Two years ago I entered an extremely challenging graduate program, which also wreaked havoc on our lives, and therefore, our relationship. Though I knew that all last summer and fall was an especially low point in our communication and in our overall happiness with each other, I’m still shocked and gutted whenever I “remember” that I cheated. Which is several times a day.

There was this other man, I’ll call him X, whom I had been acquainted with for several months. One night, while out with a group of 10 or so other friends (my husband went home early that night, the rest of us were celebrating exams being over), he paid special attention to me. At the end of the evening I acknowledged to myself that X was maybe more interesting and intelligent of a person that I’d formerly noticed. Still, I was extremely surprised later that night to receive a borderline flirtatious text from him.

I kind of hate myself for returning the attention. Looking back, I realize that I was just so flattered. No one tells you when you get married that you become invisible to other men, and it’s not that I think I’ve been out there looking for inappropriate attention …  but I found it surprisingly welcome when it came. And that’s how it all began. I’m so ashamed that it took so little, so very, very little, to tempt me into cheating on my husband.

Looking back at last year, I know now that there was something really wrong with me, for awhile. I was at least depressed, and actually I have begun to wonder if I even might have had a manic episode.  I suddenly was drinking often, and a lot (which I no longer am). I know that the pressure of my schoolwork has been affecting me in all sorts of ways that I don’t seem able to recognize in myself until that “phase” is over and I’m in the next one. However, even though I know this is a factor, I just don’t think any amount of stress is an excuse for what I did. Though my husband and I were having trouble connecting last year, and we were seriously considering a trial separation, that shouldn’t and doesn’t matter.

Because my husband and I are really open-minded people, each with friends from both genders, and neither of us prone to jealousy, I never even told one lie. There were a couple of lies of omission, but I think I was able to live in a little bit of denial for awhile just because I really never had to be sneaky, or make up stories. I just kind of detached from him, for a few weeks. Since I’ve been living in the library and so preoccupied with school the last couple of years, he didn’t notice.

The affair really only lasted a month and was much more of an emotional affair than a physical one, although the relationship was consummated, once. I have not confided any of this experience to anyone.  After sleeping with X (it makes me nauseated just to type this), even during, I knew that I really wasn’t attracted to him at all, and I just immediately realized what a mistake it all was. I got myself out of there, and began the process of ending it. Which is when I of course finally realized that X’s own mental and emotional stability was, well, compromised.

I just can’t believe how stupid I was, from the beginning. It’s hard to believe I deserve any credibility, but please know that I am usually a very perceptive, very self-aware and intentional person. How was I able to just take leave of my senses, for weeks? It is legitimately scary.

When I broke things off with X, firmly, he actually tried to physically keep me from leaving his house. Of course, nothing could have convinced me further that I wanted nothing to do with him EVER again.

Even though it all ended months ago now, there are still some things that keep me up at night. First of all, the clarity that comes with the regret of doing such a despicable thing is kind of a gift. I was able to wholeheartedly throw myself into my marriage again, and this year, 2012, my husband and I have felt closer than maybe ever. But of course, he doesn’t “know.”  We had actually discussed adultery a couple of times over the years, when we’ve seen friends or friends’ parents go through it, and we decided, each of us, that we did not want to ever know if the other had cheated on them! I know now that neither of us ever believed it would actually happen, but just by having those talks, I’m pretty sure he really doesn’t want to know.

In the beginning, I wanted to confess. Now I really don’t, and instead live in fear that he’ll hear it through the grapevine. As I hinted, X has done some things that made me realize, way later than I should have, that he is manipulative, needy and self-centered. Since he still asks me to meet him out socially on occasion, and often expresses his disapproval when I decline, I know he is not as “over” me as I pray for him to be. He can be a bit delusional. I am afraid that he will someday find justification for spilling the story to one of our common friends. I don’t know for sure that this hasn’t happened already.

What is worse is that he has a number of really incriminating and embarrassing texts from me on his phone, that he could show to anyone, at any time he felt like it. Sometimes I think I’m being paranoid when I play this scenario out in my mind, but at the same time, this is a man who pursued a married woman, the husband of whom he professes to like and respect, ensured she got drunk any time he was around her, and balked when she ended it after a few weeks. He is no saint.

Here are the issues that might be slowly killing me. How can I live with myself? My husband really is a great person, and the love of my life, and just because we were going through some doubts and hard times, I did something that would absolutely break his heart into a thousand pieces. One of the things that also stops me from confessing to him is that, if telling him destroyed our relationship, I’m scared it would also prevent him from ever trusting anyone else. I know he thinks I’m this great moral person and if I were able to betray him like that, then there’s no one who wouldn’t.

