise national traitors like the Maclean–Burgess–Philby defectors. We shake our heads over soldiers who desert their brothers-in-arms in the hour of need.
At the same time, films and TV dramas normalise marital betrayal. They glamorise it in pursuit of ‘your true soulmate’.
Traitors — deserters — cheating partners: different types of betrayal all ultimately connected like links in a greasy chain.
EM Forster knew this when he said:
‘If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.’
He put betraying someone who loves and trusts you right up there alongside the atomic defectors and Judas.
Two sides ≠ equal truth
So when some uncomprehending person trots out that old cliché about there being two sides to every story as if both sides were equally trustworthy, it's worth bearing in mind that a cheating husband or wife isn’t necessarily the person you can rely on for an honest appraisal of the truth.
If unfaithfulness and divorce or separation has been done to us, it’s human and humble to admit yes, of course we have flaws and imperfections. Loads of them.
But don’t let anybody or any society gaslight us into thinking a partner’s infidelity and abandonment was our fault.
