Lets say Man A. has an affair on his wife with Woman B. He divorces Mrs. A. and marries B. Do you think such a relationship would last?
Or lets say a woman and a man are both married to 2 different people. They meet, have an affair, and decide to leave their spouses and marry. Do you see such a relationship working out long term?
Have you known such relationships?
Did they work out?
My dad and his whore-wife were both married to other people when their affair started. They’ve been married for 25 years now.
I have known of many such relationships, and even been a participant once. I would say the chances of working out are about the same as any other relationship. People are a bit older and wiser, and hopefully know what they are doing after such an upheaval. On the other hand, a relationship founded on so much drama is bound to have challenges. I know of several that have lasted 10 plus years (and look like healthy relationships) that started as affairs. Others crash and burn.
So did someone cheat on you, or you cheated or a friend cheated; after your other questions something appears to be going on.
Or maybe write Dear Abby?
5 words: Johnny Cash and June Carter (married 35 years)
Yep, the perception is that “OMG a cheater will NEVER EVER EVER have a good relationship!” but I know several long-term relationships that started out with one or both partners cheating.
The unfortunate reality is that it’s pretty common to seek solace outside your marriage if the marriage itself isn’t working. It’s a shitty thing to do, and extremely difficult for all parties involved, but unless it’s a pattern of behavior that repeats over and over I don’t cheating in and of itself is indicative of some sort of insurmountable personality problem.
Woody Allen has been married to Soon-Yi Previn for 18 years.
Yup. Married to wife, #2 for 23 years now and have never cheated on her.
I have a friend who started dating her husband while he was married to his first wife. He left his first wife for her. They’ve been married 20+ years now.
Yeah, my last relationship started out like your first scenario, we had a good run of 9 years. While yes it did end, it had nothing to do with cheating or the origin of our relationship.
Painting with TOO WIDE a BRUSH. There is no way to say conclusively in a one-size-fits-all kind of way.
I think people tend to either talk about, or remember, the ones that ended dramatically because it feels more like a narrative story.
There are probably plenty of people who started relationships this way, and you wouldn’t even know, because why would it come up 10, 20, or more years down the road? Two couples come to mind, people my parents’ age, where I had known them my entire life and didn’t learn until I was an adult that those relationships had started as affairs.
The chances of any relationship succeeding long-term are 50/50 best. I think that relationships that start out with cheating definitely have less chances of succeeding, because of the additional hurdles they have to overcome. For instance, if there are children in the picture, they can certainly add extra stress to a burgeoning relationship by refusing to accept the new person. Families can turn a cold shoulder to the new person, either because they disapprove of the cheating and/or because the first spouse was so well-liked. And cheaters might find themselves being frozen out of their prior social circles.
Can they work? Of course. But there may be a lot of factors working against them, so they’d better be really committed to it despite those odds.
Even if it does not involve cheating, second marriages break up most of the time.
Cite.
So it is not inevitable that relationships that start as cheating will fail, but it is likely.
Regards,
Shodan
Those relationships certainly can succeed in the long term, as evidenced by the multiple anecdotal examples in this thread, but I have to imagine that a relationship that started with one or both parties deceiving a committed partner would have some big trust issues to overcome right from the start.
Likewise. My father and his whore-wife have been married about 3x longer than he was married to my mother.
Not surprising, especially when you get into third marriages. Seems like, if you’re on marriage #3, there’s a better than average chance that you’re not very good at being married for whatever reason. Obviously case by case exceptions apply.
Ditto, except replace “whore-wife” with “jerk-wife” and “25 years” with “34 years.”
My thoughts precisely. Our OP seems to have a mostly one-track mind these days.
Care to elaborate?
There are a lot of marriages where the emotional connection is dead but where divorce papers haven’t been completed: for example because of the children, economic reasons, inertia… I would expect these types of situations to have successful second marriages at comparable rates to those people who did complete the divorce papers. On the other hand there are people who still have an emotional relationship with a spouse but have a wandering eye and like to have flings. I expect these type people are less likely to have successful second marriages.
We’re such a bunch of jerks sometimes. I tell ya.
Look, everybody knows the OP is a simple minded man with a very black and white view of the world. Would it hurt you all to tell him that the couple in question is morally corrupt and will burn in hell for their sins? It would make the OP feel so much better. And after all, isn’t that the sort of kindness that the visiting Pope speaks about?