Don’t really like the word “cheat”. It is so negative, it clouds the discussion.
I prefer “stray”.
And my SO of many years, adventures, did stray. What bothered me more was she lied about it. I could forgive the straying, but the lies, I couldn’t handle. We couldn’t move on.
Relevant TED Talk, definitely worth a listen (it’s about 21 minutes long and I mean it when I say it is definitely worth a listen):
I have never cheated but I was cheated upon by my first love of 7 years at the age of 24. It was awful and I was never able to forgive her. Now, at the age of 46, in a 19 year relationship (married for 15) with children, my thoughts are a bit more nuanced. I still don’t think I could forgive, but I would probably give permission if asked. Of course then it wouldn’t be really cheating, would it? It’s the betrayal that is the problem, not the physical intimacy. YMMV.
(I’m not married)
Before getting into my current relationship, I was mostly Polyamorous (even during a previous marriage. It was all discussed). However, he made it clear from day one that he desired a monogamous relationship. We set those boundaries, we drew the lines and marked them very clearly.
I agree with everything Aangelica said. Once an agreement has been made like that, it is your responsibility to keep it. Thankfully I could never see him ever getting into that situation. It is harder for me, because I have the ability to gain feelings for more than one person at a time (while my feelings never diminish for either) - but he thus far has been monogamous to the core. I don’t ever see myself straying either - no matter what I feel, one night with a stranger is not worth losing my life partner.
I found this to be exactly the deal when infidelity was discovered by me in my (former) marriage. This might be hard to explain but I’ll give it a go: there was the day that I found out he was cheating and that really hurt. It was the days and weeks and months that followed that I spent looking back to put all the pieces together - thinking how could I not have known sooner - when each incident involving a lie being told became revealed to me. The working late, the going to visit dying relative in a hospital, etc… and this list was so incredibly extensive. What happened is I was left feeling so creeped out by a person that could - for a long period of time, especially - live their life with so much intentional deceit. I felt like only a person with something psychologically wrong with themselves could do that kind of thing. I then became fearful of that person - completely creeped out by him.
I’ve since considered the whole “humans are fallible” argument, yet I think this behavior is indicative of in the very least a serious flaw in character - more so of a psychological issue.
I don’t think that’s why parents cut off drug-addicted children. They cut off drug addicted children because they believe that not enabling them is the most likely way to save their life. It’s for the kid’s sake, not the sake of the parent’s emotional stability/self-concept.
All that makes sense if you are talking about generic spouse cheating on you. Those are reasons typical cheaters cheat, the sort of reasons people give. If I were single, and thinking about general principles, that would make perfect sense. But none of it would apply to the specific. My husband isn’t that guy. He’s slept next to me for nearly 20 years and he’s never given any indication that he’s even considered straying. In that time, he’s put up with all kinds of other crap from me–long stretches where I was selfish, self-absorbed, inconsiderate of him and his feelings. If that man–not some generic figure–were to cheat on me, it would be so extraordinary, so out of character, that I’d have to give him the benefit of the doubt that he was in some extraordinary crisis, and that what looked from the outside like he was callous toward my feelings had to actually be rooted in some sort of deep pain or alienation or identity crisis or something. And I’d want to stay with him and help him in the same way he stood by me for my shit (which never manifested in infidelity, but I have always taken more, emotionally, than I’ve given).
I mean, if he caught me standing over a body with a butcher knife, he wouldn’t think “You monster! How could you do that?”, he’d think “Oh love, what drove you to this?”. I’ve earned that with 20 years of not being a monster. I think I’d respond to infidelity on his part that same way.
Unless, perhaps, the body were his…
This question is one I honestly can’t answer. My first impulse would be toward Aangelica’s reasoning, but my second may well be to Manda Jo’s. The problem is that I may not be thinking clearly enough to get to my second impulse…
My wife has cheated, and we are still legally married and live together, but we don’t have much of a marriage. This is something I think about constantly, and at certain points I’ve decided I WANT to forgive and see if that forgiveness can help move things along, but I haven’t been able to.
A mitigating factor, I guess, is I think it’s pretty obvious to most observers that my wife has an untreated personality disorder. I suffer from bad anxiety/depression and have dissociated episodes. So I’m not easy to deal with, either.
