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Authors: Jeanne Safer

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BOOK: The Golden Condom
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The empathic love and inspiring example of good parents and a person's own efforts as a mature adult to overcome the lust for vengeance that betrayal excites offer more lasting solace than tilapia, guns, or curses can ever provide.

 

4

BETRAYAL

KEEPING FAITH WITH THE UNFAITHFUL

At five minutes to five on Thursday, April 22, 1993—she remembers all the particulars—Deirdre Black came home from work and opened the front door of her apartment. At the entrance, she found her charming, garrulous husband, Ben, standing with his bags packed. Without ceremony or explanation (“I need some space” was all he said), he walked out the door she had just walked in, never to return. She was thirty-six. They had been married for five years. Over the next several years, she emerged from this devastation with her self-esteem, her ability to love, and even her dark sense of humor intact. The unusual vow that she made to herself soon after it happened saved her.

Deirdre was a friendly acquaintance of mine, an intense, capable, flawlessly turned-out, green-eyed Irishwoman whom I used to run into regularly at our neighborhood espresso bar. She was also a profoundly pious Catholic, the only one I've ever known at all well; since I am a liberal and an agnostic Reform Jew, our worldviews clashed in many fundamental ways (we both knew, and did not discuss, that many of the social policies she was seriously against I was seriously for), but we always appreciated each other. When I saw her there in line again after a six-month hiatus, I was alarmed by the change in her appearance—she seemed wan—and, concerned that she might have been ill, I asked her how she was. That was how I learned, to my horror, what had befallen her. I knew Ben slightly, as well—she was a brooder, but he always seemed to be in a good mood—and never imagined he could treat anybody with such casual cruelty.

Little did I know when we bumped into each other that she had only recently regained her ability to speak and eat and was still mostly just going through the motions of living. It emerged as we talked that for two months after Ben's exit, she had been so grief stricken and shocked that she became virtually mute, perhaps for fear of what she would know once she heard herself say it aloud. Voicing sentiments like “I hate him,” “I hate myself,” or “I wish we both were dead,” which many people in her situation would share and some would consider a relief to express, would have violated her stringent sense of how a devout Catholic ought to feel and concretize thoughts that she struggled to suppress.

During that time, her weight dropped to eighty-five pounds because she could barely eat from despair and self-punishment—her family and friends virtually force-fed her—and her immune system was so compromised that she contracted a grave illness and had to endure a long course of intravenous antibiotics. She felt doomed, disoriented, and utterly alone. “The planes of the universe had shifted, and there was nothing I could do,” she said. “The entire situation was impossible in every way, too painful, unendurable.” She contemplated suicide but fought the urge. “I had to rule that out countless times,” she admitted. “I dragged myself bodily through every single hour. I wasn't thinking about anything but whether I could live until the next day.” She believed that it would have been an intolerable sign of weakness to commit a mortal sin when she was already so horribly sinned against; if she added bad behavior to bad fortune, she would have no honor left. At that point, the only thing left for her to cling to was self-control. Despite everything, she prided herself on not having missed a day of work the entire time. She had never even been late. “People depended on me,” she explained. Dependability is an aspect of fidelity, and fidelity was to become her raison d'être.

Deirdre then told me something that I never imagined anyone would think, let alone enshrine as a prime directive and credo. It has confounded me and resonated over the two decades that have passed since her ordeal, during which we have become intimates: as she lay prostrate trying to find a reason to go on living, she made a split-second but irrevocable decision “to remain faithful to Ben, no matter what, for all eternity.” It was a private vow, not even spoken aloud, but as fervent as any nun's.

I was moved by her seriousness of purpose, but the therapist in me was horrified; surely, it was seriously masochistic to swear fealty to someone who acted toward you with such depraved indifference. Why bind yourself to your tormentor, forsaking all possible others who might in fact treat you well and make up for your loss? Since she was such an exacting person, was she punishing herself, scrutinizing and blaming herself for character flaws that could have made him leave? Did she think she had inadvertently alienated him or not loved him unselfishly enough? In my own life, I had certainly continued to care for people who did not deserve my devotion, but I never did it as a point of honor, let alone an act of faith. I couldn't decide whether this was a self-created prison or a unique route to liberation.

Initially, it was not easy for even a trained empathizer like me to follow Deirdre's logic or to grasp something so alien and counterintuitive. I wanted to comprehend everything that was packed into that startling statement. I kept trying to pin her down. What did her love consist of? How can you love someone and not respect him? How can you love someone not worthy of your respect and still respect yourself? None of these were issues for her, because she saw her oath of fidelity as strictly between herself and God; Ben had become irrelevant, although paradoxically he was the ongoing object of her devotion. Her vow was a declaration about her own nature and how she intended to conduct herself—the only things she felt were still entirely under her control.

Deirdre's notion of fidelity is nothing like mine; no fan of the “hate the sin, love the sinner” mentality, I believe a person has to deserve love. But since Ben was out of her life for good, mutuality did not matter to her. In fact, Deirdre and I had very different feelings about mutuality even in ongoing intimate relationships, where I considered it a sine qua non and she did not. She expected nothing from Ben in return and knew that she would never honor him, trust him, or see him again. “My decision had nothing to do with Ben,” she explained in one of our many talks over the years. “Once he was gone, it was only about my relation to God. Marriage is never just between two people; it's a sacrament, a promise you make.” God, she passionately believed, had joined them, so no mere woman like herself should put them asunder. Would her promise still be valid even if he tried to kill her? I wondered. “That would be different,” she said without pausing. “I wouldn't have to stick around for that—that's crazy. You don't keep walking over broken glass.” Would it hold if their marriage were annulled? “No annulment has happened yet, so I don't know what I would do,” she responded, but I had a feeling that fidelity to Ben had become so central and habitual for her that she would maintain it even then; she had made preserving the sanctity of their marriage single-handedly the defining characteristic of her identity.

Ben's vanishing was, paradoxically, an aid to her self-restoration. It meant Deirdre never again had to deal with him outside her own mind, so she could think and feel whatever she wanted about him in complete freedom with no real-world consequences. Since the worldview she asserted was absolute and unilateral, nothing Ben could ever do to her could destroy it. She was placing herself and her value as a human being beyond his influence forever. “Thankfully, I've never had the expectation that all relationships have to be equal to be worth preserving,” she explained. For her, fidelity is not a transaction with another person; it is a sacred duty. There doesn't have to be any quid pro quo. “I'm a very faithful person,” she said simply. “It's not a commodity, it's not wampum.” It is her essence.

Keeping faith as Deirdre conceived it was her new vocation, defined and implemented in her own way. Her stance would require neither celibacy nor sexual fidelity to Ben in the future, either of which would have been self-punitive under the circumstances. She could continue to believe in the sacredness of marriage, while leaving open the possibility of remarriage. And, contrary to Catholic doctrine, forgiving Ben was out of the question. “That's God's job,” she declared. She disputes that a wronged person has a duty to grant absolution—one of the things I find refreshing and independent-minded about her. Deirdre was not trying to make herself a candidate for sainthood; she was asserting a principle to sustain her “when it would have been easier to die.”

Anyone who endures so soul-destroying an experience feels impotent and isolated. “You go through it alone,” as Deirdre said—like death. But she was fortunate to get a crucial piece of help from an irreproachable source early on.

A conversation with her father at once playful and serious galvanized her will. “One day, he asked me, ‘Is there something I can do?' and I said, ‘Yeah, I'd like it if you punched him in the nose.' I wanted him to knock off and smash Ben's little Leprechaun nose. He was quiet, and then he said, ‘Well, you really don't want me to do that—you'd like a shortcut to figuring this out, and there isn't one.'

“I wanted my father to punch him because I knew if he did it, Ben's nose would break—if a nose that small could actually break—and my father's hand wouldn't. I couldn't pull it off myself—I'd end up with a broken hand, which would not be the outcome I had in mind.”

