Celebrity Relationships of Elizabeth Edwards and Elin Nordegren Marred by the Betrayal of Infidelity
By Barbara Lock, MDJanuary 27, 2010
What do Elizabeth Edwards and Elin Nordegren have in common? Both are partners in celebrity relationships that bore children, and in which suffered infidelity.
Edwards has reportedly "had enough" of her perrenially lying husband, the former senator John Edwards, according to USA Today. CBS news reports that the pair is legally separated. Elizabeth Edwards, still undergoing treatment for breast cancer, had four children with John Edwards. Their first child, Wade, died in a car accident in 1996. John Edwards has a fifth child, Frances Quinn Hunter, who is the product of his extramarital relationship with Reille Hunter during his presidential campaign.
Nordegren is reportedly postponing a decision for divorce from golfer Tiger Woods until after he completes treatment for hypersexual disorder, according to the New York Post. The revelation of the first of Woods' numerous affairs, numbering 19 at last count, led to a marital spat and late night car crash in late 2009, followed by a decision by Woods to temporarily withdraw from golf.
Will either go on to have an intact, robust and healthy relationship with their current partner after the dust settles? If this were a choose your own adventure reader, how would you want the story to end?
It's not the celebrity status of these famous people that puts them at risk, or maybe it does, I don't know. That's not what I'm here to discuss. It's the quotidien, sadly routine experience of betrayal that needs fleshing out here. Infidelity can be considered a form of betrayal, which is a sense of harm due to the actions or ommisions of a trusted person. What does betrayal do to a couple, and how often can they recover?
Betrayal is, of course, is one of those sins intricately linked in literature with danger, romance, and the depths of hell. Who can forget Dante's Inferno, in which the narrator is famously accomapnied by the roman poet Virgil on an all-expenses-paid guided tour of hell? The hellish torment of those lustful "carnal malefactors", whose souls are blown about to and fro by unrelenting storms, unfolds in the second circle of hell, while the panderers and seducers are forced to march for all eternity by demons wielding whips in the eighth circle of hell, and the treacherous are encased in varying depths of ice in the ninth circle of hell.
Luckily, Dante's Inferno, is just a story. But even committed couples can have trouble rebuilding trust after infidelity.
The effects of betrayal can include grief, anger, self-doubt, can precipitate anxiety disorders and post-traumatic distress disorder, and can foster a sense of "mental contamination," for the victim, according to Rachmann. That's a lot of poison for most relationships, and it's hard to find an antidote.
In a survey of marital therapists who counseled or otherwise intimately knew a total of 62 couples who had suffered infidelity, 35% of the marriages ended in divorce, 50% of the marriages persisted but in a "negative" or "blah" atmosphere, and 15% of the marriages persisted in a state of an improved relationship and growth, according to Charny and Parnass.
Among those who sough marital therapy, couples plagued by infidelity experienced more dishonesty, more arguments about trust, and more time spent apart compared to couples not plagued by infidelity, according to Atkins et al.
The high profile examples of betrayal in marriage may have more impact on our children than we are aware of. The media attention of the Clinton Scandal was not lost on children ten years ago; in fact, researchers who interviewed children at the time reported that they understood themes of "lying, getting caught, infidelity and role modeling", according to Kelley et al.
Among school age children affected by divorce, boys in particular had a reduced quality of life, although this was mitigated in some cases by spending more time with the father. Quality of life increased somewhat when the divorce was by mutual agreement, and when the mother had a college education, according to Eymann et al.
Both Elin Nordegren and Elizabeth Edwards seem outwardly calm in the face of their threatened marriages, but this is apparently not uncommon. Partners who are betrayed by infidelity report less depression on the initiation of divorce than those who were not betrayed by infidelity according to Sweeney et al.
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