THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, October 1, 1996 TAG: 9610010046
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ELIZABETH SIMPSON, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 241 lines
LOOKING BACK, she sees all the hints that should have clued her in to her husband's infidelity.
His losing weight. Buying new underwear. Working out more at the gym. Spending more and more time out of town on business trips.
And one other clue that might not seem to fit with the others: Crying on the front steps of their home one afternoon.
But in the end, it would take harder evidence than that to convince this 42-year-old Virginia Beach woman that her husband was fooling around.
And hard evidence she got, when the boyfriend of the woman her husband was seeing flew in from halfway across the country, looked up her address, knocked on her door and handed her a love letter her husband had written to ``the other woman.'' The man on her doorstep also warned her that her husband was liquidating the couple's assets to run off with his lover.
It was one of those defining moments that most people expect would sound the death knell of a marriage.
Certainly the woman thought so at the time. But for this woman and her 50-year-old husband, it was simply the moment their marriage hit rock bottom, and the moment they began building back a relationship that was in trouble long before her husband strayed.
With the help of Virginia Beach psychologist Dan Briddell, the couple is still together, a year after the letter first shook in the woman's hand.
``I think people need to know that it's OK to try to work it out,'' she said. ``They need to know that affairs are rarely about sex.''
Infidelity is a phenomenon that, if not growing, is at least getting a lot of attention lately with Dick Morris' fling with a prostitute making front-page news.
Morris is certainly not the first to have his private indiscretions aired in public. President Clinton, Prince Charles, Princess Diana, Hugh Grant have each done their part in bringing the issue of infidelity to the forefront.
Studies on sexual behavior show that as many as 25 to 40 percent of married women, and 50 to 65 percent of married men, admit to doing the deed. A more stringent study by the National Opinion Research Center pegged the percentages at a lower rate: 25 percent for men and 15 percent for women.
The decision by Morris' wife, Eileen McGann, to stay with her husband has caused just as much eyebrow-raising as her husband's affair did.
Whether standing by your man or woman is for better or worse often depends on what happens after an affair is revealed, according to Briddell.
After spending almost 20 years helping couples work through an act of betrayal, Briddell has developed a program - called Intercede - that sets out a plan of action to keep a family from going through two common scenarios after infidelity is revealed: Either a family explodes in divorce. Or ``implodes'' when the husband and wife ignore the affair and pretend it never happened.
But there's another option, according to Briddell. His goal is to help the couple put deceptions, anger, fear and all the other emotions on the table, work through problems in their relationship, identify character flaws and contributing factors to the affair, and ultimately build a better relationship.
In some cases, a couple eventually decides to go their separate ways, but in most of the couples Briddell sees - 90 percent by his estimate - the partners stay together.
Marriage counselors wrestle with the problem of infidelity on a daily basis, and Briddell has tried to take what he's learned over two decades and build a specialized program to address it.
Briddell goes in as quickly as possible after a betrayal has come to light - within 48 hours if possible - and then has twice-a-week sessions to help a couple through the early stages. He also makes sure the children are getting whatever emotional help they need.
He asks each partner to sign a ``contract of fidelity.'' For the betrayed spouse, that's a promise to address the issues of a troubled marriage and to resolve the hurt, anger and resentment. The contract also says the spouse ``will exercise my right to end the marriage'' if another affair occurs.
For the spouse who has strayed, the contract is a promise to end the affair, to respect the feelings of the spouse, to agree that another act of infidelity will end the marriage.
``Clinicians over the years have seen this problem in all kinds of different families, but folks wouldn't come to them until the damage is done, until months after a family has blown apart,'' Briddell said.
Briddell wants to start damage control sooner than that.
Shock, disbelief, devastation. Those are the feelings that surged through the woman after reading her husband's letter. ``I felt violated,'' she said.
She called her husband, who was out of town with the woman he was having the affair with, and told him to come home. She didn't tell him why, or let on that anything was wrong. She wanted a face-to-face confrontation with him.
He said he'd be home in a few days.
``No, I want you home today, by noon,'' she told him.
Then she went to the bank, emptied their account, took everything of value out of their safety deposit box, and gathered five years worth of tax return forms. She wanted to protect her rights, and those of her children, so she made an appointment to see an attorney.
Then, she met her husband at a restaurant down the street from where they lived, and asked if he were having an affair.
He said no.
She asked him again to tell her the truth.
Again he said no.
``I want you to swear on your children's lives that you're not having an affair,'' she said.
He looked her straight in the eye. . . and lied.
That's when she pulled out the letter. That's also about the time the yelling began.
Looking back, her husband says he lied because he'd hoped he could bluff his way through the questions. He didn't want his marriage to end. And every time he saw the other woman, he'd think `This is the last time. This is the last time. This is the last time.'
And the last time didn't come until his wife forced his hand.
That evening, he visited his minister. By the next day he was sitting in Briddell's office.
His wife, meanwhile, took her own out-of-town trip to visit a girlfriend for a few days and decide what to do next. When she returned a few days later, she wrote him a letter on the airplane that said she wanted to try and save their 19-year marriage.
``I can't think of a woman who, if you asked her if her husband had an affair, what would she do, that she wouldn't say, `Kick the bastard out. I would never put up with it, I would never forgive him.' But I felt like we had had a good marriage and that it was worth saving. I don't think you can say you would never stay with your husband in this situation unless you've been through it yourself.''
Briddell met with them together, and separately, helping them work through issues of their marriage.
These are some of the things they discovered:
For him, a deep-seated depression that he had once sought treatment for, but never resolved. A reluctance to share his feelings with his wife. New pressures at work.
