‘I couldn’t ignore this house of cards’: A husband’s affair was just the beginning

This story is part of the Good Weekend: Best of Features 2023 editon.See all 22 stories.

Affairs are a little like childbirth. Someone is always having one somewhere, usually right under the nose of their spouse because nobody knows what happens inside a marriage, not even the people in it. The mere mention of infidelity brings confessions tumbling forth. An optometrist forgets my eye test as she regales me with stories of her father-in-law’s philandering. The barista tells me their brother had sex with a guest on his wedding night. Nothing is sacred or beyond the pale once the wick is lit.

Lust is tyrannical in dictating concealment and smothering the nag of conscience. Here’s where lovers float far above the crunch of domestic routine – conversing breathlessly in a covert lexicon of glances and sighs, for few can ignore the thrall of a desire strong enough to snuff out reason. Who doesn’t dream of being loved dangerously, thrillingly, free from the tethers of restraint?

Conservative estimates suggest affairs occur in 20 to 25 per cent of all marriages worldwide, though surveys in this field are notoriously rubbery, since they rely on self-reporting by participants who are prone to massaging the truth, often kidding themselves.

There are countless excuses for why we go a-roving: drought in the marital bedroom, domestic discord, impulsiveness, insecure attachment, loneliness, neuroticism, narcissism, discontent, substance abuse, a desire for risk-taking, a quest for self-discovery, an escape from the monotony of monogamy.

Whenever New York couples therapist Esther Perel thinks she’s heard every explanation for cheating, she stumbles across a novel variation. She’s been accused of being “pro-affair” for a nuanced approach that insists these entanglements don’t yield to simple categorisations of good and bad, victim and perpetrator. “What it did to one and what it meant to the other” is how she frames her stance in her 2017 bestseller, The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity.

I didn’t consult her expertise when infidelity first mowed me down in the hallway of my home. I didn’t want enlightenment to warm the recesses of my dank cave. In my funk of desolation, I didn’t care for facts or research or hypotheses that might explain my husband’s behaviour and elucidate how I’d contributed to our downfall. I hadn’t considered monogamy a tough gig. I hadn’t grasped the inherent logic of the adage “trust is a risk masquerading as a promise.”

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How do we recognise love that looks on tempests and is not shaken? Love is luck and legerdemain. The timing of who we meet – and when – are elements beyond our control.

I first glimpsed the man I would marry needling the then Labor leader Bob Hawke in a press conference at Sydney’s Boulevard Hotel during the 1983 federal election campaign. He stood out from the throng of scruffy journalists for his serious intent, peppery questions on budgetary policy, his horn-rimmed spectacles, eucalypt-green suit and bright red woollen vest. Our first conversation, at the bar of the National Press Club early in the Hawke government’s reign, lasted all night. We married two years later.

“I didn’t think for a moment that the dissembling that breaks hearts and dismantles households would ever come to visit me.”

Our wedding was tricky. My husband’s father, Colin, had divorced his mother, Molly, to cement a long-running affair. The other (much younger) woman, Luda, would be on Colin’s arm at a celebration too small for camouflage by a crowd. The three of them circled uneasily. I gave no thought to the vein of betrayal coursing through this family. There was a story that Colin’s mother had also taken a lover. I had no inkling of the significance of these liaisons. If I’d done my homework, I would perhaps have been better prepared for the possibility that monogamy would pinch my husband’s toes. I didn’t think for a moment that the dissembling that breaks hearts and dismantles households would ever come to visit me.

His secret unfurled following a milestone birthday party in 2006 for a new friend we’d made on returning to Melbourne after a 20-year hiatus. I’d shopped for a gift with another guest, a woman I liked enormously for her exuberance and ready laughter. She’d arrived late to the gathering. Her smile had given nothing away.

Afterwards, in the midst of getting dinner and supervising homework, I heard my husband call me out to the garage. Among the wheelie bins and rusted paint cans, he dumped his own hard rubbish. Her husband had turned sleuth with their phone bill and was likely to deliver me the bad news himself if mine didn’t get in first, controlling the narrative, finessing chronologies, skimming over the why and how.

I initially refused his request for counselling. He bought books on marriage and sex, spinning our problem as a lack of intimacy. I resented his insistence that I was the one needing re-education when surely he could do with a crash course in honesty.

Our eldest was entering year 12. I didn’t want to sabotage his prospects. I held this thing tight so that I might contain the after-shudders. I believed my husband’s glib diminishing of the affair and accepted his promise it was done.

