SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Brew, I think that it takes a lot of courage to have this discussion here with us, so perks for that.

From my perspective as the receiver of cheating, how you see it is probably not adequate with how I experienced it. I understand that from the perspective of the cheater there can be a lot of "buts", but if I had to pick being cheated on or beaten up, my question would be "How much?". I understand that you can have a bad marriage and it provides a context, but if someone's proposition would be to calm their feelings with fists and boots, you would be against it, period, no "buts", no "I feels". (Mind you that it is a very new standard, but I bet you see is as objectively and implicitly a correct one). These are appropriate things to explore in therapy, but for me it is not appropriate to use it in a general discussion on a betrayal recovery forum. "I didn't like my life and I have done something selfish, abusive, cowardly and cruel to the person that I have made lifelong vows to." This is a perspective that I would find appropriate.

I "know" all the stuff you are saying. It's all good and far better constructed than the judgey shit upstream of it.

Brew I read this last post, do you need validation to feel better or you do feel better and are trying to find your own validation?

Well spotted - I am in between. I certainly feel better telling certain posters here to go fuck themselves. And it's not even my thread! Ha - go fuck yourselves morally superiorists. There we go, I said it. If you guys come back with that 'doesn't your partner have better morals' question, I will tell you to go fuck yourselves again. Rest assured. I guess that still makes me an asshole just like them I'm still trying to kill my ego! He just doesn't wanna die yet.

But I am also working on fixing it. I am asking for help somewhat indirectly - it's resulted in: hey you judgey triggered guys come trigger me so I can be an asshole back to you! Not fully productive but helped me somewhat.

I am also trying to find my own validation - I know I did what made sense with the poor skills I had at the time. I am dealing with the guilt of hurting someone I am very close to. That was and remains agonising.

I would not be defending the guy who smashed his neighbours car. I confessed to being unfaithful and I dug out all the resources I listen. I calmed my reactions down a lot of over 6 years. Everyone around me has commented on the calmer me, it's not just my perception. And it's in part for that reason that my BH is still with me - he's not forced to be financially or otherwise, he chooses to stay.

I am looking into the art of being a Passive Master (see The Power of Passivity: The Essay by Al Turtle). I recognise it but I still retraining myself. Took years to get there, takes years to get out.

So as I say my reactions are far less 'reactive' these days. I come on here to test them - I fuck up and find out where the limits of my current learning are and then go back to the drawing board and work some more on it.

Thanks for your post!

[This message edited by Brewbrew at 12:36 PM, Monday, June 22nd]

You have no place coming on a thread of a person who is working thru his pain as a personal mental exercise and telling him and others who share his very reasonable stance to "fuck off". You might want to go read the guidelines.

Start your own thread, test yourself there.

[This message edited by InkHulk at 1:27 PM, Monday, June 22nd]

Brewbrew, I am going to be blunt because this has now moved well past "understanding" and into something else entirely.

Your argument is wrong.

Not uncomfortable. Not challenging. Not merely a different perspective. WRONG.

You started with the idea that I should want to understand my wife. I do. That is exactly why I am looking at what she actually did, not only what she says she felt while doing it. But your argument has now become a long attempt to turn betrayal into a gendered explanation about female exhaustion, hormones, childbearing, overfunctioning, burnout, and betrayed husbands not understanding women.

That may apply to some parts of some marriages.

It does not apply cleanly to mine.

My wife cheated a year into our relationship. A year. Before children. Before pregnancy. Before childbirth. Before the torn vagina or ripped open uterus imagery you felt the need to throw into this conversation. Before the intense childrearing years. Before the unequal parenting load you are now using as a broad explanation for why women cheat.

So in my case, that excuse is moot.

She was not a burned-out mother of three when she first betrayed me. She was not drowning in years of child-rearing when she began building intimacy with another man. She was not recovering from giving me children when she decided to keep a second life hidden from me early in our relationship.

And yes, we later had children, but I gave her those children too.

Those children were not something she gave me like a debt I now owe against my right to judge betrayal honestly. They are our children. I worked for them, protected them, raised them, loved them, sacrificed for them, and showed up for them too. Motherhood matters. So does fatherhood. Her body carried them. My life carried them too.

