Is it okay to divorce a remorseful cheater when you have kids?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP again. The OW is married with three kids. My husband tells me that OW's husband confronted OW and she denied the affair, but OW's husband didn't really believe it. I have had no contact with him or OW. Husband claims he ended the affair because he felt crushing guilt, and that he ended things a couple of weeks before I asked him about it. I believe that somewhat because I read their emails (he let me right when he admitted it) and they show the same story. But who knows what he does now. I don't trust him but I also feel like if he wants to hide an affair he knows how to do it.

As for money, we make basically the same amount of money and I'm actually better off because I have no debt, while he has significant student loans that he never wanted my help with.

It's such a mess. PP who divorced after two years, what made you finally decide that? PP who is still with the husband six years later, do you have peace? Why are you so unsure of the future?

PP here who decided after two years. I finally asked myself what would I advise my daughter to do? I would tell her she deserves more. My kids are 12 and 15. Divorce will be final in August and we still live together and are amicable. It is sad and hard at times but I am finding myself. I do worry about the effects on my kids but we will put them first. It has been a really long, painful road to get to this point but I am at peace with my decision. I am finally starting to see a future for myself without him (we have been together since 16). My situation is a bit different in that he had a baby with the other woman.
I wish you peace with whatever You decide to do. Just remember, it is YOUR decision. Everyone had advice for me and meant well, however, they were not living with my hurt and pain. It is not an easy road to travel but spend some time imagining your future, your retirement years. Do you see him in it? I did not!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP again. The OW is married with three kids. My husband tells me that OW's husband confronted OW and she denied the affair, but OW's husband didn't really believe it. I have had no contact with him or OW. Husband claims he ended the affair because he felt crushing guilt, and that he ended things a couple of weeks before I asked him about it. I believe that somewhat because I read their emails (he let me right when he admitted it) and they show the same story. But who knows what he does now. I don't trust him but I also feel like if he wants to hide an affair he knows how to do it.

As for money, we make basically the same amount of money and I'm actually better off because I have no debt, while he has significant student loans that he never wanted my help with.

It's such a mess. PP who divorced after two years, what made you finally decide that? PP who is still with the husband six years later, do you have peace? Why are you so unsure of the future?

PP here who decided after two years. I finally asked myself what would I advise my daughter to do? I would tell her she deserves more. My kids are 12 and 15. Divorce will be final in August and we still live together and are amicable. It is sad and hard at times but I am finding myself. I do worry about the effects on my kids but we will put them first. It has been a really long, painful road to get to this point but I am at peace with my decision. I am finally starting to see a future for myself without him (we have been together since 16). My situation is a bit different in that he had a baby with the other woman.
I wish you peace with whatever You decide to do. Just remember, it is YOUR decision. Everyone had advice for me and meant well, however, they were not living with my hurt and pain. It is not an easy road to travel but spend some time imagining your future, your retirement years. Do you see him in it? I did not!

OP here. I also don't envision him as I grow old. I used to always picture us together but now it's like my brain can't even imagine it.

I'm really sorry about the baby - that must have been devastating.

To the PP with the husband who is basically empty, I think my husband is that way too. Unless he realizes that only he can make himself whole, I don't think there's much of a chance and there will always be a ticking clock till something makes him feel unfulfilled again.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

To the PP with the husband who is basically empty, I think my husband is that way too. Unless he realizes that only he can make himself whole, I don't think there's much of a chance and there will always be a ticking clock till something makes him feel unfulfilled again.

06/11 21:22 PP here. Me too. And not seeing DH even realize this, let alone make progress on it, is what's making me lose hope.

[Anonymous]

To the women who want their husbands to dig more. What exactly do you want to hear from them? Aren't you projecting female emotions on men, that they had some complex reason for cheating? Can you except that monogamy is hard. And people can cave in a moment of weakness and sometimes man just need to realize what they can lose before they smarten up?

[Anonymous]

Please post your marriage vows and then I will advise you.