And it was, for a while. Several years later, I sat down one morning at the home computer. He’d forgotten to log off in his rush to get to the gym. Her email address burnt holes in my retina. The whitewashed picture he’d drawn for me had been kinder to my imagination. There were also emails to another woman whose name I didn’t recognise.

That night, I burgled his phone to fathom the dimensions of his deceit. I went bonkers. I punched myself again and again with my fists. Days later, I slipped off my shirt in front of the fluorescent-lit mirrors of the restroom in the newspaper office where I probed other people’s conflicts and conundrums. Bruises coloured the skin beneath my collarbone like a posy of purple and yellow-faced pansies inked into my flesh. Grief scores us in strange ways. I’d punished myself for being blind and dumb and deaf. I was horrified by my handiwork, but also weirdly proud of this vivid tattoo. Here was physical proof of my discombobulation.

For months after that cataclysmic king-hit, I withstood waves of ferocious turbulence not unlike the post-traumatic stress symptoms of returned veterans. The before and after scratches your eyelids. I’d be assaulted without warning by memories I’d have to unscramble in a harsher light as I sought to reconcile what I remembered of the past with what I now knew had transpired.

A wise literary friend discouraged me from an impetuous rush into print, every writer’s therapeutic reflex. Another who’d reeled from the blow of infidelity herself texted me tips that kept her sane: “Long walks with the dog; seeing a psychologist; writing three pages and not sending anything; having a couple of people to confide in – CHOOSE THEM VERY CAREFULLY; the occasional sleeping tablet; a saying, repeat often, ‘This too will pass.’ ”

I sought the counsel of a friend who was a family lawyer and an expert in the blitzkrieg of marital warfare. She steered me away from the bonfire of court. So I smouldered in the ashes of recrimination and sought relief in the discipline and distraction of the job I loved. Some days began with a stern lecture to myself: “You are not the story, you are not the story, you are not the story.”

‘The before and after scratches your eyelids.’

Sometimes my mask slipped. “None of my colleagues see what I carry,” I wrote to myself in notes at the time. “I stay my fury. I make phone calls. I schedule interviews. I resist the impulse to spill my misfortune down the front of my clothes like a bowl of minestrone. I stifle the reflux of self-pity. I know dignity is required. I know bitterness can maim and kill. Already I sense its toxic passage through my pores. I want to flail and curse but I do my sobbing in private or on trams and trains in the company of strangers busy with their screens …

“My mother died when I was 23. I’ve been with my husband for longer than I knew my mother. I am less resilient than my younger self. This time I do not think I can bounce back … The dog comforts me. She never comes when I call her in the park, but when I cry at home she’s there in a second, licking salty tears from my cheek.”

Credit: Getty Images

The bruises healed quickly. An ire murderous enough for me to comprehend how jealousy and treachery unleash terrible physical violence came in surges. Low self-esteem and rejection pickled my spirit. Suicidal thoughts stencilled my moods. I drank too much. I smoked a lot. Self-loathing and shame gnawed at him. Affairs might massage egos and libido, but they are detrimental to wellbeing and health.

We tried to salvage our marriage, acknowledging faults and flaws on both sides. It always takes two, and my husband nursed a log of injuries just as I licked the wound of victimhood. Distrust is a hard burden to shift and a burdensome guilt to shoulder. I truly loved this man. I knew from listening to the stories of others, with my notebook and pen, that damage begets damage and a line must be drawn, but the wronged can’t help hunting for sympathy and a coalition of outrage.

I hoped we’d muddled through the trauma so as to lessen the foulness that dines on vengeance, but I didn’t comprehend how this devilry might leach into our next of kin.

Our youngest son, who still lived at home, was my rock during the hardest months. He finished school, got a job and fell in love; then as my husband and I came unstuck, he went full pelt towards a lifelong commitment. He and his girlfriend became engaged.

We were together for the proposal and estranged by the night of their engagement party. She wore white and skyscraper heels. He was clad in an electric blue suit. We all danced until way past when. They set up house, acquiring a cat and a rescue dog, announcing within a year that they would be parents. Her pregnancy lifted our families on a crest of joy; when their bonny boy arrived prematurely, we gazed through the glass of the intensive-care nursery, enchanted by this precious, swaddled gift.