You also keep implying that I did not talk. That I stuffed everything down. That I silently submitted. That I failed to create safety. That I somehow occupied the passive role in a dance that naturally led to betrayal.

Again, wrong.

I did talk. I did raise issues. I did say I was lonely. I did say the intimacy had disappeared. I did say I felt unseen. I did try to get her to go to marriage counseling. I did bring the problems into the marriage as best I could. I was not perfect, but this fantasy version of me as some silent, helpless man who never spoke until betrayal exposed him is simply not true.

Should I have left before we had children?

Probably.

That is my failure. I should have listened to my inner voice and left.

I should have accepted what I was seeing earlier. I should have trusted myself more. I should have stopped hoping that love, loyalty, work, patience, and time would turn an unsafe relationship into a safe one. I should have chosen myself sooner.

But failing to leave someone who was already unsafe is not the same as causing them to betray you.

My mistake was staying. Her choice was cheating.

Those are not the same thing.

You keep dressing this up as enlightenment, compassion, inner circles, unmet needs, female exhaustion, and relationship dynamics, but the destination is still the same. You are trying to move responsibility away from the person who lied and toward the person who was lied to.

That is blame-shifting. I feel you have practiced this long and hard. You look for any angle you need to justify, another reason your SO should listen to their inner voice now and leave.

You say all people make sense to themselves. Fine. I do not dispute that. My wife made sense to herself while she lied. She made sense to herself while she hid. She made sense to herself while she let me build a life on a reality she knew was false. Plenty of destructive things make sense to the person doing them.

That does not make them acceptable.

That does not make them shared.

That does not make them mine.

You are also now making a gendered argument that I find deeply flawed. Women are not children, mothers are not children, exhausted women are not children, lonely women are not children. Women with hormones, resentment, unmet needs, and emotional pain are still adult moral agents.

If a woman is unhappy, she can speak or leave. Guess what, most if not all betrayed people regardless of gender, would rather you leave than betray.

If she is overwhelmed, she can say so. If she is lonely, she can bring that into the marriage. If she is done, she can leave. If she wants counseling, she can demand it. If she believes the marriage is killing her, she can separate or divorce.

What she cannot do is secretly build intimacy with another man and then have that framed as the natural result of her husband not understanding female suffering deeply enough.

No.

Pain is not permission. Burnout is not a hall pass. Childbearing is not a moral exemption. Loneliness is not consent.

And unmet needs do not turn deception into a shared marital event.

Many betrayed husbands understand loneliness better than you seem willing to admit. We understand rejection. We understand being unseen. We understand unmet needs. We understand sexual starvation. We understand carrying financial pressure, parenting pressure, emotional pressure, and silence. We understand being exhausted and still getting up the next day because the family needs us to.

And many of us still did not cheat.

That was the original point.

Not that betrayed spouses are perfect. Not that faithful people are saints. Not that I was an ideal husband. The point was that many of us had our own pain, our own loneliness, our own resentment, our own opportunity, and our own reasons to seek escape, and we still did not choose betrayal.

This struck a nerve in you for reasons only you know, but I have my guesses.

It is not moral superiority to name that difference. It is moral clarity.

Marriage problems are shared.

Affairs are chosen.

I can examine my failures without accepting responsibility for hers. I can acknowledge that I should have left earlier without pretending I caused what she did. I can understand her pain without making her betrayal my fault. I can have compassion without surrendering reality.

And I will not accept gendered excuses that turn women’s pain into a soft justification for deception while asking betrayed men to carry one more burden that was never theirs.

Guess what I do judge her actions and hold moral superiority right now, not forever. Guess what you were morally corrupt, and sounds like still are, but don't have to be. I hope my wife becomes better, and morally sound for herself. I hope your SO wakes up before you get tired again.

[This message edited by Brewbrew at 12:44 PM, Monday, June 22nd]

Hey Mister - it's a free world, if you post on here no-one is making you read it. If you read it no-one is making you react to it. What goes for you goes for me.

We agree on that. I was simply replying to your mental gymnastics.

