THE STORY BEHIND THE BOOK (in case you were wondering, which I’m sure you are…)

We know how infidelity rolls – it’s always the same. You both fall in love, Velcro yourselves together at the hip; promises of blissed-out monogamy till you both croak; then one day you discover he’s betrayed you – lies on top of lies; you’re shattered to the core, you break up; the tale comes to a close.

“The dating pool I swam in definitely had pee in it,” I said.

“Try EMDR and start online dating!” they’d say.  All I could do is wonder how many days I could go without shampooing before they started to sniff.

The stats are armageddon-adjacent: 69 percent of marriages break up as a result of an affair. A whopping 9% of suicides occur within 24 hours of discovering infidelity. 20% of suicides occur because of a ruptured relationship.*

At 25, after finding out the love of my life, Raphael Sbarge, had lied to me, I screamed. I threw my engagement ring at him. I joined the ice-in-your-veins broken hearts club and moved the f**k on. I married the first trustworthy man who came along. But after the death of our daughter and my skirmish with breast cancer, we’d become robotic. Then one autumn day, the day my stepfather died, I summoned the courage to leave – there had to be more, I needed more. We amicably divorced.

Enter Facebook, when Facebook was all the rage - everyone signing up to see how everybody had turned out, who married whom, who got fat, who never left town. It was on Facebook, 16 years after we split, Raphael messaged me, begging to make amends.

Go to hell – you destroyed me. For all these years, when he popped up on TV or in the movies, I’d look the other way. He’s a cheat, press delete. So why couldn’t I sleep? Flopping around alone in bed, I was making up scenes of his redemption, some scenes filled with revenge. Is he married? He used the word amends – that’s AA speak for cleaning up the messes from your past. Is he sober? It took three attempts. Finally, I held my shaking wrist and hit the reply arrow.

The rest is history; he apologized from the depths of his soul, we made up; we set out to do it right this time; we fell back in love, our love story came to a close.

NOT SO FAST. Turns out there’s this stinky little thing called Betrayal Trauma. What PTSD is for soldiers, Betrayal Trauma is for lovers. Same symptoms. Same hypervigilance, same high-reactivity, same pervasive discomfort and inability to feel safe. And I had it bad (I never had this with my ex-husband) but with Raphael, I was a hot mess.

“Are you loyal?” I’d repeatedly ask. On account he’s a character actor, going from set to set, in and out of hotels, working with beautiful actresses, hair and make-up artists, fans, conventions, publicists, etc. Yes, it’s a bizarre lifestyle - and yes, even if he’s as loyal as they come, and yes, the betrayal was years ago – I was jealous and controlling, constantly looking to prove he was lying or hiding something.

Why can’t I get over it? My suspicions made him over-reactive and angry. I’d retreat. Before we knew it, our amazingly renewed love had morphed into a relational hellpile.

It all came to a head when he was on a Steven Bochco TV series. In the show, playing a cop, he had a love scene with a gorgeous stripper. In the scene, they woke up in her apartment, he kissed her good morning, and then they engaged in a choreographed love scene.

This is his job!!! And poor Raphael, knowing I was going to come unglued because he was in bed with a lean and dazzling starlet, he/we made the ridiculous decision not to talk about it.

I don’t want to know, I’ll never watch the show, this too shall effing pass.

Because Raphael was wearing a towel in the scene, they spray-tanned him. Some of it splattered on his foot, leaving behind a constellation of orange-brown spots on his arch. The next day over morning coffee, I could tell he was tense. Spy that I was, I pointed to the splotches on his foot. Trying to dodge the no-talk rule, he mumbled, “I don’t know what that is. Must be some paint I spilled.”

Silence. I knew he was making shit up – and I was off to the betrayal races, convinced that if he lied about that one spray-tan thing, there must be more. Did he enjoy his sex scene? He must have!

In came the therapists: Thousands of dollars poured into rehashing and retracing, all for naught.

Until one lady sent me to rehab. Rehab? I’m no Amy Winehouse. She sent me to a betrayal trauma workshop housed in a rehab facility. I resentfully went. The thing cost 10 grand. I wasn’t smiling.

One week with a group of women, all of us, with partners or husbands who they love, who also betrayed them, trying to decide if they should stay or go. The stories knocked me over – the conflict always the same: The loving husband, great dad, the man she trusted who turns out to have a secret compartment, a secret life, a dark basement where he acts out; the wife is broken and violently angry; the husband is ashamed and afraid that everything he truly loves is about to cave in; she’s meeting with attorneys, frantic, reading every book on the subject of infidelity, compulsive porn use, sex addiction, not sleeping but still running the kids to school; he’s pleading for her to not leave; she’s cold and confused; the dance comes to a close. Except this time the women gather a few outfits and head to a workshop on sticking it out.

For Raphael and I, the painful process of healing this wound (and other wounds we knew nothing about), worked. There was a way back.

And that’s when my newest novel, HIS EFFING LIES, was percolated. It’s fiction. But it’s also a real tale of honesty, forgiveness, and hope for true love.

*https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.pn.2023.06.6.7

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10002055/