Can Marriage Survive Infideltity? One Broken Man's Story

Just the three of us: my wife, her lover, and me.

Three weeks after my wife told me she was having an affair, I decided to buy a pair of new pants. For a functional adult under normal circumstances, this wouldn't be much of an event, but I'd never been able to buy much of anything for myself—and all kinds of everyday actions had recently taken on layers of meaning. The last time I could remember buying my own pants had been in an emergency, when I discovered a rip in the seat of some raggedy khakis at work. Before the affair, I'd often worn pants until the cuffs were stringy and the lap was spotted with olive oil from eating salad at my desk; I had begun to muffin out of some of them as well. Sometimes my wife just threw my pants out and ordered new ones online—in black, so they would be harder to ruin.

I needed new pants because I'd shrunk. Almost as soon as I began to understand that my wife was having an affair and was imagining a whole new life for herself, I started to lose weight. That first week, I was mostly too confused to think about food. I started smoking again, which killed what was left of my appetite. At the same time, I also began to set personal records for push-ups, sit-ups, and distance running. The obsessive exercise was more a way to stay busy and burn off sorrow and anger than a conscious attempt to get in shape, but I lost 15 pounds, and all of my pants now had enough room in the waist for me and a box turtle. I had abdominal muscles for the first time since high school. My neck was thinner. My whole face looked pleasantly more rugged, maybe from the exercise of crying.

The physical changes were surprising, but the changes in my psychology were harder to explain. Walking into a small shop in Manhattan's NoLIta to talk about pants with a younger, bearded salesman, I didn't experience the familiar fear of being judged for trying on something too cool or expensive for someone like me. I wasn't paralyzed by the terror that no pants would be just right—the same terror that, in other forms, had made it impossible for me to buy gifts for my family or shampoo for myself, to plan a date or vacation, or to decide what to make or order for dinner without calling my wife to ask. I also couldn't pay our bills; do the taxes; make a budget; schedule appointments with my dermatologist, ophthalmologist, dentist, or barber; clean my glasses, fingernails, or ears without being reminded; do the dishes or, alternatively, keep my hands off my wife's butt while she did the dishes.

With the salesman's help, I chose a pair of khakis in my new size, more or less like my old pants but slimmer in the leg, in a lighter fabric, in a shade boldly closer to white than my usual beige. I was feeling oddly confident for a man still in love with a wife who, after 18 years together, had suddenly fallen in love with someone else.

Related: Being the First One to Have a Baby

One unusual thing about my marriage, which may explain some of its weaknesses as well as the odd blossoming that has taken place since it began to fall apart, is how long my wife and I have known each other. We met and became best friends immediately in the first weeks of college, before I had hair on my chest or knew how to pronounce Chianti, before she had a butt or, in my opinion, knew how to kiss. She was a little uptight but had a brutal wit that reminded me of Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday. I was an absentminded A-minus philosophy major who needed a dose of that kind of realism. She fell in love immediately, she says now, although she didn't tell me so then. For a long time I didn't want to spoil our friendship. The sexual tension was comically obvious to everyone. It mostly took the form of constant fights, but the fights sometimes ended in sex. After college, without ever "dating" exactly, we just started being together, quietly and with a little apprehension. Last year we realized that we'd lived through more than half of each other's lives. We also realized that we were both unhappy and didn't know why.

For two years, maybe more, I'd spent my mornings failing to write a book proposal, afternoons at my job as an editor surfing the Web, nights crashing early or waiting up jealously for my wife to come home, whole weekends napping on the couch. She was depressed and anxious, juggling medications and occasionally stricken by panic attacks. She was always telling me to do stuff that I never did. We made hasty dinners and found nothing to talk about over them other than what to watch on Netflix. Our most enthusiastic shared interest was Candy Crush. I mostly blamed work, which had become much harder for both of us—for opposite reasons: My career had slammed into a wall just as hers was bouncing up to a more demanding level. I also blamed the chemistry of our brains, and just getting older. I saw our relationship, in other words, as contaminated by all of our other problems rather than as a problem of its own.