[This message edited by Gemmy at 12:46 PM, Monday, June 22nd]

From the mature position of Friend/Friend it is pretty simple. Example: I observe you doing something. I speak up and say, "I observed you doing this." You respond, "I am not doing that." I respond, "I didn’t say you are doing it. I shared my observation. Are you suggesting that I am not having the observation I am having?" And the pattern is broken. By the way, the trick is to speak of what you observe and not your interpretation of what you observe. Say, "I heard you say, ‘shut up’ to that kid." rather than say, "I heard you insult that kid." Say, "I recall you saying you would be there at 4:00 PM, and I then I saw you arrive at 6:15PM," rather than say, "You’re irresponsible with time."

Friend : 'I observed you saying that you think cheating is the responsibility of the relationship'
Me: "Yes and I am right about that"
Friend : "I didn’t say you are wrong or right. I shared my observation. Are you suggesting that I am not having the observation I am having?" (Some posters have been Friends, some have not)

I will practice being Friend since this forum is for Friends to have Dialogue
In the case of the OP's last posts this could look like:

Me as Friend: 'I observed you saying I was morally corrupt, and sounds like I still am'
OP : 'Yes I am right because you are morally corrupt'
Me as Friend: "I didn’t say you were wrong or right. I shared my observation."

Where to next? We are nearly all (me included) slipping in and out of the 'you are wrong and I am right' and not Friend-Friend positions.

I believe this text is relevant here:

I believe that the most important task in growing up is in developing a full sense of self and a large dose of self-esteem. I will repeat a couple of my ideas here. Self only exists in relationship to others. I have no self except as I am different from others. Thus being "different" is a critical skill in being a self. Boundaries and boundary skills are the critical component in starting to build a Self. These are the lines that separate "me" from others, and that maintain my integrity during interactions with others. People do what they do because they are who they are. People grow and change as they learn new things. At any given moment we have integrity, whether we are aware of it or not. Humans are little sense making machines. We make sense all the time. We do things that are a logical result of the components within us at the time, whether we are aware of those components or not.What this implies is that whatever you did yesterday, it was the best you could do given who you were, your integrity, at the time. I think it is a complete travesty of thinking, plus a boundary invasion, to judged another person’s behavior based on your values and beliefs.

I think it is very valuable to compare other’s behaviors to your behaviors as a way of distinguishing yourself from them. An adult, a non-neotenous person, understands their own sense, is both confident and a bit admiring of who they have become and who they are. Self-esteem means "I like myself even when they dislike me."

Of course this involves a great amount of self-discovery leading to a great amount of self-awareness. Fortunately this is normally a natural process beginning in childhood. The problems occur when childrearing practices prevent this. The result is that much of the childrearing in the United States is fairly poor. A friend of mine from Africa used to describe the problem as children raising children rather than adults doing the childrearing. Fortunately, this is all remediable. You can fix it. Good self-esteem is built by the repeated application of good validation and PreValidation.

Helping Others

What I have found is that develop a secure sense of self, another person is needed. Their role is crucial to your success. That someone must be a) interested in who you are – really, b) have good boundary skills themselves and c) be durable enough to stay with you as you discover yourself. And so if you want to be supportive to someone else in this process, be prepared. I suggest you become an expert at validation, confident in seeing your own and other people’s sense, and very good at Art of Pulling. Also I suggest be able to monitor your own capacity so as not to overextend yourself. A good counselor, psychologist, psychaitrist, pastor, rabbi, etc. should have these skills.

Also remember that each person has their own optimal speed of doing this growing up. If you do anything that comes across as "Pushing," I have found that it will tend to slow them down. So don’t push. Learn to follow their progress at their speed, but be ready to invite. The process of helping others blossom and flourish, is for me probably the greatest delight in my life.

Helping Yourself

Find a working partner who will invite you. Anyone who tells you "who you are," I suggest you avoid. Anyone who is durably curious and who retains the belief that "You make sense all the time," is a good candidate.

Master: Arrogant, Entitled, Superior;

Friend: Equal, Fair, Collaborative, Respectful;

Slave: Submissive, Subservient, Victim, Passive.

