She can't. I believe some variant of this happened to her and her My Marriage Trumps All thing spills out from that. But I would bet hers is a deeply unhappy marriage.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What do Do with a Child of the Affair
http://www.marriagebuilders.com/graphic/mbi8122_affairchild.html

So a marriage is more important than the well-being of a completely innocent child?

Got it.

Yes. It sounds awful but the situation is awful, and there are no good options in it. The therapist's position is that recovering from infidelity starts, as a precondition, from complete severance of ties with the affair partner, and that the marriage cannot recover as long as the wayward spouse maintains contact with the AP. When affairs produce a child, and the wayward spouse wants to maintain contact with the child (which necessarily means contact with the AP parent), the marriage has very low odds of recovering because few marriages can withstand the pressure of constant contact with the AP and ongoing reminder of infidelity. Bluntly speaking, the betrayed spouse cannot begin recover until the AP is completely out of the picture.

Preserving the marriage protects the children of marriage and the wife, who are completely innocent as well. So, the choices are between the wellbeing of an innocent child of the affair, and the wellbeing of the innocent children of marriage + wife. The therapist votes for protecting the innocent children of marriage + wife.

+1 Million

Some people cannot seam to grasp that 100% fairness is simply not possible in life most of the time. Trade offs are real.

The trade-off that you are advocating is abandoning a child to a life without a father. In return, the children of the marriage are allowed to maintain a relationship with their father that is based on the lie that their Dad didn't cheat and that they don't have a half-sibling out in the world.

Your solution does a disservice to both the children of the marriage and the child of the affair. Children of the marriage need to know the truth, even if it's painful and results in divorce. The child of the affair needs to have a father in his life.

Children of the marriage can be told the truth when they are older. Nothing told to children results in divorce because children don't divorce. Certainly a flawed father is better than no father for them.

The child of the affair is not abandoned to a life without a father (and certainly, this is something his mother should have thought about before getting pregnant). The mother can marry an available man who will be a father figure to the child.

You can't be reasoned with.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What do Do with a Child of the Affair
http://www.marriagebuilders.com/graphic/mbi8122_affairchild.html

So a marriage is more important than the well-being of a completely innocent child?

Got it.

Yes. It sounds awful but the situation is awful, and there are no good options in it. The therapist's position is that recovering from infidelity starts, as a precondition, from complete severance of ties with the affair partner, and that the marriage cannot recover as long as the wayward spouse maintains contact with the AP. When affairs produce a child, and the wayward spouse wants to maintain contact with the child (which necessarily means contact with the AP parent), the marriage has very low odds of recovering because few marriages can withstand the pressure of constant contact with the AP and ongoing reminder of infidelity. Bluntly speaking, the betrayed spouse cannot begin recover until the AP is completely out of the picture.

Preserving the marriage protects the children of marriage and the wife, who are completely innocent as well. So, the choices are between the wellbeing of an innocent child of the affair, and the wellbeing of the innocent children of marriage + wife. The therapist votes for protecting the innocent children of marriage + wife.

+1 Million

Some people cannot seam to grasp that 100% fairness is simply not possible in life most of the time. Trade offs are real.

The trade-off that you are advocating is abandoning a child to a life without a father. In return, the children of the marriage are allowed to maintain a relationship with their father that is based on the lie that their Dad didn't cheat and that they don't have a half-sibling out in the world.

Your solution does a disservice to both the children of the marriage and the child of the affair. Children of the marriage need to know the truth, even if it's painful and results in divorce. The child of the affair needs to have a father in his life.

Children of the marriage can be told the truth when they are older. Nothing told to children results in divorce because children don't divorce. Certainly a flawed father is better than no father for them.

The child of the affair is not abandoned to a life without a father (and certainly, this is something his mother should have thought about before getting pregnant). The mother can marry an available man who will be a father figure to the child.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:DW got stage 4 cervical cancer from an STD that DH passed along from his mistress. They worked it out and she beat the cancer, but I'm not sure the order of events.

I also know someone with this same story. He nursed her through the chemo and radiation, and the two of them have spent the rest of their lives together, determined to work through their life sentences. They're miserable. I feel for them both.

Sometimes divorce is the best option.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What do Do with a Child of the Affair
http://www.marriagebuilders.com/graphic/mbi8122_affairchild.html

So a marriage is more important than the well-being of a completely innocent child?

Got it.

Yes. It sounds awful but the situation is awful, and there are no good options in it. The therapist's position is that recovering from infidelity starts, as a precondition, from complete severance of ties with the affair partner, and that the marriage cannot recover as long as the wayward spouse maintains contact with the AP. When affairs produce a child, and the wayward spouse wants to maintain contact with the child (which necessarily means contact with the AP parent), the marriage has very low odds of recovering because few marriages can withstand the pressure of constant contact with the AP and ongoing reminder of infidelity. Bluntly speaking, the betrayed spouse cannot begin recover until the AP is completely out of the picture.

Preserving the marriage protects the children of marriage and the wife, who are completely innocent as well. So, the choices are between the wellbeing of an innocent child of the affair, and the wellbeing of the innocent children of marriage + wife. The therapist votes for protecting the innocent children of marriage + wife.

+1 Million

Some people cannot seam to grasp that 100% fairness is simply not possible in life most of the time. Trade offs are real.

The trade-off that you are advocating is abandoning a child to a life without a father. In return, the children of the marriage are allowed to maintain a relationship with their father that is based on the lie that their Dad didn't cheat and that they don't have a half-sibling out in the world.

Your solution does a disservice to both the children of the marriage and the child of the affair. Children of the marriage need to know the truth, even if it's painful and results in divorce. The child of the affair needs to have a father in his life.

We've had a couple of children in our family that are the result of affairs in previous generations. Those kids were brought into the family the same way as their siblings who were produced through marriage. Us kids usually didn't connect the dots of the dynamics until we were teenagers and by then, it was too late to be angry about an affair because the adults appeared to be past it. I have a couple of friends with siblings who are the product of an affair. One in particular, her mom took in her sister because the sister's mom was unstable for a few years. Now that I'm older, I have a greater appreciation for those wives (my maternal grandmother being one of them). In her case, their marriage dissolved a decade later due to another affair, but she's remained a class act towards all involved. If anything, my grandfather is dealing with the consequences of his selfish behavior in his old age. Both have remarried, but he is bothered that we tend to spend holidays and regular visit my grandmother, to include my aunt (affair baby) and her kids. But she was the inclusive, supportive one throughout the years.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
The child isn't what places the marriage under "constant threat," it's that the husband cheated, lied, and betrayed his wife. Why should his life be made more comfortable despite his terrible choices while the child suffers? Why is his happiness more important than the child's well-being? And, finally, how can you argue that any kind of healthy marriage is created by denying the existence of a child of one of the partners? This is some sick sh*t.

Why should the children of marriage and wife suffer instead? Why is their well-being less important?

The husband should have thought about that before he cheated. That's what ruined the family and caused the suffering.

How many of you took philosophy 101 in college?

Anonymous wrote:
The child isn't what places the marriage under "constant threat," it's that the husband cheated, lied, and betrayed his wife. Why should his life be made more comfortable despite his terrible choices while the child suffers? Why is his happiness more important than the child's well-being? And, finally, how can you argue that any kind of healthy marriage is created by denying the existence of a child of one of the partners? This is some sick sh*t.

Why should the children of marriage and wife suffer instead? Why is their well-being less important?

Anonymous wrote:
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.

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.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What do Do with a Child of the Affair
http://www.marriagebuilders.com/graphic/mbi8122_affairchild.html

So a marriage is more important than the well-being of a completely innocent child?

Got it.

Yes. It sounds awful but the situation is awful, and there are no good options in it. The therapist's position is that recovering from infidelity starts, as a precondition, from complete severance of ties with the affair partner, and that the marriage cannot recover as long as the wayward spouse maintains contact with the AP. When affairs produce a child, and the wayward spouse wants to maintain contact with the child (which necessarily means contact with the AP parent), the marriage has very low odds of recovering because few marriages can withstand the pressure of constant contact with the AP and ongoing reminder of infidelity. Bluntly speaking, the betrayed spouse cannot begin recover until the AP is completely out of the picture.

Preserving the marriage protects the children of marriage and the wife, who are completely innocent as well. So, the choices are between the wellbeing of an innocent child of the affair, and the wellbeing of the innocent children of marriage + wife. The therapist votes for protecting the innocent children of marriage + wife.

The child still deserves its parents, at the very least the financial support of both its parents. That's law. Children raised without a father are at a higher risk of lots of things (sexual abuse, for example) than children raised with an active father figure. Quite incredible to me that anyone would advocate denying the existence of a child for the wellbeing of a marriage.

I don't think anyone argues with the financial support due.

I also don't think anyone denies that not having a father figure is a bad thing. But the choice is between shortchanging the child of the affair and shortchanging the children of marriage + wife. Doing justice to both is hard, and places the marriage under a constant threat of divorce.

