Repair & Reckoning

For this month's Love in Adulthood Monthly, I sat down with my partner Christopher Brown (psychotherapist and certified sex therapist) to talk about one of the most tender subjects we cover: reckoning and repair after infidelity and betrayal.

Christopher shared his clinical framework for understanding why cheating happens (spoiler: it's rarely as simple as "good guy, bad guy"), walking through the environmental and relational setups that make infidelity more likely: lie-inducing agreements, existential crisis, loss of self, unspoken mixed orientation, entitlement, and revenge. His core truth, repeated throughout: what doesn't get talked about gets acted out.

We also got personal, sharing pieces of our own story: Christopher's family history with infidelity, my own experience with non-negotiated monogamy in past relationships, and how we've had to build our own relationship agreements consciously rather than by default.

We moved through what typically happens during discovery (the technology trails, the accidental exposures, the gaslighting) and into what real reckoning and repair looks like clinically: first fully validating the betrayed partner, then helping the partner who broke trust find the meaning behind what happened, and finally reaching a genuine decision point about whether to rebuild (a whole "relationship number two," with new agreements) or separate. We also covered the four horsemen of relationship breakdown (criticism, contempt, defensiveness, stonewalling) and their antidotes, since those patterns show up constantly in the aftermath of betrayal.

The back half of our time together was live Q&A, where we worked through real questions from the group: how to create safety for hard conversations, how to tell healed from merely resolved, and how to know if it's time to stay or go. My own answer to that last one keeps coming back to intuition: what is your body telling you, underneath all the reasons to stay? Christopher closed by sharing the true story behind his own family's infidelity, one he'd never told publicly before.