[This message edited by Brewbrew at 3:04 PM, Monday, June 22nd]

Taking these two phrases

I think it is a complete travesty of thinking, plus a boundary invasion, to judge another person’s behavior based on your values and beliefs.

I think it is very valuable to compare other’s behaviors to your behaviors as a way of distinguishing yourself from them.

I think it is the boundary invasions that occur when infidelity hits a relationship that causes a lot of trouble.

The faithful person's behaviour made sense to them.

The cheating person's behaviour made sense to them.

Any action other than the following is a complete travesty of thinking, plus a boundary invasion

a) the faithful person taking action to protectively removing themself from the situation

b) a supporting person encouraging the faithful person in a Friend-Friend, observing, way to express their possible reasons about how they got to where they are in their life (without judging these reasons as good or bad) and to examine themselves in general

c) a supporting person encouraging the cheat in a Friend-Friend, observing, way to express their possible reasons about why they cheated in that relationship and situation (without judging these reasons as good or bad) and to examine themselves in general

A peruse through the majority of the posters on these forums (probably due to the existential terror around the subject of losing an intimate partner, ie fear of abandonment) - including me - have by this logic executed complete travesties of thinking, plus boundary invasions . Unhelpful. Maybe these forums have limited use?

[This message edited by Brewbrew at 3:19 PM, Monday, June 22nd]

Brewbrew, no.

You are still doing it. You are now trying to reframe this as some mature Friend/Friend dialogue problem, but that is not what happened here.

You did not simply "observe" anything.

You came into my thread and started assigning motives. You framed my refusal to carry responsibility for my wife’s affairs as ego, superiority, self-protection, victimhood, and lack of curiosity. You implied I probably had some passive role in a dysfunctional dance. You generalized betrayed husbands as men who do not understand women. You turned female exhaustion, hormones, childbearing, burnout, overfunctioning, and unmet needs into a broad explanation for betrayal. Then you told people in my thread to go fuck themselves.

That is not Friend/Friend. That is not neutral. That is not mature dialogue.

That is blame-shifting with a vocabulary upgrade.

And since you brought up Master/Friend/Slave, let’s use your own framework.

You defined Master as arrogant, entitled, and superior.

Then you came into a betrayed spouse’s thread and acted as though you had the higher lens. You told people their disagreement showed their blind spots. You decided my moral clarity was victimhood. You decided my refusal to absorb blame was ego. You decided betrayed husbands do not understand women. You declared that cheating is the responsibility of the relationship and then literally said, "Yes and I am right about that." Then when people rejected it, you told them to go fuck themselves.

That is Master, not Friend.

Master is coming into someone else’s pain and trying to educate them about how they should understand the person who harmed them.

Master is telling betrayed people their judgment is the real problem.

Master is recasting your own defensiveness as enlightenment.

Master is using another person’s thread as a testing ground for your triggers and then acting surprised when people do not appreciate being used that way. You are not being misunderstood, You are being rejected.

You keep saying all people make sense all the time. Fine. I do not disagree. My wife made sense to herself while she lied. She made sense to herself while she hid. She made sense to herself while she let me build an entire life on a reality she knew was false. She made sense to herself when she repeatedly broke me in public.

You made sense to yourself when you cheated. You made sense to yourself when you came into this thread and told betrayed men to go fuck themselves.

That does not make any of it right.

People can make sense and still be wrong. People can be hurting and still be responsible. People can have reasons and still do damage. People can be exhausted, lonely, hormonal, overwhelmed, under-supported, resentful, or emotionally starved and still not be entitled to betray.

That is the part you keep trying to soften.

And no, judgment is not automatically a boundary violation.

Marriage vows are not just my private values. Honesty is not just my private value. Fidelity is not just my private value. Sexual consent is not just my private value. Reality is not just my private value. Those were shared terms of the relationship.

When someone secretly violates those terms while allowing their spouse to keep living as if they are still being honoured, judgment is not arrogance.

It is reality finally being named.

I am allowed to judge deception.

I am allowed to judge betrayal.

I am allowed to judge years of lying.

I am allowed to judge choices that took away my informed consent.

That does not mean I think my wife is beyond growth. It does not mean I am perfect. It does not mean I have nothing to examine. It means I am not going to pretend moral clarity is cruelty just because it makes a wayward person uncomfortable.

You say you are practicing being Friend.

Then start by acting like one.

Friend does not hijack another person’s pain thread to work out their own triggers.

Friend does not tell betrayed people to go fuck themselves.

Friend does not dress blame-shifting in therapy language and then call everyone else unevolved when they reject it.

Friend does not use "all people make sense" as a way to dodge "some people still did wrong."

This thread was about betrayed spouses, it was about our whys. It was about why some people experience loneliness, rejection, resentment, temptation, unmet needs, and opportunity, yet still do not cheat. Moreover I put it in general because I do listen and appreciate waywards perspectives and opinions. I look to their experience and thoughts to help myself process, and I find it extremely helpful.

That was the point, not your whys.

Not my wife’s whys.

Ours.

If you want to explore your theories about passivity, validation, unmet needs, gendered exhaustion, and why your cheating made sense to you at the time, start your own thread.

But do not come into mine, reframe affairs as the responsibility of the relationship, insult the betrayed people who push back, and then call it dialogue.

That is not arrogance, that is accountability. I feel you have no true concept of accountability or you enjoy the conflict and validation a little too much. When people push back on me, and there have been plenty of times I am flawed in my perception and approach, it is very helpful. I actually am working on myself quite a bit but not for my wife, nor for my marriage. For myself. So my children can look up to me as a man who faced and learned from devastation rather than running and hiding from it, using excuses and reasoning myself out.

I am proud to be the man I am, including what I have and have not done, can you say the same without deceiving yourself?

@Brewbrew

let us not tar all cheaters with the same brush, shall we?

Actually, I specifically was not doing that. My entire point was to give you examples where cheaters ought to be tarred differently based on their specific motives. I was mapping out the objective landscape; all I did was provide a few stark examples where your universal "bad marriage" theory completely falls flat.

But thank you for finally providing a straight answer to the question. You believe your husband merely did not cheat due to a lack of opportunity, which is a specific constraint I cited earlier. Good to know we are on the same page there. Though I must ask: just because your husband accepted he may have cheated under the right circumstances, it does not mean everyone else would. You do get that, right? You cannot extrapolate your husband's self admitted vulnerability across the entire population to make yourself feel better about your own choices. I wouldn't have. Many other users here wouldn't have. I would indeed argue that this is in part due to my morality and wider principles and how they differ to yours... if it makes you feel better, maybe that's not superiority... maybe I just have different morals to you... different in a specific way that means I don't abuse my partner.

By your logic, if we are hand waving betrayal away based on physical and emotional deficits, what reasons do I get to use as a man? I do not have a torn vagina or a ripped open uterus to wave around as a get out of jail free card. So what is my equivalent threshold for acceptable betrayal? What if I am simply not getting enough oral sex? What if my wife is exhausted and my sexual needs are being ignored? If a woman gets a moral exemption because she feels tired and empty, does a man get the same pass because he feels frustrated and neglected? Or does this highly convenient biological justification only work in one direction?

I must say, watching your latest entries into the forum has been an absolute masterclass in deflection. It appears you have spent thousands of hours listening to podcasts, inhaling psychology textbooks, and consulting the entire pantheon of relationship gurus, only to weaponise their vocabulary so you can look your betrayed husband in the eye and say, "I thought I was starving and you were starving me."

That is quite a dazzling bit of mental gymnastics, is it not? Calling yourself a "starving person stealing food" to reframe a multi year, multi partner deception as a basic survival instinct is breathtakingly cynical. You are not Jean Valjean stealing a loaf of bread to survive the winter, Brewbrew. You are an adult who repeatedly chose a relief valve over hard conversations, using a male dominated workplace as an open buffet. I've heard of stealing a loaf of bread to feed yourself but never getting some strange. Jesus, that's some hunger you had.

