UBT: She Cheated Because She Was Lonely

In the Telegraph, a woman explains that she cheated on her husband because she was “lonely” and couldn’t express herself. The Universal Bullshit Translator is here for it.

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An alert chump sent me Alex Croxford’s confessional in the Telegraph, “I know why women cheat on their husbands – I did it myself.”

My first thought was … wow. You speak for all the cheating wives and gay men out there? Do you share a hive mind? And then my second thought was… this is going to be bullish*t.

And of course, it was. Which I why I’ve fed it to our favorite Lebkuchen-fueled bullish*t translator.

Spoiler: She cheated for “loneliness.”

There’s the fig leaf of contrition. Her ex was a good guy and she’s so ashamed! But not so ashamed that she won’t go full sad sausage in a British newspaper all these years later. Perhaps you can learn from her. Speak up about your loneliness! Make your partner dance harder to please you!

Without further ado, here are some excerpts of the sorry-not-sorry screed.

“Yet the painful truth is that I did have an affair. It destroyed my marriage and left me so deeply ashamed that I couldn’t even tell my own father what had happened for years.

It changed the course of my life. Today, at 43, I don’t have children and I counsel other women who have been unfaithful. Every week I speak to people caught in the same self-loathing hell I once inhabited, convinced they’ve ruined their lives. They all ask me the same question I spent years asking myself: “How could I have done this?”

With lousy character. You are/weren’t that deep. You didn’t value your partner and you swapped them for affirmation from a fellow FW. Don’t think too hard about this, just do better. In fact, skip the self-loathing all-together and just pay your ex’s legal fees. The UBT is amazed more cheaters don’t act on all this professed remorse.

Cash on the barrelhead please.

It’s taken me a long time to realise that the answer is almost never as simple as people think.

I’m a sophisticated person trapped in a complicated love rhombus.

My partner wasn’t awful.

The assumption is that if a woman cheats, her partner must have been awful, a crushing bore or terrible in bed. That wasn’t my experience.

I’m better than the average cheater who blames their affair on their partner’s real or perceived faults. No, my mindf*ck is subtler, I cheated because I was a timid forest creature who couldn’t express her nebulous unhappiness.

Simon* and I laughed constantly. We travelled, went to festivals, renovated our house and shared an amazing group of friends.

Back then I was a television producer working on programmes including First Dates and Gareth Malone’s choir series. Simon was a hardworking and ambitious accountant. From the outside, we had enviable lives.”

He was a good husband appliance and everyone envied us.

Blame the IVF.

“After the wedding I came off the pill, but when I hadn’t fallen pregnant five months later I went to see a specialist and was diagnosed with polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome (PMOS). We decided to start fertility treatment alongside trying naturally.

Overnight, sex became another task to tick off the list. I attended most hospital appointments alone, feeling utterly terrified I’d never become a mother. The fact I couldn’t talk about this fear with my own husband signalled to me we were not really as close as I’d imagined.

Looking back, however, I can see we’d been drifting long before IVF.

My husband laughs with me, socializes, travels, goes to parties, and is supportive of my fertility struggles — ergo, we drifted apart.

For years I’d arrived at dinners or weekends away on my own while friends asked: “Where’s Simon?” “He’s studying,” I’d sigh.

He was revising for his accountancy exams while working full-time and I never felt entitled to complain. I remember crying to a friend about how much I missed him, but I never really told Simon. Looking back, I’d quietly convinced myself that his needs mattered more than mine.

God forbid the man finish his degree.

It wasn’t his fault. It was the hormones.

IVF simply magnified everything.

It wasn’t Simon’s fault.

That’s big of you.

“We were brilliant at the practicalities of life – planning a wedding, renovating a house and organising holidays. What I wasn’t good at was telling him what I was really feeling. I thought the fact we rarely argued was a sign of a healthy marriage. Now I think it often means nobody is saying what’s really going on.

The UBT notes the not-so-subtle blameshift to communication styles. You could hide your feelings, shout your feelings, deliver your feelings by carrier pigeon, but none of that says anything about your entitlement issues.

