Regardless of what a spouse is doing, they don’t deserve the blame for being cheated on. I don’t see that as any sort of justification. No matter how bad a spouse is, cheating is never okay. If someone is not happy, they should talk to their spouse. If they can’t come to a compromise, then they can divorce.
It’s like saying it’s okay to rob a bank if you’re poor or shoot someone if you’re mad at them. Just because condition A makes you feel like doing action B, it doesn’t mean you’re justified to do B.
I was speaking in reference to my earlier post. I’d only forgive cheating if it happened because I stopped paying attention to my spouse for whatever reason. If I were still engaged and interested in him physically, it would be much harder for me to forgive.
I don’t think there is any justification in violating promises, but I do feel that both spouses are responsible for keeping those vows including the part about loving and cherishing. If you break the loving and cherishing vow, you shouldn’t be blindsided if the promise to be faithful vow is broken.
My ex is/was awful at communicating. During our ‘dry spell’ I asked her what was going on and she told me that the meds she was on knocked out her sex drive. I made suggestions to rectify it, but she wasn’t interested in them. I found out she didn’t want more kids when she started giving away the baby clothes that were in storage. At one point she was seeing a new therapist (she was on anti-depressants, seeing a therapist wasn’t anything new) and asked me to come along. After the visit I realized it wasn’t therapy…it was marriage counseling and she was pissed that I wasn’t really answering all the questions correctly. Well of course I wasn’t. I thought I was going to support her, I wasn’t in the right headspace for marriage counseling. I even though about reporting the doctor to, um, whoever you report doctors to for being a party to tricking me into that.
Anyways, I’m not saying I’m 100% blameless in the marriage ending, there’s things I probably could have done better, but her communication sucked. It’s hard to know that something bothered her if she didn’t fucking tell me about it.
Having said that, she was 100% to blame for cheating me. If she wanted to leave me, fine, whatever. But putting another guy’s dick inside of her instead of saying ‘hey, we need to talk’. Sorry, you can’t put any of the blame on me for that. None, nada.
She could have told me what her issues were. There’s a 90% chance I would have said ‘ok, I can do that’ and 9.9% chance I would have said "I can do that but you need to do this for me’ and a '.1% chance I would have said ‘I’m done, pack up and leave’. But to just bypass the whole talking thing and sleep around. Nope. I don’t care how bad of a husband I was (and I wasn’t), that’s on her.
But she’s always been all or nothing. She’s the one that would skip class if she was going to be 2 minutes late. When she was leaving me one of the reasons she gave was that ‘it feels like you don’t love me when you don’t hold the door open for me’ :rolleyes:. A few weeks ago she tried to take our daughter to the ER for what turned out to be a cut that wasn’t too much worse then a deep papercut. So of course if I wasn’t everything she wanted in a husband she would bang some other guy.
I remember years and years and years ago we were going on our break together (we worked together) and she pointed to another couple taking their break together and said ‘why don’t we do that anymore’ and I said 'well, they’ve been dating for two weeks, of course they’re going to use their break to maul each other in the car, we’ve been together for 4 years and we live together…and I’m hungry" She had a bad habit of only looking at the good parts of other people’s relationships and asking why ‘we don’t do that’ and conveniently forgetting that those people also had their downs as well.
Sounds like where I was in my earliest and most immature relationship as a teenager. I kept pushing to get that brand new feeling back, and found out the hard way that pushing worked the other way. Adrenaline junkies are always looking for new ways to risk their necks, is there a term for romance junkies who risk safe, solid relationships for the sake of those early relationship thrills and that new boyfriend smell?
And no, I don’t think it was your fault. But I qualified my earlier answer with “If I’m still attentive, interested, and affectionate then I could not forgive. But if I lost interest or stopped paying attention to my husband, I’d forgive a one time thing” because I’d take partial responsibility for letting him feel unloved and unwanted.
Speaking only for myself, my wife was cheating on me WHILE we were in marriage counseling. And afterward. And probably before, although I can’t prove it. I think the only reason she wanted to be in counseling at all is so she could tell everyone, “see how hard I tried!”
I forgave her, because life’s too short. But no way in hell would I ever want to get together again.
So was mine if I’m remembering the time line correctly (it’s a bit fuzzy at this point). I’m fairly certain that she was looking for someone to say a magic word or give her a pill that would make her want to be with me again.
