"You Can't Handle the Truth"

I love the passion behind Jack Nickelson when you admonishes the young officer examining him on the witness stand. But I disagree.

After an affair there is the issue of questions and answers. The betrayed spouse has a ton of questions and the other spouse has all the answers. I can see both sides of this one now but I want to give my opinion on it.

The spouse whom had the affair (referred to after as the betrayer) doesn't like or want to answer hours and hours of seemingly endless questions. Questions that bring every little insignificant detail to light. Questions that don't matter, especially if the couple is focused on healing and moving forward. The betrayer feels that this leads to needless hurt, pain, and focusing on the past rather than the future. And to some extent they are correct.

But I know my feelings as the betrayed spouse and offer you this insight.

The affair is like a giant jigsaw puzzle. One of those ten thousand pieces with scenes within scenes. For example, a World War 2 puzzle might have lots of scenes on it. In one spot is the battle of the bulge, in another the invasion of Normandy, the bombing of London, Rosa the Riveter, the Holocaust, and raising the flag at Iwo Jima.

As the betrayed one of the things that you have to deal with is that the world you thought you knew, one of your spouse loving you and being faithful, is suddenly distorted. Part of the healing process is trying to make sense of the world and everything that happened.The betrayed spouse now has all the pieces of the 10,000 piece puzzle of the affair and the betrayed spouse has like 150 of those pieces.

We are trying to make sense of everything and we just can't without being able to see the big picture. Part of that is at least filling in some of those holes. We know that having all 10,000 pieces isn't going to help, but at the same time having only a small part of the puzzle leaves our mind to wonder what was in the empty space.

So at the beginning I knew that my wife cheated on me, that she spent a weekend together in a rented house, and that they sent each other tons of texts, emails, yadda yadda yadda. But then I needed to know more. Like what was the weekend like? What did you do? Did you go out to eat? Did you do anything in public? Did you kiss? Did you drive anywhere? It was really my way of putting the puzzle together.

See without all these seemingly insignificant details, the puzzle doesn't make sense. If I told you about World War 2 but only spoke the invasion of Normandy, you couldn't understand the war as a whole. There is no way anyone can understand WW II if you don't talk about the Holocaust. If you don't see at least some pictures of shoes, piles and piles of shoes, or people being herded into trains then you can not truly fathom the depth or the meaning of the Holocaust and therefore WW II.

The same holds true in an affair. You can't know every single detail of every minute, but having some or most of the details gives you a much better idea of the bigger picture. It also helps to put what little sense of the now changed world, back together again.

The other thing about the information is that it does create an unbalance of power. Since only one person has the power that is the information about the betrayal, the other one has nothing. Sharing the information (willingly and HONESTLY) does help to restore that balance.

So yes, Jack, maybe I can't handle the truth, maybe I'll even cry during the telling of the truth, but I need it to make sense of the world.