Six months later, I was holidaying in NSW, giddy in pursuit of a new romance, when my mobile phone woke me at 3am. My son’s fiancée was on the other end and could hardly breathe. She’d caught him having an affair. I walked into the forest barefoot to find better reception. My heart thumped as I listened to her wail; I consoled her as best I could, then flew to her side. I thought about my son, my husband, his father, his grandmother. I couldn’t ignore this house of cards.

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In 2017, I came across an American research project testing the theory that infidelity might pass from one generation to the next, like a stain or a curse, as if this behaviour is normalised through exposure. I decided to lie down where all the ladders start. Was each transgression a singular spiral of passion between two individuals freed from the hairshirt of compromise? Did their pursuit of happiness cleave to a pattern they’d observed at home, or were they born with a genetic imprint that makes monogamy a suffocating fit?

I wish I hadn’t waited so long to pry. All but a handful of those who bore witness to the earliest events in this personal history had died. There are no archives or documentary sources or infrared technologies to burn an image of the truth. Like so many family stories, this one called irresistibly in evening’s shadow, when yesteryear bleeds into the present and we become curiouser about the footprints of our predecessors, drawn to deciphering the bloodlines of our clan.

In 2019, my husband and I – by then separated for three years – drove to Broken Hill in north-western NSW, the mining town where his late father, Colin, had lived until he was booted out of home at 14. His departure was sealed by a thrashing from his own father after Colin had dared to air his suspicion that his mother, Jean, was having an affair with the lodger. Did Colin catch her too often in the lodger’s company? Did he find them unclothed in bed, or did he eavesdrop on gossip from someone who’d seen them dancing a hair’s breadth apart?

Teenagers can be unreliable narrators. We’d only his word for what happened and the conflagration that followed. Once he’d left town, there was no need to revisit accusations that were difficult to voice. Social protocol fenced off rugged emotional terrain and fate conspired to assist this bleaching. The lodger went to war and was slain on the battlefields of France, and Colin’s parents went on together, sleeping separately, growing closer apart.

Colin bore his story like a deformed hump. He carried it with him wherever he went. He shared it with his girlfriend, Molly, before they married in 1950 and built a new home in the Melbourne bayside suburb of Beaumaris, where mid-century modernism had landed like a flying saucer in the tea-tree heath. Children hopped fences to play in each other’s yards. At weekends, their parents shook loose. They smoked. They drank. They sunbaked. They shimmied. Adultery fizzed and frothed from the narrow neck of straightening decades, and the introduction of no-fault divorce in 1975 eased the pain of decoupling.

One day, Molly rang Colin’s office. “Who shall I say is calling?” a receptionist asked.

“It’s his wife.”

“Oh is that you, Luda?” the voice breezed in a cheerfully familiar tone. When Colin got home, he dismissed the junior who answered the phone as an idiot. Molly swallowed his bluff.

Cognitive gymnastics is an artful game of justifying bad behaviour with as much composure and panache as you can muster. Colin’s conscience had crept full circle since the outrage he’d felt in Broken Hill, when he’d been too young to comprehend the legacy of compromise and consequence, or the numbness of marital fatigue.

Something happened in his own marriage to strengthen his nerve and propel him towards the exit. When his mother died, she bequeathed him a box. Inside was a note declaring that the lodger had been the love of her life.

The sky grew dark for a period but in each case, there was life after infidelity.

‘The sky grew dark for a period but in each case, there was life after infidelity.’

Colin was shattered. He took his son – the man who would become my husband – to a counter tea at the local pub and stepped him through the narrative as if he were initiating him into a family lore of almost mythical bearing. He failed to mention, as tears streamed down his face, how he’d surrendered to an affair of his own and was already planning his escape with Luda, by then his lover of several years.

When Molly returned from a study trip to China, she knew instinctively as she stepped into their house that something was amiss. Colin made her a cup of tea and dropped his bombshell. “While you were away, I moved out.” Piece by piece, she put together what had happened outside her line of sight. Not remotely interested in revenge, she got on with her life.

“It made me stand on my own two feet,” she told me when I broached it with her almost 50 years later. Would Colin’s mother have been shaken to learn that the son who hurled the first stone at her went on to hide his own affair in Melbourne, a city where crowds afforded him the concealment that she was denied in Broken Hill?

The melanoma that killed her was detected in my husband early enough to spare him. Colin died from another kind of cancer. We know the pathology of hereditary conditions that skip from one generation to the next. Do genes also predispose us to infidelity, or do children model parental behaviour, just as exposure to the piano at a mother’s knee readies an ear for music?

