Review: 'Same As It Always Was,' by Claire Lombardo (2024)
Same at it Always Was, by Claire Lombardo (2024)
Claire Lombardo’s 2024 family novel, Same As It Always Was, is an extraordinarily acute psychological exploration of the inner and relational life of a middle-class woman in the Chicago suburbs and the periods of her life from childhood to her 60s. The narration is episodic rather than sequential, moving back and forth among various segments of Julia Ames’ life, all of them illuminating each other. Not simply a narrative device, this oscillation reflects the reality that all of us live on a constantly shifting emotion-scape of memory, anticipation, regret and cherishing. Lombardo’s insight into her characters’ personalities is deep, expressed with a preternatural precision and deftness, and often with surprises and humor along the way.
The novel explores a range of Julia’s relationships – with an older mentor friend Helen, her conscientious son Ben and moody daughter Alma, her volatile mother Anita, and family friends Francine and Brady. As a personality, Julia is insecure, introverted and ungenerous, characteristics one comes to understand and sympathize with in view of her atrocious family background.
The novel’s central drama arises from Julia’s early adultery with Helen’s son Nathaniel, much younger than she, and the ramifications for her marriage with Mark. Readers of Surviving Infidelity will find Lombardo’s treatment of this insightful and cathartic.
Here are a few samples:
. . . if she [Julia] allowed herself to focus on the breadth of what she was doing, she’d be blinded by the sweeping magnitude of her betrayal, the sheer badness of her bad behavior; it was unconscionable to think that she was doing this to Mark, who was, objectively . . . the best man she’d ever been with. . . .
She kept two inarguable thoughts at the forefront of her psyche, scientific truths: first, that things had been creeping downhill for her for a couple of years, and so it wasn’t so terribly unexpected, her need for comfort, for friendship, and the fact that she’d sought it out elsewhere. But second, that she was a terrible person, that what she was doing was unequivocally wrong: that there was, despite the platitudes and nuance contained in Truth #1, no excuse for it whatsoever.
The sheer destructiveness of adultery is vivid: ". . . she had fucked up, shot everything to hell for the sake of a few instances of oblivious pleasure." Helen tells her that she seems "so intent on setting fire to it all."
Most adultery victims, a reasonable term for betrayed spouses, respond to discovery by needing and demanding to know a great deal about how the affair was conducted, but husband Mark takes a surprisingly opposite tack, deliberately not wanting to hear any details, as this series of quotes illustrates:
"I know, Julia." He looked back at her for just a dark, portentous second. "You know?" "You know—what?" she asked. "How?" "I surmise. I know enough. And I’ve decided I don’t want to know anything more."
Her breathing felt shallow, the air between them crackling and opaque. She’d braced herself for the fallout, for the painful disclosure of everything that had happened in the last few months, the last few years, all her uncertainties and darknesses and doubts and, most recently, her betrayal, which, funnily enough, had come to feel like the least serious thing overall, simply a stupid manifestation of less tangible things, everything that was wrong projected cartoonishly on a tiny screen. She’d been so ready for an explosion that the stillness scared her. "I only want to ask you one thing," he said. "Of course," she said. "Anything." "You don’t—" He drew in a small, sharp breath. "God, you don’t love this guy, do you?" She wanted to hug him; she knew he wouldn’t let her even if he weren’t driving. "Of course not. It wasn’t—anything, Mark."
But this seemed to make him even sadder. "What do you mean of course not?"
Watching a face like Mark’s darken was so much worse than watching a regular person get upset; the impulse, in her husband, was still unpracticed after so many years of living, and his hurt, his anger, his confusion all appeared with a childlike candor. . . .
"If it wasn’t—" he started to say. "Then what was the— Why? What was the point?" "I’m not sure," she said. "I’m not sure it was—about a point, exactly; it was more complicated than that. I’m—friends with his mom." . . .
"And it’s over? It’s— Your whole going off the grid like this, it’s—" "It’s over. Mark, I— You can’t know how sorry I am. And I know—there’s nothing I can say here that doesn’t sound like a cliché, but it truly didn’t mean anything, it was just a—" "I don’t want to know."
"But I—" She wanted to absolve herself, vocalize it and in doing so make it theirs. She wanted to stop being alone with it; she wanted it to become Mark’s too, something they discussed at length, however painfully, because once they did that they’d get further and further away from it, turn it into something anecdotal like they’d done with everything else from their pasts. Was that not the point of being married, having to carry less?
"You don’t get to unload this on me," he said. "It’s not fair, Julia, and it’s cruel, and you— God, you have to have some fucking accountability. You don’t deserve to feel vindicated, okay? Because I’m never going to stop being hurt by it."
