Anatomy of Infidelity
Infidelity is painful. To be the innocent party in it is gut-wrenching. My dear friend is in this gut-wrenching, god-forsaken place and I feel helpless to help her. Instead, I hide my own tears in a purposeful resolve to listen well, make strong pots of tea (because I’m good at it), make her dinner (to satisfy myself that she’s eating) and to hug her often.
I’m opposed to filling the air with words and more words, there are enough people who’ll do that to sink a boat, I’m simply determined I’ll not be one of those. My friend is one of those ‘great’ friends I wrote about in my previous blog. She’s sixty-odd years old and it feels disrespectful to me for me to run off ahead of her and blithely imagine I could fix things as if they were a teacup I’d knocked from a bench and all that was required was some glue. Some people do think that’s all it takes though!
I have a fearsome time keeping my mouth shut when some unannounced visitor (more sticky-beak) than true visitor turns up unannounced and immediately launches into a self-satisfying tirade about how they always believed (the husband or wife as the case may be) was capable of cheating. Aside from the unhelpfulness of the stated obvious I felt like it cut like a knife into my friend’s heart once more. I wanted to hit the visitor, hard.
Instead I told them my friend was only seeing visitors for 10 mins at a time. At precisely the 9.59 min sweep of my watch arm I stood up, thanked her for coming and told my ‘great’ friend I’d put the kettle on once I’d escorted the woman out. The visitor mentioned she’d stay and have a cuppa too. I believe I suffered a momentary fissure in my hearing, I didn’t appear to have heard her. Unfortunate for her really.
The anatomy of infidelity is murky. It can be opportunity, misguided infatuation, your relationship is in a rut, has changed but you’ve neglected to talk about how it’s changed and how you’ll deal with those changes together, you’ve let yourself go physically, it could be a combination of many or all of these things. But here’s the thing, the grass might look greener on the other side but when you get there you’ve still got to mow the lawn!
