If you were to ask me what the three happiest days of my life have been so far, I wouldn’t even have to think about it. Before you even finished asking, I would man-grunt just as my answer came bursting out of me in all directions, and you’d find yourself covered in a thick goopy layer of what I would say are the moments at the top of my list.

Top spot goes to the day my kid was born. And I’m not saying that in an “I’m a dad and I know it’s the correct thing to say” sort of way. There is no question about it. The day Noah was born is one for the history books. This world became a brighter place that day. Light and laughter somehow entered even the darkest corners. The devil himself nearly gave up and went home for good. Oh, I may change my mind about some of that when he rounds the bend to teenager. We’ll see. But right now, the day he entered my life definitely gets the number one spot. And yes, I will happily accept the much-coveted Biggest Cheese Award now.

Second place goes to the day I officially left the Mormon church. Now, I’m sure there will be lots of Mormons reading this, including many of my best friends and family, who will be so sad to hear that. But don’t take it personally. The reason it was one of the best days was because for the first time in my life, I declared to the entire world that I believe something different, and I am going to follow my own beliefs now, come what may.  I knew it would lead to a shit storm of resentment and pressure. I knew it would alienate me from a lot of people that I love. I knew that it would make me an outsider from the majority of the society I live in, which is why it took so long for me to do, and equally is why it was such a happy thing for me to finally declare. I am convinced that nothing brings a person happiness faster than a life of true authenticity, whatever the hell that looks like.

The third and final happiest day of my life may surprise you. It definitely surprised me. And it goes to the day that I found out my wife had been having an affair.

I know, I know. Affairs are supposed to end us emotionally and mentally. They are supposed to rip open our hearts and leave us bloodied and bruised and wanting to disappear from the face of the earth. It’s even understandable that they leave so many of us temporarily senseless or even slightly murderous. But not her affair. Not to me.

I never once was angry with her, nor did I feel betrayed. In so many ways I was just thankful. Our marriage had taken us to the point where one of us had to do something drastic to get out because neither one of us wanted to admit that it just wasn’t ever going to work.

We also couldn’t call it quits because divorce is very frowned upon for any reason outside of infidelity or abuse when you’re a Mormon. And I don’t say that lightly. People literally frown at you if they find out you’re getting a divorce. As if heavy weights were attached to the corners of their mouths, their lips droop impossibly downward. Their eyes half-squint. Their nostrils flare ever so slightly. Their eyebrows scrunch. And they look at you as if to say, “I bet you deal drugs and don’t pay taxes and kill babies, too.” I call them righteous frowns, and they have always given me the serious willies.

But throw an extramarital affair from your soon to be ex on there, and you can expect casseroles delivered to your doorstep for the next month!

As people, we love affairs.

We don’t love the thought of them. We don’t love when they’re being had by people who are supposed to love the people we love. We definitely don’t love them when they hurt and break-apart families. But we do love them.

We love to talk about affairs and mix them into our gossip. We love to jump in and dissect the whos, whats, whens, wheres, whys, and hows. We love to point fingers and cast blame. We love to cry out, “I knew that bastard was a cheater from the day I laid eyes on him!” We love the opportunities they give us to shake our heads and feel superior to others.

Affairs are the golden ticket in divorce. They’re the one thing we can take and wildly shake in front of the whole world as we declare, “see! It’s not my fault this marriage ended!” When your spouse cheats, it is so easy to make the entire world love you and hate her. The world cheers for you in your divorce. They understand it, and they don’t fight against it. They justify your divorce for you so that you don’t have to do it…

It’s why so many people hold onto the affairs for so long. As a single dad who has been in the dating scene for many years now, I can tell you that the vast majority of divorcees I have dated immediately went for the cheating jugular of their exes during our dinner conversations. “Yes, I’m divorced. I discovered he had been cheating on me with three different women, two men, and a freaky thing he met at the circus, gender and species unknown.” I have no idea if their exes even actually had affairs, but hey. When you’re meeting someone new and you have to admit that you once fell in love and committed your entire life to someone else, you often feel like you need that golden ticket to make yourself datable and loveable once again.

Me, I always like to shock the women I dated. “Oh, my wife had an affair, too.” The girl would always look at me as if to say, oh phew. This guy is datable. It wasn’t his fault. Then I continue. “Oh yeah, it was one of the best days of my life! We couldn’t stand each other. We treated each other like crap. We didn’t do much of anything to help or save our marriage. We stopped caring about each other pretty much at all. We became selfish and self-absorbed.” At this point I take a breath in, indicating that I was going to keep talking whether she liked it or not. She’d look at me as if to say is this guy serious right now? And I’d continue.

“We were young and stupid and didn’t know how to be good people to each other. We didn’t know what love even was when we got married. We were idiots.”  Her eyes would untighten a little. Maybe this guy isn’t so bad. I mean, he seems to get it. And I’d carry on. “I don’t blame her for the affair. I never have. She did us both a favor to get us out of a desperate situation.” Boom. She usually at this point decides that she kind of likes me and is ready to disrobe right then and there.

Because, you see, everyone with a portion of a brain knows that affairs are rarely black and white. Even those whose spouses cheated know deep down that it probably wasn’t as cut and dry as they often let on. And, it’s a bit of a heavy burden to constantly flash that golden ticket to everyone you meet while never taking even a dollop of responsibility for oneself.

Yes, it is true. Some people really are just cheating assholes who don’t give a shit about the person they’re with. I get that it happens.

But from what I have witnessed, many more affairs are the byproduct of relationships gone sour. They’re done out of a need for love, the need to be touched and admired, the need to be desired, and the very real need for sex. Many affairs are exactly what my wife’s affair most likely was. An act of desperation which she knew would have a good chance in ending the marriage. It was a saving grace for both of us.

Of course it’s usually going to be better to work on the relationship and to fix the relationship. But sometimes it’s impossible. For us, I have no doubt that at that juncture of our lives, it was impossible.

We both were too stubborn to go see a counselor. We both were too caught up on the notion that we gave up our youth and our entire lives to the other, not knowing fully well what we were getting into. We both wanted the perfect marriage without the work. We both were immature little brats who seemed to work relentlessly to self-sabotage our marriage over the years so that we could one day get out of it.

I’m just old enough and barely wise enough now to see that and to admit that.

We were young. We were dumb. And it wasn’t going to fix itself. We both needed to step away from the mess we originally stepped into in order to realize just what it was we were, and what it was we were doing to each other.

I never lied to the women I’ve dated as a single man since. I’ve told the blatant truth about my divorces (yes, I’ve had two of them). And surprise of surprises, they nearly always appreciated me all the more for that.

The happiness I felt the day I found out my wife was having the affair was no different than the happiness I felt when I left the church I was born into. It was the feeling of freedom from a life that wasn’t actually my own. We had both changed so much in opposite directions that we didn’t want our entire lives to be tied to each other anymore. We weren’t compatible. We would not ever find happiness or contentment, nor the ability to personally grow and mature so long as we were together. We had discovered enough of ourselves to know that if we went back in time, knowing what we know now, we never would have gotten together in the first place.

The lessons I learned were many. It took another fleeting rebound marriage and a lot of the exact same mistakes to really learn those lessons, too.

Rarely is the end of any marriage or relationship black and white. Mine certainly wasn’t. As a population, I believe we need to stop waving those giant affair flags as we declare that we had no part in the demise of our relationships and our marriages. To do so makes us victims, and when we remain victims, we cannot grow.

I think it’s okay be sad and angry when our partners have extramarital affairs. We probably should be sad and angry. But when we’re done with that, we need to stand up, dust ourselves off, and look at what part, as small as it might be, that we might have played in it all. We need to move past it, forgive, and stop using it as our impermeable shields against the judgments of outsiders. We need to do it for our own sakes.

That is difficult I know. After all, affairs are that golden ticket to appear perfect and not at all like failures in our relationships. But we should ask ourselves one question. Do we want our next relationships to be with a complete victim who takes no responsibility for his or her part in things? Or do we want it to be with someone who owns their own shit and continually improves on it?

I am not making excuses for those who have affairs. And I am definitely not saying that if we want to give our partners the happiest days of their lives, we should go hop in bed with someone else. No, no, no. When we commit ourselves to someone, and we promise not to boink other people, it’s a pretty damn good idea to keep that promise.

Personally, I think that if we find ourselves at the point of desperation where we feel like we need an affair in our lives, we should do something else desperate instead. We should tell our partners, whom we were once so in love with, what we’re being tempted with and how desperate and broken we are feeling.

I promise you, that conversation will either make or break the relationship, and isn’t that what we really want at that point? For it to be fixed or broken, once and for all?

The lessons from my past scream to me. Don’t become someone else’s golden ticket. Don’t use cheating assholes as my own golden ticket. Our lives are our own. We each make or break every part of them. Whether we choose to let the actions of others keep us broken or to let them ultimately strengthen us is completely up to each of us.

As for me, I’ve learned what and who I want in the future. I want a person who is now a champion of her past. Not a victim who never could let go of it to put herself back together again.

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