Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
To those sayng the OP should not tell the AP's husband:
The cheated-on husband needs to know. He needs to get tested for STDs (as does the OP). Who knows whether his cheating wife has slept with other men as well as the OP's DH? Basic health is one reason to tell the spouse of an AP partner about an affair.
So is fairness: He deserves to live a life where he is fully informed as he makes choices. When people have affairs, they are taking away their cheated-on spouses' agency in their own lives.
Imagine finding out years later than your spouse was cheating on you while together, as a couple, you made plans for your kids, bought a home or made other big changes, shared experiences on vacations, planned your retirement together etc. All while you thought you actually WERE a couple, and the whole time, you were not; a third person was part of the relationship all along, but was invisible to you.
That is part of the deep destruction cheating creates; the cheated-on spouse has lived, maybe for years or decades, believing that choices were made, memories forged, kids raised, by a team of two. When that wasn't real. The cheater can compartmentalize it as "It was just sex!" but the cheated-on spouse's day to day life is actually a lie. That's why the AP's DH should know. It will hurt him but at least he'll get back real agency over his own life and choices.
I mean, if you managed to do all those things—vacationing, planning retirement, buying a home, etc, while your spouse was having an affair, and it didn’t impact anything (ie, you didn’t ever know about it), then how was it all a lie? It didn’t have any effect on your life.