[Anonymous]

I am noticing a trend of a lot threads about cheaters lately. Very few of them actually seem legit.

[Anonymous]

People can "cave in a moment of weakness".....for a whole year? A whole year of lies?
Oh 14:45, give me a break. Monogamy is hard. It is for women too. But one of the basic requirements of adulthood is not, you know, lying and betraying someone you supposedly love.
OP, I am sorry, I have no advice for you. Just take your time. No decision needs to be made immediately. How you feel now may be very different from how you feel a year from now. You should take all the time you need.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Please post your marriage vows and then I will advise you.

What part of love, honor and cherish allows for cheating? If anyone broke their wedding vows, it was the husband.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP again. The OW is married with three kids. My husband tells me that OW's husband confronted OW and she denied the affair, but OW's husband didn't really believe it. I have had no contact with him or OW. Husband claims he ended the affair because he felt crushing guilt, and that he ended things a couple of weeks before I asked him about it. I believe that somewhat because I read their emails (he let me right when he admitted it) and they show the same story. But who knows what he does now. I don't trust him but I also feel like if he wants to hide an affair he knows how to do it.

As for money, we make basically the same amount of money and I'm actually better off because I have no debt, while he has significant student loans that he never wanted my help with.

It's such a mess. PP who divorced after two years, what made you finally decide that? PP who is still with the husband six years later, do you have peace? Why are you so unsure of the future?

I'm the 6 yr PP. DH had a summerlong thing with a coworker. We had been married 8 years when it happened and had very young children. We had what I considered a good marriage, and I did not see it coming at all. It was shocking. I went from having total 100% trust in him to the foundation of my life crumbling.

I do have peace now. It took a long time. We separated, which was helpful, and we did couples counseling. DH switched to a non-travel role at work, which meant he no longer was able to see the coworker, who was in a different office. I took steps to verify that he didn't have contact with her. Once he came out of the "fog" (a term from the Surviving Infidelity board: like he was bewitched & irrational) he wanted to reconcile and live with me and the kids, and he was willing to demonstrate that.

Here's the thing, which is reflected in the uncertainty expressed in my first post. After you go through something like that your marriage isn't the same and doesn't go back to the way it was. I called it Marriage 2.0. I love him, and I trust him, but it's not the same kind of trust I had as a twentysomething getting married. [b]I value his companionship, his abilities as a father, and having a partner for practical and emotional support. I don't necessarily expect as much as I once did from him, and I would never put myself in a financial position of dependency on him. It is not romantic, but in a surprising way it has made our relationship stronger.

I mentioned that we could still divorce because, well, we could. Not to be bleak, but anyone's marriage can end at any time, and there are no guarantees. Knowing that is the price of staying married.

NP with similar experience and outcome, especially bolded parts above. But I will go further: One of the reasons I stayed was that I knew I would never have the same kind of blind trust that I had before DH's affair, with anyone. I felt strongly that if DH, whom I knew to be a good person (this notion that only "broken" people have affairs is complete bullshit), could have an affair, it wasn't possible to ever be entirely certain that someone would be faithful. And so it was worth trying to salvage what had been a pretty good marriage. We ended up with a different, but in many ways stronger relationship. Twenty years later, I feel pretty sure that DH hasn't cheated again. But am I certain? No. And that's okay, because no relationship can ever be certain.

Glad I stayed.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP, I could have written your post with only minor differences in the facts. And I think I'm in the exact same place you are. I just don't know if this is going to work. I'm working my ass off in therapy trying to figure it out.

One thing I've recently come to realize, though, is: My DH is remorseful in as much as he confessed, broke it off, says he's sorry, goes to therapy, buys me flowers, etc, etc. Yet I don't think he's really trying, or wants to try, to understand or change anything about himself that led this to happen. And that includes his share of the state of our relationship when he started the affair. He says he wants to fix things, but he just isn't digging deep and I can't tell if he can't, won't, or doesn't know how.