Ten months after saying “I do”, another man – someone I’d briefly kissed years earlier – walked back into my life.”

I invited another man into my life.

He wanted my attention!

“The attraction wasn’t instant. There was no thunderbolt. In truth, it wasn’t really about him at all. It was about how I felt around him. He noticed me. He wanted my attention. Once, when we met a group of old friends, he made a beeline to sit next to me in the pub. Simon and I, I realised, had become the sort of couple who arrived together but spent the evening at opposite ends of the room.

The affair wasn’t what most people imagine. We weren’t endlessly texting or arranging secret dates. I even offloaded my misery over IVF on him.

I’m sure he’d listen to you natter on about your ovaries or the Treaty of Ghent for no-strings-attached seggs.

Of course there was excitement too: lingering eye contact, the novelty of being intimate with someone new, and our first kiss in a hotel room away from home.

Dude, you haven’t even been married a YEAR. Quit blaming IVF. You’re a terrible person.

What have I done? Let’s keep doing it!

But almost immediately that excitement was drowned by shame. The following morning I woke up feeling physically sick, thinking: “What have I done?”

Not so sick that you didn’t keep up the double life for the next. Seven. Months.

I phoned Simon, convinced he’d somehow hear the guilt in my voice. Instead, he was simply his usual kind, lovely self. I felt even worse.

The affair lasted seven months and involved just four sporadic encounters after we’d both been drinking. We never even had what most people would consider full sex.

Whatever.

The UBT can’t take much more… we’ll just skip to the part where she confesses.

The guilt was so horrific I confessed at a spa.

The guilt was horrific. When our IVF round failed, I privately blamed myself for being unfaithful. I couldn’t admit to anyone what I’d done and I was terrified I’d lost both my marriage and my chance of becoming a mother.

On the verge of a breakdown, I booked myself a healing retreat. Completely out of my comfort zone, surrounded by strangers, I said the words aloud. “I had an affair.”

The UBT notes that the guilt was so horrific you didn’t wear ashes and sackcloth, or publicly flagellate yourself, or confess to a priest, or give all your worldly goods to orphans. No, you checked yourself in to a holiday retreat and blurted your secret to strangers.

Then it takes her until 2020 to tell her chump husband and then she wastes MORE of his time trying to reconcile.

“I paid for our couples therapy as I desperately tried to save the marriage.

I wasted my chump’s time, but hey, I paid for the therapy.

We spent more than a year talking through what had happened. It wasn’t enough. But it gave me clarity.

I’m sure Simon is very comforted by your clarity. When he looks back at his trust issues, he’ll know it was all worth it because you had a spiritual journey with yourself.

I realised how lonely I’d become, yet I’d never felt able to tell Simon I needed more from him. I’d spent years becoming brilliant at coping, achieving, organising and looking after everyone else, while losing the ability to tell the person closest to me what was happening inside my own head.”

.Hey Simon? SHE NEEDED MORE. More friends, more parties, more travel, more humor, more support through IVF, more mind reading. I’m sorry you couldn’t be those things. Alex is sorry too.

Alex is still inside her head. And she’s invited the rest of the Telegraph reading public to join her there too.

I never doubted that my husband found me attractive. What I longed for was to feel emotionally seen.

The Universal Bullsh*t Translator sees you Alex. It sees a FW.

Understanding why I had an affair will never undo the hurt I caused Simon, or excuse the choices I made. But it has allowed me to forgive myself.

If the UBT had a dollar for every cheater who has forgiven themselves, it could buy a Lebkuchen factory.

Looking back now, I don’t think our marriage ended because I met another man. I think it ended because, long before that, I’d stopped being honest about how lonely I’d become.

Hey, Simon, this isn’t your fault. Alex is sorry for your pain. You just failed to SEE her and REALIZE how exquisitely LONELY she was. I’m sorry she couldn’t express herself with finger paints, or healing retreats, or interpretative dance. You were supposed to have a decoder ring. But it’s okay, really. Alex has learned from this and now teaches others how to spin their own self-pitying BS. Your suffering had purpose. Alex has forgiven herself. And isn’t that what really matters?