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

Forum Index » Relationship Discussion (non-explicit)

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

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
Fairness doesn't always equal doing the right thing. That website actively advocates for a woman who has had another man's child to try to stop the man from being able to prove paternity or to see the child. And they advocate for the male to completely forgo all responsibilities to the child they had out of wedlock in order to protect 'the marriage.' I'm sorry but my marriage is not worth destroying an innocent child or keeping an innocent child from one of their parents. And I am not raising my kids to think that if they just pretend the bad thing they did never happened, then they can go on living some blissfully ignorant lifestyle.

The cheater made a mistake, that mistake resulted in a human being that the cheater is as responsible for as the children in their marriage. To assist someone in the abandoning of this duty, particularly for selfish motivations, is morally reprehensible to me.

And I would LOVE to know if the poster who just threw out moral relativism like it has a bad taste in her mouth is the marriage builders proponent. Because that is basically the epitome of moral relativism. Do the right thing unless it makes me or my kid's life harder, then no way.[/quote]

I am the PP who referenced marriage builders (but not the moral relativism person).

I agree with you that when affairs produce a child, there are no good options. There just aren't. Someone will get hurt and shortchanged; that's the chain of events that was set in motion with stupid, irresponsible decisions made by the wayward spouse and the AP.

What that therapist has on you, I and everyone else, though, is the size of the sample.  You, me and everyone else has only their own thoughts and moral compass to rely on.  Someone who does this for a living and has probably seen dozens or even hundreds of couples caught in this shitty scenario, has much more opportunity to draw statistical inferences of "couples who choose X are much more likely to end up with Y." Because he has seen much more of this than an average person.  He has seen that families that chose to maintain contact with the child of the affair are likely to get eventually destroyed by ongoing contact with the AP/parent, which makes it impossible for the betrayed spouse to recover and the marriage to survive.  So his experience leads him to believe that just like recovering from infidelity begins from complete separation from the AP, recovering from the affair that produced a child is no different.  Marriage has low chance of survival when third parties are present.  The AP is a third party. The wayward spouse will have to shortchange *someone*.  Yes, shortchanging a child, any child is not the right thing, but is it the right thing to destroy a family and shortchange the children of marriage?

Remember that the marriage builders therapist isn't really saying what the right thing is.  He is saying, based on my experience of counseling lots of families, if you choose to stay in touch with the child of the affair (that the husband fathered), your marriage has low odds of survival.  If you choose to stay in touch with the father of the child (that the wife conceived in an affair), your marriage has low odds of survival.  Why would you rather NOT know that?

As for raising the kids to pretend that some bad thing they did never happened, the kids didn't do anything bad.  It was the parent who had the affair. And YOU aren't pretending that nothing bad has happened because it's not like you'll ever forget, whether you are the husband or the wife in this scenario. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics