Reader Hurt and Upset asks,

I'm a 50-year-old doctor who has focused on my career for my whole life. I married at age 30 a wonderful schoolmate that I knew for a long time. I was her first and only serious boyfriend and sexual partner, due to her strict Catholic education. We have one son (20) and four daughters (our last is 6 years old.) I'm a bit narcissistic, sometimes depressed and anxious since childhood. The last few years I'm been particularly nervous at work (I'm the chief of the cardiology department), and also at home. I didn't always put her first. Two weeks ago I discovered she's been having a liaison for two years with a friend of mine, who is gentle and empathic ... It may have been platonic but I don't know. What do we do now? I'm consumed with anger and hatred. I cry a lot on her shoulder asking how could it happened. We are in crisis, please help.

Infidelity is a catastrophic emotional event, and I talk about it more here. I commend you for reaching out for help, and it is great that you seem to be fully aware of what led to your wife being unfaithful. You paint a picture of yourself as a narcissistic guy who mainly focused on work and your own feelings of depression (which is very hard on spouses) and anxiety. You were surprised that she cheated, but from your own description of yourself and the marriage, it seems to make sense to you why things happened as they did. There is no excuse for her cheating, sure, but we are not looking here at what's "right" or "wrong." That doesn't help your marriage at all. You want to act as a team from this point on: You and your wife on one side, and the infidelity/self-centeredness on the other side.

I would suggest that you seek your own counseling to deal with two things: (1) your anger and hatred, and (2) your general tendency to focus on yourself and not your partner's needs. I would take this as a cry for help from your wife, particularly if it was "platonic." But emotional affairs are no joke. Men don't take them as seriously as women do, but this is a mistake. Once your wife's emotional needs are being met elsewhere, she will often want to leave the marriage.

Talk to your wife, don't just cry on her shoulder. Apologize for having been emotionally and mentally absent for years. Apologize for having put your job and career progress above your marriage. With six kids, your wife must have been shouldering a lot of responsibility all this time, and it doesn't sound like you were a terribly engaged helpmate in the home. I understand you were the chief of cardiology, but you also need to take care of your wife's heart (it was too easy, sorry.)

You need to get to know your wife all over again, what makes her tick, what she felt when she turned to your friend for emotional sustenance. You need to work on forgiving her for her infidelity and understanding what made her lonely enough to look outside the marriage. In return, hopefully she will want to get to know you again, and will see that you are trying to change and become more emotionally open and supportive. She will have to work on forgiving you for being emotionally unavailable all of these years.

Couples counseling will likely be essential not only to help you move past the infidelity, but also to learn new patterns of connection and communication. It can also help you see why you fell into the patterns that you did. Did your own parents have a dynamic where the husband was the breadwinner/important person and the wife was the homemaker/facilitator? Did you see reciprocal emotional expression growing up, or was one parent self absorbed and the other in the martyr role? You sound like an achievement oriented guy; were you always allowed a lot of leeway at home because of how smart and high achieving you were? Did you learn that you could get away with not being very helpful or engaged in the family or the home because your studies or other activities were considered more important? And was your wife always in a caretaking role, like caring for younger siblings?

Anyway, I hope I have left you with a lot to think about, and thanks so much for writing in. I hope that you and your wife recover from this and go on to have fifty years of happiness. Or more, since I bet cardiologists are pretty healthy. Till we meet again, I remain, the Blogapist Who Notices That Marriages Have The Best Chance For Recovery After Infidelity If Both Partners Discuss Their Contributions To The Disconnect.