198: What Do You Owe Your Ex-Affair Partner’s Spouse?

Hi everyone, I’m Dr. Marie Murphy, and I’m a non-judgmental infidelity coach.  If you are engaging in anything you think counts as infidelity, I can help you deal with your feelings, clarify what you want, and make decisions about what you’re going to do.  No shame, no blame, no judgements.  When you are ready to resolve your infidelity situation in a way that’s truly right for you, let’s get to work.  One of the things new clients often tell me when we start working together is, “I wish I’d reached out to you sooner.”  If you are in the midst of a challenging infidelity situation and you know you need some help, I encourage you to seize the day and get the support and assistance that you need.  And when you are ready for my wise, pragmatic help, there are two ways we can work together.  You can enroll in my self-guided course, You’re Not the Only One, or we can work together via Zoom.  To get started with either of these options, go to my website, mariemurphyphd.com.

Okay.  Today we are going to talk about what you might – or might not – owe, or want to offer, the spouse or partner of someone you had an affair with.  And to start this discussion off, I’m going to read a recent submission to The Ethicist, otherwise known as Kwame Anthony Appiah, who responds to readers’ ethical questions in The New York Times.

Here’s the column:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/23/magazine/friend-affair-husband-ethics.html?searchResultPosition=3   

In general, I agree with Appiah’s perspectives and I think this guidance is solid.  I am a little sad that he referred to Erving Goffman as a social theorist – he was definitely that, but he is also claimed by sociologists as one of their own, and one of their finest, and I don’t think he ever considered himself anything other than a sociologist.  But aside from that little quibble, I think the perspectives he offers are great.

And I also want to go beyond what he talks about and say a few other things.

Rightly or wrongly, when people are cheated on, they may feel they are owed some kind of grand apology, and they may indeed want retribution.  And I agree with the ethicist – getting some kind of apology, or even some kind of revenge, might not help the person who has been cheated on all that much.  Ultimately, what’s going to help them is for them to be able to digest their own thoughts and feelings about what has happened, and make choices about how they want to move forward.  And having some sort of exchange with their spouse’s ex-affair partner is not necessarily going to help with that AT ALL.

That said, I also want to offer some sympathy to the person who wrote this letter, and to people who are in similar situations.  It’s okay to really not like it if you’ve been cheated on.  That is totally fair.  It’s okay to want an apology, or believe you’re OWED an apology from your spouse’s affair partner.  It’s okay to think that there’s a wrong that needs to be righted – either in general, or by your spouse’s ex-affair partner specifically.  It’s okay to have a lot of thoughts, and to feel a lot of feelings if you’ve been cheated on. 

However.  Just because you think you are owed an apology does not mean that are you are, by the laws of the universe, actually owed an apology.  Just because you think your spouse’s ex-affair partner has to right a wrong doesn’t mean they actually have to do anything of the sort for you.  And although it’s legitimate to have a lot of thoughts and feelings after you have been cheated on, you may not serve your own best interests by acting on all of those thoughts and feelings.

And actually, since we’re on the subject, I was recently-ish a guest on the podcast called The Divorce Comeback Coach Podcast, which is hosted by Heidi Bee, and she and I talked about the experience of being cheated on and how you may want to deal with the challenges associated with that.  So if you or someone you know is in this position, check out episode 191 of The Divorce Comeback Coach Podcast.

But since I’m primarily concerned with the experience of people who doing the cheating on this podcast, we’re now going to turn our focus to what you may want to do if you are the cheater in the scenario from The Ethicist’s column.  If your ex-affair partner’s partner wants to talk to you, or thinks you owe them something, what do you do?

Although I usually stay away from this kind of prescriptive advice, I’m going to strongly suggest that you do NOT do what the person we heard about in this column did.  Don’t tell the person who was cheated on what they would benefit from or not benefit from hearing about or talking about.  Don’t tell them what’s good for them.  For one thing, you don’t know what’s good for them or best for them.  That isn’t your business.  And for another thing, telling your ex-affair partner’s spouse that you know better than they do what’s good for them might reasonably be considered pretty fucking insulting.  RIGHT?  Imagine being on the receiving end of that. 