Plus, a former AP has a much higher chance of her own marriage if the father of her child is not around too much or too enmeshed in their lives. The best option for the AP is to find someone to marry and provide a father figure to her child on a full-time (rather than part-time) basis.

The child isn't what places the marriage under "constant threat," it's that the husband cheated, lied, and betrayed his wife. Why should his life be made more comfortable despite his terrible choices while the child suffers? Why is his happiness more important than the child's well-being? And, finally, how can you argue that any kind of healthy marriage is created by denying the existence of a child of one of the partners? This is some sick sh*t.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What do Do with a Child of the Affair
http://www.marriagebuilders.com/graphic/mbi8122_affairchild.html

So a marriage is more important than the well-being of a completely innocent child?

Got it.

Yes. It sounds awful but the situation is awful, and there are no good options in it. The therapist's position is that recovering from infidelity starts, as a precondition, from complete severance of ties with the affair partner, and that the marriage cannot recover as long as the wayward spouse maintains contact with the AP. When affairs produce a child, and the wayward spouse wants to maintain contact with the child (which necessarily means contact with the AP parent), the marriage has very low odds of recovering because few marriages can withstand the pressure of constant contact with the AP and ongoing reminder of infidelity. Bluntly speaking, the betrayed spouse cannot begin recover until the AP is completely out of the picture.

Preserving the marriage protects the children of marriage and the wife, who are completely innocent as well. So, the choices are between the wellbeing of an innocent child of the affair, and the wellbeing of the innocent children of marriage + wife. The therapist votes for protecting the innocent children of marriage + wife.

+1 Million

Some people cannot seam to grasp that 100% fairness is simply not possible in life most of the time. Trade offs are real.

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.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What do Do with a Child of the Affair
http://www.marriagebuilders.com/graphic/mbi8122_affairchild.html

So a marriage is more important than the well-being of a completely innocent child?

Got it.

Yes. It sounds awful but the situation is awful, and there are no good options in it. The therapist's position is that recovering from infidelity starts, as a precondition, from complete severance of ties with the affair partner, and that the marriage cannot recover as long as the wayward spouse maintains contact with the AP. When affairs produce a child, and the wayward spouse wants to maintain contact with the child (which necessarily means contact with the AP parent), the marriage has very low odds of recovering because few marriages can withstand the pressure of constant contact with the AP and ongoing reminder of infidelity. Bluntly speaking, the betrayed spouse cannot begin recover until the AP is completely out of the picture.

Preserving the marriage protects the children of marriage and the wife, who are completely innocent as well. So, the choices are between the wellbeing of an innocent child of the affair, and the wellbeing of the innocent children of marriage + wife. The therapist votes for protecting the innocent children of marriage + wife.

The child still deserves its parents, at the very least the financial support of both its parents. That's law. Children raised without a father are at a higher risk of lots of things (sexual abuse, for example) than children raised with an active father figure. Quite incredible to me that anyone would advocate denying the existence of a child for the wellbeing of a marriage.

I don't think anyone argues with the financial support due.

I also don't think anyone denies that not having a father figure is a bad thing. But the choice is between shortchanging the child of the affair and shortchanging the children of marriage + wife. Doing justice to both is hard, and places the marriage under a constant threat of divorce.

Plus, a former AP has a much higher chance of her own marriage if the father of her child is not around too much or too enmeshed in their lives. The best option for the AP is to find someone to marry and provide a father figure to her child on a full-time (rather than part-time) basis.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What do Do with a Child of the Affair
http://www.marriagebuilders.com/graphic/mbi8122_affairchild.html

So a marriage is more important than the well-being of a completely innocent child?

Got it.

Yes. It sounds awful but the situation is awful, and there are no good options in it. The therapist's position is that recovering from infidelity starts, as a precondition, from complete severance of ties with the affair partner, and that the marriage cannot recover as long as the wayward spouse maintains contact with the AP. When affairs produce a child, and the wayward spouse wants to maintain contact with the child (which necessarily means contact with the AP parent), the marriage has very low odds of recovering because few marriages can withstand the pressure of constant contact with the AP and ongoing reminder of infidelity. Bluntly speaking, the betrayed spouse cannot begin recover until the AP is completely out of the picture.

Preserving the marriage protects the children of marriage and the wife, who are completely innocent as well. So, the choices are between the wellbeing of an innocent child of the affair, and the wellbeing of the innocent children of marriage + wife. The therapist votes for protecting the innocent children of marriage + wife.

+1 Million

Some people cannot seam to grasp that 100% fairness is simply not possible in life most of the time. Trade offs are real.

Your super funny story makes not one iota of sense. Keep your Trump-duh level trolling in the Politics thread.