The Sunday News
Delta Milayo Ndou
FORGIVENESS is romanticised. This thought occurred to me when I was reflecting on a message from a married man who is trying to reconcile with his wife whom he cheated on.
The man sent me a message sounding very remorseful and admitting to an affair that resulted in a child whom he says he has not seen or given his attention to because he blames that child for the ruination of his marriage. And he admits that it is unreasonable to blame the child but, in trying to track where things went horribly wrong in his marriage, he finds that having a child out wedlock is the greatest offense he committed against his wife.
His wife left him and is adamant that she doesn’t want to reconcile; they have three kids and would have celebrated their 10-year wedding anniversary in a few weeks. Now it is all gone. And the only way to save the marriage and rebuild the relationship is if his wife forgives him and takes him back. According to this man, he has sent emissaries, deployed family elders to go and plead with his wife on his behalf to no avail.
I cringed a bit when I got to that part of sending a delegation of elders to ‘reason’ with the wife because I could imagine how the conversation must have gone. I am sure the wife was reminded that men do this all the time, that other women have faced similar situations, that all men are the same and she doesn’t stand a hope of finding a man who won’t do the same or maybe even worse.
I could imagine them telling her that the baby is innocent and has done no wrong and so she must accept the situation because it has already happened. I have a problem with this kind of intervention because in many ways it is designed to downplay the pain of the betrayed woman by pointing to all other cases as if to imply that being subjected to excruciating heartache is all a normal part of being married to a cheat.
How about we take a step back and honour this person’s pain, acknowledge that her feelings are legitimate and her grievances are valid and that she has been wronged in the most profound ways possible?
Can we make it okay for the betrayed wife to express anger and hurt and unimaginable pain before we try to ram platitudes down her throat in the name of resolving issues? What good will that do, one might ask? What is the point of honouring the wife’s pain, to what end and for what reason?
The attitude of some of these forgive-your-husband emissaries tends to lean towards parroting (in a rather insensitive fashion) dictums such as osekwenzakele sokwenzakele, what’s done is done, no point in crying over spilt milk. Their approach to engaging the aggrieved wife goes something like this:
“Yes, your husband cheated on you and now there is a baby, its really unfortunate but that baby is innocent so accept the new reality and deal with it”.
I find this approach to be callous and insensitive because there is no room in that narrative to offer emotional support to the wronged party. Her pain is made subordinate to other ‘more important’ considerations like the innocence of the baby born from the affair, her pain must be deferred to advance the greater goal of family unity and keeping the marriage alive, her pain must be a thing to be endured stoically and it is not to be privileged in the process of reconciliation.
This is wrong and brutal and also a very emotionally wounding way of dealing with a woman whose husband has betrayed her. Sometimes the fact that our pain is acknowledged, that other people ‘get’ our pain and that our heartache is understood as a legitimate response to the hurt that has been inflicted upon us – is the first crucial step towards healing.
To have emissaries gang up on a woman who has been betrayed and press her to offer forgiveness and even drop threatening hints that failure to forgive swiftly could drive the husband further away – is a tactic that many have used to circumvent the necessary process of honouring their spouse’s pain.
To honour someone’s pain is to say: “I acknowledge and accept that I have hurt you and because I have hurt you I know that in this time – the only thing that matters, all that counts is you. How you feel, what you feel, the pain you are in – this is the only thing that I care about. Everything else can wait, everyone else can stand in line until you are ready to deal with it”.
The reason why people are so terrible at honouring the pain of others is because it is uncomfortable to be ‘unforgiven’ so we press the ones we have wronged to forgive us so that we feel better. We fail to recognize the act of forgiving for the burden it is and often feel that our saying sorry and being sincere in our remorse qualifies us for swift clemency – it doesn’t.
Forgiveness isn’t something that can be rushed. It is like having an open wound and then it starts to heal but on some days the scabs fall off and it bleeds anew; then the healing has to start all over again – the process is repetitive, emotionally exhausting and psychologically torturous.
You can spend a whole day processing a hurt and by evening feel like you have made some progress towards forgiving the person that has wronged you but then you wake up the next morning and realise you feel the hurt freshly and must process it all over again to try and get it out of your system.
Very rarely do people who extol the virtues of forgiveness dwell on the emotional cost of processing hurt, betrayal and eventually healing from the wounds inflicted. We don’t do enough, I believe, to honour the pain of those whom we have hurt or who have been hurt by others because we are more interested in the end goal (forgiveness and reconciliation) than we are in the means of getting there (i.e dealing with gaping wounds that mend slowly, re-open and bleed anew, then mend slowly again).
And because we know other people have gone through the same or even worse – we are impatient, unsympathetic and abrupt with the hurts of others in the pursuit of reconciling estranged spouses. The process of forgiveness is unglamorous though we may want to romanticise it and venerate those women who put up with the most emotional torture.
It is a burden that only the one who has been betrayed carries – alone. We should at least try to honour their pain, give it room and allow the hurt person to come to terms with the reality that has befallen them.
There is nothing as breathtakingly, gut-wrenching and soul-crushing as discovering that one’s husband has made another woman pregnant. Yet so many men are reckless with their dangling bits, and even moreso with the hearts of the women they have wedded and vowed to cherish until death – and then turn around, apologise and claim it was all a mistake; then expect instant clemency. The weight of forgiveness is a heavy, the burden is immense and the pain of betrayal is a journey that the betrayed travels alone. Show empathy.
Parting shot: “It was a mistake,” you said. But the cruel thing was, it felt like the mistake was mine, for trusting you.” ― David Levithan
[Written as part of the #SaveManqoba fundraising campaign. This article was sponsored by a #Heartbreaks fan. #SundayNewsSolidarity]