That view changed suddenly a few days before our eighth wedding anniversary, when she met me for what I thought was going to be a normal dinner at our local Thai restaurant and announced that our marriage wasn't working anymore. I remember my racing pulse more than the details of the conversation, but one thing she said left a big impression: We'd lost our "common project." What did that mean? It wasn't a term I'd heard applied to marriage, which I imagined as a simple affirmation of love or some kind of journey of collaborative self-discovery, and a sensible way to keep civilization from collapsing into one big, violent orgy. But her tone was firm, as if she already knew where she wanted the discussion to go. She didn't say "divorce," but she didn't rule it out when I asked if that was what she really meant. I was shaking. I felt cold. Where was this coming from? Was there someone else? She shook her head no, convincingly—I had no clue that she was lying. By the end of the night she'd reluctantly agreed to couples therapy as long as I got a personal therapist for myself too.

Our most substantial common projects until then had been the usual ones: planning the wedding, buying our first apartment and fixing it up, trying to get pregnant. We had recently postponed the last indefinitely, after more than a year of visits to a fertility clinic left us facing increasingly expensive and invasive procedures just as the rest of our lives were becoming less secure. We'd been ambivalent about children anyway, so we accepted that the postponement might be forever. Our common projects now were more quotidian, including maintaining our home and helping each other flourish in our creative and professional lives. My most valuable contributions were probably bringing her a perfect cup of coffee every morning and bringing her to orgasm once or twice a week. During her panic attacks, I also gave her pseudo-feminist pep talks: You can do anything, I'd say, rather than asking myself what I could do.

Related: I'm Gay and in Love With a Girl. It's Confusing.

Our relationship then went suddenly from seeming unique to seeming like a contemporary stereotype, straight out of Slate's "Double X" or one of our favorite comedies, Forgetting Sarah Marshall. I was the end of men personified, the man-child or beta male. She was the successful woman who doesn't know what to do with him. One of my friends put it bluntly, when I told him that I feared the worst: "You've given her enough signs that you don't want to grow up." Like most stereotypes, this one has a basis in truth but falls short of the whole truth. It has cultural currency not so much because the characters are universal but because their dilemmas raise broader questions about the meaning of love, power, justice, and commitment for all kinds of couples today. Feeling as if you're suffering a problem of your time has the virtue of helping you feel less alone, but you also feel stuck in a role, with a limited ability to change the script. The happy ending in Forgetting Sarah Marshall follows the classical formula of romantic comedy: an amicable breakup of the mismatched couple.

Inspired by the novel idea of marriage as a project, I did change a little, in superficial ways. My lame determination to show her I was trying is epitomized by a text I sent at the time: "Drinking beer and working on my to-do list." I ran many errands that had symbolic value, such as taking a long walk to Home Depot to buy some plastic trim for her garden—rather than doing the taxes, cleaning the house, or looking for a new job. I made a special effort for our anniversary, knowing it would be a sort of test, but the best I could do was to Yelp a nice place to meet up for a glass of wine. I had no plan after that, but she liked the bar and took charge of the rest of the night, hailing a cab to a cozy Italian restaurant for an early dinner, then leading me to the waterfront to watch the sunset. It made for a beautiful and seemingly intimate date. By then, she later admitted, she'd been sleeping with him a few times a week for a month and a half.

I hadn't noticed much difference in her behavior. She was "really snippy for no reason," I wrote in my diary once, "and nothing I do makes her particularly happy lately." But the entry goes on: "I get home, she makes some funny jokes, and everything's okay again." More than the awkward moments, I remember pleasant surprises, a few spontaneous day trips she suggested, to the beach or a ball game—maybe just the gestures a cheater makes as cover or penance, maybe genuine attempts to reconnect. Her best idea had been a vacation: She'd traded in credit card points for two tickets to Costa Rica. It was to be our first real vacation in two years. Ten days before the flight and three days before our first appointment with our new therapist, she told me the truth.

She started to cry as the words came out. My gut response was to hug her and say that I knew how hard it must be for her to tell me. "Why are you being so nice?" she asked.

