After Jay-Z admitted his infidelity in his marriage to superstar singer Beyoncé, it begs the question of why a woman of her caliber would have stayed.
“Even with women, you gonna shut down emotionally, so you can’t connect,” Jay admitted to The New York Times Wednesday, Nov. 29. “In my case, like, it’s deep and then all the things happen from there: infidelity.”
Hints of Jay, straying from Bey became apparent after her 2016 album, Lemonade, and he came clean on “4:44.”
“Because they’re public figures, there’s a high level of humiliation that comes along with that because it’s no longer a private matter,” said Hasani Pettiford of Atlanta-based Couples Academy to Atlanta Black Star Monday, Dec. 4. “One of the things that I always encourage couples to do if they discover infidelity is to not tell everybody. Because even though people claim to be your friend and your support system, not everyone means you well.”
And Jay is not alone in his public admission of cheating. When comedian Kevin Hart was videoed in the back of a car with a mystery woman in Miami early one morning, blogs went wild. After an incriminating video surfaced of a man who appeared to be Hart taking a woman to bed, he publicly apologized to then-pregnant wife Eniko Parrish.
“I made a bad error in judgment and I put myself in a bad environment where only bad things can happen and they did,” he said.
Celebs and Cheating
Torrei Hart Plays Coy In New Interview Over Kevin Hart’s Cheating Scandal
Kevin Hart Is Trying to Convince Fans He’s Unbothered By His Cheating Scandal But It’s Not Working
Jay Z Comes Clean On New Album ‘4:44’ About How He Almost Blew It with Beyoncé
But why would women like Parrish and Beyoncé, who have a successful empire filled with fashion, business and adoring fans, stay with a man who cheated on them? Pettiford doesn’t think that has any influence on the decision.
“I don’t think that celebrity has anything to do with whether someone should stay or not, because at the end of the day, even though it’s publicly exposed, it’s still a private matter,” Pettiford said. “She’s no more of a superhuman than a woman who’s not a celebrity. She’s the same woman in terms of her humanity.”
He added that the kind of affair — emotional or a one night stand, or even a battle with sex addiction — can determine if a person stays in a relationship.
“Most people do not divorce because of infidelity,” he said. “It’s how they refuse to show up after the discovery of the affair that often times will lead to a divorce.”
Counseling can help couples — celebrity and non-celeb alike — with moving on together after a cheating mishap. Pettiford says couples should see a therapist specializing in infidelity and outlines three types of recovery to focus on: marital recovery, individual recovery and affair recovery.
“If you don’t take a comprehensive approach to healing that marriage and those individuals,
then you’re putting yourself in the position where it could potentially happen again,” he said.