In fact, let us look at your underlying motive, because it is staring us right in the face: a pathological craving for validation. It is one of the leading reasons people cheat. They are entirely empty containers, relying on external sources to make them feel attractive, interesting, or alive because they lack the basic infrastructure to generate self worth from within. It is a bottomless pit. You cheated to get a cheap hit of outside validation, and frankly, it is painfully obvious you still have an immense amount of work to do in that area.

Look at what you are doing right now on this forum. You admitted you came here "in between" needing validation and trying to find it. You are literally trawling a betrayal recovery board, picking fights with traumatised men, purely to get a reaction that makes you feel seen. You are still using other people as an emotional vending machine to prop up your fragile ego. The playground has changed, but the compulsion is exactly the same.

And now, having run out of standard therapeutic shielding, you have pivoted to a grand, gendered defense. You claim that "betrayed males" simply do not understand the exhausting, lifelong toll of hormones, pregnancy, and unequal childcare. Let us be entirely blunt: using the image of a "torn vagina and ripped open uterus" to construct a moral exemption card for infidelity is as grotesque as it is logically bankrupt. Women are not children. Exhausted mothers are not children. They are adult moral agents. Millions of women experience the grueling, bone deep exhaustion of childrearing and managed to not bounce away their stress with the nearest most available male colleague. So what separates you from those women if not for morality... differences?

To suggest that women are so weak willed that a bit of postpartum fatigue or a charming male colleague leaves them entirely without the "ability to resist" is not feminism. It is an insult to women. I know exactly what my faithful, feminist, never once in her life - soon to be wife - would say of this! I will restrain from using her exact wording choices as I don't want to paint her in a bad light.

It appears to me that you came to this thread to play a clever little game of "test your triggers," treating a betrayed man's genuine agony as a subconscious mental gymnasium for your own ego. And the moment the logic turned against you, you threw up your hands, yelled "Fuck you" on behalf of a stranger's wife, and announced your departure because the "bunch of betrayed males" would not give you the validation you so desperately crave.

Go back to your textbooks, Brewbrew. But until you can look at your choices without blaming your husband, your hormones, or the inequalities of the childrearing years, those thousands of hours of research are just a very expensive, very loud smoke screen.

I do need to thank you though! I will remember this thread when next talking to someone around the potential pitfalls of reconciliation. I can't fathom someone would entertain forgiveness of someone holding such ideals. We must do better people.

[This message edited by DRSOOLERS at 3:59 PM, Monday, June 22nd]

Yes I recognise many travesties of thinking in my own interventions, and I have not been a Friend.

I don't think I can offer you anything here.

Brewbrew, my friend, I have observed you do the following:

* hijacking the thread and refusing suggestions to start your own;
* attacking the OP, and then, upon his response, refusing to engage substantively, calling him unfriendly and immature;
* exhibiting profound confusion as to the nature of morality and the implications of behaving immorally;
* engaging in false equivalencies;
* making assumptions, and refusing to acknowledge or apologize when they have been shown to be wrong;
* making wild gender stereotypes

And more. I have observed all that. I have observed, Friend, that you say you want dialogue but don’t engage with it forthrightly. I’ll engage with you in good faith if you do the same. But only on a thread you start.

Brewbrew
Whew I just read through all that and it ... was an effort. Lets just say that.

I wanted to bring up a couple of points:

- Even though this thread, or even this site, might be currently dominated by males, that does not mean there aren't many females on both sides of the spectrum here. At any given time there are many people spectating who choose to not participate for whatever reason. Even betrayed females with birth related injuries and hormonal struggles.

- You did choose to comment on a post by a betrayed partner who recently discovered their betrayal. If you want to get specific WS support, you can post in the WS forum with a stop sign so only other WS's can respond. Probably a better option then telling a bunch of traumatized people to go fuck themselves. Just sayin.

- You say you are reconciling, and that your betrayed partner feels safe finally. Unfortunately if you are looking outward for the reasons you chose to betray, you are looking in the wrong direction entirely. Until the core reasons you made those choices are identified, and you are taking full responsibility for them, you will not be a safe partner even though you think you are. Along those lines I applaud you for coming here to interact at least. "Short help is better than no help at all" -Han Solo, Star Wars VI

- If any part of the betrayal is the betrayed partners fault, any part at all, then there is no hope of reconciliation long term. It makes it impossible to 100% fix yourself because you are not 100% of the problem. There will always be a vulnerability because 'he' is part of the reason you made these choices, according to you, and you will always be waiting on him to fix them. Always in some kind of limbo caused by him, and always with a ready excuse to not look inward.

