The statistics…. It’s an area that I delved into heavily post DDay.
When we look at statistics, what we are looking for is a prognosis for the future so that we can make an informed decision on how to spend our most precious resources. Unfortunately, I don’t believe that there are statistics that can answer this question for any of us.
Key questions we may need to ask ourselves when making this assessment are:
1.) The “level” of the affair.
2.) The “investment” in the marriage now from the wayward spouse.
3.) The “fear of missing out” (FOMO) for either R or D
4.) The possible return on the investment of pain and heartache for either option.
The “level” of the affair is what most of those statics miss. A ONS while intoxicated is a tremendous breach of trust and possibly a dealbreaker for many. An LTA is a different story. With an LTA you are dealing with months or years of missing history in your own world. If there were multiple Aps perhaps that is also a different story.
You also have levels of depravity – i.e. were you in a dead bedroom, starving for attention, affection, validation or support from your spouse while someone else was getting those aspects of a relationship you valued. Did the wayward use your home, your finances, your children or anything you hold dear in their secret fantasy land? Did they make fun of you to their AP? Was the AP someone you both knew? Was the wayward spouse unkind in very substantive ways?
The statistics that I reviewed, obsessively, did not account for those differences in the level of an affair to a substantive degree. Any statistic on that end would likely be flawed because there is no way to gather that data other than to self report… and someone in an LTA or with multiple Aps would likely not self report those aspects of an affair.
The next thing that these studies/statistics cannot account for is an accurate gauge of how much the wayward is invested in the marriage after the affair. How could a study accurately gauge this when we are unable to do so? I can tell you, when I tried to reconcile the marriage I needed some tangible measure of knowing that my WW was interested in reconciling. I got that part of it, but her heart – truly – was not in it. Her investment was not in “me” but in our “family” and the life we shared. It was difficult to see those things as separate concepts at first. Any study that tried to qualtify these things would likely never survive peer review – the data would be dependent on self reporting and that, as we know, is not viable in this realm.
The FOMO aspect is perhaps the thing we are REALLY dealing with when we look at statistics here. Think about it like cancer. Imagine your doctor says you have cancer and you have to make a choice on a course of treatment. The doctor says that one course has a 10% survival rate, but that you will not suffer long term health implications, and another course has a 40% survival rate, but there are long term health implications… and only you can make the choice. There is no right answer, but I guarantee what you will ruminate on is the FOMO no matter which course you choose. (If you’re like me anyway.). R is a choice that comes with HORRIBLE side effects, but, on the balance, MIGHT be better than divorce depending on what you believe is important in your life. This might be children, finances, home, lifestyle, friendships, relationships with other people… if you lose the marriage then things will be impacted in those areas, so, on the balance, R might be the better deal to you (hence the ‘wait six months’ trope). But, it becomes circular when you bring statistics into this… you’re looking for confirmation bias to affirm you made the right choice to try R. If you go to D, then you look at statistics for R and sometimes regret your decision because of all you lost in the D (or at least some do, I think). Statistics here really only are used as confirmation bias when you start to go down the line on either option. The issue is that without taking level and commitment to fixing marriage into account, the statistics are particularly useless and lead to a more acute feeling of FOMO through the time period after making the decision…. “oh, if only I had stuck it out I would have been Red and it would have been amazing… like 10% of the people reporting for this survey.” “Oh, if only I had divorced I would be happy when I am not stuck in a ‘meh’ marriage and the kids are almost grown up.”
The FOMO angle is us trying to use statistics to be comfortable with the decision our heads already made, and sometimes kicking ourselves for the path we think we should have chosen. We should all give ourselves grace to think that we made the best decision with the information we had at the time. R might have been a nightmare with the level and commitment factors we observed. D might have been the wrong decision as we miss our partners.
When these surveys come out, the people that take them are likely looking to either justify the path they chose or the feel guilty about the path they chose. I think it’s nearly impossible to get to the root of such a complicated feeling with a questionnaire.
Then there’s the ROI for either course. This goes back into FOMO, to an extent, but when answering these questions I think that we all want to believe we came out “on top.” This could be the reporting of “I am happy with my divorce” or “I am glad I tried R and it worked after a long time.” It’s, again, likely a bit of confirmation bias in the survey response that there is no accurate measure for.
I’ll be brutally honest here with my own situation and how I navigated it. Statistics played a large part in how I looked at it, but I used them differently.
The backstory is that my WW had two LTAs that spanned years each. I suspected more. I desperately wanted to reconcile, even before DDay, because I valued my family more than anything else in the world. I said that I would give it a shot and gave non-negotable conditions to reconcile. I also offered R way, way too soon, because I was sure of my course. The conditions were:
1.) Cut all contact with AP. (I did eventually allow her to call him to have ‘closure’ without violating this tenant.)
2.) Agree to take a polygraph test.
3.) Post nuptial agreement – one that was fair and would have been how it would have turned out anyway in a divorce case. I wanted to make sure she knew I would not fight her on it and she could leave without worrying I would destroy her in court. I wanted to know she was “here” and with me because she actually wanted to be… that was important.
4.) A physical manifestation of her commitment to the marriage.
The terms of this were a logical attempt to gauge the feelings of a person skilled for more than a decade in hiding them.
After six months of trying to R, I found out that she was in contact with her last AP still. I gave her an ultimatum and she crossed the line. That meant I had to follow through with the promise I made her.
At the same time as I found that out, she refused to take the polygraph test. This was a physical manifestation that showed me I did not know what was going on inside her head, and that she did not have feelings for me.
I filed for divorce shortly thereafter.
The statistics that I used were not those ones reported on Google, but rather the statistics in my own marriage that mattered to me.
Could she have “loved” me when she was in an affair? No. What was the statistical relevance for me?
At first, I believed she had been having physical affairs for roughly 20% of our marriage. Well, I can work with that. Then, after a few months, I learned that it was more like 40% of the marriage. I tried to work with that because that was at least less than half. Then, I started to think… well, for at least 80% of the marriage she had been lying to me. I get why, but that’s rough. Finally, when she had contact with AP and refused the polygraph, I had to assume there was more and that likely pushed in infidelity past a statistic where I thought she could remotely have feelings for me. Statistically, there was no way I could continue. What I concluded is that she was in our marriage because she couldn’t figure out a way to get out of it.
And yet, even when I filed, I thought maybe that might change sometime. It did not. She went back to her last AP, and now has moved onto another man. Call divorce an experiment with hard data behind it that is relevant to you. How does the wayward act if you move for it? Does he or she run back to the AP? Well, then maybe that’s the answer. Watch what he or she does after divorce if you need assurance… if they start hopping around then you can rest assured that they really, really didn’t “love” you in the same way you “loved” them. It’s one of those hard evidence things.
There was a story I read that broke my heart. A young couple got married and the wife cheated. The husband divorced and remarried. The WW never remarried, never had boyfriends and waited hoping the BH would come back. She was dying of cancer and only wanted one more day with him before she passed. It really, truly, broke my heart. Honestly, I think that story, if true, encapsulates what love is even after an affair backed up by hard data through time.
Mostly though, I think that the wayward is more concerned about the optics of the situation and the practical repercussions. And, if you divorce, you will see this as the wayward mourning, and then moving on. They may create a better relationship with someone else, but it’s probably not the undying love that we all wish we had.
So, this is a long way of saying this: Choose the statistics that matter for you and define your decision by those statistics. You can’t rely on what other people did before you because the data is unreliable.