It’s much more typical that the betrayer resists detailing the story, even after disclosure, and that the betrayed wants to know more and even asks the same questions over and over. Here, Julia’s wish to tell more is unusual, as is Mark’s resistance to hearing more, but this unusual reversal of instincts becomes quite credible in view of these particular personalities. Insightful as usual, Lombardo notes a possible underside of storytelling, how it can be a selfish imposition of an unwelcome burden on the betrayed spouse.
The lasting damage of adultery, even 25 years later, is achingly portrayed:
He’s not over it. . . . Despite everything that’s been said, everything they’ve agreed not to say; despite their affection for each other, the kindness they’ve shown each other, the salient fact of all the time that’s elapsed, the fact that so much of that time has gone by without either one of them giving it a second thought; despite the dinner parties and the weekends spent making each other laugh while they did tedious projects like cleaning the basement and the nights when they fell asleep together in unflattering pajamas in front of Frasier reruns, despite Alma. Despite all of it, her husband is not over what she did to him, and she can’t blame him for that, because he’s right, he’s always deserved credit; there is no amount of credit she can give him, really, that will match what he’s given her. How long, she wonders, have they been this fragile?
She’d once feared being close to him but now they don’t know how not to be together, even when they want to be apart; this is perhaps different, she sees now, than what she’s always mistaken for intimacy; they have spent so much time, now, in the impenetrable haze of intuition and misunderstanding and willful blindness that is a long marriage, that she can’t remember what it’s like to be anywhere else. . . .
Marriage in the aftermath of an affair: she hadn’t known it was possible to feel so shitty; she could never have predicted that she could physically hurt because she was so sad, or that her own sadness would be secondary to Mark’s. . . . she realized that there was such a thing as hurting someone beyond repair.
Julia and Mark’s marriage survives and even thrives in some ways. Yet all of us in betrayal trauma have learned that an important part of healing is the development of a shared narrative of our lives with our partners, however painful it may be to develop such a shared narrative. That common story is closed off for Mark and Julia, which leaves a lasting loneliness between them in what is otherwise a nourishing and joy-filled marriage.
I highly recommend this novel. Check out the positive review it received in the New York Times.
1 comment posted: Wednesday, July 24th, 2024
"How to Save Your Marriage: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told," by Harrison Scott Key
How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told
Harrison Scott Key
Avid Reader Press (an imprint of Simon & Schuster), 2023
How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told by Harrison Scott Key is a remarkable book about adultery from the perspective of the betrayed spouse. I was not familiar with Key or his previous work until I heard about this book during Jillian Hamilton’s interview with Key on the podcast ‘Cheating: When Love Lies.’ Key’s wife Lauren, with whom he has three daughters, now in their teens, took up with their married neighbor Chad (a pseudonym) and had two extended affairs with him. With scorching transparency Key narrates the first revelation and its patched-up aftermath and then how they navigated the revelation of the recurrence and how they’re working on reconciliation and healing now. Amazingly, Lauren contributes a chapter of her own near the end, where she explores the background and dynamics of her adultery.
Key’s first book, The World’s Largest Man won the Thurber Prize for American Humor, and he brings acerbic and no-holds-barred humor to this book as well. Sometimes the humor feels forced, like mediocre stand-up jokes, but it’s often spot-on. Key bares his soul as he explores his experiences of hurt, anger, love, humiliation, longing and fighting for his wife and his marriage. He is unsparing about his own faults and how his self-absorption, careerism and workaholism contributed to the environment in which Lauren decided to step out on the marriage. He explores the deep background of his own upbringing and Lauren’s as well.
Writing as a committed Christina, Key says the book is about his marriage, yes, but equally about the spiritual and religious journey that shapes how he has navigated the treacherous waters of his wife’s betrayal. As he traces the religious contours of his childhood, his adolescent questioning, his and Lauren’s return to faith and church, he brings caustic wit to his assessment of some forms of church life and portrays movingly the new community church in Savannah, Georgia, that helped support him and Lauren through their trauma. Profanities abound in Key’s language, but his theological insights into the Bible and such major Christian themes as love, humility and forgiveness are profound.
I highly recommend this book. Betrayed spouses will find multiple resonances with their own experience and benefit from Key’s analyses. Betraying spouses will benefit from learning about how a victim of betrayal feels and will find Lauren’s exploration of her experience illuminating. This is a landmark work in adultery literature.
0 comment posted: Tuesday, September 19th, 2023
Notes on Films that Feature Adultery
ADULTERY ON FILM AND TELEVISION: A RANDOM LIST
Why do so many novels and movies focus on adultery? This emphasis is an oblique way of addressing the central human concern with love, the deepest longing of human nature and the deepest source of meaning. People want to focus on the nature of love, the limits of love, the dynamics of love. Adultery is the sharpest and most vivid betrayal of love, so wrestling with adultery becomes a major dramatic terrain for exploring the nature of love. It’s in the contrast with darkness that particular avenues open up for exploring the nature of light.
