I was in a relationship for 26 years, married for 17, and my husband had an affair. It was hidden, long term and denied until discovery. I divorced him but that was delayed and I had to live with him for a further two years. I spent a year alone in my new house with my now adult sons. Now I am a little over a year into a new relationship and suddenly panicking about it. I’m scared to go forward. I’m not sure I can commit to long term again, and if I see him looking at other women (we work together in a predominantly female workplace), I panic! I’m older than him by nine years and I feel like I want to end things to prevent getting hurt. But then I feel I’m being cowardly. How can I stop going down this road in my head?
Eleanor says: On behalf of everyone everywhere, let me say: what a schmuck thing for your husband to do. That is such a big betrayal. And the cruelty you’re living through now is that as well as teaching you to be mistrustful of others, betrayal on that magnitude teaches you to be unsure of yourself. If I misread things once …
Hurt like that teaches us all too acutely about the costs of trusting people who don’t deserve that trust. It’s totally reasonable to prioritise avoiding hurt for a while. But in that self-protective aftermath, it can be easy to mistake isolation for safety. That’s what the panic tells us, anyway; cut it off, head back, smaller circle, lick the wounds.
In fact, retreat isn’t safe. It just keeps you safe from one specific kind of loss. Retreat and avoidance are not cost-free. Day after day of vigilance, of declining possible connections – what does it add up to? A life without betrayal, sure, but also a life with fewer loving connections. A life without ease.
Backing away means there’s no one moment of acute hurt, but it’s a cost all the same; the steady accumulation of ways to make our world smaller. Taking the worst of the past as a guide for the future means we find less in that future to counterbalance the past.
Your situation isn’t about trying to talk yourself into taking risks when safety is on offer. It’s a choice between two kinds of risk: is it worth missing out on a good relationship to guarantee not being hurt by a bad one? Could knowing that give you something to say back to the panic, when it tries to boss you around? The panic might say, yes! Keep me safe! And I know it can feel like it has a point; because it feels like another betrayal would be completely unbearable. Like stomping on a broken bone. But in fact, you know something from what you’ve been through: you know it didn’t destroy you. You know you can go through one of the worst things you thought could happen, have everything you thought you knew dissolve and then keep going. You weren’t finished.
You might be hardier for this; you’ve met and spent a lot of time with the part of yourself that survives other people’s rejection and neglect.
One last thing to tell the panic is that it can become self-fulfilling. Doubting people, scrutinising them and withdrawing can create the very distance and mind-change we’re so scrupulously scouring for evidence of. Just like urgently saying “trust me” isn’t a very good way to produce trust, urgently acting from a fearful need for reassurance isn’t a very good way to get it. One way you get relationships of ease and trust is by leading with the parts of you that aren’t your fear; because fear can obscure the best of you. You could remind the panic that in trying so hard to keep you from loss, it risks creating it.
Fear can long outlast the need for vigilance, but you don’t face a choice between safety and threat. It’s a choice between which kind of loss you’d rather risk.
This letter has been edited for length and clarity
