Reply to If you forgave infidelity, how did you do it?

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Reply to "If you forgave infidelity, how did you do it?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]If your beloved puppy drags diarrhea all across the rug, you clean it up and still love him.  It's like that.  Sometimes the love is greater than the infraction.[/quote]

You just compared cheating to diarrhea. And your partner to a dog.

The point of marriage is that you commit to honesty, fidelity, monogamy. That’s the whole point. If you can’t hack it then don’t stay married. And honestly, if someone can’t hack it then what they’ve messed up is not a contingent part of the relationship but the core of it. Very hard to come back and build a true love after that.[/quote]

Me thinks you don't understand analogies.[/quote]

Making messes in the house is natural and to be expected for a pet.
Sleeping with another person and lying about it is a choice and a massive betrayal for a spouse. [/quote]

Stop being dense.

Duh, cheating is betrayal.

Anyway, because you clearly are unable to synthesize an analogy, the point is when you really love someone, you can forgive them and really move on.  Or, if you can't, you can't.  Complaining won't get anybody anywhere.[/quote]

I’m a different poster and I agree it was a dumb analogy. There’s only one person in this world who can fairly compare crapping in the house with cheating, and that’s Johnny Depp.

A better one would be if your kid murdered someone. Does your love trump the infraction? For some yes, others no. [/quote]

Stop with the analogies.  A child who commits murder isn’t committing an offense against the parent.  It isn’t about live trumping the infraction.

Marriage is an intimate relationship which requires trust between two partners. [b]When one person has broken that trust in such a serious way, the other person is not obligated to continue the relationship[/b] just because of live. Love does not require self-subjugation to abuse.

[/quote]

I assume this means any and all trust, right?  Or does only sex count in your mind?  There are plenty of ways to let down your spouse and lose trust.  Perhaps your spouse experiences job loss and you no longer trust them to contribute to finances.  Maybe your spouse isn’t a good parent.  Maybe your spouse doesn’t handle the in-laws well.  I could go on…. Just seems strange to only focus on sex and fidelity as requiring trust.  [/quote]

This. I have friends married to spouses who have never cheating  but they have broken some trust in the marriage in many other ways ( verbally abusive, financially irresponsible, gambling etc).

In the last few months, I myself have gambled and lost 10k in the stock market without my DH's consent( we check in with each other for any expense above 3k and I did not check in because I was so sure that I will put it back into my checking  in no time). I broke his trust there.

Should these lead straight to divorce as well?[/quote]

I have friends unhappy in absolutely miserable marriages and/or they only complain and don't even like their husbands much anymore and there is no cheating (from them or that they know about from him).  They fantasize about divorce at empty nest.

And, I have friends who had what appeared to be a lot of love and happy marriages that got rocked by an affair in midlife.  It was a hard road for the ones that stayed together, but a lot of listening and a lot of therapy and work and they are thriving.  They appear to be happier than the 'status quo' marriages and definitely the ones that were miserable.  I think if there was a lot of love and goodness there and it's ripped apart---but then a lot of therapy is done which fixes whatever ways of communicating or a personal trauma in the cheater or betrayed (a lot of this is circumstantial midlife stuff--terminal illness or a parent, death of a close friend, unaddressed trauma/bad parental role models, etc., etc. which isn't dealt with in a healthy way and comes to a head in their 40s/50s) these people that had a boatload of chemistry and were compatible can come out stronger.

Of course, there was one where the spouse was a narcissistic jerk that was never going to change and didn't care about the fallout or his family/my friend.

Life is funny.  You never know what is in store 10, 15, 20, etc., years down the road.  It also changes some of your 'stark' views of what you would do since when you made those proclamations you weren't in the same stage/age/circumstances or had the wisdom and life experience.[/quote]

This makes sense.  I read a fact that marriages in which affairs that are never discovered or confessed are 50% more likely to end in divorce than ones in which they were confessed by the guilty party.  I can see the ones where people were having them in secret and fooling their spouses were just biding time until kids were older and then 'hey this isn't working for me', whereas the ones that had them and confessed really wanted to change and work on the marriage and having a monumental 'secret' cannot allow for intimacy.  An undisclosed affair is like cancer in a marriage. Left untreated it will slowly kill the relationship, chipping away day-by-day at the souls of both betrayed and betrayer (even if the betrayed doesn’t know).   In addition, you will find that having this lie between you makes you uncomfortable when the topic of affairs come up, and it does come up, because it’s a sadly common sickness of our society. TV shows, music, books, and advertisements are wrought with affair messages.

One of the biggest reasons why disclosure of infidelity is essential is because an unconfessed affair results in a lack of staying power with regards to the commitment of the unfaithful person to remain faithful. They have avoided negative consequences from their bad behavior, and there remains a lack of accountability. The root causes for the unfaithful behavior remain unaddressed. There is no real discovery about why they acted unfaithfully in the first place.

Undisclosed affairs rob the couple of true healing and of the better relationship on the other side – which is only possible when the truth is out on the table.  Undisclosed affairs serve only to promote infidelity in our culture. In the end, the “code of silence” leads to greater pain, a greater number of broken families, and it promotes generational patterns of infidelity. Where affairs remain undisclosed, ironically, the children from those families are more likely to repeat the patterns of their parents. Truth, while often painful at first, leads to freedom.

There is a saying “once a cheater always a cheater.” This probability of repeat affairs is much higher w[b]hen they remain undisclosed.[/b] Confession is hard initially, but it is also the path to freedom.  Of course, getting therapy and fixing things instead of having an affair is the best route--but most people aren't that self aware until everything explodes in their face and they see they are at risk of losing everything they truly cared about.[/quote]

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