``I checked out,'' said the husband. ``That's what I always do anyway, I check out. I escape reality.''
In turn, she filled the growing void between them with volunteer work and more time with their two children, which ended up alienating the couple even more.
Over the past year, Briddell has taught them how to better communicate. They spend at least 15 minutes a day talking alone, without the children. Once a week they go out together, alone.
``I had to learn to make my priority my husband and not let the children always get the first attention like I know I was doing.''
The husband has gotten help for the depression that he struggled with for decades. He remembers the day several months before his wife discovered his infidelity when she found him crying on their front steps. ``I thought the affair was causing the depression. But later I realized it was flipped, that the depression led me to the affair,'' he said.
Four months ago, his wife told him she forgave him. ``It was one of the best days of my life,'' he said.
Both say they are still working on trust issues in their marriage.
``To get that trust back is going to take time, a lot more time,'' he said.
``You can forgive,'' said his wife. ``But you can't forget.''
Briddell often sees a pattern in the couples he sees. There's usually some type of family history of divorce, betrayal or bailing out when the going gets rough.
There's usually some new kind of stress in their lives, whether it be a new child, job pressures or a family illness or death.
And, third, there's usually alienation in the marriage in which the partners have stopped talking or sharing feelings as much as they did early in the relationship.
``A lover seems all magical, all wonderful,'' Briddell said. ``They soothe the heart and make them feel loved and cared for. But it's an illusion, it's an escape from reality.''
First, Briddell sets out ground rules, like determining who sleeps where, delaying immediate decisions about the future of the marriage and making sure children aren't being used as pawns in a marital war.
Then he sets about helping the couple uncover the weak links of their relationship.
``There's a mentality in this country that infidelity is an unforgivable sin,'' Briddell said. ``It's like cancer, there's a sense that it's a death sentence. But it doesn't have to be. We all have pain. And pain leads us to do things we would not ordinarily do.''
All of this, of course, is not to say adultery is acceptable. Rev. Joe French, pastor at Francis Asbury United Methodist Church in Virginia Beach, said there are couples whose marriages need saving in the aftermath of infidelity, but others that don't, and that's the challenge for clergy in giving guidance.
``You have good people who have made mistakes, and acted out their problems,'' said French, who has referred couples to Briddell. ``If you are dealing with basically good people, they can come back and end up with a healthier relationship. But you have to know when infidelity signals some real problems - like abuse or misogamy - and when your work is to help the woman get out of the marriage.''
While French says he doesn't know whether infidelity is on the rise, he will say that it seems to be more accepted today. ``We have striven so hard to get away from being judgmental and condemning, and to be so forgiving, that we've gone to the other extreme,'' he said.
In six of every 10 families Briddell sees, the husband is the one committing adultery. In four of those cases, it's the wife who strays, a statistic that's believed to be increasing because more women are spending more time out of the home, making them more likely to meet men.
In another case that Briddell handled, a Virginia Beach businessman in his early 30s became suspicious that his wife was seeing a close friend from his office.
One night last December when she came home late, he confronted her, saying he thought she was seeing someone. She told him she had been to see a girlfriend. He knew that wasn't true because he had already called her girlfriend to see if his wife was there.
He drove his car around in anger for hours after that, slowly putting together pieces of the puzzle in his head. When he returned he asked if she had been seeing his friend from work, and she admitted she had.
He became so distraught at this double betrayal that he stopped eating. He couldn't sleep for a week. He could barely make himself get out of bed in the morning to go to work. ``I felt like dog meat,'' he said.
After seeking help from his priest, he went to see Briddell. ``I was in real trauma. I was feeling things I had never felt before,'' he said. ``He helped me separate my emotions from the issues.''
The husband not only made himself do all the things he needed to - go to work, spend time with his children, seek counseling with his wife - he tried to push himself past that to improving his life.
``I had to take a leap of faith. I decided I would do all the right things, and if it worked, great, if not, I'd tried as hard as I could.''
Through counseling with Briddell, he and his wife discovered that while his side of the family had a history of long marriages, hers had one checkered with split ones. He had been avoiding any kind of confrontation in the marriage, so he didn't share his fears with her. She was feeling neglected, and in need of attention, which she got from the man with whom she had the affair.
While she still feels a lot of guilt about the affair, her husband's reaction to her betrayal proved something to her.
``It was like a light bulb went off in my head that this guy really loves me, or he wouldn't be in so much pain.''
It was a revelation, given that she had married as a teenager after she found out she was pregnant. ``Deep inside, I felt I never had that romantic feeling of, `This marriage was meant to be.' But now I know he's willing to fight for me, that there's feeling there.''
They, too, started having daily, private conversations to work out the rift that had developed in their relationship. At first, their elementary-school-aged daughter thought they were meeting in private to talk about her. She became depressed too.
``She knew something was going on,'' said the husband. ``You can't manufacture lives so your children don't feel pain, you have to be open with them.''
They found a counselor for her as well, and made sure she knew their marriage problems were not her fault. Her two other siblings were too young to understand what was going on.
Nine months have passed since he first found out about his wife's affair, and he feels their relationship is better than it's ever been. He also feels closer to his three children, and he's made gains in his work as well.
``It was an opportunity to take care of issues I had, and to make myself better. It was like giving birth, where it was painful, but once it happened you have this burst of energy and creativity. It's not like we can say everything's OK now, it's a constant process, it's new issues coming up, but it's a continual improvement.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color staff illustration by Janet Shaughnessy\The
Virginian-Pilot
KEYWORDS: INFIDELITY AFFAIR ADULTERY COUNSELING by CNB