I didn't know. It was a mixture of instinct, love, and denial. I assumed at first that the affair had just been about sex and that it was over. Given my own shortcomings, I might even have been slightly relieved to have a less than perfect wife. It took me a few minutes to grasp that I might not have a wife at all anymore, at which point I curled up in a ball on the couch, moaning in her lap and begging her not to leave, while she stroked my hair with pity and seeming bewilderment. She'd never seen me cry before. I hadn't cried much since I was a teenager, and it felt completely different than I remembered, with none of that warm relief. It took all the muscles in my face and some in my torso to produce the tears, as if the salt had first tried to scrape its way out in crystalline form directly through my forehead and chin before dissolving under pressure into a poisonously concentrated ooze.

The next day one of the first things she revealed, what I'd least expected and what would come to matter hugely to me, was that he is more than 20 years older than I am. I asked a lot of questions. Did he make a lot of money? Did this explain why she had suddenly started listening to Led Zeppelin? Did she ever have sex with both of us on the same day? She answered most of my queries without flinching. He made about twice as much as I did last year, which sadly isn't enough to make him rich; no, she'd always liked Led Zeppelin, she claimed; and no—okay, yes, once or twice—but she felt really bad about it. I hoped that having to answer such questions would spoil whatever was special about the affair, in the same way that explaining a joke can ruin it. I hoped it would hurt her more to tell me all the sordid details than it would hurt me to hear them. I wanted to shame her. But her answers were bland, frighteningly so. "He just is who he is," she said at one point—meaning that, unlike me, he isn't searching for himself. By all appearances, he was an essentially normal, probably friendly, late-middle-aged white divorcé, not much at all like the men I'd imagined her drunkenly tonguing at late-night "work drinks," who were basically all just cooler versions of myself.

"He's cute," I said, after googling him.

She shrugged: "He's bald."

It was, I joked, the most conservative affair I could imagine. Of course I was angry, but over the years I'd lost my fighting skills. What she had done was cruel, childish, and stupid, I thought—that would all be obvious if our genders were reversed—but I was scared that saying so would only give her another excuse to leave. Instead, I stupidly tried to reason her out of her feelings. It was unfair, I argued, that she was choosing someone who'd already been through the uncertain parts of life—as if she were cheating not only on me but on time itself. When I accused her of having a daddy complex, she allowed the possibility but said that she preferred to see herself as filling a "man-size hole in her life." (My new therapist nodded solemnly at that one.) Being older, I brilliantly observed, meant being closer to death. She smiled distantly, as if that thought had already occurred to her and she might want to be there with him for the end too.

She told me all kinds of things that I can't bring myself to write, and I don't want to put words in her mouth or give the impression that I know what her new relationship was really like. Some of our most painful arguments (maybe also our most productive) haven't been about the morality of the affair—from which she did agree to take a hiatus—but about whether I can accept her experience as real, her account as valid, without trying to tell her what she really feels and why. There's also a lot about him that she struggles to articulate, and parts of their story that she doesn't want to pick over with me. But the words I heard loudest, because they hurt the most, were completely mundane. The conversation and sex just felt "natural" and "easy," she said. Another word she used that I found extremely threatening was secure.

At first I imagined my wife was delusional, which was reassuring. There were clear signs of what, in condescending therapeutic lingo, is called "infatuation," including the playlists she made for herself on our iTunes: "The Way Young Lovers Do," "You Make Loving Fun," "I Want You to Want Me." At times, the way she spoke about her lack of control over what had happened made it sound as if she was hypnotized. At other times, though, she seemed more self-possessed than I'd seen her in a long time. I had the unsettling sense that she had just rediscovered a few of the factors basic to eroticism as well as to everyday well-being: the ability to play and imagine, to feel interesting and spontaneously sexy, to accept someone else as he is, to relax and be herself. It was devastating to imagine that she could find those things with anyone other than me. Yet it was nothing like the experience described by the marriage-saving industry, according to which affairs are like illness—their effect trauma, their only cure a sober process of healing, even mourning. What if my wife was just in love?