I've only recently realized how much this is contributing to my ambivalence. I think in part because it took until about month 4 to not be in full fledged panic. And until month 6 or so to realize I couldn't fix things on my own. I'm now coming to realize I can have some patience for him to get to these things, but it's not infinite. And at some point it's the right, selfish thing for me to move on. And that's the right choice for all of us in the end.

Maybe that's helpful perspective. At the very least, know you're not alone. Wishing you all the luck in finding the best path for you.

OP here. Thanks, PP. I feel the same way. If my husband would just do some soul searching and dig deep, I would be so more open. I asked him to do a few things (like more involvement in household planning issues) to help with the relationship generally and he really hasn't done them. One major thing I asked was for him to seek individual therapy, but he has only gone . couple of times over the past year and is very defeatist about it being worthwhile.

I wish there was an in-person support group where we could talk and drink bad coffee. My friends are amazing but I don't want to be a broken record.

I'm the PP who has been married for 20 years following an affair. I really think this is a problem, and IME makes it less likely that your relationship can recover. It's not a good sign that he can't fully commit himself to figuring this out or to doing the work to convince you of his commitment

[Anonymous]

I agree with 22:41. It's like he's saying he doesn't want to look inside himself to figure out why this happened. If he doesn't know why, what triggered it, what the circumstances were, then he can't prevent it in the future.

I'll draw an analogy with suicide. People who are suicidal are counseled that you have risk factors and protective factors. You have a safety plan and when you find yourself thinking too much about death you follow the steps on your plan.

I think he should have something like this. He needs an awareness of when he's feeling lonely, or needs more attention, and in those times to watch out that he's not traveling more, or spending more time with a particular woman. It's fine for him to have needs for love and affection (if that's what was going on - we'll never know if he doesn't look) but he needs to meet those needs in his marriage. Otherwise the pattern will play out again.

Also, I think it's incorrect that men don't have emotional reasons for cheating. Maybe not when its a drunken one night stand, but in a yearlong affair, or several drunken one night stands, something deeper is going on. I've known a few men who cheated, one a serial cheater who fell in love with each woman, the other a player who always had multiple women on the side. The first guy had deep issues with his mom and the other I think just hates women but is insecure and also needs them, a lot of them. He's hard to figure out. One of the pp's who posted about her husband's emptiness - that's mental illness I think. I read about it a lot on psych forums.

So my point is there is a reason but only he can do the work to find it.

[Anonymous]

LydianWells wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP, if you ask anonymous posters whether you should divorce a cheater, everyone is going to say yes. They see cheater = evil. They don't know your husband and his good vs. bad qualities. Most importantly, they don't have to deal with the fallout of divorce and all the effects. No one call tell you when it is ok to divorce a spouse. One who will only have duty sex once a week? One who won't go on date nights? Won't save for kids college funds? All of these are deal breakers for some, and not others and that's ok. Wife and I had our rough patches, and I posted here years ago and had many people say "divorce!" My best advice to you - read some divorce blogs. Read what it's really like to go through a divorce and real world consequences. Then, you can make a decision with your eyes wide open and make the best out of a bad situation with no great options.

I must agree with this post because telling someone else to divorce is easy when they don't know all the facts involved. He gave you the BEST advice ever and that is read what it is really like to go through a divorce, start all over and live separately while raising your children. I thought taking the road of divorce would solve all our problems and for the next ten years found out that trying to heal myself, my sons, and restore a resemblance of a family nearly broke me in half.

There is a divorce rule that says for every two years of marriage it takes one year of healing. Looking back, the energy it took to rebuild my life could have been spent on making that marriage last. Many times I have regretted my decision to break our family apart. Guess what, I was the one who had the affair and divorced my husband. Oh, how I wish I had listened to his pleas to make things right, despite him also telling me the affair was a deal breaker. God blessed me with a new husband and restored family with my sons, but not without years of their resentment against me. My advice is to fight for the family you want, and work long and hard on the marriage you already have and to continue going to counseling. Someday everything will fall in place. Keep up your faith!

NP. Thanks so much for posting this !!