'3 years ago, I decided to stay with my cheating partner. Here's how it's changed our marriage.'

There are two kinds of people in this world, those who have been cheated on and those who think it will never happen to them. 

Three years ago, I lived smugly in the latter of those groups. Until my loving husband of 10 years surprised me one afternoon by asking me for a divorce. “I love you; I am just not in love with you anymore,” he said. These words landed on my skin like a small grain of sand infiltrating an open wound. 

Not immediately painful, but the more I thought about it – the less it made sense and the more uncomfortable it became. After a decade together, why would we be actively in love? We had so much going on a blended family, a family business, a rural property, and his Fly-in Fly-out career.

Watch: The Science of Cheating. Story continues after video.

That night I rolled my mattress out in the lounge, the same way I did on the nights he drank too much and snored too loudly. I woke up at 2am with a bolt of clarity. There was someone else. I walked into our room, woke him up and asked him to show me his phone.

He refused to, telling me I would not like what I would find and then after I questioned him, he admitted to there being another woman. I didn’t feel angry or raise my voice. I was enveloped by a knowing. All the invisible signs in the lead up suddenly made sense. I asked him to put her to the side and give me a week.

Over seven days we had profound conversations, wild sex, romantic dates, and daily visits to a therapist. For the first time ever, we saw each other - it was both beautiful and brutal. I was living from breath to breath with a profound sense of hope. At the end of the week when he told me he was leaving me for her my heart broke like the windshield of a car in a high-speed traffic accident. Messy, painful, and impossible to repair.

Six days later he returned, as it turns out when the lustful glimmers of infidelity come under the glaring reality of a spotlight nothing was as luminescent as he had imagined it would be.

It is an uncommon thing, to repair a marriage after infidelity. The societal narrative for the ‘victim’ is to leave - “What a dog.” “He does not deserve you!” “Run don’t walk.” It is black and white. There is no room for nuance, only judgement. Society seems happy to toss out a marriage, a family, a life together in the same way they do fast fashion.

Forgiveness came easily to me, but anxiety and depression came easier. All at once every negative thing I had ever believed about myself was proved to be true because he left. I hated myself the most I ever have, I was unsure, insecure, and physically sick. When close friends would ask how everything was going, I would say our marriage is great, but I am not.

As marriage 2.0 blossomed, so did my fear of being rejected again. I worked hard not to soil the good times with my overthinking, but I found it impossible and so I kept interrogating him for details he had long forgotten. Collecting the fragments of glass and trying to glue them back together. 

I worked tirelessly at making myself more like what I imagined her to be – fun and attractive. I grew my hair, I started wearing make-up, got a Brazilian and gave up my granny pants. I got to try on a brand-new persona – not much of it stuck, but in the process, I began to uncover more about myself and what I required of him. 

A real breakthrough came when I got angry. For a few years I could not see the point. I pictured myself yelling at him the way my mother did when I was a child and I wondered how it would help. Or if he could handle it. So, I chose not to be angry, I walked in the bush, and I did yoga religiously. 

What I didn’t realise is that by not expressing my anger I was robbing him of delivering an apology that would bypass my ears and my brain and land squarely in my heart. And that is exactly what happened when I eventually let it out accidentally one night after work.

Listen to No Filter, It was after a dinner with friends one night, that journalist and writer Kate Legge’s husband pulled her into their garage to confess; he’d been having an affair. Post continues below.

I discovered my unsuspecting husband had neglected to pick up some black stockings for me while he was at the shopping centre. The bubble burst. Words like liar, deceitful, disgusting, and selfish spilled out of me and onto him. At first, he was defensive, but as the words rang true, and the gentle rage grew he was able to feel the depth of my pain. He saw it, he held it, and he owned it. All of it.

The red-hot bushfire of lies and betrayal is searing, destructive and long-lasting but in the wake of catastrophe there is new growth. We have not tried to revive our old, shattered marriage. Instead, we have built a new one, slowly, without tools and sometimes blindfolded – but we are building none the less.

Feature Image: Supplied

Tarrin Lenard is a Zimbabwean Immigrant who loves gin but drinks tea, teaches yoga and writes words. And not that it should matter but who has also birthed four humans. And been married. Twice. You can find more from Tarrin on Facebook or Instagram.