Guilty Mind
Guilty Mind
My wife worked for her previous employer for 10 years and became friendly with her male boss. Three years ago when the company was being sold, a series of meetings was held out of town with the merging business. During one of these trips she and her boss were alone for three days.
Business travel was nothing new for my wife. Each evening while she was away she would call me and the kids around the dinner hour. Late each night she would call me again to say goodnight. This was a standard you could bet on. During this particular trip she did not call for 30 hours.
Upon her arrival home the kids and I were glad to see her. I casually said, "Gee, no call to me or the kids?" I was dumfounded when she snapped back, "I was sleeping." She does not sleep well when away, even on family vacations, and she never ever sleeps the entire night. I got a terrible gut feeling.
That night a strange thing occurred. Normally she would unpack the next morning. However, this time as I was laying in bed about midnight she decided to unpack. She opened her suitcase, pulled out only her underwear, and placed them in the laundry basket in the bathroom.
When I got up to go to work, they weren't on top of the clothes basket. Thinking it odd, I looked among the dirty clothes until I saw them all tucked tight in the middle of the basket.
From that trip forward she was extremely cold to me. She did not want me to see her nude while dressing or preparing for a shower. She rolled away from me each evening in bed, and her body jumped when the male character on a television show shared the same name as her boss.
This was also the first year I did not get an anniversary card from her. Certainly emotional infidelity took place, and if I were a betting man, I'd say something physical happened as well.
Kieran
Kieran, sometimes behavior falls so cleanly into an archetypal pattern it makes us want to scream. When your wife came home late at night and removed her underwear from her luggage, what could we think of except Shakespeare's "Macbeth."
In that play Lady Macbeth urges her husband to kill Duncan, the previous king, and then in her sleep tries to wash imaginary blood off her hands. "Out damned spot! out, I say." All your wife had to do was go to bed and deal with the laundry in the morning.
But her guilty mind would not leave her alone.
Most people with guilty secrets have a problem. They don't know how to act to conceal what they've done. If you watch true crime shows, you often see the same pattern. The person who killed a spouse can't convincingly behave like someone whose spouse was taken from them by a violent act. This is true even when the murderer is a highly intelligent person like a rabbi or a surgeon.
People cannot resist telling you who they are. Even in spite of themselves they cannot resist telling you who they are. You will never know the truth from your wife, except by inference, but inference is a powerful way of knowing and your betting instincts are correct.
Aristotle grouped adultery with deserting a comrade in battle. From a religious standpoint, two of the ten commandments forbid adultery. One says don't do it, and the other says don't even think about it. Our own emotion, jealousy, tells us we can never be satisfied except with someone who loves us exclusively.
It makes sense that your wife didn't want you to see her naked. Aside from possibly hiding physical evidence, she was separating herself from you to be faithful to her new man. Cheaters want fidelity even in their infidelity.
Wayne & Tamara
Authors and columnists Wayne and Tamara Mitchell can be reached at www.WayneAndTamara.com.
Send letters to: Direct Answers, PO Box 964, Springfield, MO 65801 or email: DirectAnswers@WayneAndTamara.com.
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Posted on Aug 14, 2006 by Site Admin
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