Love entails faith, in which trust is a major component. Truly loving means keeping faith, fulfilling the trust that another has in oneself. Betraying the beloved violates that trust, that faith. Hence infidelity, a synonym for faithlessness, has become one of the main synonyms for adultery. Adultery recurs in fiction and film as a prime vehicle for the human struggle with what it means to keep faith.
It can be difficult for victims of adultery to view films with adultery, for it can plunge us into replaying how we were victimized. At the same time, viewing others’ drama can relieve the isolation of one's own hurt, activate catharsis and yield helpful insights into the dynamics of betrayal and healing.
Here's an alphabetical listing of films and television series in which adultery plays a major part:
"A Million Little Things," 2018 – Family drama based in friendship among four guys. Sometimes treacly but often good. A major storyline is about an adultery among them that results in a child being conceived and born. Set in Boston.
"A Storm at Christmas," 2022, Netflix – Travelers stuck at Oslo Airport, in Norwegian. Good on various characters and interactions: bartender dying of cancer is reunited with long-lost daughter; lesbian singer repents her imperious treatment of assistant; demanding traveler is transformed by helping in a soup kitchen; young daughter helps her parents to stop arguing; naïve young woman who helps a pilot become less cynical; a woman chaplain along the way hooks up with a traveler; a philandering girlfriend confesses her numerous affairs to boyfriend, who appropriately ends the relationship. Good acting, subtle generally, though maybe trite in how all comes right in the end.
"A Walk on the Moon," 1999 – Excellent. Stars Diane Lane as Pearl, a straying wife in upper New York State in the summer of 1969. Features both the Woodstock Folk Festival and the first moon landing. Liev Schreiber plays Pearl's husband Marty, and Viggo Mortensen plays the affair partner. It’s all quite credible, with the possible exception of the closing reconciliation, which comes without the probing of any mutual discussion.
"Apple Tree Yard," 2017 – Excellent British 4-part series based on the novel of the same name. Emily Watson plays geneticist Dr. Carmichael, who co-starts adultery with wolfish Mark Costly in House of Commons crypt and falls heavily for him with sex in public places. She’s raped by a colleague at an office party, and Costley kills the rapist, substantially at her behest. He’s convicted of manslaughter while she’s let off. Adultery comes out in court, which is hard for her husband. Why didn’t she tell husband about the rape? – "I didn’t want him always to have that in his mind in coming years," in addition of course to her not wanting the adultery to tumble out into the open.
"Both Sides of the Blade," 2022, in French – From Ebert: "No one starts with a clean slate in adulthood. How you deal with this reality says a lot about who you are: how do you make sense of the narrative of your life, how do you fit your own past into your present story? This is the central tension of Claire Denis’ emotionally volatile and unpredictable ‘Both Sides of the Blade,’ with Juliette Binoche and Vincent Lindon giving two tremendous performances as a contented couple whose lives are exploded by a chance encounter in the street, by the past strolling back into the present, re-asserting its primacy with no warning. The past is the ultimate party-crasher." Yes, but with one modification: Sara sees Francois (the former flame) by chance, but he was intending to contact Jean (her husband) and did so to propose a new business venture and, I suspect, to try to win Sara back, so it was not simply by chance. Justin Chang on NPR: "The title of ‘Both Sides of the Blade’ evokes the age-old question of whether a person can love two people at the same time. And Binoche, so good at revealing complex, contradictory emotions, shows us a woman torn between a partner she adores and an ex she can’t forget." New Yorker: ". . . an update of the classic romantic triangle, which Denis inscribes on a much more elaborate geometry of politics, history, geography, memory, and mores." Oddly, this reviewer says the film depicts the obstacles to a woman’s freedom, but the opposite is the case: Sara has total freedom and she simply misuses it by adulterizing with Francois and then lying to Jean, gaslighting him and trying to convince him that she wants their quasi-marriage to continue, when in reality she’s pledged her love to Francois and had sex with him. As is common, she wants the safety of the good guy but is excited by the danger of the bad guy. In the end she loses both Jean, who rightly is fed up and walks out, and Francois, who can’t reach her because she let her phone fall into the bathtub, probably in order to prevent discovery of her texts with him. So she brought on herself the aloneness that her behavior deserved.
"Dark Desire," 2020-22, Mexican series – Wife of judge goes out partying with a friend, hooks up with a guy, and the friend is murdered. Murder is the mystery throughout. Husband turns out to have been adulterizing with the murdered friend. Hookup guy is the son of a wrongfully accused and convicted man who shot himself in custody, so son’s hookup with the judge’s wife and then their daughter is revenge. A steamy, vivid illustration of the results of adultery.
