It’s very modern and edgy these days to read articles about how monogamy may be an unrealistic expectation in marriage, how cheating might even help a marriage, how we should rethink our views about cheating, and so on. And that’s all just fine and dandy if the non-monogamy is consensual—but that’s not really the norm. The norm is that the sex outside the marriage is secretive and deceptive and affairs are still a major reason for divorce. And, although the gap may be closing, men still opt for cheating more than women.
Through online forums and interviews, I was able to take a glimpse into the private lives of women who had dealt with a cheating husband who often turned out to be a serial cheater. Was it really no big deal? And, when given the opportunity, what motivated them to stay?
Of course, not all women are given a choice of whether to stay or go. There are plenty of husbands that simply trade them in, usually lining up their replacement before announcing they are out of the marriage. But here, we are talking about women dealing with cheating husbands who seem to want to stay married but cheat anyway. Why do the women say they decided to stay?
- Love—These wives actually love their husbands. For most wives, the cheating is not constant—there may be periods in between where things get better—maybe a few years go by and they think they are past it. And then it happens yet again—and they are traumatized, blindsided, in shock, and they love so much about their husbands, but every woman is different in just how much she can endure.
Some will stay for the duration, some will be discarded, and some will make the hard decision to go, even wishing they had made the decision to leave long before, after the first cheating episode was revealed.
“The idiots-who-take-them-back club is big. It was 4 years between my first discovery and my second discovery.”
“There is more to a marriage than sex, but it causes such tremendous damage to intimacy and trust that it is hard to recover. The periods in between the cheating episodes can be normal and hopeful. Other parts of the marriage can be happy-ish—companionship, compatibility, shared interests, sharing responsibilities for family, shared history, especially in long-term marriages.”
- Economic realities—The stories of women finding out about cheating never occur at a convenient time economically. Some were pregnant, some were pregnant and had a toddler as well, some had left the workforce to become a full-time mom. Others had spent a generation with their husbands and amassed a complicated and intertwined set of joint accounts. Some were on the verge or retirement. Some just couldn’t face the economic reality of the cost of divorce combined with an unanticipated return to the workplace. Statistics prove that a woman’s standard of living will go down after divorce by about 25 percent while men’s will go up by a minimum of 10 percent.
“I knew I would not come out well in the divorce financially. A marriage is also a financial partnership, and it was definitely a factor in why I stayed. Plus, after each infidelity, I was traumatized and didn’t feel like I could make good decisions. I dreaded the process of dividing everything up on top of all the emotions I was already experiencing. It was overwhelming.”
- Children/extended family—Speaking of consequences of cheating, it is hard to imagine a spouse who doesn’t care that they are threatening and disrespecting more than their spouse—it absolutely hurts their children as well as their extended families who have become one family over the years.
When the wives were confronted with cheating while still raising small children, or even anticipating the birth of another child, the idea of becoming a single parent or having to ferry children back and forth between households during the week and on holidays was all just too much.
Sometimes, they believed their children would be better off in a two-parent household. Sometimes the wives themselves just found it would be in their own best interest to stay.
“Yes I’m the chump that put up with the lies, deflection, projection, gaslighting, word salad, crazy making for 25 years all for the sake of the children.”
“I think that too many people hold onto relationships broken by infidelity because of the guilt that they feel when they think about their kids.”
“I am not looking forward to finding a new job so I can earn more money and be away from my kids a ton more. It is hard to push thru to a future you are not looking forward to even though you know it is necessary.”
- The husband can/will change—If the men were wanting to stay married, they usually made convincing arguments that they would change. And here’s the deal—the wives want to believe this is true. They are themselves decent, honest, moral women who have committed to marriage, who have not cheated themselves, who are loyal to a fault. They are susceptible to promises of change because they can’t fathom how the husband, the person they trust and love, would lie to them again. Others simply said it was easier to believe they would change—easier than facing the reality that their husbands truly put their needs first and were willing to hurt them at the deepest of levels. It was just too much.
“I took a HUGE toke off of the hopium pipe when he interacted with a couple who had a great deal of love between them…he told me that he admired their relationship and I immediately had visions that he would learn that devotion and commitment come first and the fruits follow and he would be ‘that guy’ and we would be so happy and bonded… but alas, he lost interest in that whole idea in minutes (or perhaps remembered that his years of cheating were a stumbling block to real intimacy) and forgot the whole idea.”
