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   Home  > Books

The Monogamy Myth: A Personal Handbook for Recovering from Affairs

By Peggy Vaughan

Introduction: The Myth and the Reality

Most of us expect monogamy to be a normal part of marriage (or any committed relationship). This was certainly my assumption when I married my childhood sweetheart at age nineteen. I grew up with no first-hand knowledge of affairs and no idea that it was a subject of any concern to me. I simply took it for granted that my marriage would be monogamous.

My expectations of monogamy were shattered after eleven years of marriage. It was at that point that my husband, James, started having affairs. When I first began to suspect it, I couldn't bring myself to believe this could happen. He was a pre-ministerial college student when we married, and we shared the same traditional values of marriage and monogamy. But there were many changes in our lives during those first years of marriage. He decided to become a psychologist, and later a professor, and I moved into a more traditional role as wife and mother. It was during this period that he began having affairs.

James' affairs continued for seven years, and during that time my suspicions grew stronger and stronger. But I found myself incapable of confronting him. If it were true, I felt I'd have to get a divorce to save my pride. And I felt anxious and uncertain about my ability to make it on my own with two small children. So instead of confronting him, I began working on myself, trying to gain strength and confidence in my ability to deal with whatever might happen.

The real breakthrough came when he left the university setting and we began working together as psychological consultants to corporations and other organizations. A major part of this work involved our conducting workshops and seminars on communication, trust, and life/work planning. James became uncomfortable with the idea of working together on issues of honesty and trust while being dishonest with me about something so important to our relationship. Eventually, he volunteered the information I had wondered about for so long, admitting that he had had a series of affairs.

Fortunately, by the time he told me about his affairs, I had grown strong enough to face the situation and see if we could work through it. By continuing to talk about everything related to the affairs and our feelings during that time, we were able to develop an honest, monogamous marriage again.

We gradually began using our experience in dealing with affairs in the workshops we were conducting, to illustrate how honest communication can allow people to work through problems and differences, regardless of how difficult or seemingly insurmountable. The positive reactions to what we had to say gradually led us to begin writing a book about our experience, a process that took six years. However, we didn't anticipate the difficulty we encountered in getting it published. We finally resorted to self-publishing the book, putting a second mortgage on our home to finance the project. It was 1980 when Beyond Affairs finally came out. Despite our belief in what we were doing, we were unprepared for the reactions we received. The response completely changed my life.

I didn't realize at the time just how unusual it was for a couple to talk personally about their own experience with affairs, but the reaction from the media was overwhelming. We appeared on about a hundred television and radio talk shows, from Donahue to To Tell the Truth, to publicize the book. This allowed us to reach a large number of people, and our openness brought a wide range of reactions—from business associates, family, friends, and the general public.

The most unexpected (and unpleasant) reaction was from some business associates. As independent consultants, we'd been working with a large corporation for several years at the time the book was published. The top people at the company knew about James' affairs and knew that I knew about them (since we had used examples from this experience in helping companies deal more effectively with interpersonal issues). They even knew in advance that we were writing the book, and they assured us it made no difference to our work with them.

However, following our appearance on the Today program, we were told that our contract would not be renewed. They acknowledged that our public discussion of the subject of affairs was the reason. So even though we were professionals who were sharing our experience as a way of bringing more understanding to this problem, they couldn't accept the idea that we had "gone public."

Within my own family, there were a variety of reactions, both to the knowledge of the affairs themselves and to the fact that we publicly discussed them. I had told my mother the whole story several years before the publication of the book, so she was not shocked by the revelations it contained. But, understandably, she was not thrilled with the idea of my talking publicly about something she considered so personal. She acknowledged, however, that she thought the book would be a significant benefit to others; she just wished someone other than her daughter had written it.

Our kids were not a problem for us, but they were a problem for a lot of other people. I don't believe there was a single talk show where someone (either the host or a member of the audience) didn't ask, rather incredulously, what our children thought of the book, or of our telling our story. Our kids were 16 and 18 at the time, but they had known about our situation for five years and were well aware of our work with this issue during that time, both personally and professionally. So our public discussion of the experience wasn't strange or troublesome to them. Their only problem was wondering why everyone thought they should have a problem.