Before getting to the forgiveness part, handling the emotional/jealousy issues are one stumbling block. On one hand I know that there’s almost nothing about my wife’s actions that have anything to do with me personally, as weird as that sounds. On the other hand it feels like a complete betrayal and that my entire existence was rejected and put “below” others (that to my ego were inferior choices makes it worse, probably).
Also, I think the “cheater” has to be willing to accept forgiveness. Sometimes they think they haven’t done anything wrong and don’t need forgiven. Sometimes it’s twisted so it’s all your fault. I’ve ended up knowing several adults who think infidelity is acceptable under the circumstances of 1. They aren’t haaaaaaaaaaappy in the marriage and/or 2. The affair partner might just be the “love of their life” and they “owe it” to themselves and the universe to find out, even if families are destroyed… Hey you gotta follow your passion, or whatever. Inevitable the love of their life becomes the worst person ever a couple months or years down the line, and the cycle repeats.
Yeah, so I guess I might be able to forgive if it’s personally important to keep the marriage together, and the cheater has come clean and is willing to accept forgiveness.
I sincerely do not believe my own spouse would commit infidelity - it would be very, very much out of character for him. This is one of the reasons we’re together and have been for more than a decade.
That being said, even if infidelity is supremely out of character for him and almost certainly a reflection of some sort of pretty serious issue he has going on - if he’s committing infidelity, that means, by definition, he’s got a major issue he has failed to discuss with me for long enough that he’s gotten to a point where he’s broken not one, but several specific promises he made to me of his own volition. I mentioned earlier that the actual physical act of infidelity is in a lot of ways the tail end of a long string of broken promises to me. It’s essentially the culmination of a series of decisions in which he elected not to discuss the situation with me and has instead chosen to behave in what he is perfectly aware is an especially hurtful fashion to me. In other words, it’s not just one single mistake we’re talking about here - it’s the end of a pattern of inappropriate behavior.
Everyone who commits adultery has some sort of reason going in their brain - everyone. There is always an excuse. Healthy, happy people just don’t wake up one day and find themselves randomly compelled to commit infidelity out of the blue. We all have a responsibility to our partners (one that we volunteered for) to keep them informed about major shit goin’ on with us.
I sort of think of the physical act of infidelity as sort of an end-line symptom of an underlying condition.* I would also like to note that it is to be hoped that well before my spouse gets to the point of committing infidelity, I will have noticed that something ain’t right and made appropriate and concerned inquiries. If this is the case, it’s part of my husband’s responsibility to answer me honestly and fully. Some people are better at hiding mental and emotional turmoil than others (I could give lessons, yo). If you are in a committed monogamous relationship, then it’s part of your responsibility to be open about your turmoil if you think there’s any chance in Hell it might affect the relationship or, yanno, wind you up having sex with someone who isn’t your partner.
If I’m standing over the corpse of someone I’ve just stabbed to death in our kitchen, I’d hope my husband would give me the benefit of the doubt - but that is in part because I would hope that he had at least a potential explanation for my behavior readily to hand. For example, the corpse is of a stranger dressed in black with a facemask on - I’ve stabbed an intruder! Alternately, the corpse is that of the sister I’ve been arguing with increasingly bitterly about our parents’ estate handling, it’s not a stretch for him to reason out pretty quickly that things got a little too heated too quickly. My stabbing of someone in the kitchen isn’t a bolt out of the blue, you see? If I have randomly stabbed someone in the kitchen for no reason at all, I have just had a psychotic break of some sort and clearly I am just flat out not responsible for my own decisions and behavior.
In this last scenario - if someone has just committed infidelity because they’ve had some sort of psychotic break then I’m of the opinion it’s not actually infidelity they’ve committed because they’re just not responsible for their behavior. I just consider the actual bolt-from-the-blue psychotic break as being approximately as likely as “my spouse is in a coma of indefinite duration and I cannot discuss the fact that I’ve fallen in love with someone else during the past several years they were in a coma”.
I also would like to point out that if this last scenario were to occur, it’s highly likely I would still do my level best to help my spouse get the help he would obviously need.
*Granted, this condition is sometimes “I’m A Selfish Asshole Syndrome”, but the condition could be one of a million other things.
I recommend Happy Fun Ball’s link to the TED talk below, describing the paradoxes of cheating, how we humans can be walking contradictions, breaking down the components of temptation that often lead to infidelity, and also how couples can sometimes not only survive but also thrive afterwards.
Quite interesting.
