BEL MOONEY: Should I forgive my husband for sending flirty texts?

Dear Bel,

MY HUSBAND and I are in our 60s and have been married for 30 years, but I found out a couple of months ago he’s had an online affair. What I read on his phone was flirty and affectionate, with sexual overtones. I was devastated!

When I confronted him, he didn’t deny it but said it had ended about three months earlier.

He said he didn’t realise it was an affair until I said so. He said it started innocently at work, then a few days later they met for coffee.

Apparently, he ‘opened up’ to her about problems at home, etc. They then stayed in touch (on WhatsApp) for about three weeks.

There was no more contact for more than a year, when she contacted him again to ask for help with car repairs. Or did he make renewed contact? He can’t recall.

This was at a time when my husband and I were probably not getting on as well as we should.

We were both stressed and spending a lot of time away from home and each other. Also, he’d had a heart attack and hadn’t been feeling well for about 18 months — which I think was a factor.

I have also been quite ill since it happened. It appears they were both getting more and more flirty and carried away and it took my husband nearly a year to realise it was wrong and stop it.

A whole year! How can that be?

He has assured me he didn’t speak to her by phone and they never met again, but thinks if it had carried on they probably would have. He tells me he is very sorry it happened and he doesn’t know why it did. He has also told me how much he loves me and wants to stay together.

He has been making a big effort to be kind, helpful and loving and I am also trying hard to do the same, although I have had doubts at times whether this is what I want. I find I’m unable to accept what he has done and forgive him.

One day I’m OK, then it will all come back and I feel terrible.

My husband says he never had any intention of leaving me or being with another woman and that he bitterly regrets what happened.

I would like your thoughts — do you think I’m expecting things to be better too soon, or am I overreacting?

DIANA

Here we have evidence of a significant difference between men and women. To your husband, a flirtation conducted online over many months, but with no clandestine meetings for sex is, quite obviously, not ‘an affair’.

To you, reading ‘flirty’ messages on his phone (sent in two batches over — in total — a lengthy period) is straightforward disloyalty in action, and for ‘disloyalty’ read ‘betrayal’ or ‘infidelity’.

In the past I’ve warned that if a man or woman has lunch/drinks/supper more than once with a co-worker and deliberately keeps this a secret from his/her partner, then it’s a slippery slope, even if no sex is involved.

It must have been a terrible shock when you saw the emails. I understand that and pity the sapping of your confidence and pain in mind, body and spirit that must have been involved. But now, unless you see clearly, you will make yourself far more miserable than you already are.

Why did it all happen? He had been ill, chatted to an attractive colleague at a time when the two of you were going through a rocky patch, enjoyed the fun and flirty contact, then realised it was a bad idea and stopped it.

Nobody had sex. Nobody died. A man and a woman flirted and on the flirtation scale it was pretty mild. This was most definitely not the end of the world.

Don’t think me unsympathetic, because I know how these things can rankle for months or years and feel concerned about any reader who is deeply unhappy and unable to see beyond that feeling.

But you say that even though your husband is making a huge effort, ‘I find I’m unable to accept what he has done and forgive him’.

OK — so what is the alternative? That you split up and face the rest of your life alone? That you ramp up the bitterness and punish him for ever with resentful silence and tears for his heinous crime of wanting to ‘talk’ flirtatiously online to another woman?

Surely you don’t wish for either miserable outcome? In that case you have to ditch that word ‘unable’ and recognise that you are — if you choose — perfectly able to see this for what it was. He was unhappy and so sought a bit of pleasure in words exchanged with somebody else.

Honestly, just tweak the scenario and imagine it might have been you doing the same thing! Would you expect to be ‘forgiven’?

You now have a choice whether you let it harm you permanently or not. If I were you, I would do everything possible to get to the bottom of exactly why you were both so unhappy at that time and vow never to let it happen again. Talk, talk, talk and then talk some more.

Consciously start doing things together. Work on the now with an eye to a future you share.

Oh please . . . move forward before it’s too late.

Can I exorcise my toxic dead mum?

Dear Bel,

I once wrote to you about my abusive mother.

I had no relationship with her — she was a completely toxic woman who never once said a kind word to me or my siblings and beat us for no good reason.

She died last summer and, since I hated her every day she was alive, my feelings have not changed. I hate her beneath the grave.

I wanted to write her a letter to tell her how her treatment of us made me feel, but I never did.

Now she is gone, I feel that there is no closure and still hate her as though she were still here. I know it is futile and I can change nothing, but it’s eating me up.

What can I do?

JANINA

My short reply to your short but heartfelt email is — please don’t ruin the rest of your life by hating.

You must have known I’d say that, just as I have suggested in the past that people like you write a letter to the dead person who made their life a misery.

To pour everything into a letter — holding nothing back and writing carefully on real paper, then putting the page(s) into an envelope — then destroying that letter by burning or burying it . . . yes, I have heard it really can work.

Such a careful procedure can bring ‘closure’ and it is never too late to try it.

Those who perform the ritual (for that is what this is — and actually a form of magic within the human psyche) have reported feeling lighter in spirit afterwards.

If you continue to hate, then effectively you will be allowing that woman to haunt your days.

If you exorcise her now, you will own your life.

My fears for trans teenagers 

Dear Bel,

I am a cross-dresser in my 60s. My partner and I do not live together but when I told her, she was accepting and encourages me to do it every so often.

I have been like this since my teens, keeping it a secret. I read biographies of April Ashley, Caroline Cossey and Jan Morris and felt that I, too, felt more feminine.

I wondered about transitioning, but didn’t do it. Instead, I married and had children and now grandchildren — who I would never have had if I’d opted to have the operation.

I now enjoy the best of both worlds, although I don’t go out dressed as much as I would like. But I am glad to have an understanding woman to help me.

What I’m saying is that it worries me that many young teenagers these days are encouraged to transition before they are old enough to really understand.

Yes, I know there are many who genuinely suffer from gender dysphoria — but I know from experience that it can be more complicated. I could have made a grave mistake and am glad I didn’t.

Thank you so much for writing this very timely email, which will interest the thousands of people who feel deeply disturbed by aggressive ‘trans’ activism, especially Nicola Sturgeon’s determination that 16-year-olds should be considered old enough to address the complex issue and make mature decisions.

In my view, that single-minded obsession is the polar opposite of ‘kind’ — because it could ruin many a young life. Your letter suggests just one reason why. Nowadays you would be pressured to call yourself a ‘trans woman’ and perhaps even take the (often painful) route of hormones and surgery.

Instead, you acknowledged your predilection for cross-dressing and led two lives, one as a conventional family man and the other as a person who felt happy wearing female clothes when it was possible.

I see nothing at all wrong with that. Your email gave a male name, but you signed off with the female version of that name. So I chose for you an abbreviated pseudonym used by both men and women — and wish you the best of luck with whichever persona you are ‘in’ when you read this.

 And finally… Work out — and thwack a punchbag!

Every Tuesday morning at 10am I go to a small local gym for a session with my jolly trainer, Jenny.

I’m making such good progress I can deadlift 15kg ten times and shoulder-press two 5kg weights, again ten times. And do both sets three times. That’s why I can’t tell you often enough that it’s never too late to start exercising.

Each week, before we start boxing, Jenny asks me if I’m feeling aggressive. I always am! The hard sound of my gloves thwacking the pads she holds is so deeply therapeutic it always make me feel better. But why?

Aggression is the cause of so much suffering and sorrow in the world. It’s an ugly thing —outside a pub on a Saturday night when the fists start flying or right up there in the Kremlin. I detest aggressive people who wind you up in arguments in order to pick a ‘fight’.

And the kind of hysterically opinionated anger you see so often on social media is horrible. Why, then, is all right for me to think of somebody/something that makes me mad and want imaginatively to smack ’em each week?

Perhaps it’s because that particular exercise can briefly stop you feeling powerless. Even though you may think journalists lucky to have a ‘voice’, I can assure you we feel as frustrated and powerless as most people.

For example, I go to Bath and have to pay for parking with a phone app that I can’t make work: thwack at the tyranny of tech. I have to cancel a London visit to see a friend with cancer because of rail strikes: thwack at strike-contagion.

As a keen watcher of politics, I’m sad there’s now no party to which I can give full allegiance: thwack at weak and woke politicians who have lost my vote.

I read that primary schools have guidance from the trans-activist group Stonewall which says babies are ‘given’ a sex at birth: thwack at all the nonsense that says biology isn’t real. And so on.

Yes, that feels better . . .