I think Consolation’s post 2 sums it up for me. You don’t know what goes on in anyone else’s marriage.
I think there is a big difference between a one-time, one-night fling and a longterm affair. I’m not sure I would end my marriage for a one-time thing.
I’ve long told my husband that if he ever strayed, he’s not to tell me. Based on that, if I knew a friend or a spouse was having an affair, I’d keep my mouth shut.
@marie1234 …“Okay, I’m starting to understand. You think perhaps Bill Clinton is mad at Steve Kroft.”
Not me. I really didn’t think that. I just find it funny he’s on the same hot seat now. But not exactly because he’s a reporter and not a politician. This probably wouldn’t be news except that he’s so skeevy. I wonder who had access to his texts. This is another lesson about what we say on the computer or in texts.
I agree that we never knows what goes on in someone elses marriage. I am only speaking for me- I would have to end the marriage. If my wife asked me what she should do if I cheated I would tell her she should leave me.
For myself personally I would end the relationship if I found out my SO cheated on me. It may not necessary mean a divorce, but there would be no intimate relationship between us. This is just me. I wouldn’t look down or judge anyone if they should decide to over look it. Like someone said up thread, we all have our own threshold. Trust and loyalty are very important to me, and cheating violates both of those core values for me.
If I should find out my friend’s husband is cheating on her, I don’t think I would say anything. Most couples know when the other person is cheating, it may not be right away, and it is for them to decide how they want to work it out.
I really feel bad for those public figures that they have to air their dirty laundry in front of so many people. I can’t even imagine how their kids must feel.
To tell you the truth, I think this thread is doing an excellent job of showing why people do cheat! If someone is unhappy in their relationship in a manner that would be improved (in their opinion) by some extracurricular activities, then they have essentially three options:
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Try and repair the relationship so that they are no longer unhappy - a difficult, unpleasant, and often ineffective option.
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Leave the relationship and lose all the benefits in the hopes of creating a new and better one with someone else.
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Cheat.
Mathematically, I am not sure that the expected value of option 3 is worse than the expected value of the other two options!
^^ I also thinks there’s just a type of person who likes cheating - the flirting, the thrill of the pursuit, the secrecy, the emotional high. Such a person may be perfectly happy in a “committed relationship” but still want to cheat, simply because he/she enjoys it.
Unfortunately, not everyone is built for marriage and commitment. May I offer (once again) the example of my ex? I know he later remarried and then cheated (serially) on that wife, too. Apparently that’s just the way he is… you can call him a cad (or worse - I know I have!), but I think his behavior is more a reflection of who he is and not the state of his current romantic relationship. I can’t believe he’s the only man in the world who has this particular character anomaly (and if he is, how lucky was I to marry him? 
)
Based on what I know, for various reasons. A lot of the time I suspect it may be financial reasons, that unless uber rich divorce generally puts a big financial hit on the lifestyle, and especially when it may effect the kids (for example, where the kids go to private school, or feeling the kids are better off with a stay at home parent), it can affect them doing it. If a wife cheats,husbands often are reluctant to divorce because divorce laws tend to not favor them, usually the mother will get custody of the kids, will often be awarded the house and the husband has to pay both child support and alimony. Where a wife is financially dependent or let’s say was making little money, this makes sense, but even in cases of gross infidelity thanks to the no fault divorce laws a husband can get the shaft, including ending up having to pay for boyfriend to live with the ex (it is one of the cases where the ‘men’s rights’ advocates are right, divorce laws are still stuck in the 1950’s).
It also depends on what the affair was, if it was a one off, if it was situational, it is very different than a long term affair. As others point out, it also depends what the affair was, if it was strictly sex (which is generally true more often with men than women), it is a lot less devastating than an emotional affair, where the cheating spouse talked to their outside partner about the intimate details of their life, emotionally shared with them (and often, not with the spouse) and so forth.IMO women having affairs are often a lot more dangerous to the relationship, in that from my experience (from reading and from some people I know), when women cheat it often becomes an emotional relationship, one book I read said that women when they cheat often are looking for someone who will pay them attention and not make them feel taken for granted, that the sex is often a sidelight to the other aspect. One stat I read was that in cases where a woman has cheated on her husband, in something like 70% of the cases where it ends in divorce, it is the woman who files, and the book said that was because when wives cheat it usually is emotional, and in the end they decide they want to break up their marriage and try with their outside partner (which from what I have read, doesn’t work out all that well, for one thing, men who cheat with married women generally are not looking for a wife, they like what they have, plus also usually a guy who has an affair with a married women (I have known some guys who did this), would have a hard time marrying her, because she had cheated on her first husband…(and understand, these are generalities, and it isn’t that men are angels and women demons, just saying there are different parameters around cheating).
As far as ‘doing it for the kids’, there are plusses and minuses. Having two parents who are there for the kids, the financial implications, can make it better,there is no doubt. The problem is can the parents truly shelter the kids from the emotional fallout of the cheating? Kids pick up subtle clues, and even if they don’t know why things went south, they often pick up the tension between parents, and for example, kids see when trust has been broken between the parents, they read it, and it can be unhealthy, so it all depends. Two parents barely living together, resenting each other, barely talking isn’t going to be good for the kids either.