The same logic applies in the reverse. You are constantly going to feel like you are the cause of his problems, and the way he handles them. Neither is true. Each person is responsible for their own happiness, and if they aren't happy they need to address it in a healthy way. Not by betraying the people they claim to love.

Brew, I hope you consulted Shirley Glass but forgot to mention her. She wrote that As happen in good marriages when the WS has poor boundaries. That certainly helps explain my W's A.

*****

I take issue with the proposition that the BS needs to understand the WS.

In order to heal, IMO, the BS needs to focus on themself first. The WS's 'reasons' for cheating are not directly related to the pain felt by the BS, and the BS's healing is processing the pain the BS feels out of the BS's body.

I don't think the WS's reasons are all that relevant to the BS if R is on the table. R is about future behavior. If the WS changes from betrayer to good partner, the WS's reasons become non-factors.

*****

I'm not sure one has to understand one's partner, but I'm not really sure what 'understand' means in the context of relationships.

I'll agree that partners probably need to like each other at a gut level, and like how each other thinks, at the level of intellect, and like something about pretty much any avenue of connection there is. I think it's most likely that relationships rise and fall on what the members like and don't like. IMO relationships rise and fall on what members give to, get from, and tolerate in each other.

But 'understand'? What type of understanding are people talking about? I can't get away from 'understand' as some sort of ability to predict how one's partner will behave. I've known my W since 1965, and she still surprises me again and again.

[This message edited by SI Staff at 4:27 PM, Monday, June 22nd]

Just wait till perimenopause comes along, and then actual menopause. Aging, graying, grandchildren, illness. Each of these is just another potential hall pass you are ready to self deal.

This all shows the moral fiber of single ply gas station toilet paper.

Thank you for this....

This all shows the moral fiber of single ply gas station toilet paper.

I have tears running down my face for the right reasons for the first time in a long time.

Just wait till perimenopause comes along, and then actual menopause. Aging, graying, grandchildren, illness. Each of these is just another potential hall pass you are ready to self deal.

This all shows the moral fiber of single ply gas station toilet paper.

Wow, how dare you question the absolute morality of someone who chose to do something objectively destructive on a thread specifically asking a simple question: why did the faithful spouses not cheat when they faced the exact same pressures?

​It simply cannot be down to personal principles, can it? It must be because your aunt’s boyfriend’s nephew stubbed his toe, or perhaps a sudden hormone imbalance perfectly coincided with an untidy kitchen, an overworked husband, and a bit of a messy house. Or because they were hungry or something. Obviously, the entire sequence of events was completely out of their hands.

​Did you not get the memo? An affair can be triggered by a million different cosmic excuses, provided absolutely none of those reasons involve a person's own character or choices. It is down to absolutely everything else in the universe, yet somehow has nothing to do with the actual adult making the decision.

Us betrayed males are real pieces of work suggesting that an adult had an ability to align their principles with their actions. When will we learn it's impossible to not cave to emotional whim. We also mustn't judge.

[This message edited by DRSOOLERS at 5:53 PM, Monday, June 22nd]

I am asking for help somewhat indirectly - it's resulted in: hey you judgey triggered guys come trigger me so I can be an asshole back to you! Not fully productive but helped me somewhat.

Yeah I got that, that’s why I gave you a helping hand.

I see you are starting to fight with the ego shame but you’re not hitting it with conviction yet.

I just pointed to you that ego is a pussy, slap it well and cries out I. A corner.

I am confident in time you will reread here and maybe get a different insight about what the guys were telling you, you will not get interpreted as confrontational.

You know what is right and wrong.
And I suspect you want to embrace the right and tell the asshole to fuck off.

You will get there eventually.

I have tears running down my face for the right reasons for the first time in a long time.

🫶🏻