"Deep Water," 2022 – Film starring Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas: long, torpid, ultimately uninteresting! But long awaited by critics because it was the first film by director Adrian Lyne since his "Unfaithful" in 2002, which is outstanding. In this film the wife is a promiscuous cheater, while the husband tolerates it superficially but in reality is killing off the affair partners. Evidently in the novel original they had agreed on an open marriage, but not in the film. The film is a waste of time, largely because the husband’s emotional passivity with his wife and her behavior is simply not credible. Yes, he’s active in killing off the partners, a displacement of his reaction to his wife’s behavior, but it still doesn’t hold up.
"Drive My Car," 2021 – Based on Haruki Murakami's short story of the same name, the movie won the Academy award for best picture. It focuses chiefly on a man’s wrestling with his wife’s infidelity. In this case she has multiple affairs with men from her TV screenwriting life, though we are witness to just one of them. When the husband comes home from a canceled flight to his wife having sex with a young actor on their couch, he quietly closes the door and leaves, which turns out to have been a longstanding pattern. Obviously, that’s a very self-destructive response. Very long movie that captures attention in the moment, but over time it has little staying power, maybe because his extremely passive response strains credulity.
"Faithfully Yours," 2022 – Two married women friends, apparently happily married, go off on an adulterizing weekend, but when it ends in catastrophe the husbands end up getting blamed! It’s a classic 21st-century expression of feminist entitlement, but it’s also a mediocre film.
"Fatal Affair," 2020 – All African American characters. Woman lawyer has dalliance with old flame who turns out to be psychopath, so there’s violence along the way. Her betrayed architect husband has the memorable line: "I can’t say I’m not angry. I can’t say I’m not hurt. But I say again, I need you because you’re what makes my world make sense." Resonates with how men forgive adultery more than women do, at least in terms of staying in the relationship.
"God Forbid: The Sex Scandal that Brought Down a Dynasty," 2022 – CNN documentary about Jerry Falwell, Jr., and wife Becki Tilley – of Moral Majority and Liberty University – who together had a years-long affair with 20-year-old Giancarlo Granda. Strikingly blatant and perverse behavior by prominent Christian couple. Interesting for adulterous initiative taken by Becki, with Jerry part of the threesome as he often watched the trysts.
"Infidelity," 2004 – A woman family therapist’s adultery with male musician in New Orleans, recapitulating the pattern of her father’s infidelity. Longsuffering husband finally discovers the truth, leaves, but returns and reconciles. Questionable pregnancy appears as well. Grade B movie, but interesting.
"Intimacy," 2022 – Eight-part Spanish series about two women: the married woman vice mayor of Bilbao who has a reckless affair and is filmed having sex with her affair partner on a beach, the video then going public; and a woman factory worker whose filmed participation in a sex tape goes public. Series is about privacy violations of women. But its advocacy is weakened by the fact that promiscuity is the underlying reality, especially since the politician, Malen, stubbornly refuses to apologize, even to her husband. "Men have done this for ages," goes the argument – yes, of course, but the answer should not be that women should likewise misbehave with impunity! Series is mistitled, for its subject is not intimacy but the considerable costs of infidelity and promiscuity.
"Lady Chatterley’s Lover," 2022 – Movie version of D. H. Lawrence’s famous 1928 novel. Tremendous acting by Emma Corrin, who played Princess Diana in Season 4 of "The Crown," and Jack O’Donnell. Amid tremendous sexual tension and beautiful sex, it depicts the lying and deception inherent in adultery. Of course, the husband is depicted as cold and mean, a standard trope designed to justify women’s adultery. Movie version’s happily-ever-after ending differs from Lawrence’s more ambiguous ending. Reviewed positively by critics.
"Love and Death," 2023, 4 episodes – True story of Candy Montgomery and Allan Gore’s mutual adultery as Methodists in Wyllie, Texas, in 1980, which ended with his wife coming at Candy with an axe and Candy killing her in self-defense with the axe, a defense that a jury affirmed in acquitting her of murder. The feelings expressed by the adulterers, especially Gore, were significant and interesting: very much as one would imagine how basically okay people might discuss, decide and ruminate over their adultery. Interesting feature: Both couples went to Marriage Encounter, which prompted Gore to end the affair.
"Loving Adults," 2022, Danish – Middle-aged Leonora discovers husband Christian is having an affair with young construction engineer colleague, so threatens him with disclosure of their company’s unrelated financial fraud on behalf of their disabled son. To eliminate the threat, he tries to kill his wife but runs down another unrelated woman instead. Turns out his wife Leonora, while a teenager, had killed a boyfriend who cheated on her. So now she masterminds killing the affair partner. And they get away with it! Says frustrated detective, "Love destroys" as well as fulfills. As so often is the case, adultery lies at the root.
