When I first learned that my husband had cheated on me, I fled to the bookstore. Not immediately, of course. First I screamed, cried, threw things. But, in fairly short order, I was at the bookstore scouring the shelves for something that would give order, perhaps an acceptable ever after, to what I was enduring. Maybe most of all, I was looking for some evidence that another woman had gone through this and come out the other side. At that point, the only experience I had with marital infidelity was my parents’ — and my dad’s affair had sent my mother into a decade-long addiction to alcohol and pills, plus numerous suicide attempts and subsequent hospitalizations. Not exactly a path I wanted to follow.
This was 2006 and most of us were still buying books at brick-and-mortar stores. There were blogs, but not a lot of them. I was so raw. Like a burn victim. Anything that felt remotely abrasive made me recoil. I came home from the bookstore with Janis Spring’s How Can I Forgive You? (spoiler: I couldn’t; I haven’t), along with a book whose title I no longer remember but that was written by a magazine editor in her 60s. Much of it was relatable, but she had a passivity that grated on me.
And maybe that was the problem. While I absolutely found comfort in reading another’s story and was grateful to know that the “infidelity diet” seemed universal and I wasn’t just starving myself, I wanted to read my story … or the story of someone who sounded like me.
I still find comfort and, yes, power in others’ stories of surviving infidelity. Two decades and umpteen memoirs later, I recently sat down with Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage. The book is resonating with far more than just those of us who’ve lived the pain of infidelity. (Or maybe there’s just way more of us than even I imagined.) The author, Belle Burden, has wealthy friends in high places and has lived a life of relative luxury. Hunkering down with her husband and two of the couple’s three kids at the start of COVID at their summer home on Martha’s Vineyard sounds like the start of a movie — beautiful people living beautiful lives while something sinister lurks just beneath. Which is how her story unfolds. She believed in the beautiful lie — that she and her husband were happy, that they were dedicated to their wonderful kids, that they were committed to mutual flourishing: him making increasingly more money as a hedge fund manager and her focused on raising kids and using her law degree to help with the occasional immigration case. She acknowledges that sequestering to their home on the Vineyard is an option many didn’t have. Part of what makes Burden so likeable is that she understands the privilege she has, and is grateful for it.
Burden frames her book through observations of the osprey that nest near her summer home. And her story unfolds like something of a thriller. Its power comes from Burden bringing us along with her as she slowly discovers her husband’s duplicity. Not the affair — that comes early and with the subtlety of a punch in the face. Just days into their Covid retreat, Burden gets a phone call from a man telling her their respective spouses are cheating with each other. Surely a joke, she imagines, but when she confronts her husband, he’s already packed and has one foot out the door. He doesn’t want her, doesn’t want the marriage, doesn’t want the kids, the house on Martha’s Vineyard, the apartment in New York. None of it. He wants out.
It’s the undercurrent of duplicity, however, that Burden slowly reveals to us, just as it was slowly revealed to her. Her husband had convinced her to use trust fund money she had to purchase both the apartment and their summer home. But though she’d paid for both, she wasn’t the sole owner — her husband was listed on each of them too. We learn that he’d convinced her, right before their wedding, to adjust the prenuptial agreement. Instead of each maintaining the assets they brought into the marriage and then splitting anything that accrued during the marriage, and despite the counsel of her lawyer, Burden changed it to read that assets (i.e. homes) are split but that any income each generate during the marriage remains their own. Great if you’re a hedge-fund manager. Not so great if you’re a stay-at-home mom. In short, the homes she bought belonged to both of them. The salary he earned while she raised kids and took care of those homes was his alone. We come to learn this slowly, the same way it dawned on Burden, along with questions that dog her: Were they ever happy? Was the whole marriage a ruse? Was she married all this time to a stranger?
Like a lot of us when we’ve been cheated on, Burden lost any filter. She told almost anyone who’d listen what had happened to her. At dinner parties, at the club where she and her family are members, on the street when she ran into people. It’s an honest impulse — arising from, I suspect, some need to see our pain reflected back at us. This is really happening. It’s real. It’s excruciating. You’re not imagining it.
But Burden learned, as so many of us do, that the world doesn’t always see infidelity through our eyes, as a moral strike against everything we hold true. Some of the women she knew steered clear of her. Some of the men she told greeted her news with sardonic grins. “Playing hardball, is he?” said one when she detailed the divorce proceedings. As if this was a game. As if her entire life hadn’t been upended. She heard accusations that, by not sheltering her children (who were teenagers) from the truth, that she was a bad mother. Particularly galling when he was the one who left. When he was the one who created a home with no room for his children to spend nights. When his contact with them consisted of the occasional dinner or professional sports event. One more example of how men who leave are granted more grace than women who are left.
Burden doesn’t give us a fairy-tale ending Not exactly. But she does get to a place, after four or five years, where she’d given up any hope that she would understand what happened, that she’d get clarity or closure, two concepts that we give more power than they’re worth. Her husband wouldn’t tell her much of anything. She was left looking at old photographs, sifting through memories, sorting fact from fiction. We were happy becomes I was happy. That much is true.
And maybe, by telling her story, by bringing us along as she makes sense of her own marriage, we get the benefit of what she has figured out. “I don’t know why he left,” she writes near the end of her book. “I don’t think I ever will.”
But that will have to be enough. And it is. “He is someone I can survive without,” she realizes. “He is someone I don’t know. He is someone who doesn’t know me.”
There’s pain in that, of course. Isn’t that why we get married in the first place. To love and be loved? To know and be known?
But Burden’s “happily ever after” comes from getting to know herself. From a long, painful excavation of the ways in which she’d abandoned herself in her marriage, and the ways she showed up for herself in the aftermath of its dissolution. Her book ends with two words that sum up everything she learned: Welcome home.