My parents got divorced four years ago, at which point my brother and I were both in our 40s, and our parents almost 70. They broke up after my mother discovered that my dad had been having an affair. The feeling of letdown was enormous, as if our father had suddenly become this person we didn’t recognise. He had always taught us to be fair and honest, and this made us question everything.
My brother and I have made a lot of effort to keep him included in our lives since then, especially for the sake of his grandchildren. However, we’ve only had one demand – that we get to see him alone. The Other Woman still feels like the cause of the breakup of our family. I feel an enormous amount of hurt and resentment about the lies and deceit, but I’ve made a conscious effort to not wipe out his positive impact on my life up to that point.
My father, however, feels like we’re being completely unreasonable by not wanting anything to do with his new partner. He’s brought it up often and often a bit aggressively and has been reluctant to come to family events if he can’t bring her.
This has really taken a toll on both my brother and myself. I get extremely stressed every time I’m seeing my dad, because I’m half expecting to be ambushed by her coming along. I’m also worried that seeing her would cause a rift between us and our mother. Some friends say that it’s time to deal with it, meet her and move on, and that she’s probably actually nice if we get to know her. That might well be, but I don’t feel like I owe her anything.
What should I do in order to not cause a further deterioration of relationships in the family? Do we need to just suck it up and start including her?
Eleanor says: If we narrate the affair as the end of the marriage, why not the other things that – in his telling – might have meant it wasn’t working?
You and your dad might be steering by different maps of this event. To you what happened was the unfair collapse of a happy marriage and the loss of trust and certainty in the world around you; the loss of a good man, and of your family, which until this point meant something safe and permanent.
It’s possible that to your dad, the affair wasn’t the cause of the marriage breakdown. I think this is oddly common: someone privately decides a relationship is over, emotionally processes that, leaves, starts a new relationship – all without telling their first partner. So they’re almost surprised by the indignation when the affair is discovered, quasi-forgetting that no one else was included in their sense of the relationship being over.
You could spend the rest of your earthly lives trying to prove who’s right. Or figuring out whether the other woman is a nice person, deserves your forgiveness or is to blame. As with all conflicts where one side insists on important-seeming details while the other is trying to communicate the emotional semiotics of what happened, it could drag on for ever.
The alternative is to think: look, we all have very different experiences of these same facts. Given that, what’s fair? What will keep us close?
I’m really sorry to say those questions have different answers. You said two things: “I don’t feel like I owe her anything”, and “What should I do in order to not cause a further deterioration of relationships in the family?” That’s exactly the bind – we can’t occupy both perspectives at once.
Being close with someone eventually becomes incompatible with holding on to the legitimate pain they’ve caused you. This is horrible, because it requires the wronged party to do restorative work when they’re the ones entitled to the restoration. But it’s the truth. You can be righteously wounded in perpetuity, or you can be close.
You don’t have to decide that the relationship should win. Some pain is so great and so unfair it permanently rules out closeness. But if you want to preserve the relationship, it’s hard to imagine it will be possible to keep her out for ever. He’s decided he wants to be with her, at considerable cost. This relationship matters to him.
It takes massive amounts of work and empathy to see hurtful things in the context of a whole human being. Not everybody gets to demand that of you. And there might be other reasons to not see her, like if it would make your mother feel replaced a second time over. Or if your dad can’t grasp that your forgiveness is a kindness, not something he can demand while tapping his watch.
But those are all reasons for deciding there’s an upper limit on how close you want to be with your dad. They might be good reasons, but that’s the decision.
What will keep you spinning in circles is trying to simultaneously be close with him, treasure your time together and prevent further deterioration in your family’s dynamics, while insisting you don’t owe her anything. You cannot balance it all.
Your father’s done you a terrible disservice by putting you in a position where doing what’s fair and doing what’s best for your relationship might come apart. But that’s your position. You’re right that you don’t owe her anything. Sometimes being close to someone is partly a matter of giving more than you owe.
This letter has been edited for length