"Mammals, 2022, 6-part series – British dark comedy about marriage and adultery. Chef Jamie’s French wife Amandine is found to be having sex with several men. Jamie’s devastation is portrayed very well, drawing the viewer’s empathy. But he resorts to sleuthing and then confronting the men rather than his confronting his wife, until midway through the series, when he does so publicly! In the last moments of the series it turns out that she started her adultery because she’d seen him having sex with another woman, but, similarly, she’d never confronted him about it. Instead, she embarked on revenge affairs. Revenge adultery is not uncommon, but it usually occurs after the original adultery is confronted.
"Marriage Story," 2019 – Ebert: "Divorce is described in Noah Baumbach’s masterful ‘Marriage Story’ as like a death without a body. Something has been lost. There is grieving, anger, denial. In his personal and moving story, Baumbach captures the insidious nature of divorce, how two well-meaning people who still care about each other will do things they would never think they would do." Adam Driver and Scarlet Johannsson are remarkable. From NYT: "It’s funny and sad, sometimes within a single scene, and it weaves a plot out of the messy collapse of a shared reality, trying to make music out of disharmony. The melody is full of heartbreak, loss and regret, but the song is too beautiful to be entirely melancholy. The most painful parts of ‘Marriage Story’ act out that revisionism, as idiosyncrasies are made to look pathological and mistakes are treated as potential crimes. The German social critic Theodor W. Adorno wrote that ‘divorce, even between good-natured, amiable, educated people, is apt to stir up a dust-cloud that covers and discolors all it touches,’ an insight that Baumbach illustrates with vivid precision. He shows how ‘the sphere of intimacy’ (to continue with Adorno) ‘is transformed into a malignant poison as soon as the relationship in which it flourished is broken off.’" Driver’s character is revealed to have had an affair, but adultery is not the primary focus of the movie.
"My Sordid Affair," 2017 – Six-episode TV series, each fairly short episode highlighting a separate instance of adultery, mostly by women. For instance, in one episode a mother gets involved with her son's guitar instructor. In another, a women does adultery with the guy who's teaching her photography class. In all instances, the adulterer's world comes crashing down, so the series seems designed to warn viewers off having affairs. Grade B, but reasonably good. About the title: Actually all affairs are sordid for they involve betrayal, secrecy, sneaking around and abuse of an intimate relationship, so the title is instructive!
"Outlander" – This multi-season 2016 period-time-travel drama between 1945 England and 1743 Scotland is quite something with Catriona Balfe as Claire and Sam Heugan as Jamie: wartime between clans and Redcoats, remarkably moving sex and personality encounters. Reviewed well by New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum as one of the best dramas on TV when it started in 2016. But: "Outlander" is partly a female fantasy of adultery that’s conscience-free because while Claire’s trapped in the 18th century, she gets to have her daughter in the liberated 20th century, then go back to Jamie in the 18th century after her boring husband Frank dies in an auto crash in the 20th century – conscience-free.
"Overspel," 2011-15 – Dutch TV series in 3 seasons. Married photographer Iris and married lawyer Willem embark on adultery, with lots of personal and family ramifications. He lawyers for a shady real estate family that her husband is pursuing as a state prosecutor, so lots of complications ensue. Very well done, with emotional costs fully explored. Overspel means adultery in Dutch, but the English title is "The Adulterer," which is misleading, for the two principal characters are, obviously, equally adulterous. The American remake was titled "Betrayal."
"Scenes from a Marriage," 2021 – Remake of Ingmar Bergman’s 1973 "Scenes from a Marriage," which starred Liv Ullman and Erland Josephson, Bergman’s beginning is very stilted, but much of the rest of it is compelling – after his adultery revelation, Marianne is cringingly willing to humiliate herself for the sake of love in the early days, and she grows only gradually in being able to name the dynamics. The remake’s characters, played by Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain, are more nuanced, not so stereotypically arrogant (Jonathan now vs. original’s Johann) or deferential (Mira now vs. original’s Marianne). Now, though, the roles are reversed – it’s the wife, not the husband, who abruptly leaves for an affair, a nod to the contemporary reality that the frequency of adultery among men and women now is about the same. First episode includes contemporary dynamics of open marriage, lesbian experimentation and abortion. That episode ends with Mira choosing abortion. The viewer might conclude it’s because she suspects or knows that the child’s father is her affair partner, whereas her husband does not yet know of her adultery, but it later seemed that it was because she thought a second child would make it harder for her to leave the marriage. 4th episode is the most wrenching – in the house waiting for the movers – and the most erotic. In the final episode they’re still trysting four years later, despite he having remarried, but it’s a relational wilderness: she feels traumatized by her own abandonment, while he’s gotten married and has a child but still has affairs, partly because his wife doesn’t want sex, and he senses that the marriage marriage won’t last. He recognizes his moral vacuity but doesn’t care.
