Reply to Would you consider having a revenge affair/ fling if your spouse had an affair and you decided to stay together?

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Reply to "Would you consider having a revenge affair/ fling if your spouse had an affair and you decided to stay together?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
Not trying to be better.  What has happened has happened.  Dealing as best you can with the cards you have been dealt.

Watch Esther Parel.  She talks about on in America there is this pressure to get divorced whenever infidelity happens.  There is little consideration to how it affects family bonds or kids.

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Because they value being with their kids every day! Americans don’t value family enough.

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]the vast majority of philosophers and humans would consider a well-timed and satisfying fling in the wake of a partner’s affair to be quite excusable. It would be about sex, full stop. Nothing to do with proving yourself desirable or better, just evening the playing field. I don’t mean tit for tat necessarily, but it means you now
have an equal experience. Not sure why it would cause so much “hurt”. It makes you equals.
[/quote]

[quote]This makes me think of that maxim we all learn in kindergarten 'two wrongs don't make a....', wait no, not that it was, 'an eye for an eye' yeah.[/quote]

OP, you know yourself (and your DH) best. Therefore, do not let the glib posters (like the "two wrongs" poster) unduly influence you. It may be that your DH can only understand how the affair made you feel after you have one yourself.

[b]I know of circumstances where a DH had affairs, promised to stop, but did not until the DW had started having affairs herself. Once he knew that she had experienced and enjoyed another man, he understood the impact of his actions. In other words, the DH lacked the empathic awareness to understand how the DW felt until she treated him like he had treated her. [/b]

Of course, most men are not that shallow and feel actual remorse for the affair without having to feel the pain themselves. However, you know him well enough to know if he might need the lesson your affair would provide.
[/quote]

Seriously: why stay married in this circumstance.  Everyone in the bolded relationship behaved without honesty, integrity, or self-respect.  This is sad.

There are worse things in life than being divorced and single.  Seriously.[/quote][/quote]

That’s kind of a manipulative excuse, right?  Like your spouse could have used the exact same reasoning for cheating on you:

I can’t stand this marriage but I want to be with my kids every day.

In fact, I see plain old cheaters using that rationale on this website constantly.

You can “revenge cheat” if you want but you’re no better than the original cheater.[/quote][/quote]

The thing I hate, hate, hate about Esther Perel is the way that she prioritizes kids and family bonds over the health and safety of the victim of infidelity. She doesn't see infidelity as abusive or manipulative, and she doesn't deal with the way it turns what the victim partner thought was consensual sex on the basis of negotiated monogamy into non-consensual sex.

Infidelity, particularly serial or long term, can cause significant long term trauma to the victim partner and advocating for partners to stay together in the interests of "familial bonds" and "effect on the children" is just advocating rape culture.  It is asking the victim partner to stay in an unsafe environment.  It's not the victim who should consider the impact of their response (divorce or not) to infidelity on family bonds or kids after the i fidelity - it's the cheater, who should have considered kids and family bonds before cheating.

Sometimes actions have consequences that can't be fixed.

[/quote]

I don’t think she’s deny that infidelity can cause serious harm. I don’t think I’ve ever heard her advocate for a partner to stay. I do think she’d raise an eyebrow at your suggestion that marital sex somehow becomes rape if a partner is cheating. [/quote]

The incredible violation you feel when you are having all kinds of sex with your spouse and find out they have been having unprotected sex with someone else is traumatizing. Period.  I threw up as soon as I found out and felt sick for months after.  It’s horrifying. [/quote]

+1. It is knowing that your spouse deliberately tricked you into having sex on terms (non-monogamy) that they knew you would never have agreed to had they told you they were sleeping with someone else. It is non-consensual sex. It is sex without informed consent. It is non-consensual sex by fraud. [/quote]

ok lady[/quote]

DP. So true. And I can’t believe these OW don’t care he’s having regular sex with his wife and spooning with her every night.  The ow knew this - yet when I found out about her I divorced and he dumped her.   She had zero qualms “sharing”—-but it’s not really sharing when one party has zero idea. [/quote]

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