I recall hearing a radio personality saying (she’s a therapist) if you’re going to recover from an affair you can’t do it while the affair is on going. You have to put 100% into the marriage it’s just not possible to do that if you still seeing the other person on the side. Now, I only agreed with about 75% of what this person said, but that always made sense to me. It’s going to be hard to fix your marriage if you have the affair still going on, even if your husband doesn’t know that it’s still happening. You can’t put 100% into the marriage if your putting some of your effort into the relationship and there’s no way you can put your all into the marriage as long you know you have that safety net there if the marriage doesn’t work out. Break up with the affair and you’ll put a lot more work into making sure you stay with your spouse.
And just because I like saying this, I don’t know how the guy that was screwing around with her had the nerve to marry her. He now knows for an absolute 100% fact that his wife is willing to cheat on her husband. I mean, she can say ‘it’s different with you’ or ‘I didn’t love him like I love you’ but he should also know that she’s a liar. She was lying to me, why wouldn’t she lie to him? If I were in his shoes, every time she stayed out way later then she said she was going to be out or said she just had to run to Target and came back 3 hours later I’d be nervous as hell. Basically, he should be paying attention for patterns that she used when she was cheating on me. He probably knows them, I’m sure she said ‘I told him I was just running to Starbucks so we only have a few minutes’ etc. There’s no way I could ever live like that. It was the realization that he married someone that is willing to cheat on her husband that made me go from anger towards him to ‘ha, sucker’. I sort of turned a corner when I figured that out. I also remembered all those times I’d have friends in college that would be crying into their beers about catching their girlfriends cheating and I’d be saying ‘well, she started dating you before she broke up with her boyfriend, so you should have seen that coming’. At some point I started warning friends about that. If a girl they were dating was still dating the last guy I made sure they realized that she would probably cheat on them as well.
The bottom line is this: He is the man I love, the man I plan to spend the rest of my life with. To lose him at my age would mean being alone for the rest of my life. Either I forgive him and keep him or I send him away. What would be the point of sending him away? Who would I be hurting? I’d still love him as much as ever, still want to be with him as much as ever. Sure I’d be hurt, but not as much as trying to live without him.
You know, masturbation is an option. So is discussing a problem before you act on a creatively underhanded solution.
Would the act itself be forgivable? Perhaps. But when you consider that my love and trust were not important enough to you to have a simple conversation first? In the end, you just handed me a lifetime of pain and worry so you could have 45 minutes of squishing with a stranger, and an orgasm you could have achieved in 3 minutes while you showered this morning.
Maybe it’s different for me because I am perfectly happy living alone, and perfectly capable of earning all the money I need to be comfortable. I can’t think of anything a companion could offer me that would trump honesty and fidelity. If you can’t offer me those I’d just as soon have my closet space back.
Trust is the corner stone of any relationship. If that cornerstone is destroyed, then there’s nothing left to support the relationship. Sorry, it’s time to pack and move once that happens.
Besides, it’s one of those burn me once, shame on you, burn me twice, shame on me kind of things.
I’d like to think I could forgive my wife, and would be more apt to do it if it was with another woman, as I would assume it was some latent bi-sexuality since she sometimes comments on how certain women are “hot” if we are watching porn.
If she cheated with a guy, the circumstances would obviously play into it quite a bit. For example, a one time fling when she was drunk with a stranger would be one thing versus an affair with a co-worker or mutual male friend/neighbor we see all the time, simply because the circumstances that led to it happening would still be present after we reconciled, so the likelihood of a re-occurence would be very high.
Ultimately though, I have to be honest in saying we would still probably break up in the long run, because my trust in her would be gone, and I don’t know if I could ever forgive that. We had an ugly incident early on in our marriage where my wife had a spending problem and tried to hide it by secretly opening a credit card behind my back and having the statements sent to her work. Of course I found out and that alone almost broke us up for the same reason.
Having given forgiveness a much more than fair shot in the past, I can give this a solid no.
Wife 2.0, to my knowledge, has not and would not cheat. But if she does, I’m reaching for the fast forward button and ending the marriage as soon as I find out. Doesn’t matter why, it was discussed before we swapped rings, and I’d be disappointed if she wanted to forgive me in the unlikely event I cheated because we both deserve better than that. I’ll wrap up my journey on this rock solo before I go through that again.