"The Americans," 2012-18 – Excellent long-form series about undercover Soviet spies in 1980s Falls Church, Virginia, starring Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys with two children. Lots of horrifying violence and manipulative sex that illustrate callousness of high-level spy operatives. Interestingly, Elizabeth turns out to be the more vicious and ideologically committed operative while Philip becomes increasingly skeptical of their work, though even she gives in to her doubts at the end. FBI agent Stan’s role across the street is major, though his letting them get away in the end is not credible. Ultimately they lose both their children to staying in USA as they have to return to USSR to escape capture. Toward the end Elizabeth has to admit to her daughter that she’s been using sex to entrap people, and she devalues the significance of sexuality altogether – that is the price of promiscuity. Excellent acting by all.
"The Bridges of Madison County," 1995 – Famous film starring Meryl Streep as Italian immigrant Iowa housewife Francesca and her 4-day affair with National Geographic photographer Clint Eastwood. Erotic and romantic, with the marriage and husband depicted, of course, as drab! Its rapturous reception indicates the film was and remains many women’s wet dream, which is a bit pathetic. Housewife realistically decides to stay in her marriage, but infidelity author Shirley Glass points out that her cherishing her memory of the affair in secret until her death undercuts her purported lifelong commitment to her husband. Disclosure and analysis are crucial to any authentic healing after adultery. A betrayed spouse deserves to know the truth about the marriage he/she is in.
"The Descendants," 2011 – Set in Hawaii. A boating mishap puts lawyer Matthew King’s (George Clooney) wife Elizabeth in a coma. From their teenage daughter Alexandra he finds out she’d been doing adultery with an unknown guy, which is confirmed by ‘best friends’ who had concealed it from him. With Alex’s help Matt tracks down and confronts her affair partner Brian Speer, who’s then found out by his wife Julie. It’s all about the spreading trauma that adultery causes. Based on the novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings, it was nominated for 5 Oscars.
"The Duchess of Duke Street," 1976, BBC/PBS – Initially entertaining about a lower-class young British woman who makes it as a chef to the upper classes. But then there’s a wretched episode about an artist woman up in London who adulteries with a politician cad, falling for his flattery, and declares her love for him while her husband ails back at their country home. The B&B household cheers her on and sympathizes as she plays the victim when it all comes tumbling down. It recalls Esther Perel’s comment in Mating in Captivity about how female sexuality tends to center on being adored.
"The Eyes of Tammy Faye," 2021– Excellent movie about televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, their rise and fall amid financial and sexual scandals. Jessica Chastain’s portrayal is luminous, stunning and skillful, well deserving her 2022 Best Actress Oscar. It’s striking about how both of them fell into adultery, she with PTL’s music producer, he in a threesome and then also with gay men. Chastain’s singing is terrific and Tammy’s spirituality comes across as more authentic than Jim’s. As in the documentary about Jerry Falwell, Jr., and his wife – "God Forbid," noted above, it's a good portrayal of Christian leaders’ descent into adultery.
"The Fabelmans," 2022 – By Steven Spielberg. One review implied that his boyhood filmmaking obsession is center stage, with the adultery of his mother, played by Michelle Williams, vaguely alluded to on the side. Instead, the adultery is center stage, while the filmmaking is a strong accompanying theme. Clearly the trauma of adultery is the central energy, for at age 75 Spielberg makes a memoir film in which he’s working out the trauma of his mother’s adultery.
"The Lost Daughter," 2021– Stars Olivia Colman as Harvard academic Leda on vacation in Greece, where childcare and adultery tribulations of a Queens vacationing family evoke wistful and regretful memories of her own motherhood struggle, adultery and abandoning her husband and two young daughters. Lots about the struggles of motherhood. Altogether about aging reassessment of one’s life, triggered by whatever. Leda is not idealized but cast actually as an unpleasant character and an "unnatural mother" who nevertheless elicits our empathy for her struggles with her weakness and malevolence.
"The Morning Show," seasons 1 & 2, 2019 & 2021 – The entire show is premised on adultery. Mitch Kesslery, played by Steve Carell, is a married TV morning show host who turns out to have had multiple affairs with network women, so is then divorced by his wife. Jennifer Anniston, playing Alex Levy, is the married TV star who turns out to be one of those women. Bradley Jackson, played by Reese Witherspoon, is the young brash West Virginian who helps bring it all crashing down, but then has sexual intrigues of her own. Billy Crudup plays Cory Ellison, the top executive who tries to manage all the vicissitudes, both personal and corporate. Well done, with some subtle explorations of feminism.