Also, don’t string them along.  If your ex-affair partner’s partner wants to talk to you, and you say you’ll talk to them, do it.  But perhaps more importantly, before you say you’re willing to talk to them, make sure you are actually willing to talk to them.  Make a clear decision about what you are truly willing to do or not do before you tell them what you’re going to do.  Saying you’re willing to talk to them and then putting it off or ghosting them or otherwise stringing them along is going to be unpleasant for YOU – and, they probably won’t like it very much either, and you might want to at least do them the favor of dealing with their request efficiently.  You may not OWE them the apology or whatever that they think you owe them, but you might WANT to them definitively and efficiently out of consideration for them, and for your own sake.

Having said that, let’s be really clear about something.  If you had an affair with someone, and their spouse or partner wants to talk to you about what happened, do you have to talk to them?  No.  You don’t have to do anything.  And I’m not saying that flippantly.  You really don’t have to do anything, and you certainly do not have to talk to your ex-affair partner’s partner.  Even if THEY are pretty convinced that you have to. 

But yet, you might WANT to talk to the spouse or partner of the person you had an affair with.  There are some reasons for doing this that you might consider pretty good.  And I’m going to talk about some of these reasons, and also talk a little about what you might actually say to your ex-affair partner’s partner if you decide to engage with them.  But before I do that, I’m going to tell you why you might NOT want to talk with the partner of your former affair partner, no matter how badly they want to talk to you.

First and foremost, if you have any reason to suspect that your ex-affair partner’s partner will become aggressive or violent with you if you talk with them or meet with them, that’s a pretty good reason to give them a very wide berth.  You really don’t HAVE to have any kind of engagement with your ex-affair partner’s partner.  They may THINK that you have to talk to them.  They may THINK that you owe them some kind of explanation or apology or remorse.  And they have every right to THINK that you owe them these things, but that doesn’t make them right.  Furthermore, your ex-affair partner may really want you to talk to their partner.  THEY may be in your ear, too.  For all kinds of reasons, your ex-affair partner may think it would be a great idea for you to talk to their spouse, and you may be rather inclined to take their requests seriously.

For these reasons and lots of others, sometimes people start to believe that they really do NEED to meet with their ex-affair partner’s spouse – and so they agree to do so, even when they are concerned about their own safety.

Here’s the deal, people: it is your prerogative to prioritize your own safety.  If you believe your safety would be at risk if you were to talk with your ex-affair partner’s partner, that’s a great reason to not do it.  I know this might sound like simple stuff, but for some people, prioritizing their own well-being over other people’s requests or demands or preferences isn’t easy.  So it’s important to make it really clear that you have the right to not do what other people want or expect you to do.  It’s important to emphasize that just because somebody truly believes that you owe them something, that doesn’t mean they’re right.

Okay.  Safety concerns aside, there are other reasons why you might not want to engage with your ex-affair partner’s partner.  And here is one: you simply might not want to.  If you cannot identify any reason why you would WANT to engage with your ex-affair partner’s spouse, you might want to consider that a good enough reason to decline their request to communicate.

To put some of the points The Ethicist made in a slightly different way, you don’t know for sure what your ex-affair partner’s spouse will get out of an interaction with you.  So if you think that you’re going to be “helping” them by meeting with them or talking with them, and that’s the reason why you should do it, you may want to reconsider.  There’s really no way for us to know what is ultimately going to be helpful to another person, and we don’t NEED to know.  That’s their business, and that’s the universe’s business.  It isn’t really your business.

So if you simply don’t want to do it, you might want to allow it to be just that simple.  Sometimes doing our part to improve a situation is to do less, rather than to do more.  NOT communicating with your ex-affair partner’s spouse might end up being more beneficial for everyone involved. 

