Once the trust is gone, there is nothing left. You cannot get it back. I tried to learn to trust my ex after his affair, but it was just gone. And wouldn’t come back, no matter how hard I tried. And I tried harder than most people probably would.
I know if my SO was ever with another women, I would never be able to let anyone else in again. It just hurts too bad to have that trust ripped out, without benefit of anethesia.
I would rather spend the rest of my life alone.
And I don’t think it is just about sex. It hurt as bad to find out the ex was spending time with his “friend”, as to find out he was boofing her. I would of loved to have that time with him. And I felt it was my fault, that I wasn’t sexy or pretty or smart enough to keep him interested.
Now I have a BF who would not do this to me. He knows if he does, it would be over. Period, end of sentence.
I don’t know. This whole “trust” thing seems overrated. I don’t need to use “trust” as an excuse to control my SOs actions. I am interested in our love and support of each other, our ability to build our lives together and our intentions to stay commited to each other. I don’t need to set up zero tolerence requirements hold it over his head, saying “Well, if you do X it shows that you don’t really love me”, because that might not be true. If something should happen, I will ask “Does he still love me and support me in my life?”, “Does this affect our ability to live our lives together (as in living together, having kids and that sort of thing)?” and “Does this indicate that we will not have the stability to build that life together?”. The answers might be yes, or they might be no. I trust myself to judge on a case by case basis.
My SO has his own life. While our lives are intertwined, I know it is not my place to dictate his life. I accept that parts of his life will always be hidden from me, I accept that some parts of his life may be separate from mine. And he accepts this from me. I love him as a person, not as a set of rules. We are in this together, to live and to love, not to threaten and control.
I can see being upset about sex, because it does have a lot of implications. I cannot, however, imagine begrudgeing my SO for having times and people in his life that are seperate from me. I love him, I do not own him. He owes me nothing more than his love, and his commitment to keep this relationship stable enough to build a life together. The rest shall come.
My relationship with my wife is not really open, but we semi-jokingly allow each other a little infidelity under extreme circumstances (mostly involving hot celebrities). I feel comfortable enough with her that if I was seriously tempted I would tell her about the temptation first, and work from there. It would definitely have potential to damage our relationship, but not necessarily destroy it (a lot would depend on the circumstances).
My wife recently had a dream that she told me about that gives me a bit of insight into how she sees it. She dreamed I brought home a short skinny girl with long black hair. She says she was angry at first, but then thought ‘He just wants to screw her’ and decided to let me, but then later in the dream I started spending all my time with this girl, cuddling with her and talking with her almost exclusively, which made her far more angry than me bringing her home. She confronted me about it and I told her that we had been growing apart and I thought it was time for our relationship to end. When I got off work (I work nights and come home around the time she’s getting ready for school) she was mad at me, and when I asked her why she told me I was ‘acting up’ in her dreams. She also had one that night where I refused to take her advice and pull over when there was a tornado in the middle of the road.
I wouldn’t say that you could compare lying about an affair as being in the same category as lying about how much money you spend on clothes, etc. It’s an entirely different ballgame. You won’t get STDs from buying clothes. You won’t worry every night if your SO is really where they say they are if they are out at the mall shopping instead of shagging somebody else.
There aren’t many married couples/committed live-together couples that don’t tell the little white lies to each other like how much money they spend on personal items.
I guess the bottom line would be how important the intimancy in a relationship is to each person. Personally, I don’t want to be with someone that takes sex lightly. Your body is the one thing that you have to offer to someone special and if you are going to give it up to anyone that catches your eye, then I don’t want it. I want someone that cherishes it as much as I do, that hasn’t done the booty call three or four times a night with a different person, or for that matter three or four times a week with a different person. It’s called being old-fashioned, and yes I am. To each his own. I don’t condemn anyone that wants to live that way, I’m just not going to be in a relationship with them.
See, and to me, “intimacy” is not the same as “sex.” I have had sex with a lot of people in my life; I have been intimate with two or three. And by “intimate” I don’t mean, “in love.”
I can’t explain it. I dislike the unstated assumption that because I have not been sexually faithful that sex and intimacy and trust do not matter to me as much as they matter to people who ARE sexually faithful.
While others feel that cheating is the deal-breaker, I do not…and I don’t like the implication that that makes me a lesser person. It doesn’t. Different, but not lesser.
Just as a general note, if you say that you don’t look down on people who don’t feel the same way about this, then genuinely DON’T, mmmkay?
(And that’s a generic “you,” not an ultress “you.” :D)
I’m a posessive person when in love and I certainly do not want some other guy enjoying my loved one. Infidelity, for me anyhow, is a parting offense. I do not cheat and she had better not either. What she gives me in sex is a special gift and if she spreads that gift around, then that’s it for me and I’ll call it quits.
I have to admit that I would be pretty upset if my husband lies to me about anything. I never, ever lie to him. And I don’t plan to in the near future. If I can be completely honest with him 100% of the time, it’s because I expect the same from him. If he wants to go to a baseball game, why couldn’t he just say, “I’m going to the baseball game.”
Lying is lying, and I really really can’t put up with dishonesty.
Being in an open relationship with my wife, the rules are not that much different for us than it is for couples who are not in an open relationship. There is no sneaking around, and no lying. Other than that, its pretty much open season.
If my wife lied to me about sex (or anything that really mattered) I would be quite upset, but nothing in our relationship is a marriage killer (outside of her slaughtering my family or something). I don’t think that divorce is an option for Jenn and I, and I am willing to do everything in my power to make sure that we stay together. Therapy, concessions, whatever it takes. I plan on being with this woman for the rest of my life, and am willing to do anything to keep it.
I have been cheated on once. It is the worst emotional pain I have ever endured in my life, and I was so sure that I was the type of person who could just say “goodbye”, but it turns out that being in that situation and predicting that situation are much much different. I forgave him, because we were in a rocky part of our relationship, and well, I don’t know why I forgave him. But it ripped my heart out, and I couldn’t live without him. God, I feel so bad now. You think there’s an extent to which a person would just give up and say “forget it” after being hurt so much, but I guess there isn’t for me. I have been with him for almost a year now, and I am happy with him. I have told him that I can’t do this anymore with him, because we’ve had an on-and-off relationship for a while now, and next time it goes off again it’s staying off.
I have never had this happen to me, so I can’t say for sure what I would do.
But I don’t think having my SO cheat on me would automatically lead to my splitting up with her. If she was becoming cold and distant, and the relationship was on the rocks, then her cheating would probably be the final straw where I would just declare, “This is not going to work, time to call it quits.” But if everything were going otherwise fine, and I was satisfied with the relationship and we were both happy, and then I discovered that my SO was cheating, then I’d be a fool to throw a good relationship in the dustbin.
If Hamadryad and her husband are still deliriously happy after she cheated, then I think they made a smart decision in staying together.
What do you mean by “intimate?” It’s an honest question,
not an attack.
As for the OP: I would be hurt too much by infidelity for
the relationship to last. I would continue to live with my
wife until the kids were all in college, but I don’t think
I’d ever trust her again. Once my last kid was in college,
I’d leave.
I have ended a couple of relationships because of cheating, even though it hurt like hell at the time, because the trust was gone and it could never be rebuilt again. In one relationship, the first, we tried to make a go of it but every time we made love, I just pictured the other guy hopping between those legs and seeing what I was seeing and her responding how she responded to me. Plus, I found I just could no longer trust her, so I ended it.
I don’t want excuses as to why they did it, because I never have and never will even though I have had many an opportunity to do so. Even to having a girl strip right in front of me! Fidelity is fidelity.