Then, too, in the fallout from the affair, they may figure out that they still love each other and are willing to try and work through what happened.I have read or know about, for example, where one of the spouses was bisexual, and the other one was okay with them having a same sex partner on the side, I know of spouses where one of them was basically sexually dead, was okay not having sex with their spouse, but they gave the spouse the green light to have lovers outside the marriage, as long as it didn’t take away from their time together (doesn’t always work, have read of couples like this where the spouse going outside fell in love with one of their outside partners, and it trashed the marriage)…
What I have tried to do is not judge when someone cheats, but as I have gotten older I have gotten a lot more squishy, I am saddened when I hear of these things and my hope is the two people can work it out. That said, I also understand that cheaters are not necessarily vile, selfish people, there are often other circumstances, like the wife trapped in a loveless marriage or where the husband emotionally is shut off, and is looking for someone to relate to, the spouse where the husband or wife is unavailable (alzheimers, advanced MS, etc), to me it is very simplistic to say 'they are bad" when the circumstances may not be all so rosy (very different then let’s say the corporate executive type, like the dads at my S’s old private elementary school, who dump their wife because she dared to get old, and marry some 20 something girl and end up with a second family.).
It is bad enough when it happens in private, it has to be much worse when it is in front of the media and so forth. To be honest, with all the horrors in the world, with all the real issues out there, the personal pain of someone shouldn’t be news, and I am sure the late night talk show hosts had plenty of laughs with this, but I am sure to the wife and family in the Kroft case there is little to laugh about. I would hope that like with any couple, that rather than throwing the marriage away, they can use this to try and make it stronger, but that is up to them.
I don’t think an affair/cheating necessarily has to mean the end of a marriage. It certainly might! However, if both spouses are willing to examine their own roles in the marriage and where they might be failing each other, it can be possible to forgive and put things back together. My experience in my own relationships and from other folks is that frequently there are issues that go beyond one person cheating. Sometimes the ship can be righted. It takes a lot of maturity and the ability to forgive and regain trust.
"Percent of children who are the product of infidelity 3 %
I read somewhere that 3% is remarkably constant across cultures and times.
At high school, my biology teacher told us that she used to get kids to do a PKU taste test, get data from their parents, and report the results. She stopped that very quickly when it became apparently that simple genetics was not enough to explain all the results."
My H delivers babies. There are situations in which he knows (because the patient told him) that her husband is not the father. Obviously he’s sworn to secrecy about that or other extramarital affairs. He will make it a special point when the baby comes out to say “what a cute baby - boy, he sure looks like Harry, chip off the old block” or some such. The women are grateful. Of course he’s never had a situation where, for example, a mixed-race child came out …
But yeah, the 3% wouldn’t strike him as off the mark.
As embarrassing as the Kroft texts are, I wouldn’t want random selections of my texts all over the nightly news either.
“Hey hon, can I wear this shirt to dinner tonight?”
“Oh God no. Just… no.”
Yeah, no one should have to see that.
I know a mom whose divorce will be final this month. She learned that her H was cheating sometime last spring or early summer. There is a concern about financial devastation. She is losing her home (her H is buying her out), but not much equity there. She can’t afford to stay in it.
Most families cannot support two households. Typically one spouse earns a LOT more than the other. Divorce can mean an uneven financial condition post-divorce. Some women may not want their H’s to have that “better financial condition” and freedom that can come from a divorce.
I recently read an article about too many dads become like “uncles” to their minor children. Mom has to be the disciplinarian, make rules, bedtimes, etc…while the NCP dad’s home becomes the “no/few rules” place because dad is too busy chasing women, etc. That might also be a reason why some women don’t seek divorce.
I am really, really careful with my texts and emails - once you send them you lose control over them. Friendships change - a friend today does not mean a friend tomorrow. Guess it is the lawyer in me.
My only comment on this is that I have often been surprised that I did not do what I thought I would do when some difficult situation actually arose.
^^^
Aaahhh, of course the ultimate test. You are right we all are speculating on what we think we would do.
I just want to know who sold the texts the the gossip rag.
Yep (to Hunt #74). Talk is cheap. Life is complicated, lots of things that appear black and white are shades of gray. Not for me to get inside anyone else’s marriage but my own.
I wouldn’t judge others who chose to stay or leave a marriage after learning of an infidelity. For myself, I don’t think I could forgive it. I might be able to go through the motions of the day to day routines , but the trust would be gone and I couldn’t be intimate. I don’t understand it if you are in love with your spouse and they betray that, how you can feel anything in a physical way again. I suppose that some can get thru it , but I don’t think I have that in me.
I suspect that a lot of couples stay together post affair out of financial constraints and how difficult it would be to dissolve a relationship with all of the complications…how sad is that ?
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Yep (to Hunt #74). Talk is cheap. Life is complicated, lots of things that appear black and white are shades of gray. Not for me to get inside anyone else's marriage but my own.
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Yes. When I was growing up, I couldn’t understand why my friend’s parents didn’t divorce. The dad was having an open affair with another woman (his employee) for at least a decade. Now that I’m older I realize that the dad owned an extremely profitable business, likely had a LOT of assets/investments, and didn’t want to split them. The wife (depressed) spent much of her day just sitting on the bed watching TV. She likely didn’t have what it took to go thru the divorce complications and he didn’t want his business split.
Unless each spouse has a well-paid position, benefits, etc, it really can be financial devastation for at least one spouse to divorce for average people. And, some people “know” that they have a spouse that would get really revengeful or spiteful in a divorce. In the divorce I mentioned upthread, that wife’s atty had to hire some kind of financial forensics expert to find where the H had hidden money. He had also hidden money in his GF’s name…and maybe even in a GF’s relative’s name.