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Sometimes I hear from wives who are quite confused about a confession that just came in from their spouse. She has confessed to cheating, but there is a catch. The deception does not just happen, even though the confession is fresh. There are some people who choose to confess to the deception years, or even decades, after it happened. The faithful spouse often wishes the cheating spouse had kept quiet, or wonders why the hell they would wait so long to be honest.
A wife might say, “To say I’m amazed is an understatement. Today, out of the blue, my husband came home and announced that he had something to tell me. He asked me to sit down. He took my hand and told me that almost twenty years ago years (about two years after we were first married) had a four-day affair with someone at work. He recently found out the woman had died. But he said other than that, she hadn’t died. I didn’t think about her in years. However, he emphasized that he wanted to go ahead and tell me because he didn’t want to die without confessing this. (He just had a health scare that turned out okay, but it scared him.) He said he felt I deserved to know. He said no. he had cheated on me ever since, not even close. And he felt he did it early in our marriage simply because he was young and immature. He says he is very ashamed and doesn’t want the guilt to haunt him, although he stressed that he firmly believes it has been a good husband ever since. inado because in fact, he has been a good husband. If he hadn’t told me this, he would never have guessed it. Frankly, he doesn’t flirt with other women and he gives me all of his attention. I’m confused. And I am furious. Why bring this up now? Do you want to hurt me? Do you want him to know that someone else found him attractive? I really don’t understand why we really have a good marriage. I thought we had always had a good marriage. But I guess he was wrong. He said that he didn’t tell me before because he didn’t want to lose me. I’m not sure why he doesn’t think he might lose me now. I guess he thinks it doesn’t matter since it’s been so long, but I still care a lot. It’s still cheating, no matter when it happened. I just don’t understand why the hell he would kick the hornet’s nest now.”
I can certainly give you an educated guess based on a similar situation among some friends of mine. From my own experience and my articles, I asked the husband in question why he would make a confession so long after the fact. He responded similarly to the husband above. He basically said that now that he was older, he was looking at his life achievements, his mistakes and his legacy and that he didn’t want to leave anything on the table. He wanted to do the right thing while he still had a chance to do it. The affair was not the only thing he confessed to. He basically reached out to everyone he felt he owed an apology to. He tried to heal old wounds and heal grievances and broken relationships. Yes, the affair was the biggest surprise to come out of this, but he also reached out to old business associates, old friends, or anyone he wanted to get a sense of closure with. He wanted to get everything off his shoulders and know that he had done what he had to do to feel free of the burdens of the past. Honestly, he didn’t realize that he was now placing this burden on his wife. Because he felt the same way this wife felt: he wondered if he just wanted to hurt her by bringing it up now. All he could say in response was that he never meant to hurt her, but that he wanted to be completely honest now. I’m not here to say whether or not I agree with his reasoning. I’m just trying to share the possible thought process. In his mind, he was trying to do the right thing, even if the attempt was too late.
So where does this leave you? Well, at the end of the day, I think you have to decide if his behavior as your husband for all these years cancels out the deception of not only the affair, but not telling you all this time. You’re right that it’s still an affair and you’d be within your rights to demand that he make amends and rehabilitate himself (just as he would have done if the affair had happened yesterday). He must have expected that this might be the case when he is about to confess.
You have every right to feel the pain and shock that you would have felt if the affair were recent. Time does not deny that. It still happened regardless of the date it happened. However, in a new adventure, you are often not sure if your spouse will rise to the occasion and become a good and reliable spouse again. You have no way of knowing if he’s going to do it right. In your case, there is no mystery in that. Her husband rose to the occasion. You have had a happy long-term marriage and that is quite an achievement. You’ll have to decide if you want to just delete that because of something that happened a while ago.