One of the hard relationship lessons I learned early on concerned keeping things from my wife. One of the biggest blow-ups we had concerned the rehearsal dinner.
Rehearsal dinners are challenging enough without blended family dynamics thrown in. They make any situation worse.
Things didn’t go as planned and I hid information from my wife to be about who paid for what portion of the dinner. With a blended family situation, these things are volatile.
I took the line of thinking “What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her.” That was a mistake. I learned the hard way that hiding things creates MORE problems.
The dangerous idea of “what they don’t know won’t hurt them” is often found with cheaters. This way of thinking ends up causing more problems than it supposedly helps, especially when you’re working through affair recovery.
One place this comes up is when you have an accidental or unavoidable encounter with the lover. Although things are over, situations come up where you cross paths with them.
It may be at work, the grocery store or at a coffee shop. The crossing of paths may even be text messages or images sent to your phone.
You may not have planned the encounter. Although you didn’t someone else may have planned it. These encounters are not innocent.
These encounters are not situations to keep secret. These are situations you need to tell your spouse about. They can handle such encounters much better than you keeping it from them.
Hiding those situations makes you look guilty, even if things were innocent. During recovery such encounters, even text messages and calls need to be shared with your spouse.
These are times where the two of you can work together against a common threat. (If you don’t see your former lover as a threat, then the affair is still not over).
If you struggle with finding your way through such challenges, consider the video, “Help for the Cheater: Starting the Road to Recovery”. It guides you through those early stages of breaking up and ways of handling starting your recovery.
Telling your spouse the truth may be uncomfortable, but hiding the truth from them makes the situation even worse. Those uncomfortable moments where you tell them the truth ends up being some of the building blocks of trust later on.
Keeping It Real,
Jeff
