These types of situations usually require that old friendships be abandoned. It CAN be worked out, but hypothetically speaking, you probably don’t want that ghost hanging around. It’s a small price to pay for the survival of your marriage.
…and he has to commit to not stepping into that same house…
Correct. Those old relationships have to go into the “irreparably damaged” bin.
This. We had a counselor that consistently thought one of us (ok: me) was the bad guy in every case. That just about did us in, until we tried someone else and things got better surprisingly quickly. Do be prepared to try more than one counselor, and if your spouse agrees to try counseling, make sure they know this as well. OTOH, your first counselor may be great, so don’t let these warnings poison the well, but forewarned is four-armed, or something. 
From my experience, what you suggest is the exception rather than the rule. Can it be worked out? Yes, sometimes. But it doesn’t happen often. From what I’ve seen, it’s more a choice of ripping the band-aid off fast and enduring a sharp pain of limited duration, or peeling it off slowly so it hurts a little for a long time.
In fairness, the couples that do work it out probably are not taking to lawyers about it. Entering my 14th year of practice, I’ve never had a client call me because things were going well for them.
I’ve been in this situation as the cheater and cheatee.
If a couple wants to attempt counseling, good. If it works, great. But it sounds like six months of marriage didn’t work as well as the 10 year relationship.
If the person who was cheated on is never going to forgive the cheater, *the cheater should end the relationship. * Because the relationship will never really be the same. Even if s/he says they’ve forgiven cheater.
Again, just from personal experience. YMMV
But for every couple who hires you, there are probably two who never call you at all. There are plenty of people who choose to address their problems head on and come out stronger for it.
I’ll bet the ratio is far less than 2:1. More like 1:100 that survives infidelity.
I’m sure there’s a published stat somewhere, though.
Perhaps because people are so often told that a single infidelity SHOULD be a deal-breaker and no one should EVER have to put up with cheating and if they do they’re just letting themselves be taken advantage of rather than giving a relationship worth saving a second chance.
I think that if people weren’t so quick to just drop each other because one partner fucked up one time, we might have a higher success rate to talk about.
For my part, I think that how and whether infidelity can be overcome depends on the reason for the infidelity. In my case, my SO’s infidelity was basically symbolic of a desire to try on a different life, and at that time, it wasn’t such a strange desire to have. I understood why she did it and could easily have seen myself doing the same thing, so after some angsting, I forgave her and believed her when she said it had only happened once and would never happen again. It was extremely difficult, but after making the decision to forgive her and move on, I had to just put it out of my mind and operate as if it had never happened. Some might say this is dangerous, but I think this is the truest form of forgiving and forgetting, and it’s worked for us. 3 years later, we’re happier than we ever were, and the infidelity rarely even enters my mind, much less our conversations or concerns.
The wife in your hypothetical situation has some questions to ask herself. Is the relationship worth saving, or are the problems leading up to the infidelity not likely to be fixable? Could she, in time, come to forgive him completely, or would she be likely to punish him for it forever, or throw it back in his face in an unrelated argument 10 years down the road? Does the husband actually seem to regret it; does he seem to genuinely understand the depth of harm this has done to the relationship and want to do everything he can to heal it, or is the wife having to extract promises and declarations from him? These are just some of the many I asked myself in making the decision.
Bottom line is, I do think that almost anyone, given the right set of circumstances, can fuck up one time and betray the person they love the most. I don’t think it’s a defining set of actions, and I don’t think that it’s necessarily a repetitive cycle. Of course some people, even many people, are serial cheaters, but if you don’t try to work it out after the first time, how would you ever know you didn’t throw away something wonderful?
(Bolding mine)
Look, I’m not saying anything about you, your SO, or your relationship. That’s between you two, you two know yourselves better than I know you, and in any case, far be it from me to get involved in someone else’s private stuff. The “you” in what I’m about to say is the generic “you” meaning “everyone.”
That said, I disagree that this is one fuck-up. When you accidentally leave the gate to your house open, and the neighbor’s dog gets in and shits on your dad’s prize-winning magnolias, that’s one fuck-up. When your wife goes to move out of the parking space, but she forgets that she’s in reverse and backs up twenty feet and hits a cop car, which makes the officer spill his scalding hot McDonald’s coffee onto his crotch, making him scream like a little girl while a bunch of seventh graders on the corner start laughing about fried pork, thereby adding mental anguish to his physical anguish in every legal sense of the term, that’s one fuck-up. An accident. A momentary lapse of attention. Your dad plants new magnolias, your wife gets out of jail, you settle out of court with a big cash payment, you slap your wife in the face and call her a bitch, then you get out of jail, and everyone just moves on with their lives.