“I really do feel sorry for my 30 year younger self. She should have run the other way the first time she saw him. He was a wolf in sheep’s clothing and the wolf showed himself here and there, I forgave him and felt so sorry for him being a wolf. I really believed he wanted to change. I believed he had the capacity to change. He certainly had the tools, opportunity and resources to be a better man. What he lacked was the will, the honest desire and the character to be better.”
“The promises of change seemed sincere—and maybe they even were sincere for a time. But then something would happen—I think sometimes it was just boredom—he just couldn’t find meaning in life or excitement in life if he wasn’t pursuing sex outside the marriage. He didn’t really seem engaged in life—he didn’t like to handle life’s little details. He was emotionally and intellectually lazy, and cruising online for anonymous sex or flings seemed to be the answer to that boredom. And the secrecy and getting one over on me seemed to make it all the more exciting, I guess. It was really just that simple and shallow. It was fantasy and an escape from reality. So many better ways he could have spent his time—so much meaning in life that he missed. Such a better legacy he could have left for his children. He was destructive to us as a family and destructive to himself.”
“I convinced myself that his negative actions were the result of depression or bipolar or anxiety or SOMETHING that allowed for the possibility of change and recovery.”
- Denial of reality—This came in two forms—one was the husband denying the truth of the marriage. The second was the denial of reality by the wife—an idea of what she thought her marriage was or what it used to be—and that reality either never existed or had changed. Looking back, most women realized that it never really was the marriage they believed it was. It just took an awfully long time to see it.
“I have come to realize that you will never know what was running through his head. I cannot cry over what could have been.”
“I thought we could go on forever being grandparents together.”
“I believed him, because I wanted the fairy tale romance to be true. And me believing him lead to another 23 years of lying.”
“It’s all a mirage and poof— it’s not really there! Takes a long time to see them for who they are.”
“It is the fear that keeps us trying to hold on to the cheater- the desire to continue with the life we thought we had (and which for me I NEVER actually had, it was an illusion)– and to hold it together for the kids.”
“It was so surreal–not the life I thought I had built with him.”
“I too began to look back, after his final gigantic exit affair, which was proceeded by many other instances of paid sex and work-related improprieties. I started to really doubt my marriage was ever really what I thought it was. I began to think he never really loved me at all. I think I was just part of an image he wanted to project, but not really a person. By the women he chose to exploit, I realized he degraded women—they were often vulnerable or easily discredited. And clearly he didn’t respect me.”
“I always trusted him. (I had suspected something at the time but blew it off.) Now, I’m going back analyzing my entire life with him and I am thinking of a lot of other suspicious things he got away with. The fact is, I would never have believed he was that kind of person.”
“I gave it my 100% and his 100%. He didn’t have to work hard at our relationship. I was doing it all for us and believing his words of devotion and commitment. I was gaslighted, lied to, cheated on (apparently more frequently than I first found out about), abandoned…and I still had hope.”
“I knew something was up, but surely my husband of 25 years would never lie to me! The smirks, the eye rolls, the silent treatment. I was the recipient of it all. My ex knew me well enough to know that I would never judge him without ‘proof.’ Well, proof I got in the form of a front page news story.”
“I look back and wonder why I was so stupid. How could I have believed the garbage he was spewing? At one time, I was hung up on blaming myself. I was so committed to my marriage that I was not acknowledging what was right in front of me. I am more forgiving of myself, now. That’s what these kinds of people do; they make you doubt your own judgment.”
- Gaslighting—After so many lies and cover-ups, many wives began to doubt their sanity. They no longer trusted their intuition or their judgment. Decision-making became increasingly difficult.
When the cheating was revealed as the result of an STD diagnosis, many of the women were so shell-shocked, they couldn’t make a rational decision, or the prospect of divorce on top of everything else was just more than they could handle. So they chose to stay simply to avoid additional emotional distress.
“My husband wrote, ‘to my best friend and sexy wife … whom I deeply love.’ Then he got caught the very next week texting one of the other women.”
“He has tried every tactic in the book to convince me otherwise. He tells me that he loves me and he would never do anything like that to hurt our family or our relationship. He tells me that my imagination is just making normal things look bad.”
“My husband sent me a message to say, ‘it can all come back,’ with a photo of us celebrating our 30th anniversary. Literally, the next day he texted his (also married) affair partner that he was ‘throwing his marriage out the window for her’—that he loved her, that he had told everyone in his family he loved her and wanted to marry her…he referred to me, his wife of more than 30 years, as ‘the warden’ and told his affair partner I ‘slept all day.’ If I hadn’t seen the text messages, I would never have believed he could be so cruel.”
