Reply to what's the worst affair story you've heard of where the marriage recovered?

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Reply to "what's the worst affair story you've heard of where the marriage recovered?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The children of marriage ALWAYS come first to the wife. As they should.[/quote]
Wrong. You are thinking like the wicked stepmother. No wonder kids hate their stepparents if they think like you.[/quote]
Expecting a second wife to be kind and welcoming to a child from the first marriage is very different from expecting a wife to be kind and welcoming to a child her husband fathered in infidelity while married to her. [/quote]

The thing about you, angry PP, is that you aren't just saying that the ability to forgive this would be beyond you. I would get that. Understand it. It's reasonable, this would be a really hard thing to get over. And if you are choosing between treating an innocent child like dirt or not ever talking to them then certainly pick the latter. But you also seem viscerally against the idea that there could be women out there who got just as angry at the betrayal, but chose a different path to try to be the most beneficial to the children.

Not everyone is like you. That's ok. I certainly have my own flaws and weaknesses, but I don't act like anyone else strong enough to overcome those weaknesses is full of it. [/quote]
I don't think you understand how this whole line of argument came about. Perhaps you jumped into this discussion in the middle of it. How it came about was that someone opined that the wife (in the Thailand example) was a saint who chose kindness and decided to give this child a better life.  It is this characterization that caused my objection.   What I said - and I'm happy to restate this - is that no woman, in this case, would be motivated "solely" by the desire to give a child of infidelity a better life.  My theory - and it's all theory - is that the wife did this primarily for the good of the marriage and her original family.  She must have decided that her marriage and family had the greatest possible chances of survival and stability if the husband's love child was integrated into the family.  THAT was her motivation.  To preserve the family. That this decision happened to have the effect of kindness toward the child is immaterial.  It wasn't kindness that drove her.  It was her decision that her family would be best of with this course of action.  If she thought that her family had the best chances of survival and success with leaving the child behind, she would have done just that. [/quote]

I read the whole thread before responding. I understood just fine.

Personally I don't believe anyone does anything for purely altruistic reasons because it's virtually impossible to separate consequences from actions and for to the way humans think about choices, unless someone managed to do something completely against their own self interests that served literally no conceivable possible positive it couldn't be defined as pure altruism. And at the end of the day even a soldier throwing themselves on a grenade to save their friends could theoretically be motivated by glory/hero status.

That said, I do think sometimes people do things that are very hard for them, hard but tolerable, to improve the lives of their loved ones.

IMO a woman who finds out her husband fathered another child is in a pickle. But in the Thai scenario, assuming the Thai mother completely released any claim to the child, man and wife had two choices. Put the child up for adoption or take it in. Assuming they could handpick a good family that would be much better for the wife than taking the child in.

Assuming the Thai mother wanted contact with the child it becomes send child support to Thailand knowing the child is being cared for and looking the other way when the husband goes and visits or taking the child in.

In both of these scenarios taking the child in and staying in the marriage feels like the most difficult choice. So while I'm not going to say your theory is implausible, it is in my opinion less likely. Regardless, it takes strength and a good person to take the child in and commit to treating it with love and care. Your desire to strip this woman you don't know of any praise for her good act is kind of bizarre. [/quote]

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