Jelly roll And Bunnie Xo are ready. After Bunnie publicly said they had “been through hell,” after she mentioned the infidelity out loud, after years of what seemed like one of country music’s most ride-or-die love stories, the marriage is coming to an end.
And the withdrawals are already flying. She forgave him too quickly. He never really changed. She should have left years ago. He should have begged harder.
I want to slow it down. Because I’ve sat with many couples who looked exactly like this from the outside. Public reconciliation. Public dedication. Tattoos, lyrics, anniversary posts. And then, quietly, a divorce filing three or five years later.
There’s a reason why “we’re past it” so often doesn’t apply. And it has almost nothing to do with whether the love was real.
The third person who never quite goes away
An affair, in terms of attachment, is not just behavior. It is the introduction of a third party into the primary bond. And the primary bond rests on two beliefs that your nervous system needs to feel safe: I am your priority. I am enough for you.
An affair instantly tells your partner’s body that both things are at stake. That’s not living. That’s a body that scans for danger.
People also misunderstand the size of the wound. They think an affair is one betrayal. That is almost never the case. There’s the affair itself, and then there are six or seven minor injuries in it. You lied to my face. You made me feel stupid. You took her to the restaurant we said was ours. You said you loved me one night I now know you were texting her. You had a whole life that I wasn’t in.
Moreover, the betrayed partner loses grip on reality. They look back on the last vacation, the last anniversary, the last “I love you,” and they can’t tell what was real. That’s a kind of dizziness.
Now add the cruelest part. The person they experience as the one who hurt them is also the person they want to be comforted by. That’s crazy, and it’s the room that Jelly Roll and Bunnie lived in, the same room I see couples in every week.
The loop that eats away at marriages three years later
Here is the dynamic I see in destroying couples who “did the work.”
They come to me two, three, sometimes five years after the affair. They stayed. They are ‘fine’. They’re posting again. And then an outburst every few weeks. He’s late. He’s holding his phone in the corner. Back in the trauma, she asks the questions again and her voice rises.
He sighs. He collapses. He says, “Oh my god, are we doing this again? I’ve apologized a thousand times.”
She explodes.
I call this the “Never Forget, Never Forgiven” loop. And it’s the silent killer of post-affair marriages. From the outside, the eye roll looks like a guy who doesn’t care. Slow down the tape and I see a man terrified. His nervous system doesn’t hear, “I need reassurance.” It is hearing, “You are bad. You will always be bad. No matter what you do, you will never be free from this.”
The eye roll is not arrogance. It’s desperation. It is the breakdown of someone who feels like he is serving a life sentence in his own marriage.
If you want to know if you and your partner are in a circle like this, Request your free relationship analysis. Sometimes the pattern is easier to see if someone names it for you.
Why shame is the real marriage killer
The biggest obstacle to recovering from an affair is not the lack of love. It’s shame.
The partner who has strayed often drowns. They look at their partner’s tears and it confirms their worst fears about themselves. I’m a monster. I am destructive. I am unworthy. So when their partner starts crying or asking again, they cave in. “I can’t talk about this, I’m such a piece of shT.”
That collapse is a disaster. Because when you fold “I’m bad,” you make the moment about you. You leave your partner in pain for the second time. They’re left alone during the explosion, while you drown in the guilt of lighting the fuse.
Meanwhile, the betrayed partner tries not to punish. She’s checking. Are you still there? Do you still get it? Is it safe? When he turns away, her safety evaporates, making her louder. She needs him to feel her pain so she knows she’s not crazy. This is classic attachment traumaand the protest behavior of both partners guarantees that neither will be granted.
What looks better in my office isn’t “communicate more.” It’s specific.
First you close the door. Complete. No ambiguity about the third party. You cannot perform surgery while the patient is still bleeding.
Second, pause the “we both contributed” frame. For a season, traffic flows in one direction. One person dropped the bomb. The other stood in the explosion. Asking the betrayed partner to “take their share” feels like gaslighting, because it is.
Third, the traitor must change the internal mix. Right now their cocktail is 100%: “I feel terrible about myself.” It should be 20% “I feel terrible about myself” and 80% “My partner’s heart is broken and I will stay present without backing down.”
That third move is the one that breaks the loop. And it’s the step that most couples never quite learn to take.
The sentence I would have liked to tell them years ago
I don’t know Jelly Roll and Bunnie. I won’t pretend. But I’ve seen this kind of ending a hundred times, and it’s almost never where the love wasn’t real. It’s that the loop got too tired to keep running.
Forgiveness is not a finish line that you cross once. It’s a position that two people have to choose again and again, on a Tuesday, when no one is looking, when she asks the question again and he has to decide what to do with his face.
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Fig O’Sullivan, the founder of Empathi and his wife, Teale, are relationship therapists in San Francisco, relationship experts at the Stars and Silicon Valley, founders of Empathi, and built Figlet, our AI relationship coachan AI relationship coach trained in their clinical work.*
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