“I had evidence and confessions but STILL found it difficult to accept and then move into action. My paralysis was short, three months–divorce will be final early next year.”
“I think it’s very difficult to make informed decisions while you are going through the unparalleled emotional pain of infidelity.”
“My biggest regret is not trusting my gut (intuition.) My gut told me something was wrong even before we got engaged. I saw what I thought was evidence Even though my gut was SCREAMING at me that something was wrong, I still chose to believe him.”
“That is the trick, being objective – which can be very difficult. Talk to others—close friends, family—let them be objective for you.”
“Somewhere along the way I think I did begin to doubt my sanity. He had told me for so long I was wrong about facts, that I was reading things into situations, that things weren’t really they way I thought they were, that there was something wrong with me—I just started to believe his reality, and I didn’t really know what the true reality of my own life was. I know a lot about what he was up to, but I will never know everything.”
“My mind and my spirit were damaged. It was not even remotely the person I was or ever had been—it was like I was brainwashed. He took me to very low places and exposed me to people of very low character. I lost my dignity and kept lowering the standards of what I was willing to accept. I just wasn’t me anymore.”
“I feel like a part of my mind has been stolen. Thief….”
“I look back now and it all makes sense.”
“It’s opened my eyes about humanity. The good, the bad, and the sick, sad and just plain fucked up worlds some people live in.”
“I never thought in a million years I would have experienced what I have in the last few years. I truly had my head stuck in the sand and I have had feelings and pain I didn’t know even existed.”
Duping Delight, Cheater’s High, Sneaky Thrills: When Duping Becomes an Aphrodisiac
- Sunk cost fallacy–The sunk cost fallacy involves the concept that you have so much invested in a decision or a material object, that letting it go is wasteful and you must honor your sunk costs.
Example 1: You buy an expensive ticket to a Broadway show. The show gets terrible reviews and the person who you were going with no longer wants to go. You now don’t want to go either but you spent so much on the ticket that you feel like you have to attend.
Example 2: You bought an expensive pair of shoes, but they are uncomfortable and wobbly. You spent so much that you wear them anyway and regret it. Then, you put them in your closet, but you can’t stand to throw them out because they cost so much.
Well, some women eventually ask themselves if they are refusing to leave a serial cheater due to sunk costs. After a long term marriage, finally giving up is very difficult. One, you are left at an age where your options are limited and where finding a job may be more difficult. Two, surely your husband is now old enough to quit cheating.
One woman relayed how her husband was still cheating at age 67 with an old girlfriend he dragged up on Facebook. Her friend was shocked: “Don’t they have grandchildren they should be playing with?” Yup, for some, particularly the narcissist types, the party never ends—nor does the pain to the wife. “Sadly, both these fine married people (not to each other) did have grandchildren they could have been playing with—they just preferred meeting up for public blow jobs in the car.”
Decades-long marriages can be especially hard to leave because (1) you’ve invested most of your life and all your money in it; (2) you may have just wasted the bulk of your years on earth with this person; (3) family and friends told you to get out a long time ago; (4) you made the mistake of believing him when he committed to no more cheating.
“No matter how long you’ve been married–some investments are just bad and need to be dumped—cut your losses. I think it’s a bad risk to continue to trust people who have GIVEN you reason to not trust them.”
“Every day I think of the dupery and that the dupery gets deeper the longer and more I dig. I find myself still ‘suffering’ still having so much trouble moving on from this.”
“I am blamed by people for letting him ‘get away’ with it, in other words, I am blamed for being blinded that nothing was going on, or allowing myself to be in limbo too long while he was living it up never batting an eyelash and ‘going on’ with his life, while still married to me. I think back and little/big things come up like him constantly texting at dinner while we were out, jumping up to ‘use the bathroom’ at a restaurant or the last days it is was jumping up and running outside to take a phone call—‘I have to get this,’ leaving me sitting in the restaurant, etc. Looking back now I was such a fool. He was in deep since day one.”
“You don’t want to admit things didn’t work, or that you could be so easily fooled.”
“Leaving a long term marriage is so very difficult. It is the equivalent of cutting off a body part. But that part is cancerous and is going to kill your spirit. My life hasn’t been the easiest since I left, but it is my life, and it is not one of deception and contempt. Like so many here, I wish I had left a lifetime ago.”
(This article is excerpted from a book I am writing with the working title Cheating Husbands: What Wives Would Like You to Know.)