Deirdre wanted to outsource her desire for violent retribution to a surrogate (as well as ultimately to God the Father) so the wish would not possess her, and it worked. “I was so distracted with delight at the picture in my mind of him actually punching Ben! Seemingly ridiculous things can sometimes give you the strength to go on.”

She allowed herself to enjoy a fantasy of revenge—which every betrayed person entertains and must negotiate. In this, she was unwittingly following the advice of Theodor Reik, one of Freud's early followers, on how to maintain mental health despite the assaults of the world: “A thought-murder a day keeps the doctor away.”
1

But she also appreciated her father's realism. Preoccupation with wreaking vengeance, he knew, keeps a victim a victim. It is an attempt to turn the tables in order to avoid feelings of sorrow and helplessness, but since the past cannot be undone, it never works. His logic made sense to me; for years, I had told myself and my patients, “The only way out of pain is through it.”

There was a darker, unconscious side to the way Deirdre swore eternal devotion to the man who had abandoned her. She described the process with a startling image. “I felt like it took me a week to pull that trigger, but it actually happened very quickly.” The gunshot metaphor she used to describe her instantaneous decision could as easily characterize a murder or a suicide. But rather than killing Ben or herself, she managed instead to destroy the harm he did her. She was pulling the trigger on her own pain, eradicating it. This was an act of healthy violence—“sublimated,” in the language of psychoanalysis—which was one of the reasons it succeeded.

*   *   *

I began to understand how Deirdre's pledge both reinforced and transformed her self-image, but did she do anything different as a result? On the surface, it seemed as if nothing dramatic had changed. Then it dawned on me that the very ordinariness of the actions she started to take—beginning to eat and speak again, never missing work, seeing a therapist, and consulting her confessor—indicated that something fundamental had shifted and that she was coming back to life (she called it “unfreezing”).

The things she didn't do were as significant as the ones she did and required at least as much self-discipline: she did not stalk Ben or pine for him, nourish fantasies of reconciliation, attempt to insinuate herself back into his life, try to ruin his reputation, scrutinize him on Facebook when that favorite tool of the obsessed became available, or even seriously wish him ill.

Slowly and subtly—almost mystically—she began to reinterpret the purpose of her life. She concluded that it consisted in being of service to those she loved, in ways small and large—from running errands to keeping vigil during their illnesses. These were things she was already doing. But taking a solemn oath and sticking to it casts everything in a different light and infuses the ordinary with significance. It can change a person more radically than any drug or many years of therapy.

Ben did not make it easy for Deirdre to keep faith with him. Her patience was sorely tried by his refusal to behave with even common decency toward her, which continued long after his precipitous exit. For ten years, he refused to divorce her, effectively preventing her from marrying again in her childbearing years. He never cooperated with annulment proceedings and still has not. He never apologized or (according to her lawyer) seemed to suffer pangs of guilt or remorse and later went on to remarry and have a family without ever looking back. “What he did is despicable. He almost destroyed me and thinks he hasn't done anything,” she said. Nonetheless, she would not allow him to destroy her integrity or her ability to care, even for him. He broke her heart but not her soul.

Deirdre's vow was the lodestar that guided her back into the world and kept her there during that first problematic decade. Afterward, she no longer had to exert any effort. Practicing fidelity daily made life worth living again. It restored her pride and her joy and helped her regain her health. Her tie to Ben lessened naturally when she found a man more worthy of her devotion—even though she did not publicly announce their marriage for several years to protect herself in case he, too, might fail her.

Those who suffer in love are routinely counseled by well-meaning therapists, friends, and self-help authors to run in the opposite direction from “the toxic person” and never look back—advice that is hard to follow, though usually sage. Deirdre did the opposite; she made use of her toxic person to save her own life and to reset the planes of her universe. It wouldn't work for everybody, but it certainly worked for her.

BOOK: The Golden Condom
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