Think how violence, addiction, political allegiance and even vocations in families may promote choices and habits that cross generations. My husband was quick to remedy feelings of marital dissatisfaction by venturing beyond the picket fence. He knew of his grandmother’s legacy. He’d watched his father’s philandering blight his own marriage.

The sky grew dark for a period but in each case, there was life after infidelity. He could appreciate the costs and the benefits of another chance at love. His father’s affair had left a door in his mind ajar.

Credit: Getty Images

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My sociological dig through layers of romantic couplings across four generations of one family unearthed shards of enlightenment worth the sweat and tears. I pondered distinguishing traits beyond the skid-marks of infidelity linking my husband, his grandmother, his father and our son.

A shared intense sociability that shields insecurities. An engine of determination. Little derails their pursuit of needs and goals. They are profligate and generous. They pay particular attention to clothes and shoes and fashion. Perhaps unrestrained desire for self-gratification is another enabler of infidelity.

American psychologists Dana Weiser and Daniel Weigel, whose research first caught my attention, set out to explore the impact of parental infidelity on offspring, given how many habits and experiences in childhood set us up for life. Social learning theory argues that we encode information about the desirability and acceptability of certain conduct based on what we see and hear from those close to us and then proceed to model that behaviour.

“For example, if a child sees his or her parent in happier or more fulfilling relationships following infidelity and a subsequent divorce, then infidelity behaviour may be perceived as being vicariously positively reinforced,” Weiser and Weigel proposed in their 2017 paper Exploring Intergenerational Patterns of Infidelity, published in the Journal of the International Association for Relationship Research. Several academics had nibbled at this question, with evidence that sons whose fathers had cheated were more likely to play around themselves.

Over the course of three separate studies, the authors found that those who had knowledge of a parental infidelity were significantly more likely to follow that example, although the magnitude of this effect was small and further work recommended.

I considered whether my willingness to forgive my husband had strengthened our son’s nerve. Had my display of tolerance confirmed in his mind that lying was okay, and positioned infidelity as a legitimate response to discontent?

Life conforms to the curve of precedence. Children who watch trysts unfold can become inured to a thorn in the side of marriage, so that even though they are hurt and angered by one parent’s betrayal of another, they may go on to repeat the injury. But this is not the whole story. There are so many random variables and impulses at play outside of marital discord that can hasten a sultry glance towards a breathless kiss, or tip a salacious aside into a full-blown affair. A chance meeting; an electric connection with a stranger; a sudden, unexpected opportunity for intimacy that inflames a rare passion or unfinished business with a lover; or a traumatic event inviting reckless behaviour to numb inconsolable pain.

Affairs create their own weather systems. They leap fences like wildfires and give rectitude the flick, and in the aftermath there is a bill of claims and damages to be logged. We are drawn to broken glass, like ghouls guiltily feasting on the drama. The hurt, the highs, the hubris, the audacity, the anguish jolts us out of dull complacency.

I was still untangling the strands of this curse afflicting our clan when a palm-sized, furry brown rodent called a vole scurried across my screen. The word “vole” is an anagram of “love”, but this is not what made American scientists wonder if this creature could plausibly unravel the mystery of human relationships. Zoologists conducting a routine population study of voles were blown away during field research by the discovery that prairie voles were turning up in pairs. (Only a tiny percentage of mammalian species are considered to be monogamous.)

Initially, they thought the prairie voles were sexually exclusive, but further experiments using DNA fingerprinting turned up evidence of opportunistic infidelity among the population. Nonetheless, the bonding behaviour of sharing nests and raising offspring together set them apart from their montane or meadow vole cousins, who bed a mate then flee without a backward glance at their young. Physically identical, the prairie and montane species are difficult to tell apart. They are 99 per cent genetically alike, but this 1 per cent difference makes one homebound and the other footloose and free.

Neuroscientists zeroed in on the neural variations between these two types of voles. In particular, they examined their brains’ regulation of the neurochemicals oxytocin and vasopressin, which heighten bonding and attachment habits. They mapped the location and density of the receptors for these neurotransmitters and found that prairie voles boast more receptors and these lie closer to the brain’s reinforcement and reward pathways, shoring up the animal’s nurturing instincts. The more promiscuous montane vole has fewer receptors and these are located further from the brain’s reward circuitry.