And it’s not just that I cheated on him that is so disturbing, it’s that I didn’t even choose someone, for lack of a better term, more worthy. X is just not a person I would even date, if I were single. I just feel pathetic. How can I call him needy, when I was so taken with the first person to pay me a compliment?

Sometimes I struggle with all of this even being real. Even though I might not have earned any credibility here, please believe me that this is very out-of-character for me. Now that the fog has lifted, so to speak, my memories from this affair seem like a movie that I watched, instead of a time that I lived through. There is another time in my life that feels that way, when my mother almost died after a terrible accident, and was in the hospital for months. So I know that in a way, it’s kind of a protective mechanism, but how do I make sure nothing like this ever happens again? Right now, nothing repulses me more than the thought of doing something like this again, but . . . I know now that I’m capable of really terrible things. I never knew that before.

Mostly, I’m just sick that I can’t undo this. I’ll always know. I’ll always know that I “ruined” our marriage, even though my husband (hopefully) won’t ever have an inkling. There was just this pure thing, this devotion, that we had, that we had promised to each other, and I was so ready to throw it away. And he never would. I don’t deserve him.  Living with this regret is just so unbelievably harsh. I’m pretty sure time is making it worse. It’s like the longer I “get away with it” the worse I feel. Is my whole experience just a total cliché anyway? Does everyone who cheats on their partner end up feeling this way?

I’m realizing that it’s taken me this long to even write this letter, to reach out to someone, because deep down, I still need to punish myself, and prolonging the bad feelings is the worst punishment I can inflict, that doesn’t also hurt my husband.

What do I do? How do I try to let this go? I’ve never, ever had such a low opinion of myself.

Hindsight is 20/20

Dear Hindsight,

It will take time for you to forgive yourself. It will take time for you to sort out what kinds of unhappiness led you to make this mistake.

But that’s fine. You have time. You have a pretty good life in most ways. There is just some unhappiness in your life that you have tried to ignore. This affair was the result. Once you begin looking at your unhappiness, things will start to make sense, and you will find some compassion for yourself and will begin to forgive yourself.

It just takes time.

You can begin by contacting a marriage and family counselor.

If you do nothing, it’s likely that over time the severity of this event’s impact on your emotional life will lessen. But your marriage will probably end badly.

It will end badly because as you withhold your emotions the marriage will offer less and less satisfaction until it is practically worthless as a life-supporting partnership. It will become just another burden to maintain, just another life-sucking routine.

But it doesn’t have to end badly.

A decent marriage and family counselor can help you.

Your main hurdle may be in shedding your current frame of reference long enough to begin to look at what actually happened. For instance, you express amazement that this happened, and yet empirical evidence is that it happens a lot. So, in rational terms, your error was in excluding yourself from the set of people capable of having an affair. Every married person is capable of having an affair. There was really no basis for excluding yourself. You are human like everyone else. The intensity of your desire to stay true to your husband is obviously not a guarantee of success. It is only a wish. You just made a common human error in thinking: With no basis for doing so, you excluded yourself from the set of people capable of having affairs. Similarly, I excluded myself from the set of people capable of having cancer until I got cancer. It’s a common mental error. If you go back and examine your life to find the basis for your belief that you would not cheat on your husband, you will probably find the same kinds of baseless beliefs that millions of other people have also had. So I suggest you bring some academic rigor to your examination of your own life. But don’t try that on your own. It’s too painful and destabilizing. Do this only under the care of a therapist. Because you may make a second mistake: You may blame yourself. You have to do the opposite of blaming yourself. You need to forgive yourself. That may take some time. You haven’t been taught how to forgive yourself. You will have to learn. A therapist can help you with that.

This is not a puzzle or theorem but a wound. You can put off the actual work of recovering for quite some time. But eventually, you will have to begin.

Why not begin now, while you are still in fresh pain, while you are still motivated, while you still feel that it is an intolerable moral burden to live with? Emotional pain is a great motivator.

This can be fixed. Your marriage can survive. You can forgive yourself. But you need to begin.

Through my own searching  I’ve come to realize in these years one important way his death has changed me. It has enabled me to value the days more, and fear living less. This is a wonderful thing. Having been visited by the experience of the death of someone close to me, I feel like I am now much better at understanding what matters and what does not. That’s helped me to become a more relaxed person, and more adventurous too.

The problem is that I’ve changed in ways that make the relationship between my wife and me increasingly fraught. So much so that if it weren’t for the kids I feel like we might contemplate leaving one another. I don’t want to run away and see the world or be with other people. It’s rather that I find myself intolerant of my wife’s anxieties because they get in the way of doing what I think really matters, which is enjoying the time we have on this earth. That may mean curling up in bed all afternoon with a book, or walking, or whatever. But what it does not mean is worrying over small things. We’ve talked about this. For me this internal shift feels too big to change, and besides I don’t want to. She doesn’t feel it’s fair for me to expect her to change to match the new me, which is true, and thinks her way of doing things is just fine.

