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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Inspired by the other thread, I'm wondering what people tell themselves when their spouse cheats on them. Do they reflect on their own behaviors and patterns and consider what role they played in creating the circumstances that led to the affair? Do they care whether their spouse wants to leave them for the AP? Is it less devastating if the spouse wants to stay married?[/quote]

I was heartbroken when I found out that my husband cheated on me. I loved him very much. Our marriage had very much been his idea, and, I thought, a happy one. I confronted him about cheating. Much to my surprise he responded by begging me to stay together.  I insisted we do therapy; he agreed. I thought a lot about whether I had contributed to his cheating or if there was something wrong in our relationship. In therapy, he told me that he had cheated with someone at work…….except, that didn’t line up with the evidence I had.

To make a long story short, over the course of about 8 months in marital therapy, he answered my questions about his affair. His answers turned out to be an increasingly elaborate cover story about an affair that he thought would be more acceptable to me than the real story of his infidelities. He did this in order to get me to stay with him. Outside of therapy, due to inconsistencies in his story, I snooped thoroughly and found hard evidence of multiple affairs and other kinds of problems, although I never tipped my hand about the evidence I had. It was shocking, disorienting and traumatizing. One day in therapy, I told him I was done and he needed to move out by the weekend.

After our split, he saw a psychiatrist, and I was invited once or twice early on - with my ex’s consent - to meet with the new psychiatrist to offer some background and history to help make a “differential diagnosis.”  (I think he thought if he was diagnosed with an illness like depression, I would take him back.) Much to my surprise, the Dr. informed me, in all seriousness, that he was trying to decide whether my ex was a sociopath or a psychopath, and proceeded to ask me a series of questions to differentiate between the two.

I know, OP, you will find some way to blame me for his affairs or to say that I should have known.  He was an adult responsible for his own behavior. If he had a problem in our relationship, he could have voiced it or asked for an open relationship or a divorce. That is what adults do: they use their words to negotiate problems. He did none of that. Instead, he chose to lie and manipulate. He was a very good liar. Not only did he fool me, but he fooled many of his peers and coworkers, who told me when I met them how lucky I was and what a great guy he was. He fooled his affair partners. He fooled a second wife into marrying him, and, within 6 months of that divorce, he fooled a serious girlfriend.

In retrospect, if I did anything wrong, it was to give him far more grace and spend far more energy helping him get help than he deserved, but I did so in the interest of our children, who were both under 5 at the time. Believe me when I say that our children and I paid for that mistake for years.

OP, questions like yours are designed to blame the victim of abuse. That’s what cheating is - a cruel form of abuse and manipulation. People who ask what the victims did to cause the infidelity abuse are allying themselves with the Epsteins, the Weinsteins and the Monsieur Pelicots of the world - men who use their power to deceive and/or coerce someone into a sexual relationship they would not otherwise accept.  It’s long past time for men to be responsible for their own actions. Men who cheat choose to cheat - not because anyone made them - and they know they will largely not be held to account for it in any serious way.[/quote]

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