TATIANA: Hello everyone, and welcome to the Sex, Love and Superpowers Podcast. I’m your host, Tatiana Berindei, and today I am here with CJ Grace, and we’re going to be talking about why infidelity in marriage happens, advice from the Adulterer’s Wife. CJ is the author of Adulterer’s Wife: How to Thrive Whether You Stay or Not, and she’s currently completing her next book, Hotel Chemo: Learning to Laugh Through Breast Cancer and Infidelity. CJ dealt with the double whammy of both discovering her husband’s infidelity and later being diagnosed with breast cancer by refusing to be a victim and keeping her wicked sense of humor. She was a BBC staff journalist in the UK and then worked for China Radio International in Beijing. Arianna Huffington personally invited CJ to blog for Huffington Post after receiving a copy of Adulterer’s Wife. CJ writes an infidelity advice column on her website, in association with DivorceForce.com. Her mantra, the best revenge is to get past the need for it. Welcome, C.J., to the show today. We’re really excited to have you. We’re gonna dive right in here, I’m gonna ask you what are your superpowers?

CJ: Well, I have some superpowers that I think are both ordinary and extraordinary. The first one is to be able to connect with people from all backgrounds and resonate with their stories. I think in some ways this is related to the listening power that you, Tatiana, developed during ceremonies when you were sitting in with others from all kinds of indigenous cultures. I’ve been sitting in with ordinary people hearing their stories and feeling a real connection with what they have to say. That’s the first superpower. The second one is to notice the absurd humor in life and make folks laugh. Because I am British, I come from a culture of Monty Python. I just see the absurdity even in dreadful situations as they happen to me, as they happen to others. Life is absurd, in a way, it’s a cosmic joke.  And if you don’t laugh you’re gonna cry, so why not laugh? That’s the second superpower. The third one, which I think is really important in today’s polarized world, is to be able to see nuance, shades of gray. There’s so much demonizing of people or making people into heroes when, really, we’re all just ordinary folks with various flaws. In some ways, everybody is very special and everybody is very ordinary. But there’s always nuance. There’s never just one side to a story. So those are the capacities that I have that I think are my superpowers.

TATIANA: I love it. And humor is such a vastly important medicine, really. I think it’s an undervalued one.

CJ: Absolutely. Even in the Indian tradition, they have laughter yoga, which is supposed to be very beneficial. I don’t need to go to laughter yoga classes to laugh. I can watch funny movies. I can hang out with friends that make me laugh. I can just see the absurdity. That’s what works for me.

TATIANA: Yeah, and it’s such a gift really, especially someone who has been through some really tremendous trials in life, to be able to laugh through it. I learned that, too, from some of my elders who I’ve studied with. They have an incredible capacity to hold a space for joy. You know, people you think shouldn’t necessarily be joyful because of what they’ve been through in their lives, I think it really helps us to get through some of the hardest things in life, to be able to find the joy and humor in it.

CJ: Absolutely, because real happiness is in your head. It’s not really outside. You can have two people going to the same situation, going to a party. One person’s really depressed. They’ve just lost their job. They’re not happy with their wife, or whatever it is. They go to the party. They’re depressed. They really don’t like it. It’s a dreary event for them. Somebody who’s really feeling up, who’s a joyful person, maybe they’ve just had their book accepted by a great publisher, whatever it is. They go to that party and they’re really in a good mood. They engage with people. They have fun. So these two people have gone to the same event and they’ve got a completely different reality of what it was like.

TATIANA: Yeah, and I love what you said, too, about being able to find the nuance, the shades of gray, because we are in such a polarized time right now and we are all just humans and we make mistakes and some of us are shining our brilliance a little bit more than others, but we’re all kind of … I think we could use a little bit more of that being willing to listen to one another. I’m assuming that that ability to see nuance really comes from that gift you have to deeply listen to people’s stories.

CJ: That’s true. It comes from being able to listen rather than have a bag of anecdotes that you really have to bring out and tell somebody. You’re just waiting for them to finish their anecdote so you can bring out yours. That’s not a conversation. That’s not listening. And that happens so much, I find, in conversations with people. They’re competing to have the best story, the best anecdote, rather than listening to what the other person is saying.

TATIANA: Absolutely. I would love to hear from you how these superpowers of yours influenced your journey through discovering your husband’s infidelity and, especially humor. If someone is listening to this because they’re curious about why infidelity in marriage happens, how do you bring humor into a situation that seems so painful emotionally?

CJ: In some ways, I found I was laughing at myself because your initial reaction is almost like a stereotype of the wronged wife. And I hated that. You’re either going to be the jealous harpy who probably deserved it because she’s such a nasty person or you’re going to be that poor doormat who was just trodden upon and treated so badly. I didn’t want either of those roles. And you do find yourself slipping into that when you’re dealing with an unfaithful partner.

