The day I found out my husband was having an affair (via his repeat Ubers late at night from the same roster of hotels), my world as I knew it crumbled. I couldn’t get out of bed. I could barely bring myself to speak to friends, and focused instead on functioning daily.
I can’t imagine this happening with the world’s media standing at the garden gate, watching your family’s every move, as Victoria Beckham implies in her candid response to the Rebcca Loos scandal and an alleged affair in the Netflix Beckham documentary.
Part of my recovery was to hide away from friends and family to try and deal with it in private, picking the mess of our marriage apart from our two very different perspectives. Our situation felt as straightforward as it could under the circumstances, when your life as you know it is turned upside down by the person closest to you. We got to make a choice and quickly resolved that we both wanted to try and make it work, rather than split immediately. Like David and Victoria Beckham at the time of the Rebecca Loos headlines, we had young children in the equation.
That decision to stay in the marriage and work at it, felt at odds with what I felt society expected of me — to up and leave, outraged. But to be frank, I felt way too confused and crushed to make that type of rational decision in the days that followed the affair discovery.
Shaun Botterill
Later down the line I fantasised about it as an easier option, to just walk away from the months of heartbreak that followed, the hard conversations that kept recurring, the mental comparison your brain flirts with and you have to conquer. Of course I know myself and from friends sharing their experiences, that is there is no easy choice, and for some there is no choice at all.
The reality is marriage and long term partnerships can be hard, infidelities are a surprisingly common occurrence. As I went through the healing process I realised I couldn’t hear the voices of the women who chose to dig in and sort through the hard stuff.