Infidelity Quotes

“Sex isn't all that important, but it is when you love someone very much.”
― Ava Gardner, Ava: My Story

“Soon he was online every night until one or two a.m. Often he would wake up at three of four a.m. and go back online. He would shut down the computer screen when I walked in. In the past, he used to take the laptop to bed with him and we would both be on our laptops, hips touching. He stopped doing that, slipping off to his office instead and closing the door even when A was asleep. He started closing doors behind him. I was steeped in denial, but my body knew.”
― Suzanne Finnamore, Split: A Memoir of Divorce

“How could you do that to me?" I repeat. I don´t have to itemize. He knows what I speak of.
Eventually N produces three answers, in this order:

1. "Because I am a complete rotter." I silently agree, but it´s a cop-out: I have maggots, therefore I am dead.
2. "I was stressed at work and unhappy and we were always fighting...and you know I was just crazy..."

I cut him off, saying, "You don´t get to be crazy. You did exactly what you chose to do."
Which is true, he did. It is what he has always done. He therefore seems slightly puzzled at the need for further diagnosis, which may explain his third response:

3. "I don´t know."

This, I feel instinctively, is the correct answer. How can I stay angry with him for being what he is? I was, after all, his wife, and I chose him. No coincidences, that´s what Freud said. None. Ever.
I wipe my eyes on my sleeve and walk toward the truck, saying to his general direction, "Fine. At least now I know: You don´t know."
I stop and turn around and fire one more question: a bullet demanding attention in the moment it enters the skin and spreads outward, an important bullet that must be acknowledged.
"What did you feel?"
After a lengthy pause, he answers. "I felt nothing."
And that, I realize too late, was not the whole truth, but was a valid part of the truth.
Oh, and welcome to the Serengeti. That too.”
― Suzanne Finnamore, Split: A Memoir of Divorce

“I am replete with stamina in finding out every single fact I can about this whole affair.

Yet, I think, do I want to pull that thread? Do I want to unleash the truth, unravel deceit, and kill reality as I´ve known it? It is irreparable, if I do, from the moment we met until now. It is long. If I discover too much that is false about what I thought my past was, Time will be skewed even further. I already have a poor connection with the present. Example: I have no sense of what day it is. It´s better.”
― Suzanne Finnamore, Split: A Memoir of Divorce

“I sensed he may have occasionally strayed in some of his past relationships. It was something I felt but ignored, a rent in the fabric of an otherwise splendid garment I thought I could mend. I thought I could live with it—I thought, yes and I admit it, that I would be different. That at the very least, middle age and children would slow him down; however, they seemed to accelerate his pace.”
― Suzanne Finnamore, Split: A Memoir of Divorce

“How can I grieve what is still in motion?" I ask her. "Shoes are still dropping all over the place. I´m not kidding," I say. "It´s Normandy out there.”
― Suzanne Finnamore, Split: A Memoir of Divorce

“They ought to do away with divorce settlements. Instead, both parties should flip a coin. The winner gets to stay where he or she is and keep everything. The loser goes to Paraguay. That´s it.”
― Suzanne Finnamore, Split: A Memoir of Divorce

“Yes. THANK YOU. And say hello to Judas Iscariot.”
― Suzanne Finnamore, Split: A Memoir of Divorce

“I saw my reflection in their eyes, but not the men themselves, not clearly. This preserved the idea that all intelligent and even vaguely attractive men were essentially good. Delusion detest focus and romance provides the veil.”
― Suzanne Finnamore, Split: A Memoir of Divorce

“Irrationally, I think, Will You Marry Me? Four words. I Want a Divorce. Four words. I would like time to count the letters as well, but there is not time.”
― Suzanne Finnamore, Split: A Memoir of Divorce

“This people know where their husbands are. I would like to vomit. I would like to vomit my soul out.”
― Suzanne Finnamore, Split: A Memoir of Divorce

“Flannel shirts should be outlawed for ex husbands; I realize this now. Flannel shirts are to women what crotchless panties are to men.”
― Suzanne Finnamore, Split: A Memoir of Divorce

“I know my vision is impaired and cannot be trusted with even the simplest tasks, much less dating. Not that I´ve come within talon distance of a man.”
― Suzanne Finnamore, Split: A Memoir of Divorce

“My mother is a firm believer in the long pause, useful in interrogations, proclamations of truth, and the occasional cutting dead of someone without their knowing it.”
― Suzanne Finnamore, Split: A Memoir of Divorce

“(On getting married at 19)
We told ourselves we had forever and we never looked back. The problem was that we never really looked ahead.”
― Crystal Woods, Write like no one is reading

“The abandonment came, and now this shabby bacchanal.”
― Suzanne Finnamore, Split: A Memoir of Divorce

“A pink razor is like a mouse, where ever it is the pussy will follow.”
― Helen Ellis, Eating the Cheshire Cat

“Everyday in my office I meet consumers of the modern ideology of marriage. They bought the product, got it home, and found that it was missing a few pieces. So they come to the repair shop to fix it so it looks like what's on the box. They take their relational aspirations as a given－both what they want and what they deserve to have－and are upset when the romantic ideal doesn't jibe with the unromantic reality. It's no surprise that this utopian vision is gathering a growing army of the disenchanted in its wake.”
― Esther Perel, The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity

“In so many senseless deaths, beauty is to blame.”
― Suzanne Finnamore, Split: A Memoir of Divorce

“So the great affair is over but whoever would have guessed
it would leave us all so vacant and so deeply unimpressed
It's like our visit to the moon or to that other star
I guess you go for nothing if you really want to go that far.”
― Leonard Cohen

“The real genesis is forbidden to me, vis-à-vis N´s inability to confess even the mildest transgressions.”
― Suzanne Finnamore, Split: A Memoir of Divorce

“This is much easier than when N left. Our son is unable to grasp and simultaneously turn doorknobs yet. If only this trick could be unlearned by men over thirty, many more families would celebrate Christmas together.”
― Suzanne Finnamore, Split: A Memoir of Divorce

“Conversely, I though humiliation would be everything, but it´s such a nothing.”
― Suzanne Finnamore, Split: A Memoir of Divorce

“This is much worse than losing a cat. You do not wish the cat dead, for example, after the first two days. You still love the cat and presumably the cat still loves you, or some variation of love that may in fact be dependence and even indifference.”
― Suzanne Finnamore, Split: A Memoir of Divorce

“I´ve blown it, the whole grisly charade.”
― Suzanne Finnamore, Split: A Memoir of Divorce

“The Betty Lady explains love and splitting up: "It´s like playing the shell game with Jesus. You can´t figure anything out; it´s best not to try. You´ll just humiliate yourself.”
― Suzanne Finnamore, Split: A Memoir of Divorce

“...bunches of flowers and kisses, their bodies locked together by a stopwatch."

Descriptive on an affair”
― Susan Richards Shreve, You Are the Love of My Life

“I review what I know once again, confronting the monolith now alien and almost unconnected to me: my marriage.”
― Suzanne Finnamore, Split: A Memoir of Divorce

“Dorothy asked timidly: "Did his wife say anything?
"She sent her love to you."
Nora said: "Stop being nasty.”
― Dashiell Hammett, The Thin Man

“Lying in his parents' house, in the middle of the night, she told him the whole story, about meeting Dimitri on a bus, finding his resume in the bin. She confessed that Dimitri had gone with her to Palm Beach. One by one he stored the pieces of information in his mind, unwelcome, unforgivable. And for the first time in his life, another man's name upset Gogol more than his own.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake