Letter to the Straying Partner

Dear Straying Partner,

Regardless of the decisions that brought you here, you have my respect. It took courage to end your affair. And it takes grit to begin a process of reconciliation and growth with your partner, a process that takes time and won’t always be easy.

I know you started your affair to try and meet important needs. Likely, there were parts of you that weren’t being seen, weren’t being expressed, parts that felt pushed underground. And the affair was the outlet for those parts. Even when it brought guilt along with it, and the stress of managing separate lives, the affair spoke to those unseen parts of you, and breathed life into them.

I know it might have been years since you felt seen in the ways your affair partner saw you. And I know the dynamics in your relationship with your long-term partner might have gotten stale, might have felt calcified or unworkable. You might have felt trapped, or suffocated, or that life was moving around you while you were frozen in place.

If any of this is real for you, it needs to be talked about. Your feelings and your needs are valid. The historic dynamics of your relationship were co-constructed by you and your partner, and they must be named and deconstructed by both of you in order to replace them with something better.

This is often where the straying partner wants to begin, with a heartfelt discussion about how the two of you got here, about the buildup of self-repression and possibly resentment between the two of you, about the gradual deadening of your communication, and the loss of spark over the years.

Whatever your historic dynamics together actually looked like, they are important, and they need to be unpacked. But to try and start here would be a grave mistake.

The first thing you need to understand is that the pain your partner is going through, and hopefully expressing out loud, is the result of a legitimate emotional crisis. It’s not just “strong feelings” or “grief.” What you are seeing with them is what happens when an attachment trauma occurs. The person they counted on for comfort and security, their primary attachment, you, lied to and betrayed them.

Those are strong words, lies and betrayal. But I use them without any moral judgment and without any intent to hurt or demean you. I am fully on your team, just as I am fully on your partner’s team. I use those words because they’re accurate and we shouldn’t shy away, especially now, from telling the unvarnished truth.

An affair is when a partnered person gets important needs met, sexual or emotional, outside the agreed upon structure of their relationship. The expectation of monogamy is explicit in most relationships. The expectation of exclusive emotional intimacy is often assumed and implied, but not directly discussed.

This does not create a permission structure for emotional affairs—implied is not the same as absent.

And it’s worth saying: Emotional affairs do as much damage as sexual ones.

Affairs are a way of trying to get important needs met without talking about those needs. Or in some cases, without talking about them with sufficient force. After all, in an environment of total honesty, if your needs were emergent, you would tell your partner, or leave them, before you cheated on them.

The lie of an affair often starts as a lie of omission, and the rationalization that “what they don’t know can’t hurt them.” This quiet lie often evolves into more active lies as the affair progresses and requires more and more false backstory to keep it hidden.

The betrayal is a betrayal of trust, and of the couple’s values and agreements, explicit or otherwise, that they built their relationship on.

But the most important part for you to understand is that your partner’s reaction—the sadness, the anger, the fear, the checking behaviors, the confusion, the “How could you do this?” and other questions asked over and over—all of this is a normal response to attachment trauma, and it’s all incredibly painful for your partner.

The research on affair recovery, and my own experience working with couples provides clear guidance: Real progress happens in three stages, and the order of these stages is important.

First, Stabilization. We need to turn down the emotional temperature to get productive work done. The goal here isn’t to get “back to baseline” or for both partners to “feel good,” that isn’t realistic right now. It’s to help the Discovering Partner once again trust you enough so that their hardwired threat detection system can downregulate. Right now, it’s running at full steam.

To earn back that trust, you must lean into how your partner is feeling, validate those feelings, and continue to do so consistently over time. This process will involve setting aside some of your own valid needs, for the time being.

It’s important to name this explicitly: Your partner needs you to validate how they’re feeling, consistently over time, to trust you again. They need you to be open and honest when answering whatever questions they have, and to recognize that it’s normal for them to have those questions over and over.

The healing heart of the Stabilization stage hinges on your ability to generate empathy for what your partner is going through, and to temporarily set your own needs aside.

This is the real work of Stabilization for the Straying Partner: Hold that your own needs are legitimate, and also that right now isn’t the time to lead with them. That’s not a verdict on those needs. It’s a sequence.

Stage 2, Processing, is built for exactly this, for digging into the historic dynamics that led up to the affair. And Stage 3, Rebuilding, is about replacing those worn out dynamics with something more vital and more honest than what was there before. You’ll get there. And you get there by moving through Stage 1, not around it.

Setting your needs aside to attend to your partner in a moment of crisis isn’t erasure. It’s timing. And it’s temporary in a program that supports both of you, and takes you both seriously.

If you’ve already cleared the conceptual hurdle of stage-based needs sequencing in a single reading, if it’s making sense and you’re ready to give it a shot, you’re going to get a lot out of the Affair Clarity program. You’ve opened up the possibility, with consistent and committed future work, of returning not to the same relationship you had before, but to a better one.

Let’s get to work.

Alec Wilson, PsyD