We found that our close friends became even closer and our social acquaintances became more distant following the publicity around the book. I guess this shouldn't have been surprising, but it was something we simply hadn't considered in advance.

The most gratifying of all the reactions were the ones from the general public. We had anticipated some criticism based on people misunderstanding our motives or simply disagreeing with the idea of speaking publicly about our experience in dealing with affairs. To our surprise, we received very little criticism; and when it came, it was invariably from someone who only saw us on media appearances and had not read the book.

We wrote Beyond Affairs because we genuinely believed that what we had to say would be helpful to others, and the overall response bore that out. A clergyman in Seattle, who operated a counseling center, told us he was using our book in his group sessions with couples dealing with the issue of affairs. A sociologist in New Jersey began using the book in courses on marriage and the family. We heard from other professionals as well, but the most significant reaction came from those people struggling with affairs themselves. By the time the mass market edition of the book came out the following year, we'd received hundreds of letters and phone calls from people who identified with our story.

While many of the letters were from women who felt I had perfectly expressed their feelings, I also heard from men who had dealt with their wives' affairs, from couples in which both partners had had affairs, from unmarried couples who were struggling with monogamy, and from a few same-sex couples who were dealing with the pain that affairs can bring. I was extremely moved by the outpouring of feelings that came from these people who were strangers, but who were talking like close friends.

I wanted to support their efforts to survive their experience with affairs, so I responded personally to every letter. I also received many phone calls late at night. It was painful to hear the sense of desperation and isolation expressed by most of the people who called. I felt inadequate to do much in a one-time response, whether by mail or by phone, and always invited them to write or call again.

This was the beginning of my personal dedication to helping others in dealing with the experience of affairs. But I could see I wouldn't be able to keep up with all the contacts on an individual basis. If I were to continue, I had to bring some organization to the effort. So I asked those who would like to maintain the contact to fill out a sheet providing some basic information: how long they'd been married, how long since the affair, how much it had been discussed, whether they had sought counseling, and whether or not they were still married.

I asked them to agree to have their names and addresses put on a list that would be distributed only to others in the same situation. This formed the basis of a support network ("Beyond Affairs Network" or BAN) where they could contact each other, as well as make it possible for me to put people in touch who might be especially helpful to each other. Since they were scattered all over the country, as well as Canada, there were only a few locations with enough people to hold face-to-face meetings. Otherwise, all the contact was by mail. Even this kind of contact was difficult for some people, since they felt they had to keep the information hidden from their mates. Those who knew their spouse didn't want them to discuss their personal life with anyone else arranged to have friends or family members receive their BAN mail, and several even rented special post office boxes just for this correspondence.

I began to write a monthly newsletter about affairs, using their letters to me to determine the most common issues to be addressed. I wrote the newsletter every month for the next three years, but I also continued to write personal letters, developing a deep friendship with many of the people. Through the years, either due to my own travel or because of trips they made to my area of the country, I met with about 20 of the BAN members in person. After all these years, I'm still in touch with several members of this original group, and they continue to provide a source of insight and perspective.

The overwhelming message I've gotten from this group through the years is that dealing with extramarital affairs is a life-altering experience. Their quotes and case histories used throughout this book illustrate its devastating impact. Some of them had been married only two years at the time an affair was discovered; others had been married as long as 39 years. Regardless of when or how it happened in the marriage, it became an issue that rocked the relationship to its core and constituted a dramatic change in their lives. Here's the way one person described its effect.

    When a person witnesses a murder, they describe how they relive it, and how the shock is still with them and has changed their whole perception of the world. This is so easily accepted by people; yet dealing with the trauma of an affair is not—though it too dramatically changes life, and your perception of it, forever.

The reason dealing with an affair is such a devastating experience with such long-lasting effects is that our beliefs about monogamy have led us to expect that we won't have to face the issue of affairs—and to feel like a personal failure if it happens. This way of thinking is based on what I have come to call the Monogamy Myth.

Table of Contents

The Monogamy Myth

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In this book
- Review

Sample Chapter
- Table of Contents
- Introduction: The Myth and the Reality
- The Monogamy Myth
- New Hope for Monogamy
- Why it's everybody's business

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