Related: How Women Are Getting Rich by Writing Down Their Fantasies

In a heated moment, I took off my wedding ring and told her to keep it until she made up her mind. She left to stay at a friend's apartment and figure out what to do. She didn't call that night or the next, although she thoughtfully texted to tell me where she kept the Klonopin, in case I had trouble sleeping. I spent one of those nights lightly medicated, smoking cigarettes and drinking while watching a DVD of our wedding. We'd always been too embarrassed to watch it together. We said that pictures might spoil our memories, but once I began to doubt my own memories the images suddenly mattered a lot. I could even smile at how dorky my suit looked, and at how hard I tried not to sound too casual, too serious, or too enthusiastic as I pronounced "I do." She kept laughing and making me laugh during the ceremony, like we were sharing inside jokes. She was so very beautiful. The tears came more easily now. They began to feel good, and then they were gone, leaving just traces of salt on my glasses.

"Why would you do that to yourself?" she asked, when I called to tell her I'd watched the video. I'd read online that you were supposed to remind your cheating wife about the good times. I'd even thought about leaving the video out somewhere, in the hope that she'd watch it and see how happy she looked. I also thought seriously about making her a mixtape.

"It was a great wedding," I said.

"Of course it was great," she said. "I planned the whole thing myself."

When we were apart, I mostly felt a blinding pain I'd never felt. To try to describe its symptoms is just embarrassing. On one run, I literally chanted out loud, "Let the pain go." I downloaded self-help books onto my phone and secretly read women's magazines, because there just isn't much advice out there for men about what to do with feelings. The pain would fade away for a while, then arise again, especially at night or when I was alone. Even at my worst, though, I never felt what I know some people in my situation do. I didn't feel hopeless, as if my life had lost all value. It had just lost all of its shape. I felt unmoored, with my emotions all over the place and my identity adrift. As strange as this may sound, there were a few moments in the first weeks of the crisis that felt ecstatic, revelatory.

After our initial few days apart, for example, I invited her to a picnic lunch in the park. It was my first fully formed date idea in eons, and while the grilled-cheese sandwiches I brought didn't quite hold up, the wine and fruit were good, and the talk wonderful. The combination of knowing each other so long and suddenly doubting everything, having gotten past most of the factual questions about what she had done and still being curious about each other's feelings and the future—all that plus maybe the weather and a lucky alignment of moods made for a conversation that was more wide-ranging, even philosophical, more honest, sensitive, and creative than perhaps any we'd had before. Conversation had been missing from our marriage for so long.

I had a similar epiphany the next night, when for some reason she asked me to come to one of her big work parties. We had gradually stopped going together to such events, knowing that I'd feel left out when she was talking to other people yet annoyed when she worried about me, and that my presence would only add to her professional anxiety. This time, however, because I no longer felt like a husband, I didn't feel dragged along. I was invited, and she behaved more like a hostess with a guest than a handler with a monkey. I didn't hover around her, awkwardly juggling my wine and a plate of hors d'oeuvres. It made me happy, not jealous, to glance over and see her work the room, to see how liked and respected she was.

We considered canceling the vacation but, with trepidation, decided to go. I took care of planning with a ruthless efficiency. "I'll draft a budget today," reads one of my officious texts, "and maybe start fleshing out that itinerary with activity/day trip possibilities." The itinerary was inspired, if I do say so myself. The trip itself was darkly magical, bittersweet. I remember especially clambering up a rock in the ocean, with waves crashing all around, to see her waving from her own rock near the deserted beach, topless in her sunglasses. There were some long periods of silence in the car, some "awkward attempted sex (I think)," as I described it in my journal, and a few big fights, especially near the end—bitter and angry ones, culminating in threats to separate for good, culminating in sex—but we never felt trapped with each other as we feared we might.

It was hard to give her space; I remember the anger I felt as I watched her hiking through the misty rain forest on our second-to-last day, far ahead on the trail in a clear poncho, keeping to herself and looking like a self-involved ghost. We were all alone and surrounded by beauty. Why couldn't she share that experience with me? But I also remember us running and laughing with glasses of wine as I led her down the side of a mountain, trying to make it to a lookout point before the sunset ended. She took a goofy snapshot of me in the airport on the way home, tanned and bedraggled in my new black shades. "Look at this guy I picked up at the beach," she said. I hardly recognized myself.

