I’d leave him if he cheated, and that means so much as kissing another woman. I have a zero-tolerance policy about cheating.
But, all the other stuff can be dealt with. I think even if he smacked me, I could forgive it. Now, beating the crap out of someone is entirely different, that would be grounds for divorce.
But, drunk driving, bank robbing, etc. would be a hassle, but not a dealbreaker. I might have to reconsider if he did something that landed him in prison for more than a year or two. I can’t be expected to sit and wait, my life is too short.
Okay, I think I see the problem in communication - in Alberta, drunk driving is a criminal offense. To the best of my knowledge, if you blow over 0.08 (the legal limit here), you automatically lose your license for a year, you get a $1000 fine, and you get a criminal record. It is a VERY SERIOUS offense here.
A car accident while changing a CD is completly different from robbing a bank or being a drug addict. I wouldn’t date a drug addict and doubt that someone would rob a bank by mistake. Now if they drove drunk ONE TIME and that ONE TIME caused a bad accident, then I would stand by them. Or if someone they hardly knew put their stash on my SO without her knowing about it and she got caught with it. Then I would stand by her. If she herself was a regular hard drug user, I wouldn’t date her.
Real life laspes in judgement don’t have the consequences that lead to a lost home or a loss of all the money. People who screw up that badly have a lot of practice. They screw up all the damn time and have gotten so good at that they can do these spectacular screw ups.
If you want to trot out your “I won’t under any circumstances accept X” clauses, do it when you’re dating. Someone you’ve made a deeper commitment to likely deserves at least some consideration though. As Athena said, marriage is work. Hard work. I’m not much for zero-tolerance policies in general, and in a long-term committed relationship it just seems petty. Without getting into extremely specific or ridiculous hypotheticals I don’t think it’s wise to follow a “If he/she does this I’m out.” policy. Each situation needs to be addressed on it’s own merit.
slight hijack…I love your UserName, Severian…huge fan (of the reference, not you particularly…that sounded bad.).
From a male perspective, I’ve been slapped a few times, and it doesn’t make me want to leave, so I’ll rule that out. I think that’s a double standard, though (and I would never slap my wife).
The drug thing…meh.
So huge a trust issue would mean one thing first…she would have changed so greatly from the woman I married that I would probably have thought about it already. Would I be proactively looking for a trigger?
Mistakes are mistakes…I can forgive a lot. Cheating…I second what Anaamika said.
Upon preview, I wonder if my wife is secretly on the boards as Indygrrl. She’s certainly slappy!
Marriage might be hard work, but in some cases it turns into “hardly working.”
The realistic assessment is that choosing to love someone else outside of your family of origination is by its very definition a kind of conditional love. Certainly your spouse will do things that you can forgive, but it should never be a situation of “do whatever you want; after all, I promised to stay with you.” If your spouse cheats or robs a bank, the person has perhaps revealed themselves to be someone different from who you married.
Yes, and I’ve been in that position too. I stayed for five years in a bad marriage because I thought I should. I would have been much better off if I’d left earlier. And it wasn’t one specific unforgiveable thing that destroyed that marriage, but a lack of love and respect. Well, and a fair amount of abuse. So I guess I would leave my current relationship for that after all.
But even having failed once, I’m still the sort of person that IS willing to work very hard at a marriage, and will forgive many things.
IMO, this is wrong too. I’m certainly **not ** saying your wife is in any way abusive, but if you don’t expect abuse, don’t give it. Hitting men is just as wrong as hitting women.
I almost left my husband because of speeding tickets. He drove a little sports car in a very small Southern town where the police knew him by sight and kept a very close eye on him. He knew they were watching him, but it didn’t stop him from speeding and getting ticket after ticket. We were just starting out, had a baby, and were very broke. Every time we had to part with $150 or so of our hard earned money to pay another (completely avoidable) speeding ticket, I became more and more intolerant. Our insurance rates went up, too. I felt like he didn’t care much about the well-being of his family if he could throw our money away like that by being stubborn and not just slowing the hell down.
This was a habitual thing though, not a one-time mistake. Still, I was ready to call it quits over speeding tickets. Pretty stupid.
Ditto. I am the product of an abusive home (mostly emotional, some physical) and I made sure DeHusband understood this long before we ever married. He can only hit me one time. Then I’m gone. And he better make sure it counts because I will never give him the chance to do it again. (Please know that he has never raised a hand to me. This is my baggage and he understands that.)
To me, everything else can be worked through… Serial cheating? Move her into the middle bedroom and make her help on the mortgage and cleaning. Bank Robbing? I’ll bake him cookies and visit him every week at the prison.
I don’t *like * to say this, but I come from a toxic home environment, too. Entirely mental. I wouldn’t call it abusive, since everyone was suffering, but it wasn’t pleasant. But hitting has always been off my books and I’ve always had trouble understanding why in this day and age women stay after that one time. I’m not really talking about **Indygrrl ** because it seems like she’d kick his ass, but plenty of others.
And serial cheating? If she’s going to help with mortgage and cleaning I might not mind so much.
I don’t completely agree with this. We are in a very precarious financial situation right now, and if my husband lost his license due to drunk driving, he would lose his job that requires him to drive. If he lost his job, we would lose all our income, because I’m currently laid off.
In this situation, his lapse in judgement to drive after drinking could have crisis-level consequences for both of us, which makes it seem really, really stupid to me. The potential consequences vastly outweigh the enjoyment of the action.