"The Split," 2018, 2020, 2022 seasons – Very good BBC series about adultery and divorce in British divorce law family firm. Nicola Walker plays Hannah who cheats with her law school chum Christie. Various adulteries arise, but the drama among Hanna, Christie and her husband is central.
"The Worst Person in the World," 2021 – Well-reviewed Norwegian film about a young ambivalent woman in Oslo who struggles with love and vocation. Actress is winsomely attractive, but her character is so callous in cheating on the two love interests that it’s ultimately uninteresting and somewhat repellant. Vocationally she ends up being a still photographer for actors in TV series – that's fulfilling? How would this play if the protagonist were a man? – probably not so well in the popular imagination, demonstrating the extra mile given today to women in all matters relational and adulterous.
"The Worst Year of My Life, 2015 – A comedic drama about a down-on-his-luck romantic named Kyle who, one week before proposing to his girlfriend, discovers that she’s been having sex with another man – and later that she’s a financial cheat as well. Lots of intersplicing with a deadpan insightful young woman therapist as he deals with his anger, hurt, obsession, desire to reconcile and, at times, addiction to the pain. He finally gets free of his former fiancé and is able to form a new relationship.
"This Is Where I Leave You," 2014 – Very clever family drama with lots of humor, but also lots of pathos: Judd, played very well by Jason Bateman, comes home to his wife having sex with his boss, then hears that his Jewish patriarch father has died, so goes to his family to sit shiva, reconnects briefly with an old flame (Rose Byrne), while siblings (including Adam Driver) and mother (Jane Fonda) all have their own dramas. Movie version of the novel of the same name by Jonathan Tropper. The movie’s very good, yet the novel is even better.
"Truth and Lies: Monica and Bill," 2019 – Documentary about the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, with lots of footage from the time and interviews with journalists and others. Good. Especially stunning is the recklessness with which Clinton pursued adulterous relationships – Lewinsky obviously, but also Jennifer Flowers and Paula Jones. But, of course, adultery is always reckless – people not reckoning the risk and pain.
"Two Lovers," 2009 – Joaquin Phoenix plays bipolar 30s Jewish Leonard living at home, slated to marry daughter of parents’ business partner but then is infatuated with neighbor Gwyneth Paltrow, who is a lawyer’s mistress. He beds both of them. In the end, Gwyneth returns to her sugar daddy and Leonard decides to be content with the fiancé.
"Under a Tuscan Sun," 2003 – Diane Lane in a flimsy, flip and shallow film about a woman who moves to Italy after her husband cheats on her. Interesting that Lane’s two excellent adultery roles – "Walk on the Moon" and "Unfaithful" – were issued in 1999 and 2002, so this was a semi-comedic comedown the next year.
"Unfaithful," 2002 – Perhaps the best adultery movie, it stars Diane Lane and Richard Gere as a married couple in Westchester County with a young son. He commutes to NYC, and she’s a homemaker busy in community life. Couple was happy: in contrast to many depictions of female adultery, there is nothing about the marriage being unsatisfactory in any way; her husband was loving and attentive. Nevertheless, Connie flings herself into a fling with a French Manhattan bookseller because she wants to: it’s exotic, exciting, sexually rapturous. An older woman friend’s warning about adultery always ending badly was impressive. Couple being genuinely loving, though traumatized, in the wake of the affair was credible. Film’s ending is appropriately ambiguous: coincidentally stopping in front of a police station does not imply Gere was going to turn himself in for murder at that moment, only that the threat of law enforcement would always hang over them regardless of what they do. Reviewed positively by the critics.
7 comments posted: Wednesday, September 6th, 2023
Book: Cheating in a Nutshell: What Infidelity Does to the Victim
Book Review
Cheating in a Nutshell: What Infidelity Does to the Victim
I recommend to readers the book Cheating in a Nutshell: What Infidelity Does to the Victim, published in September 2019. It’s written by an advice columnist couple, Tamara and Wayne Mitchell, on the basis of 3,000 letters they’ve received. They’re not professional psychologists, but they’ve done an impressive amount of psychological and sociological research. They have an overly pessimistic view of the viability of a betrayed staying with a betrayer, but they say some things that, from my experience, I think are true:
– Infidelity marks an indelible before and after in a marriage.
– Most memories fade, but trauma memories are unique in not fading.
– Staying with a betrayer is biologically as well as emotionally counter-intuitive.
– DAST is the natural reaction to betrayal: Disgust, Anger, Suspicion, Trauma.