And this may be especially true if you don’t intend to have a relationship with your ex-affair partner’s spouse in the future.  If your ex-affair partner’s spouse is someone you don’t know, and don’t plan to ever have a relationship with, it may be even more true that there really isn’t any good reason to meet with this person unless you want to for specific reasons that you are really clear on.

So I want to affirm that it is your prerogative to not meet or communicate with your ex-affair partner’s partner, even if they really want to engage with you.  And even if your reason is simply that you don’t want to do it, that’s a good enough reason.

Now, there are also reasons why you might want to talk with or meet with your ex-affair partner’s partner.  If you had a preexisting relationship with your ex-affair partner’s spouse, you might want look them in the eye and talk about what happened.  This may be even more true for you if your pre-existing relationship with your ex-affair partner’s spouse was an important to you.  If your ex-affair partner’s spouse is a good friend, or a sibling, or a colleague, or a neighbor, you might believe that you owe this person some sort of a conversation about the affair, and you might like that idea.  There’s nothing wrong with thinking we owe someone something if we like the idea of that.  Like, I believe I owe it to my dogs to give them food and water and shelter and love and medical care and exercise and all of that kind of stuff.  And I am quite happy to think that way.  Sometimes when we say we owe someone something, what we’re really saying is, we feel COMMITTED to delivering on a certain something, or we feel committed to doing something.  Underneath us saying that we owe it to someone to do something, we may really be saying that we WANT to do something.

And it is entirely possible that you may WANT to have a conversation with your ex-affair partner’s spouse because you think it’s the right thing to do under the circumstances.  Or you think it’s the best way to do your part to improve a difficult situation.  Or you like the imagined outcomes of talking to your ex-affair partner’s spouse a lot more than you like the imagined outcomes of NOT talking to them about the affair. 

And again, this may be especially true if you intend to continue having a relationship with your ex-affair partner’s spouse!  For instance, if you have an affair with your sibling’s partner, you may want to preserve your relationship with your sibling – or at least, you may want to do as much damage control as you can.  Or not – I’m certainly not saying you have to.  Maybe you don’t have a close relationship with your sibling and you don’t want to.  But if you do want to try and maintain your relationship with your ex-affair partner’s spouse, you may decide that there’s a LOT to be gained by having some kind of a discussion about the affair. 

COULD you just sweep the whole thing under the rug and pretend like it never happened?  Quite possibly.  I imagine this has happened millions upon millions of times within human history.  But if your ex-affair partner’s spouse WANTS TO TALK TO YOU about the affair, and they’re making that very clear, and you want to maintain your relationship with them, attempting to not talk to them might create more problems than that approach is likely to solve.

The choice between having an uncomfortable conversation with them and not talking to them about the affair at all might seem like a shitty choice, but it IS a choice.  If your ex-affair partner’s spouse is someone you are or were close to, and they want to talk to you about the affair you had with their partner, you get to choose.  You could say, no, I don’t want to talk about it.  I’m just not going to do it, and you could deal with whatever comes out of that.  Or you decide that you’re willing to have a conversation with them even though you don’t love that idea, because that seems like the less bad option of the two.

If you do decide to have some sort of a conversation with your ex-affair partner’s spouse, you get to decide where your boundaries lie.  They may have an agenda for the conversation, but you don’t have to talk about anything they want to talk about just because you agree to talk to them.  You get to set whatever limits you want.  If you want to keep the conversation as short and to the point as possible, even if your conversational partner wants to get way more in-depth.

For example, you might want to sit down with your ex-affair partner’s partner and say something to the effect of, “You know, I’m really sorry this happened, I know how much grief and upheaval this has occasioned for you, and I respect the fact that you’re really upset with me.”  IF, of course, that sort of statement is applicable in your situation.  You can succinctly take responsibility for your actions and apologize for the hurt and disruption that’s occurred.  And if they want to get into the details of what happened, you can kindly but firmly let them know that you aren’t going to go there with them.  And then, if you wish, you can make a pitch for diplomacy in your relationship going forward.  You can indicate your willingness to give them their space, and your intention to simultaneously maintain cordial relations, if that’s what you want to do.

