Sharing is caring or is it?

 The big decision is who to talk to after you discover that your husband has been having an affair. Adrenaline may carry you through the first month or so, but after that you will need support from a confidante and the role of that person is to be a sounding board.  When you need to rage and rant, they will listen and supply the tissues.  When you need another perspective, they will oblige, but the important thing is that they do not have their own axe to grind.

So let us look at a few potential groups:

Your family

I do not recommend telling your family and if you want to see why put yourself in their shoes.  If your sister announced that her husband was having an affair, how would you react?  Would you not become very righteous and demand that she kicks him out and gets a divorce. The chances are she will react in exactly the same way and then you would have to consider what happens if you choose not to take her advice.  Imagine a situation where you and your husband decided to stay together and now imagine walking into a family function where everybody knows.  In my case, my family think very highly of Tom and would be really disappointed with him.  As a result of that disappointment, I believe they would over-react and he would go from hero to zero in 30 seconds flat.  I think that it could put undue pressure on our decision to stay together.

Your in-laws

The same applies to your in-laws as to your family, though their natural reaction would be to support your husband.  In some ways, I would have liked Tom to tell his sister as I felt that facing up to her would have been therapeutic for him.  She is also trained in a profession that would make her more open-minded.  He chose not to and again it has left family gatherings more relaxed.  Also remember that your kids are part of the two families as well and you should consider the best course of action for them.

Friends who are friendly with you both

This would apply to the couples you regularly meet for dinner parties or other outings.  Perhaps you have gone away for weekends together.  Remember they are a couple and if they value your friendship, they may also have a hidden agenda as they could be forced to take sides if you split up.  If you suddenly become single, you become a threat to this network of couples, so it could become very difficult to maintain the friendships if you decide to kick your husband out.

Parents of your children’s friends

Often when we have children, our main social network revolves around a group of parents where the children are similar ages.  Again the chances are they are couples, so the above applies.  Some of them may have been through the same thing, so put them on your list of possibilities.  However, the main consideration would be how could telling them affect your kids?  You could easily lose control of what your children learn about the affair.

Someone who is just your friend

This is possibly the safest bet.  They love and will support you in whatever decision you make if they are good friends.  You should consider how broad-minded they are.  If they hold very firm opinions, would they have the ability to just listen and let you work it out for yourself?  Or, when it is required, have the ability to play devil’s advocate to get you to look at both sides of the argument.

Your husband’s friends

This is a group that we want to talk to, especially to see what they knew.  My advice is to leave them alone, as they are probably going to tell you as little as possible.  Their loyalty is to your husband and he is going to need their support through the coming months as an escape from the reality of the affair aftermath.  Yes, it is likely that they knew or suspected something was going on, but it was easier for them to bury their heads in the sand.  Perhaps, they had internal conflicts about the deceit, but if they had come and told you earlier, how would you have reacted?  Shoot the messenger?  I can understand this, although I did try to speak to them and afterwards, I referred to them as the 3 monkeys – See no Evil, Hear no Evil and Speak no Evil.

Your children

I believe that children old enough to understand should be told something as they will have picked up the atmosphere at home, the anger, the increased intense discussions, the tears and the wan faces.  It does not have to be the full truth, but enough to explain what is going on.  Explain that you are trying to rebuild the marriage and that the priority for you both is to do what is best for them.  Ideally, both parents should reassure them, but Tom found it very difficult to speak about it at all to them.  If they ask questions, answer them as matter-of-factly as possible, but do not use it as an opportunity to vent your feelings.  They need reassurance that their world is safe and they will know that world is now severely threatened.  Your children are your children and do not cross the line that could turn them into a confidant.  It may be tempting if your children are a bit older, but I believe that a lot of a young adult’s confidence is linked to a stable home.

Work colleagues

You spend the most of your day with your work colleagues, so the chances are they will pick up something is wrong.  Their loyalty will tend to be with you, but seeing you at your worst could affect the working relationship in years to come, so use your judgement.

Acquaintances that are going through the same thing

Possibly almost accidently, you discover that an acquaintance has also just found out that their husband was having an affair.  This is probably the safest bet as they are on the fringes of your social circle, so if things got awkward later on, you can avoid each other.  You will be able to share books, insights, the name of a good counsellor or coffee and cake when you are down.  You will be able to take it in turns to listen or to vent, but because they are on the same long road, they have no preconceptions.  For example, now I would be very open to both sides of the argument of whether to kick Tom out or not, but in a few years’ time, if I have successfully rebuild my marriage, I would possibly be biased towards staying together.  If we broke up in the future, my bias may be to kicking him out.  But right now, I am in no man’s land, not knowing exactly where I am going, although I have a vision, but it means that currently I am not that biased either way.

People who have gone through the same thing

You would think that people who have been through the same thing would be able to give you guidance, but the truth is that only a few of them will be able to.  They have worked out a solution for themselves and either are so stuck in an abyss of bitterness that they cannot see anything else or they have worked through it and worked out their own solution.  If that is the case, the chances are they will have a bias to that solution, which may not necessarily work for you.

So where does that leave us?  We have 3 to 4 possibilities and a few of them come with some riders.  The safest are:

Acquaintances that are going through the same thing

Someone who is just your friend

People who have gone through the same thing

Work colleagues

Perhaps, you can have some hypothetical discussions with them to gauge how open they are to different viewpoints.  But by considering each group, you should have a few possibilities.  I told a couple of people at work.  I told one lady I had worked with for a long time and showed her a photo of the other woman and we shared a laugh about her looks.  We never spoke about it again, but it helped.  The best person I told was someone who visits us occasionally and when she came in, somebody asked about her husband and I just knew.  We were able to get together and compare notes and it really did help.

However, the best places to pour your heart out are in your journal and to your counsellor.  There can be no regrets there as both are completely confidential and when you are ready share your insights with the world through a blog.  The main danger, for you and your marriage, is talking to a male friend about the affair.  You are vulnerable and that could push the marriage beyond the point of no return.