The Wrong Side Of Infidelity

Think for a moment and see if you can think of anyone who has had an affair.  It's very, very likely that you do know of someone.  In many ways, this indicates just how prevelent it is.

Still, knowing someone, or of someone who has had an affair is very different from knowing what the impact is like when it happens to you.

And why is it that so few people have not the slightest idea what it's like to experience the devastation that infidelity causes?

Is it that most people don't care?  Is it that they would rather not think about it?  Is it the way the media portrays it like a soap opera?

Perhaps it's all of these things.  Perhaps.  Either way, when you speak to those who have experienced it, you soon realise that it's no small matter.  In fact, most will tell you that it's devastating, that it's the most dreadful and powerful event of their lives.

So how come nobody is really aware of that? Why is it, that very few people know about the shock, the depression, the hyper-anxiety, the weight loss (or gain), or the lack of sleep?  And then there are the images, the scenarios that are imagined by the victim of an affair, as they run in their minds, over and over again, the coupling, the intimacies, the shared laughter? 

I can't help thinking that it is fear.  The fear that one day it could happen to you, and we know, sort of instinctively, that it would be hell on earth.  And perhaps we know, that it happens a lot, and that it is perhaps not so far away from happening to us.

Most of us know someone who has had a one-nighter, or maybe something more prolonged.  And yet, we still choose to never think about what would be the implications of it actually happening to us.

It is that very decision, that choice to never consider the possibility for more than a minute that causes the great shock when it does happen.  And when it does happen, the shock is staggering.  Browse around some infidelity forums and you will read of people referring to the event like 'being hit by a train'.  Of how their entire world has virtually disintegrated, and how they wonder if they'll ever get over it.  It's hard to imagine that anyone does ever get over it, at least not completely, although every now and again some inspired soul will write in these forums that they have 'won the battle.'  In these forums, you sense a togetherness born out of the uniqueness of the shared experience, like war victims who can only really converse with other war victims.  You had to be there, you had to see it to believe it, no one else will understand.

Soon, maybe in the next few years, as a consequence to increased exposure, there will be a new appraisal of how we deal with infidelity.  Maybe when someone tells us casually of their 'fling' or of how they are 'playing away from home' that perhaps we may point out what this actually does to people.  Maybe there will be a kind of mass enlightenment, in which gradually we come to understand that in many ways infidelity is a psychological violence, and we don't tolerate that in other areas of life, so why should we tolerate it in acts of adultery.