We are never prisoners of our own biology, but genetic variations in the brain’s reward pathway may help explain why some of us pursue risky sexual encounters while others remain constant and true. The neurobiology of love is an ever-expanding field of inquiry. It’s not possible to confirm a cause and effect between sexual proclivity and genetic traits. Studies undertaken to date report correlations only. Some people will be unfaithful, just as prairie voles are not perfect. Whatever happens in our brains will be modified and moderated by social, cultural and religious beliefs and other events, including early life stresses such as an absence of parental love.

The question of nature versus nurture has been thrown into flux as we understand more about the brain’s plasticity and the way it changes constantly in response to experiences that impact both wiring and chemistry. Short of booking my next of kin in for a series of neurological tests, I will never know whether their circuitry predisposes them to cheat, whether infidelity was learnt at home, or whether a lack of restraint and a surfeit of opportunity are to blame.

Our cluelessness can be traced in part to the guesswork of courtship and marriage and there is something we can try to reconfigure in the sweepstakes of partnering. Listen to your heart and your head. Be persuaded by passion as well as reason. Think hard before you commit. Have honest conversations about past relationships and the fine print of future commitments. If you’re romancing somebody who has a track record of infidelity, it’s likely to predict a pattern. Be as sure as you can of staying together before welcoming a child into the world.

And if you’re struck by lightning, hold yourself together as your world falls apart. Repeat often, “This too will pass.” Find it within yourself to share the blame. Know that time salves the pain. You’ll heal eventually. If you’d interrogated me in the heat and horror of discovering my husband’s treachery, I’d never have believed we could be civil again. I learnt the balm of forgiveness from others I brushed up against on the way to recovery.

Credit: Getty Images

Forgiveness is healthier than rancour and bitterness. An old boyfriend who was in these same dire straits reflected on how lonely and chilly it gets clinging to the moral high ground. We tug the cloth of truth to suit ourselves, covering our nakedness and construing our intentions in a complimentary hue. I know my husband recoils in shame and remorse at the hurt he caused everyone grazed by his deceit.

When he read an early draft of my book, he got up from the table and left the house to go for a walk. Too judgmental, was his response. He was right. He has strong views that buttress his behaviour and tame the guilt, and he’s crafted a defence to shield his character. I admire his unflinching tolerance of my blowtorch. The telling of this story has been tempered by the passage of time and the shift in perspective that distance affords us.

‘Perhaps unrestrained desire for self-gratification is another enabler of infidelity.’

Affairs happen. No amount of shame or punishment will shut the gate on sexual desire and the lure of forbidden pleasure. I don’t have the answers. My solution is not yours. Just as every unhappy family is miserable in its own particular way, every dangerous liaison is forged by the personality of the participants, their circumstances, the moral codes and judgments of the hourglass they inhabit. Truthfulness spares both partners the agony of lies being bared with potentially catastrophic consequences. We are all hewn from crooked timber. Each of us makes mistakes. I couldn’t have countenanced this admission when I was flaming with vitriol, but I’ve touched down in a sweet place of peace and acceptance.

Atonement has preoccupied my husband as he’s sought to make amends to me and our sons. We’ve worn a path through our wilderness, trying to reconcile each other’s account of what happened to us and how we fell apart. He stays with me when he’s in Melbourne. The crunch of toast in his mouth still drives me crazy; he hates that I keep the heating low during winter. We’ve both got other relationships and while we keep separate addresses, neither of us could yet be bothered with divorce.

In all my reading I found the most sense in therapist Esther Perel’s belief that infidelity can pilot emotional growth, while the guidance of commentator Dan Savage, who is gay, married and “monogamish”, encourages preserving the good of the relationship, which is something we’ve practised in our own way. The birth of our first grandson and his parents’ estrangement demanded that we channel our best selves.

The grandchildren know my husband as Grumpy. I’m Grandma. They are aware we live apart and, while sometimes confused by our comings and goings, often find us together in the rambling old house that was once home to their fathers. Our friendship surprises many people, who can’t imagine how we’ve mended our brokenness. My mother-in-law is glad that the centre holds. Accepting former husbands and wives, acknowledging previous lovers, overcoming the knee-trembling fear that trust is fragile takes a rare confidence that doesn’t come easily, swiftly or cheaply. It’s hard-won, but the reprieve from suspicion and jealousy, anger and hatred, is liberating. My husband and I remain close despite everything we’ve been through, perhaps because of all we’ve survived.

*Kate Legge’s Infidelity and Other Affairs (Thames & Hudson, $35) is out February 28. She will appear at Adelaide Writers’ Week in March.

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