Infidelity is different. It results from a series of fuck-ups unless your partner’s winding up in another’s bed involves a transporter beam. First she has to go out. Then she has to find the guy, whether or not she actually knows him from before. Then she has to get into increasingly intimate and compromising locations and situations, you know, like a bar, then the stairway, then the living room, then the waterbed, and then, depending where you are and what she’s into, the guy’s best friend, then the chains hanging from the ceiling, then the gimp, and finally a noise complaint, which results in a visit from the same damned cop, who’s still whining about his crotch.
You see what I mean? These involve multiple fuck-ups and lapses of judgement, and that’s assuming that he or she wasn’t planning to fuck you over in the first place. At the very least, it involves a real failure of judgement multiple times! And if your partner skips some steps and just phones the other person at their place and meets them there it’s not even a fuck-up anymore. That’s deliberate.
What I’m trying to say is that this is why I join the chorus of people saying that if a person cheats on you once, they’re most likely going to do it again. It might involve different reasons and different circumstances, but chances are, it will happen. I say “most likely” and “chances are” because I know people can change in theory. In practice, though, I would never take that sort of chance. The odds are just too much against. In my mind, the partner who commits that many screw-ups in a row forfeits the benefit of the doubt for good.
Linty Fresh, you’re arguing semantics. Obviously by “fuck up” I don’t mean “trip, fall, and land on someone’s genitalia.” Of course it requires multiple bad choices, but to be honest, the choices up to the one to share real, actual physical intimacy with someone else are pretty irrelevant.
I don’t give a shit if my partner is attracted to other people. I don’t even particularly care if she flirts with them. The real fuck-up that matters is the one that results in her climbing out of someone’s bed, no longer able to say she’s been faithful. YMMV.
Also, the string of “fuck-ups” that can result in an episode of infidelity can be surprisingly short. For example, plenty of infidelities can be boiled down to “got way too drunk to control oneself and hooked up with someone randomly”, and that kind of infidelity really stems from a single bad choice to drink more than one can handle. Don’t mean to trivialize the act; I’m just saying that I don’t think it’s always such a cause-and-effect cascade as you might think, and it’s not entirely fair to treat every infidelity the same way.
I think that the operative phrase here is “if both parties want to.”
Something tells me that at least one of the parties doesn’t want to.
Around my neck of the woods, the counselors are a waste of time. The few men that I’ve known who’ve been to a marriage counselor have been *attacked *for being real pigs, by the counselor!
In perspective, just who the heck are these counselors? What the heck gives them some status as somebody that can help a marriage? What can they provide that is not already there in the event that a couple already wants to reconcile? Advice? You can get good advice on the web, but just look at this MB: nothing that is new, or restorative. Somebody to vent to? That may be helpful. I personally think that it is a case of the Counselor’s New Clothes-people project what they want onto the counselor.
It’s not good, even hypothetically, to flip the fuck out in a “friend’s” house.
I hear what people are saying re infidelity can be gotten over or some such. I think each case if very, very different. The hypothetical husband in my example told me he had done this–and he felt so much better after his confession! That is what he said. And then he would answer no questions about this hypothetical fuck up and said it was over. Well, for me it was (hypothetically) just beginning. It was just his hypothetical bad luck that this coincided with my getting vitiligo–a disease which is devastating to self image and esteem. Sucks to be hypothetical him, no? Somehow, I didn’t/ don’t have much hypothetical sympathy for him. And so the damage was done, not to be undone. Word to the wise–get help.
Anyhoo, what this hypo humping did for us was to expose other, deeper hypothetical problems. We hypothetically attended couple’s counseling–he went twice; I went for several years (have forgotten how many). Hypothetically, it helped, in that we weren’t having nasty fights anymore–hypothetically, we had civilized nastiness, instead. Now, hypothetically, we have reached hypothetical detent and are planning a divorce. It’s not pretty or good or pleasant; it is banal, boring and stale. The hypo humping was a symptom.
