Why Do I Feel Guilty When They Cheated?
I caught my wife cheating, and by the end of that conversation I was the one saying sorry. I’ve told very few people, because every time I do I watch them try to fix their face, and I understand why. It sounds impossible, or it sounds like I’m leaving something out. I’m not leaving anything out. I found out, I brought it up, and somewhere in the next few hours the subject moved off what she’d done and onto what was wrong with me, and I went along with it, and I apologized. If some version of that has happened to you, two things are worth knowing before you read any further. It has a name. And it’s been studied by people with no stake in your marriage, which means you didn’t invent it and you’re not the first person it worked on. Knowing how it works doesn’t undo it, but it answers the question that follows men around for years afterward, which is how the man who got cheated on ends up carrying the guilt for finding out.
It’s called DARVO
Researcher Jennifer Freyd at the University of Oregon named this in the 1990s. DARVO stands for deny, attack, reverse victim and offender. Four moves, in that order, and they go fast. First the denial: it didn’t happen, you’re wrong, that isn’t what that is. Then the attack, which isn’t a defense, it’s coming at you: you went through my phone, you don’t trust me, this is what you always do, what kind of man does this. Then she’s the one who’s been wronged, your suspicion is the thing that hurt somebody, and what you actually found has left the conversation entirely. Read those four against whatever happened in your house. Most men who’ve been through it can put a time on each one. The reason having a name for it matters is that the whole thing depends on feeling like a run of unrelated emotional moments instead of a move you can see coming, and once you can see the shape of it, it loses a lot of what it had over you.
It works because you’re honest, not because you’re stupid
The thing people get wrong, and the thing that kept me quiet for years, is thinking this lands on men who are easy to fool. It doesn’t. It lands on men who believe they should answer for what they do. That’s what it needs. If you take responsibility seriously, if you’re willing to turn and look at yourself, if you think a fair man hears the other side even when he’s furious, then you keep a door open marked maybe I’m the problem, and you keep it open on purpose, because that’s what makes you honest instead of just certain. DARVO walks straight through that door. The move can’t land on somebody who’s incapable of considering they might be wrong, and that person is very often the one running it on you. So the thing that gets you taken here is the same thing that makes you worth being married to. That’s hard to sit with and it’s a lot closer to true than deciding you were naive.
Ten years of small ones came due in an hour
That night didn’t come out of nowhere, and this is the part I’d most want somebody to understand. By the time I found out, I’d already spent about ten years in a house where her version of events beat mine, never on anything big, just small things, hundreds of them, until giving in on what happened was simply how a disagreement ended between us. So when the biggest possible disagreement finally showed up, everything was already built and tested and the only thing that changed was what was at stake. Nobody goes from certain to apologizing in one evening. It looks that way from outside, and it looked that way to me, which is exactly why I blamed myself for it afterward. I wasn’t beaten that night. I was finishing something that had been going on quietly the whole time, and the affair was just the first thing big enough to make it show. If you got turned around on something huge, the reason is in the small stuff underneath it.
The damage isn’t the affair
People assume the cheating is the wound, and I want to be exact, because it isn’t. What lasts is what the turnaround does to your ability to trust what you see. Once you’ve been walked out of a position you knew was right, on the clearest evidence you’ll ever get in your life, a question opens up that doesn’t close on its own. If I was wrong about that, what else am I wrong about. And it doesn’t stay in the marriage. It gets into your work, your friendships, how you handle your own kids. You start running ordinary decisions past a second opinion in your head, and that second opinion isn’t yours and isn’t any good. That’s the real cost and it’s why this particular move matters more than the cheating that set it off. You can get over somebody betraying you. Getting back to trusting your own eyes takes a lot longer, and most men don’t know that’s what happened to them.
What to do with it
There’s no script for winning that argument and I’m not going to make one up, because you can’t out-argue somebody who’ll move the subject onto you every time it gets close to her, and trying is how years disappear. What helped me, late, was smaller than a plan. Write down what happened the day it happens, before anybody’s explained it to you. Not for a lawyer. For you. Because the turnaround works on your memory, and your memory is the thing getting rewritten. Something you wrote before the conversation is the one piece of your own version nobody can change afterward. Past that, when you notice the four moves running, stop trying to steer back to the original subject. You won’t get there. What’s useful is knowing a turn happened, so you don’t add it to the pile of proof you’re quietly building against yourself. You went looking, you found something, and you were made to apologize for finding it. That isn’t a story about a weak man. That’s what happens when a man who answers for himself stands across from somebody who never has.
Continue Strong and Controlled: The Most Extreme Narcissist