So I found myself almost laughing at myself at the stereotype thoughts that were coming in. The standard thing is to absolutely loathe the mistress and to feel it’s all her fault because you want to somehow work out a way to get back to where you were before and maybe reconcile with your husband and therefore, you have to put all the blame on the mistress. It’s all her fault. Prizing away this hapless guy who just couldn’t help it but be drawn into her web. Well, she isn’t the one who has done a marriage vow with you. She’s not the one who you’ve tried to build a life with. You don’t really know anything about her. She’s just the person that your husband has chosen, and it is a choice, to have a relationship with. The other thing that I found in terms of being able to see nuance: I really didn’t want to be demonizing either my husband or his mistress, because they weren’t demons. I wouldn’t say they were absolutely perfect, flawless people, but they absolutely were not demons.

And the amount of demonization I got just from talking to my friends who would come out with all this stuff about how dreadful my husband was, so how could I put up with it? How awful the woman was, she must have a very bad character and all this kind of stuff. It’s not true. These things happen and I used this as an opportunity to look into why infidelity happens. Sometimes it’s the dynamic between you. Sometimes it’s because things just aren’t right and people go and search outside the marriage for sexual fulfillment or whatever it is. Sometimes it’s just opportunity. It’s different for every person. There’s really no one size answer to why infidelity happens, but there are a lot of reasons and they’re not always the cheater’s fault. Sometimes it’s more the cheater’s fault. Sometimes is equal. Sometimes it’s more the person who’s been cheated upon. But even then, putting the blame upon it doesn’t help you get over it. The best thing to do is to let go of the blame and move on, using the situation as a catalyst to decide how to make the rest of your life more fulfilling, with or without your partner. You’ll find you’re going to be a more complete person as a result rather than just being in some ways the appendage of your partner.

TATIANA: I think that piece about blame is so key and so hugely important because it’s true: we either fall into “it’s their fault” or “it’s my fault.” I’m a real big advocate for taking personal responsibility and that is very different from blaming oneself. For me, if I’m in a tricky situation, I look at where the places are where I contributed and whether or not it was my fault, whether it was an energetic piece that I was absent on or if there’s a place where I maybe was no longer being my fullest self or what have you. I think that’s a key thing to distinguish between blame and personal responsibility and being able to rise above the whole thing and see the whole picture for really what it is.

CJ: Yes, that’s true. And in some ways, even if you have done something that you could blame yourself for, some major error that really is an error, what is the point of beating yourself up over it. It’s like you’ve given yourself a bad knee and all you’re doing is bashing yourself on that knee. That’s not how you get rid of it. Or if you feel that your husband has treated you badly, or your wife has treated you badly and you churn that in your mind, it’s like re-injuring yourself. You’re never getting free of it and that’s really what you want to do. You want to get free of it.

There is one circumstance that I should mention that I do have a chapter on in my book, Adulterer’s Wife: How to Thrive Whether You Stay or Not, and that’s about celibate marriages. This is another dirty secret that many couples don’t even talk about and it’s very common, especially amongst older couples. It’s another major reason why couples stray, why a partner will stray and have an affair. Because to use the vernacular, “if you ain’t getting fed at home, you’re going to go for a take out.” So that’s one reason why people have sex outside the marriage. Also if sex has become really boring, or it doesn’t happen very often, it takes a lot of effort and care and a desire to keep things going to make sex fun, interesting, passionate, over the long term. It’s fine to do it over the first year or two, over the honeymoon period, but keeping it going is more difficult, definitely much more challenging and that’s another reason why people go for the forbidden fruit because it’s new and exciting and different.

TATIANA: What you did after you had this experience of your husband being unfaithful is you went and interviewed a whole bunch of people because that was your background as a journalist. So you talked to people who had also had this happen in their marriage, correct?

CJ: That’s true. I found that the stories came to me. I wasn’t even seeking them. I found people who would open up to me with all kinds of stories. And to be honest, I think my circumstances were a walk in the park compared to some of the people I spoke to. It was easier for me to let go of blame and to try to move on and not to be vengeful, compared to what I saw some of these other people go through.

I had an elderly relative, for example, who was in her 60s … I shouldn’t say elderly because now we’re really quite young in our 60s, so let me change that one! Anyway, she had been with her husband for decades and decades and what he did was salt the money away slowly to Switzerland. He lived in England and once he got all the money over there, he dumps the wife for his secretary. And she was left with practically nothing and totally shocked. She’d never even paid a bill while they’d been together. He’d always say, “Oh don’t worry, I’ll take care of everything.” And, of course, he certainly did but he took care of himself and not her. So in that kind of circumstance, the guy was a cad. I don’t think that you can really skin it any other way than that, but even with those sorts of circumstances and it’s also a common story that that happens, you do have to drop that blame and get over it. It’s just a larger obstacle that you have to try to somehow dissolve in your mind to use as a catalyst to choose how you want to live the rest of your life. My free PDF, which contains excerpts from my Adulterer’s Wife book,  will give you some tools to do that. It’s called  Overcoming Infidelity: Tools to Tame the Roller Coaster of Negative Emotions, and there’s a link to it on my website.

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This is a transcript of the first part of CJ’s interview with Tatiana Berindei on the March 29, 2018 Sex, Love and Superpowers Podcast. Listen to the full discussion on CJ’s Radio Interviews page. Tatiana  specializes in  “FutureCrafting”—moving her clients from confusion to clarity. Want to know your superpower? Take the quiz on superpowerexperts.com.