– Reports of post-betrayal marriage improvement are probably false or exaggerated.
Among many sobering and sometimes devastating resonances I find in Cheating in a Nutshell is this: 80% of relationships where cheating occurs end – relationships, not marriages. So, yes, while research suggests that only 30% of marriages end after cheating, when cheating occurs while unmarried people are ‘dating’ or in a ‘longterm relationship’ or ‘living together’ – well, they do the obvious: end the relationship.
Cheating in a Nutshell is a tough and well-researched book that counsels victims of cheating to leave those relationships because they will never recover. The authors’ arguments are well made and powerful. However, while they uncover lots of important truths along the way, they don’t have the whole truth. There are just too many of us who have made a go of it after suffering adultery. But the book does reaffirm the hard lines of some truths: Adultery is abuse. A marriage will never be the same. Trust can never be rebuilt entirely. The reactions that many betrayed spouses feel are not the result of personality peculiarities but are built into the human organism biologically.
Here are some particular insights:
– Degrees of trauma correlate with sources: Trauma from natural disasters like earthquake, fire, flood, heart attacks. Trauma from inadvertent human action, like many car collisions. Trauma from deliberate human action, like assault, murder, workplace intrigue. But trauma from deliberate human action by an intimate, by someone whom you have let into your inner sanctum of intimacy, is the most severe and searing – here is where adultery fits. It’s why in virtually all societies divorce is accepted for adultery.
– Trauma treatment typically includes removing victim from the scene and assuring the victim that they are no longer in that situation despite the dreams, flashbacks and so on. But when an adultery victim stays in the marriage they are staying at the scene of the crime and staying with the perpetrator of the crime. So it’s no wonder that staying in the marriage is not only difficult but that the flashbacks, the replaying, and the struggle with relationship continue indefinitely.
– Lying: ‘A lie is an assumption of power over another. A lie is an assault that attacks not only the dignity of the other person but also their physical and mental wellbeing. A lie steals power from the one deceived. It reduces their alternatives. It causes the betrayed person to act as they never would have acted had they known the truth. A liar deliberately feeds inaccurate information, and when there are children, the lies reverberate in their lives as well. As ethicist Sissela Bok says, ‘The greater the actual gap between role and reality, the more constant the need for concealment.’ The more the concealment and the longer the concealment, the greater the damage. . . . Infidelity wounds because it is an attack from the human being with the highest level of access to our private, personal, intimate information. No one else possesses that kind of knowledge or that kind of power.’
– The authors deconstruct forgiveness as commonly understood as saying, ‘People who do bad things always get to win.’ And: ‘I gave as a victim, and now you are telling me to give again. That puts me in a way to be victimized a second time.’ Yes, give up the resentment, but also exit the relationship, otherwise your cheating alarm will always be on. And: ‘More forgiving spouses experience a constant level of psychological and physical aggression from their partner. Less forgiving spouses saw aggression from their partner decline over time.’
– ‘How people manage to stay, and the likely answer is through cognitive distortion. People often stay with a cheater by kidding themselves about their own and his or her motives. They also stay by trying to accommodate to the pain they feel and making it the new normal.’
As a betrayed spouse, I’m committed to healing and reconciling in my marriage, and my wife and I have made a lot of progress. Cheating in a Nutshell argues otherwise, and I disagree with the authors’ pessimistic conclusion. Nevertheless their insights are helpful for us betrayed spouses to keep in mind.
80 comments posted: Monday, August 31st, 2020
Movie recommendation: 'Unfaithful'
The movie 'Unfaithful' is one that I find very helpful as a BS because it helps me understand the dynamics of how an affair can begin amid a basically good & happy marriage. Diane Lane does a remarkably transparent & revealing job of portraying a suburban woman who starts an affair with a French bookseller in the city. She was nominated for Best Actress for this in the 2003 Academy Awards. The situation parallels my own: we likewise lived in the suburbs; my wife likewise had her affair in the city; the affair partner was likewise a foreigner. I found Richard Gere's portrayal as a BH helpful to me, for he portrays movingly how I have felt at many points. Yes, the movie also triggers stuff for me, but I find that the insights are worth whatever triggering happens. It was on HBO last night & I watched it for the 3rd time while on a business trip. I'm going to try to get my fWW to watch it, for it could prompt some self-understanding, in addition to helping her see the depth of the pain she caused. And FYI: This movie is very far from glorifying or glamorizing adultery. Diane Lane's character alternates between reckless abandon & paroxysms of guilt & resolutions to break it off. One of her female friends happens to drop in a conversation that affairs never end well & she concludes by saying that the affair she had is 'the one thing I will regret as long as I live.'
7 comments posted: Monday, February 27th, 2017
