‘When I first found out my husband had cheated on me, it absolutely floored me,’ says Emily*, 59, ‘but to be honest, it never entered my mind to leave.’
Emily was in her first marriage when she found out her husband had been having an affair, and much like Hillary Clinton, who recently said that staying with her husband Bill was the ‘gutsiest’ thing she’s ever done, she decided to remain in a marriage after infidelity.
'I think the gutsiest thing I’ve ever done, personally, was to stay in my marriage,' Clinton told Amy Robach during an interview with Good Morning America. She appeared on the show with her daughter Chelsea, to promote a book they wrote together called The Book of Gutsy Women.
‘It definitely is really brave [to stay],’ says Emily, ‘because other people do think you're a fool. I had loads of people saying to me "Why don't you just leave him?" and "What’s the matter with you?". So you do feel a bit foolish and weak.’
It’s the obvious assumption for many: if a partner shows such brazen disrespect to your relationship by cheating, you should leave – and lots of people do question someone for staying. But actually, for Emily, making the choice to leave was a much bigger decision than staying.
‘We had a daughter together who was the most precious thing in the world to both of us; that was the main reason I couldn’t think of leaving,’ she says. ‘But also, to all intents and purposes, we were still the way we were before. Everything else in our lives, other than finding that out, was exactly the same so it would’ve been absolutely catastrophic to leave for that one reason.’
For Katie* however, the catastrophe of breaking up her family was worth it. She suspected her husband of an affair for six months before she found out for certain, and says leaving him ‘almost felt like a relief’.
‘He lied constantly and made me feel as if I was going insane,’ she says. ‘He suggested that because I was so “paranoid", I should go to the doctor. To make matters worse, I had been receiving IVF treatment and looking after our young child while he was enjoying expensive holidays and weekends with another woman, leaving us in debt.’
For her, the consistent and compulsive lying was too much to bear – and she has never regretted not trying to work through it. ‘Yes, it is a big leap to leave but staying would have been signing myself up to a lifetime of misery,’ she says.
People might disagree about whether staying in a marriage after infidelity is ‘gutsy’, but it’s undeniably hard. There is a lot, maybe too much, to get over. For Emily, the break in trust was one of many things that led to the eventual demise of her marriage – it just took her five years to actually leave.
‘Even when cheating is cited as the reason for a break-up it’s only ever part of the story,’ says divorce lawyer Ayesha Vardag, ‘Some people are innately philanderous, they do it for fun and don’t really feel bad about it. There’s not much to be done about that. But equally, they may be responding to affection and companionship after years of abuse, coldness, alienation or rejection.’
Vardag, who has been privy to hundreds of adultery cases in her profession, believes there are ways to work through infidelity – depending on the reason the person chose to stray. However, she says that it takes ‘something pretty strong’ in order to do so.
But is it strength? Or, is it staying in a comfort zone? For Emily, it’s the latter. ‘A lot of the couples I know now who’ve been together for decades, they lead separate lives but just under the same roof,’ she says. ‘They don’t seem happy together at all. I suspect for a lot of cases, staying is best financially… or they’re trapped in their comfort zone…or think they can’t do any better.’
Whether you choose to stay after adultery or not, one thing seems sure: re-evaluating your relationship is a necessity. Perhaps it’s re-establishing lost trust, or opening your relationship up and ridding yourself of the typical bounds of monogamy.
Whether it’s worth it or not, is up to you. For Clinton – who is now celebrating 44 years of marriage – it seems that it is.
*names have been changed
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