Reply to When did you get over your spouse's affair? Or did you?

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[quote=Anonymous]To ask for statistics on people she has helped in therapy is a bit strange, because the metrics for success in these kinds of situations are so squishy.  For example, I'd hardly call it a "success" if a couple managed to stay married but remained miserable.  She's currently on a national speaking tour, and she's sold out in many cities.  She obviously helps a lot of people, including people on this board.

I don't think she was ever "pro-affair".  Even in her Ted talks (long before her most recent book), she describes affairs as similar to a lethal cancer.  She says in her Ted talk that just because a person can survive a horrible bout of cancer and be stronger from it doesn't mean that she'd ever recommend that people get cancer.  Perel's parents were Holocaust survivors, and she grew up in a town full of Holocaust survivors.  She says that there were two types of people in the town, "those who didn't die, and those who came back to life".  She says that her parents were the kind of people who learned to thrive after tragedy.  So I don't think that she shrugs off the tragedy of infidelity, as much as she just is very steeped in a worldview where people should move forward.  She emphasizes that she has lived with the wreckage of infidelity every day in her office for the past 30 years, and knows it well.  She also writes extensively about how sometimes happy people cheat, which I think underscores her belief that affairs aren't always the fault of the cheated-on spouse.

While I don't speak for her, I think she would look for a few things to determine how capable of self-examination a couple is.  For the cheater and the cheated-on spouse, I think she looks at the conditions in which the affair occurred, and she says she also looks at how narcissistic each member of the couple is.  She says it usually doesn't bode well if either member of the couple is deeply narcissistic, because they will always make it all about them in the long-term.  She expects both spouses to be able to take responsibility for the negative aspects of the relationship before the affair occurred.  How are you supposed to know?  I think you know over time.  But, yeah, you'll never "know" for sure with any human being.  At some point, if you can find it in your heart, you have to trust.  If you can't, then you probably have to split up.

I think in some infidelities, there is a clear "perpetrator" and "victim", but in many infidelities there isn't.  You clearly don't think that, which is understandable, as the betrayal you experienced is particularly grotesque.  We can agree to disagree.  Your partner being willing to jeopardize the life of your baby is about as awful as it gets, but I'd slow your roll a bit when you get into this line of thinking that you're somehow the moral authority on all people who have had a particular experience.  Grow up.  I am sincerely sorry that I offended you with what I said, but I said it because I believe it is the truth.  You cannot put billions of unfaithful people since the beginning of time into one category, just because it fits neatly with your black-and-white worldview.  As Perel says, "Certainly, millions of people can't all be pathological."  Many cheated-on spouses happy contribute to problems within the relationship and then expect to be publicly canonized "Saint Cheated Upon" because it feels good.  [/quote]

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