sSara (00:03)

Empowered people make informed decisions that lead to living a life without regret. This is Sara Khaki and Shawna Woods from Atlanta Divorce Law Group. And this is the Happily Ever After Divorce Podcast.

Welcome to another episode of the Happily Ever After Divorce Podcast. I’m Eterna Sayer-Kacky with the Atlanta Divorce Law Group and I’m joined by our very own managing partner, Shawna Woods. Shawna, the topic today is, does infidelity necessarily mean ending a marriage? I know you have some notes.

sShawna (00:34)

I

Have some noobs and I’m going to give you my favorite lawyer answer. It depends.

sSara (00:38)

What does it depend on for you?

sShawna (00:42)

Well, I think it depends on a lot of things we’re looking objectively at, you know, across the board. Infidelity doesn’t necessarily have to end a relationship if both parties, you know, really want to open the communication, figure out why the infidelity happened in the first place, address the underlying problem and earn each other’s trust back. And there’s a lot of statistics out there.

And one of them, says that 80 % of people who cheat and lie about it end up in divorce.

sSara (01:23)

Wow. So it’s the lying, she has lied about it. Okay, continue.

sShawna (01:25)

Yes.

Okay,

And they base the statistic on a five-year average and they say after five years, if the infidelity has been either found out, know, it was lied about, right, that’s the big part. It was hidden, it was lied, and the other person either had to find out on their own, right, or it’s completely still kept a secret. Right. After five years, only 20 % of those couples are gonna be remained married.

Now that statistic changes when there’s an infidelity and then there’s honesty and responsibility. That number drops to 43%, less than half of people who commit infidelity and then come clean about it and are honest about it, less than half percent of those couples are going to end up in marriage. They have a chance to That sounds emerging. Isn’t it?

sSara (02:05)

Responsibility.

A chance to make it.

sShawna (02:29)

The key to it is that honesty. Because how else do you build the trust?

sSara (02:29)

That’s so weird.

To be that honest.

So this makes me hypothesize that it is not the act of infidelity that breaks the marriage, it’s the act of deceit that breaks the marriage.

sShawna (02:49)

I think that we’ve got something going here when we talk about this. And I also think it depends on is this a pattern, right? Is there continuous infidelity or was this a one time?

sSara (03:02)

Well, if there’s continuous infidelity, then I think that the responsibility piece hasn’t come in, right? Because it’s one thing to be, say the word, I’m sorry, but then you need to act on the remorse, act on the sorry. And that is the part where you take responsibility and have a change of behavior. Without the change of behavior, true responsibility was never quite taken.

sShawna (03:26)

Right? And we are talking about infidelity here in the truest form of the word. These studies are based on actual intimacy and fidelity. In our world, we hear infidelity thrown around in a lot of different ways. Emotionally, cheating, you know, sometimes they think that looking at pornographic sites could be cheating, but we are talking about actually engaging in an extramarital affair.

Yes. Physical extramarital affair. And I do think it has to come down to that honesty. When we look at patterns of people who are more likely to step outside of the marriage, you see a lot of addictions, right? You see a lot of mental health issues. You see a lot of people who already struggle with honesty and being open to their spouse about what’s really going on with them. Right.

sSara (04:22)

So the thought leader that I like to follow for this is Esther Perel and she wrote the book, The State of Affairs Rethinking Infidelity and she’s given a couple of TED Talks on this and she’s fantastic and she actually gives a roadmap, a path forward for couples who are battling with this and how to overcome it and I actually sent her material to a lot of our clients who wish to stay married and work on their marriage and

She says that the biggest part to repairing the relationship is repairing the trust. So it brings us back to everything you’re saying. That’s the crucial piece to recovery because the infidelity, what it damaged was the trust. Again, it goes with our hypothesis that it’s not the act itself, it’s the deceit that’s so harmful. And in order to rebuild the trust, she talks about how you’ve got to

Create and re-examine the narrative of the relationship and the values that brought you two together. And I think part of that conversation, Esther Peralta doesn’t necessarily say this, but this is true according to the world, according to Sara Caffey. It takes two people to end up here. I always say it takes two people to make a marriage great. It takes two people to break a marriage apart.

For anybody who’s been cheated on just to stay with me and hear me out because that can be that can be fighting words what I’m saying that can hurt to hear that but I think that if you can accept that there’s power in that there’s you won’t feel stuck in a place of I’m a victim to this and you can see choice in this in this place of if I choose to stay in this marriage how can I take

Any responsibility for why the state of our marriage is here. And if I choose not to stay in this marriage, then you no longer have to play a part in a marriage that had was involved in infidelity. I do think that what I’m saying has exceptions. I think there are situations where there’s abuse involved. I think there’s situations where there’s emotional and physical abuse and those are our outlier situations. But I think

Two healthy adults in a marriage that do love each other and want to stay married. It takes two to break it apart. It takes two to get it here. And if you are going to re-examine the narrative of the marriage as Esther Perel, you know, prescribes for us to rebuild the trust, it takes two to rebuild that trust. So in our situation, a divorce program, the cases where we’ve seen people come back

After they have tried to recover after infidelity. There’s two ways when they come back to us and say it’s done, we can’t get through this is A, like you said, the pattern of infidelity continues and the trust just cannot be rebuilt or B, the party who was betrayed is not engaging in trust building but is engaging in punishing.