I have to say, given that I have been a hypothetically cheated on spouse, that it is NOT one fuck up, even hypothetically. At some point, a decision is made and acted upon (hypothetically). Each decision leads to the next. It’s like being a little bit pregnant–ain’t possible. Does it mean the cheating one will hypothetically cheat again? Not necessarily, but it does mean that trust has eroded, if not evaporated into the hypothetical stratosphere. Good luck getting that back w/o a ton of hypothetical work on both parts. Hypothetically, my spouse wasn’t willing to do that work. I have often wondered what his hypothetical reaction would have been if I had been the one (hypothetically) confessing.
I have a speculation here: you say that things were good when large problems needed to be solved within the relationship. I am no psychologist, but perhaps this was an unconscious act by hypothetical spouse to create a large problem, so as to re-energize that bond? Whacky way to go about it, but it’s a thought…
Qadgop–I have been spelling your name wrong for at least 5 years. I am sorry. :eek:
There was a cartoon in the New Yorker where the wife tells husband she doesn’t want his apology, she wants him to feel sorry. This is part of the process where the offending party has to understand how they have hurt the other person. Another part is accepting responsibility for ones own actions. I think most people don’t like to cheat, and so often people consciously or unconsciously blame their partner for their infidelity. “My wife won’t have sex, so what’s a guy going to do?” Or, a wife blames the lack of emotional intimacy, and uses that to justify an affair.
It’s not easy to own up to one’s frailties. I’ve had some serious wake up calls and it’s been an eye-opener to me on really being honest with myself, on why I did things that I was doing and on working on changing my underlying beliefs and reactions to situations.
I think often it’s the case that the offending person sort of understands they acted inappropriately, feels guilty about it and apologies but doesn’t take the further steps on really getting to the core of why they did it. And the core isn’t simply that with wife wasn’t putting out or that the husband was distant.
The heart of the matter is that the person believes that they are justified in taking actions which can really hurt someone else when they feel hurt, rather than work through the original problem. If this belief isn’t addressed, then further affairs are much more likely to occur again. OK, so the couple solve the problem of the day, but what happens when the next problem comes?
This process is involved and takes time. It also happens under a highly emotionally charged environment, where the hurt partner naturally isn’t able to help support the offender. This is where counseling is really useful, and I think that individual counseling for the offender could allow their problem to be better isolated and worked on.
I don’t know if I can see enough from the OP to say either way. He does want to work things out, but is he sorry?
Yup. Even in case of affairs, there can be problems all around. The cases I talked about above are examples of people acting in appropriately to problems, but there are problems by the partner.
It’s not easy and a lot of work, and this doesn’t even address overcoming the hurt feelings, the lose of trust and how to regain it. This is not a trivial task, but I think it can be done, if both parties really work at it and are truly willing to give it the necessary efforts and tears.
Because it will take work and tears, you have to decide if it’s worth it. Or, you can just fall back on simple blank and white clichés and say that people can never change.
me too. Personally, I blame Scrabble. In Scrabble, the Q and U go together like love and marr… well, like two things that usually go together.
As for the OP, and for eleanor, my sympathies, hypothetical and real. Staying in a broken marriage, and divorce both suck.
:dubious: That should be "there can be problems by the partner. I’m not going to give all cheaters an out.
Unfortunately, I think too many people try to solve it this way, and it does not work. That is really too bad.
I am struck by how did the hypotetical couple manage to get married with such bad timing. Were they already having problems and did they think the piece of paper would automagically fix them? That happens way, way too often IME, and not only does it not work, it makes things worse.
In any case, the hypotetical couple should hie themselves to a marriage counselor, pastor or other cool-headed person to help them work things out. Emphasis on cool-headed, and it should be someone who knows better than to take sides.
My grandmother lives through her husband’s infidelities by claiming they never happened. Her sister-in-law discovered that her own husband’s taste for visiting brothels during business trips, combined with his talking in his sleep, meant that she got to learn about (and make him perform) sex acts that she would never have known about otherwise and she did enjoy. I kicked out my cheating bf, not for the cheating, but because I realized that our communication problems weren’t a matter of me not speaking clearly enough, it was a matter of him thinking with the earless head. Every person’s mileage varies.
I can see where it could be too raw to really consider it seriously at the moment, but that can change.