On the other hand, if you have a really close relationship with the person whose partner you had an affair with, and you want to continue to have a close relationship with them, a more in-depth debriefing of the situation may be in order.  And by “in order” I mean, that may be something your ex-affair partner’s spouse wants, and it may be something you want, too.  If you had an affair with your bestest, oldest friend’s spouse, and before the affair, there was never anything you didn’t discuss with your best friend, and now that your best friend knows about the affair, they want to talk about it at length – well, maybe you want to discuss it at length with them, too.  Maybe that feels totally appropriate and good for you.  Maybe you’re willing to talk about anything they want to ask you about.  Depending on the circumstances, this might be totally okay with you.

Similarly, if you are or were very close to the person whose partner you had an affair with, you might want to apologize for your actions in a different way, or to a different degree than you would if the person in question were someone you had nothing to do with.  This isn’t to say that you have to apologize for your actions, necessarily – remember, you don’t HAVE to do anything.  But in some situations, you might WANT to.  

My only exhortation is that before you jump into a conversation with your ex-affair partner’s partner – no matter what your relationship is to them – you THINK THROUGH how you want to participate in this conversation.  Think about what is right for YOU when it comes to having a conversation with your ex-affair partner’s partner.  What do you want to say – or not say – and why?  What are you willing to talk about if asked, and why?  What are you willing to shut down, or even lie about, if asked, and why?  Especially if your ex-affair partner’s spouse is someone you want to continue to have a relationship with – or a close relationship with – it’s important to consider your own position and preferences before you leap into a conversation with them.  Your first instinct may be to try to make them feel better, but that’s not the instinct you want to act on.  You don’t have direct control over making them feel better or not.  But you do have control over how you participate in the conversation with them.

If you are in this kind of a situation and you want help figuring out exactly you are going to say or not say to your ex-affair partner’s spouse, let’s work together one-on-one.  I can help you make thoughtful choices about how you handle the specifics of your unique situation.

Okay, one last thing I want to say about why you might WANT to talk to your ex-affair partner’s partner, no matter what kind of a relationship you’ve had with them.  To expand on something I said earlier, you might WANT to talk to your ex-affair partner’s partner is because it aligns with your sense of karmic duty, or your sense of what is good and right and just, or your sense of how you want to conduct yourself in the world.  Maybe you believe that the right thing to do is make yourself available to a meeting with your ex-affair partner’s spouse if they want to talk to you, no matter what comes of the meeting.  Maybe you believe that if someone is hurting in the way that you imagine they are, it’s your job as a human to be present with them in their pain, because you were part of the situation that occasioned their pain.  Maybe you know that you cannot relieve them of their pain, but you also believe that there is value in being willing to witness and acknowledge their pain.  Maybe you really want to offer them an apology.  Maybe you want to look them in the eye and say, “Yep, this happened, and I know you don’t like that, and I get it.” 

If you’re coming from an angle that’s anything along those lines, and you feel good about acting from these kinds of reasons, that, in my opinion, is fantastic.  Carefully considering how we want to conduct ourselves, and lining our actions up with what we believe it’s important for us to do is a really important component of honoring our relationship with ourselves.  And at the end of the day, our relationship with ourselves is our primary human relationship.  But doing something because you believe it’s the right thing for you to do, and being willing to accept whatever comes out of your actions, is very different from doing something because we think it’s going to be good for someone else, and expecting to be rewarded for that in a particular way.

And that is it for today.  If you need help dealing with any aspect of your infidelity situation, why wait any longer for some relief and a clear path forward?  I can help you deal with your situation in a way that you feel great about.  The rest of your life – beyond the drama and difficulty of your infidelity situation – is waiting for you, so let’s get to work.  There are two ways you can have me as your coach: we can work together one-on-one via Zoom, or you can enroll in my self-guided course, You’re Not the Only One.  To get started on either of these options, go to my website, mariemurphyphd.com.  I can’t wait to meet you.

Thank you all so much for listening!  Bye for now.