And you can’t rebuild trust on that. So I think it’s so important when you decide to rebuild the narrative of the relationship and rebuild the trust and be honest with yourself. Are you capable, if you’re the one that was betrayed, are you capable of doing that? Are you capable of making yourself vulnerable again to have this conversation of how do we do this? And can I open myself up?

To rebuilding that because if you put it on the other person’s plate to say, this is now the you fix it project and I’m going to be in that corner mad, angry, resentful and wanting to punish you for every wrong move, this person set up for failure and they’ll never make it past you.

sShawna (08:39)

I agree and I think that in our world, there is a count that you can file on adultery when you’re filing for a divorce. But simply because your partner stepped outside the marriage, and I tell people this all the time, the count says, is adultery the cause of the breakup of the marriage? And it’s a very powerful statement. I have some people sit in it. Now I will tell you right now, there’s some cases where

It is the cause of the breakup of the marriage, significantly when there’s repeat offenders, right? I’m telling you right now, if I ever find this out again, that’s done for me. I can’t remain in this relationship if you continue this pattern. As well it should be, right? But for the vast majority of the time when we’re talking about somebody who’s done something like that to the marriage, there is, like you said, some responsibility for both parties. And I don’t want these to sound like fighting.

I want them to be very reflective in saying, I’m not forgiving necessarily you yet. Right. Am not discounting the pain that you have caused me by choosing to step outside the marriage. But what was going on in our marriage at that point in time that that actually happened.

sSara (09:58)

The cause and effect led to

sShawna (09:59)

What

Cause and effect led to this and where do we go from here? And I’m going to give a couple of examples. You’ve always heard the adage, a cheater always cheats, right? Well, when we’re looking at these studies that I was just talking about, less than half the people who had infidelity cheated. They were the cheaters in their first marriage, less than half cheat in the second marriage. And I’m going to go out on a limb and say they probably had a lot of therapy and self-care.

sSara (10:23)

Wow.

sShawna (10:29)

Work before that second marriage. We sure hope so. The other one is kind of a personal example. So I’ve told you before, my parents were married to each other twice, divorced from each other twice. And the first time one of them accused the other one of infidelity. And they got back together three months after their divorce pretty quickly. And that was the topic of every fight they had.

sSara (10:31)

So.

sShawna (10:59)

Until they divorced again, 15, 20 years later. If you don’t work through it and you quote unquote like they did, stay together for the kids, everybody’s gonna know that that was a sore spot. Everybody’s gonna know that there is lack of trust there and that fight has never gone away. And if you think you’re staying together for the kids and you’re going to get over the infidelity, but not really.

You’re still holding on to it. All you’re causing is turmoil in that whole family, right? So you have to make a conscious decision. If I choose to remain in this marriage, I’m gonna have to let it go.

sSara (11:33)

Yes.

You know, your parents example just nails Esther Carell’s, one of her TED Talks, I think it’s the first one she did on infidelity so well, because she talks about up until the marriage you had that led to infidelity.

It’s a whole different marriage. The marriage you will have and have to rebuild and revisit its narrative after you choose to stay married after your fidelity is a whole other marriage. Yes. And not until you can let go of that first marriage you had with this person that led to infidelity, can you move on to this next marriage. But you’re almost entering into a brand new marriage together because otherwise you’re using yesterday’s trash to make tonight’s dinner.

The last piece that I want to make sure we touch upon in this conversation that comes out of the State of Affairs Rethinking Infidelity book is the identity threat that the infidelity portrays to both the person who was the betrayer and the betrayed. It is the person who walked out on the marriage having to take responsibility for the fact that they betrayed somebody.

And what that does to their self identity, how that the awareness they need to have, how that impacts their belief of themselves and who they are and becoming very real with that and working through that in therapy. And the person who was betrayed, the identity threat that that poses on them, their spouse walked out on them, had a physical affair outside of the marriage and

What does that mean to them about who they are and what kind of a marriage they’re in, what kind of a spouse they are. It’s a huge identity threat and until that person also takes responsibility for how they feel about that identity threat, this next marriage that they have to create together cannot be possible.

sShawna (13:52)

On this. I think we’ve got

sSara (13:53)

Thank you. Thanks for listening to the Happily Ever After Divorce Podcast. If you’d to learn more, go to atlantadevorceloggroup.com forward slash resources.