So we’ve reached an impasse, and I don’t know what to do about it. I suppose that our values are now different, where once they were not.

I’d appreciate your thoughts.

Found and Lost

Dear Found and Lost,

Through this death, you received a gift. It was like an inheritance. It’s something to bring into your marriage and share. It may not be apparent to your wife what this gift is, exactly, or how she is to use it, because you received it. But it is a gift that can be shared in the marriage.

The way you share it is simply to embody it and be faithful to it. The way you do not share it is by insisting that your wife all of a sudden change. She can’t do that. She doesn’t have to. Part of this gift is realizing that your wife is who she is, and she doesn’t have to change in order for you to enjoy this gift.

Simply the way it has changed you is a gift that can be shared. You share it by living in your new way. You share it just by being who you are. When you fail to join her in her worries, that is a gift to her. Eventually, it may have an effect, but its effect on her is not the point. The point is in how you now go forward, bearing this new way of being. Please try to think of it this way. If you think of it the other way, as if now that you’ve changed now your wife has to change too or else, then it is not a gift, it is more like a curse. If it tears you and her apart then it is not a gift.

Also if you hoard it then it will tear you apart. If you move farther away from her out of scorn and disappointment, then it will not be a gift but a curse and it will tear you two apart. You need to share this gift you received, this gift of knowledge of how precious life is. Share it not by setting up an obstacle course for your wife; not by testing her, but by opening your hands and sharing this knowledge with her. If she doesn’t seem to get it, don’t worry about it. Don’t get on her case. She doesn’t have to get it. That’s not the point. The point is now there is someone in her life who has learned something profound. One day she may value that. Relax and laugh and share with her how you are no longer worried about what’s going to happen. Let this gift suffuse your body and mind so that you walk around and radiate it. Radiate this new feeling that life is precious and everything is going to be OK. Let this gift radiate out from you and she may pick it up after a time.

It won’t cure her or make her a different person. That’s OK. She may be thinking at times, what the hell is this? She has her own problems and her own nightmares. You can’t fix that.

But you can fully embody the gift of grief and loss yourself. That’s all you have to do.

Also saw some good jazz on a Wednesday night at Blue Jean Blues in Fort Lauderdale.

Now back to the column.

Dear Cary,

I got married about three months ago to a man I truly love and respect. We are both doctorates in the same field in the sciences. We’ve always been long distance — we met in undergrad, seven years ago, but started dating only three years ago when we were both in grad school on opposite sides of the country. He finished his degree a year ahead of me, and started his new job in a city on the East Coast.

My problem is that upon graduating, I had a very hard time finding a job in my husband’s city. I had a good offer from a city 4,000 miles away, and have come here now to work. But I wonder if it was the right thing to have done and I am still applying to jobs in husband’s city. We are both miserable, he wants me to come back and give up the job. (He can’t leave his job right now because he is in the middle of a project and has to stick around for at least another year.) He keeps telling me that I should go back and live with him, and we should face our problems together.

I would love to go back as soon as I get a job offer and I have told him so. However, he thinks I should go back even if I don’t get a job offer in his city, as we are meant to be together now and he makes enough to support us both. But I don’t think I will be happy just sitting at home. I should mention that my current job in a faraway city is far from my dream job, but it comes with very good money (about 1.5 times what he makes) and I like being busy. I love my husband very much and cry myself to sleep sometimes, but I would still take being employed and being lonely over being unemployed and being together.

Is he wrong in asking me to leave the job without an offer from his city, or am I wrong in being unwilling to leave my current job before I get an offer from his city?

Thank you,

Confused

Dear Confused,

If marriage is an arrangement in which the husband is in charge and the wife must obey, then of course you would have to sacrifice what you want and join him. But if marriage is a negotiated project between equals, then it’s not a matter of who is right and who is wrong but a matter of negotiation. And that is what your marriage sounds like: a modern partnership in which each partner negotiates, and in which each partner’s personality and aspirations weigh equally.

It is a partnership built on love but material considerations are not shrugged off. We know that love does not conquer all. Love conquers some, and geography conquers some. Economics conquers some, and personality conquers some.

The luxury of romantic love that remains in the modern, negotiated marriage is the recognition that feelings do have a place. They may not justify recklessness but they deserve to be heard. He wants you. He wants you there with him. That is a real feeling. It doesn’t have to be sensible. It arises from passion. It is his feeling. It is real. It is what he wants. That doesn’t mean he will get it. He must negotiate. When he asks you to leave your job and come live with him, he is asking because that is what he wants. It doesn’t have to be the smart thing or the thing that will make you happy. He can still express his wish. It does not have the force of right. It is simply how he feels. So perhaps you can give him some of what he wants. Perhaps you can visit him.