Anyone but me involuntarily rolled their eyes the second you heard the speaker’s accent? :rolleyes:
Not married, but I have always thought I could be okay with it if it was definitely a one time thing and not due to problems in our marriage. The only scenario where that makes any sense to me is that “exceptions list” that some people jokingly have.
In other words, if you get one shot with someone you’ve had a celebrity crush on forever, I think I’d be able to forgive. But, of course, I don’t know because I’ve not been anywhere near that. None of my past girlfriends ever cheated on me, as far as I know, and I never them.
The spouse and I are partners in so many different things: we are raising children together, we share finances, we support one another’s careers, we maintain a house together, we spend leisure time together, etc. Sometimes we aren’t on the same page in one of the facets of our relationship. Usually, we have enough good stuff in some areas to outweigh whatever isn’t working as well. To me, sex just isn’t so much more important than being a great co-parent or whatever that infidelity would be automatically unforgivable.
I can’t imagine the circumstances ever being so simple that I can outline what would be forgivable and what wouldn’t be in the hypothetical, but it’s definitely conceivable to me that I could forgive infidelity.
I guess my mindset is that if it gets to the point of actual infidelity, we must have both dropped the ball pretty badly, and if we are imagining that somehow this crazy hypothetical has occurred, I am not sanguine enough to think that I must have done everything right (noticed him suffering, made inquires, whatever) and that he just stubbornly ignored my outreach. It’d be totally out of character for me to be that insensitive but no more than for him to be that callous.
I guess what I am saying is that any situation where he’d cheat would have to be so vastly, vastly complicated–would have to have involved circumstances I cannot even imagine right now–that I cannot be confident about what that cheating would mean, or how I should interpret it. It can’t be stripped of context, because it’s impossible for it to happen without lots and lots and lots of relevant context.
I actually agree for the most part 
Mostly I’ve done a lot of thinking on this topic (and discussing it with my husband) because his family is a drama-filled clusterfuck under the most tranquil of circumstances and several of his close relatives apparently view infidelity as a hobby. Including both his parents. He has absolutely no desire to live his life in the pattern he spent his childhood witnessing. I will say it’s not like sat down and had lengthy discussions about what infidelity meant to each of us - but given his family history the topic kept coming up all by itself 
As a practical matter, I try to pay attention to his overall health and happiness and mental stability - and he does the same to me. I’m fairly well convinced that this alone reduces the chance of having to put my money where my mouth is with regard to infidelity to fairly close to zero. For most healthy relationships, I tend to be of the opinion that by the time someone actually commits an act of infidelity, the whole relationship has been in clear and present danger of imploding for quite some time such that the actual infidelity is sort of the least of the problems. I’m also going to suspect that one of the things you evaluated when you married your husband was whether or not he was the sort of person who’d keep his promises to you. In my case, I know it was - if my marriage ever gets to the point where my husband thinks so little of my feelings and has so little respect for me and our relationship that he’s okay with infidelity, then I’m not sure what there is left to salvage.
On the other hand, I know personally any number of people who either (as with my husband’s relatives) view infidelity as a hobby (or possibly a sport - depending on the relative) or who convince themselves that committing infidelity is somehow justified. The people in Column A are, in my opinion, assholes. The people in Column B are, again in my opinion, selfish twits. They’re entitled to their own (presumably different) opinions about infidelity - but I made a serious and concerted effort to weed out people who fit into either category when I was selecting partners.
Hypothetically…
Only if due to some really odd circumstance they had legitimate reason to believe I was dead would it be forgivable. That doesn’t mean it might not be worth working through, particularly if there were kids involved, but not completely forgivable.
Both my spouse and I are on our second marriage. Both of us cheated on our first spouses. So it has been established that we are both capable of cheating on a spouse. That would lead me to be more likely to forgive. But, I would certainly have to evaluate if the relationship would continue.
She and I were both married to cheaters first time around, and we discussed it before we tied the knot. It’s easy to take the blame for your spouse wandering, but in both our cases, the spouses just had a different expectation: ok for me, but not for you. For our marriage, it is mutually understood to be the kiss of death for the union. No forgiveness will be sought or given. I know others can’t quite grok the concept of absolute marital fidelity/sexual possessiveness, and that’s fine, but it means a lot to us no matter how difficult it may be to explain.
Some people commit infidelity because they’ve allowed underlying emotional problems to fester and ultimately affect their relationship.
Then again, some people cheat because they are selfish jerks who just feel like it.
Forgiveness is possible. It’s more difficult to forget.