In the weeks after our vacation, the fun of playing strangers gave way to frustration at having to question even the most harmless interactions between us, at not even knowing whether it was okay to text her good night or hold her hand. It was excruciating to break those kinds of simple habits. As I did, however, I began to feel energized; parts of my brain seemed to wake up. The sadness I felt was different from the grinding, soul-crushing, everyday depression I'd felt before the affair. Change in my own life seemed possible. It was already happening, only partly through intentional effort.

I was also forced to get out of the house more. She had agreed to keep living with me as long as we spent a lot of time apart. I started going to movies on my own, often to the kinds of arty or violent films that my wife wouldn't like. I went to a bar alone and watched sports I didn't follow with old men I didn't know. I wandered deep into Brooklyn to see some experimental music at an unmarked arts space, and my hatred of hipsters was overcome by the fun of meeting some slightly weird, unusually attractive, passionately curious younger people. The whole city felt more vivid and meaningful. So did my personal relationships. The old friends that I'd always secretly hated turned out to be incredibly caring listeners and full of good advice. Dinner with my parents, without my spousal buffer, was more work initially but ultimately less tedious. I began to write in the library and found it a lot less lonely than my study.

I also started listening to music again for the first time in years. Of course, every pop song seemed to be about us, and the effects were sometimes unpredictable. I felt weirdly rejuvenated whenever I listened to the Supremes' "Where Did Our Love Go." After one rough day of fighting, I put on a love-hate mix that I'd made, and when "Dismal Day" by Bread came on—"I look into my morning mirror/ And it reveals some things to me that I had not been able to see"—she started to laugh and dance to it in the kitchen. I don't think I had seen her dance since the last of our friends got married. She moved much more fluidly, I noticed, than she had in college. The next song was "No Easy Way Down," from Dusty in Memphis, and we began to slow-dance together until I heard her sobbing on my shoulder and begging me to turn it off.

In an unabashed attempt to win back my wife with nostalgia for our friendship in college, when I used to try to impress her with my music collection, I bought a record player and hauled up a pile of old LPs from the basement: Wes Montgomery, Bill Evans, Thelonious Monk. She wasn't impressed, but it was refreshing to listen to jazz instead of watching Netflix during dinner.

"I'm really enjoying Blonde on Blonde these days," I told her.

She rolled her eyes. "That's because Bob Dylan hates women."

This isn't an essay about how an affair can save a marriage. I still don't have my ring back, and there is a lot of ambiguous joking lately about whether an ex-wife can be a wingman. When I'm feeling masochistic enough to ask, she tells me bluntly that she still wants to be with him. At best, her friends have been able to convince her that she might have been moving too fast. As of this writing, then, her affair remains on pause, not technically over.

I still don't have a great job—I'm a writer, as she knew I would be when she married me—but I do take care of most of the rest of my own life now. It seems strange to me that it was ever so hard. How had I become so helpless? It couldn't have all been my fault. There must have been something about her, too, something that, as we tried to grow up together, transformed the dynamics of our early friendship into a paralyzing pas de deux. She must have had a complementary weakness to my own, perhaps a need to divert herself from her own anxious insecurities by taking care of someone "lesser." The selfishness of her affair could have been a way to disrupt that habit.

But now any possible future marriage between us would probably have to begin by ending whatever we have left and starting over on completely new terms, as adults, with more distance between us and more courage to fight. Figuring out what we are to each other now may become our last common project. We don't even know what we think about monogamy anymore, whether it's right for us or for society in general. Recently, we were hanging out with a few of her friends, and one of them was worried about a pair of newlyweds I didn't know, one of whom had cheated on the other. My wife and I exchanged a nervous glance. "Sometimes something like that can be good for a marriage," I said.

My wife smiled.

"Or not," I added, and she laughed out loud.

This article appears in the December 2014 issue of ELLE magazine.