Visit him as often as you can while you work this out. Give him some of what he wants. But be vigilant in meeting your own dreams and aspirations as well.

In a word: Negotiate.

The column should resume Monday, April 16.

Dear Cary,

I’m a 20-year-old female. I’ve been married for just a little under one year now. I also have a healthy 7-month-old son. I only had a relationship with my husband for one month before we got engaged. Two months after that I got pregnant.

Everything was great up until the engagement. The pregnancy made things a little better for about two months. We got married around the time I was 4 months. As time passed things got worse and we got distant. He has been all about himself and only did things for me to get stuff out of it for himself. He has been tempted to cheat and has talked inappropriately to other girls during our whole marriage. I finally got tired of it and I’m now at my mom’s. He wants me to come home but I can’t bring myself to do it.

He is horrible with money and we would have to get money from family to get the baby what he needs and get us food too. He left me in the hospital while I was 8 and a half months pregnant.

He still tries to bribe me to come back and it’s all about him again. He wants me to give him the rest of my money but I’m about to get my license and my sister is giving me her old car. It feels like he doesn’t want me to have money so I can’t get anything and I’ll need him. He makes $600 biweekly while I make less than $300. Although I love him I’m not in love with him. It feels like I stayed with him for the baby. Now I don’t know what to do. Should I go back and try to work it out even though I gave him a bunch of chances before and he hasn’t changed, or should I leave him for good? I’m torn between the two. Everyone says I should finally leave him but I’m not sure. Can you help?

Torn

Dear Torn,

It’s probably best for now that you take care of your baby and stay at your mother’s. You’re safe, you’re healthy and you have a healthy baby. If your mother will keep you there, then you have a stable place to raise this kid. You don’t need a man in your life right now. You need to concentrate on surviving, making a decent living and providing for your kid.

That may seem hard at times. You may feel lonely and truly want your husband. You may miss the intimacy and the good times. But your life has changed. You have some very grown-up challenges now.

It won’t be like this forever. At least maintain the situation as it is for a year or two and see how things go. Make stability your chief priority. Try to eliminate all the distractions and drama from your life right now, and just concentrate on raising your baby. Be grateful for your mom’s help and support. These are crucial months for your baby. The stronger you are, the more secure you feel, the better it will be for your baby.

Later, when you feel you have some breathing room, you can think about longer-term plans. Maybe your husband will fit into those plans and maybe not.

Can you stay with your mother while you endeavor to perhaps finish a college degree or get some training in a business or trade? Can she take care of the child while you are out of the house, or does she also have many outside obligations? How long can you imagine living with her? Are things OK or are they tense? If things are OK now, it may be that you and she could raise this child for the next few years. Then you could move out when the child is a little older and you’re on your feet financially.

These are the kinds of things you will need to think about.

Time is going to fly by. Since you are young, your perception of time is that of a young person. But marriage and child-rearing happen over years and decades. So does your relationship with your mother. These are slow-moving, evolving things. They require the long view. Your best decisions will not be based on how you feel right this moment, but on how things will be in three to five years.

So take some time to visualize how you want things to be in three to five years. Think about your baby and what will be happening then.

It’s hard for some people, myself included, to do this kind of thinking. We like to live in the moment. But planning does not necessarily require a calendar and a calculator. One way to start planning is to simply visualize things. Think about how you want it to be. Clip pictures from magazines or print images from the Internet that represent how you want things to be. Surround yourself with images of your ideal life. When you feel tense or frightened or confused, spend time visualizing the life you want to have. If you can imagine it, you can at least head in that direction. Then when people with some experience in life see your vision they can say, Hey, here is how you get from here to there.

Your child’s father at some point will most likely want to be in his life. That could be a positive thing. Your child will probably want to know his or her father. So do what you can to maintain a good relationship with him, even if you are apart. Just don’t let him take over your life; don’t believe his promises. Believe only what you see. He may not be mature enough and stable enough right now but that could change. So try not to burn your bridges. Just tell him that right now you have to do what’s healthiest and most financially stable for you and the baby.

Be kind to your mother. She may get on your nerves from time to time but she is really saving your life. Take advantage of her willingness to help. She is probably excited about having a grandchild and will enjoy helping, but may feel at times that she’s overworked.

All the important people in your life are growing up. You’re all changing. There are great surprises and challenges ahead. Welcome to adult life!

Just take it one day at a time. You’ll be OK. You’ll get through this, things will get easier, and one day you’ll look back in amazement.