To think this relationship is an utterly depressing tale of selfishness

[itsgoodtobehome]

So, the story is that my Mum (DM) has a friend. Friend's daughter had a long term boyfriend, and a few years ago, they went down the usual path, got engaged, got married. DM went to the wedding.The marriage lasted less than 3 months, as daughter of mum's friend (DOMF) suddenly upped and left her husband. Nobody knew why, and the family were very upset for a while.

It then turned out that DOMF had been having a long standing affair with her boss (starting before she got married), who was unfortunately married with 2 young children. After she had got married , she realised she had made a big mistake and was in love with the boss man, so left her new husband.

They dilly-dallied around for a while, trying to stay apart, but eventually they couldn't fight it, and boss man left his wife and young family to be with DOMF.

Both couples get divorced, and DOMF and boss man get married. DOMF then of course decides she wants children. Problem is, Boss Man has had the snip, as he was obviously clearly content with the family he previously had. So he goes for a reversal.

For whatever reason they still can't conceive naturally, so they go down the IVF route. About 5 or 6 rounds later, DOMF eventually gets pregnant, and has now just had a baby.

So, mumnetters, is this a tale of true love overcoming all obstacles, or just a totally sad and joyless tale of 2 very selfish people who didn't care what lives they destroyed as long as they got what they wanted?

I should add that this has absolutely no impact on me, but as a wife and mother with a young family, it just makes me terribly sad to hear stories like this. The ex husband, ex wife and 2 young children all affected by their actions.

Its both.

The original husband had a lucky escape!

I just feel sorry for his two kids from the first marriage if I’m honest...not ideal for them is it. Unless the first marriage was a match made in hell I suppose 🤷‍♀️

Good lord no i never said this is what caused her infertility!!

What I meant was sometimes our actions have far reaching consequences which cannot be seen at the time.

However I'm of the personal opinion that life is too short to stay in an unhappy marriage.

Any marriage breakdown is awful for all parties but as I also pointed out no one knows what goes on behind closed doors.
And unless you are directly involved it's better to not judge.

I think here they clearly decided they wanted to be together and have made a commitment - far better to do so than keep everyone unhappy

However horrible affairs are I think you need to make a distinction between short lived physical affairs (always wrong) and ones like this where two people genuinely do love each other

The other thing is as long as the divorce was done sensibly and the interests of the children put first and they are treated well and have a good balance between their parents that is far better than seeing their parents miserable with each other

I think your own life must be pretty empty if you can find the time and energy to write all of this on a public forum. And want confirmation that you are right.

What have their lives got to do with you?

People make mistakes,

IMO it's better to up and leave within 3 months knowing you have made a mistake than live for 40 years in misery and be deceiving the other person all along by pretending to be happy.

I also think everyone has a right to be happy. Sometimes that means hurting other people or staying in an unhappy relationship just to keep up the pretence.The other option is to be a martyr.

Is that what you'd suggest? Both couples live in misery forever?

I have seen friends and friends of my parents split up after 30 and 40 years of marriage. For some of that time they had been having long term affairs, for decades. That to me is worse. At least be honest and leave, and give BOTH parties another chance for happiness.

I think unless you have walked the walk, OP, you are in no position to be judge and jury. In fact you sound nasty.

I'd mostly assume the story hasn't finished yet.
Man falls in love with carefree young woman, marries then has young children with all the responsibilities that entails. He meets and falls in love with another carefree young woman, then has a child with all the responsibility that entails.......

I was one of the children in this scenario and mine and my siblings life was fucked up for a long time.
But hey ho as long as my dad could get his leg over with a new younger compliant bit of stuff that's fine. When I was in my 30s I asked him why he had had an affair, was he unhappy with my mum? Was it true love had he found his one and only soulmate?
No it was apparently because the OW 'thought the sun shone out of his arse' (his words)
So it wasn't really about love just another selfish man putting himself first and bugger the fallout for everyone else.

Life isn't black and white. He can be a good husband to wife #2 but he's still let down his first two kids by not giving marriage #1 A proper go (cutting off OW and trying counselling at least). If he can live with the guilt so be it.

It doesn't seem completely joyless, they have a baby, she might of had fertility problems and struggled to conceive with anyone, I don't think it's karma.
You don't know everyone enough to know how it's effected his family. I know two people that got together as a result of an affair and the children from the 1st marriage are happier as he sees them more now and is generally a more involved father.
I think this kind of thing is getting increasingly common because social media and apps like WhatsApp make it easier to cheat and it's less common for people stay together forever anymore as divorce isn't as taboo now.

People who have affairs deserve to be humiliated. I'm sick of people equating affairs with divorce, they are not connected. Divorce is sad, it's sometimes cruel but normally not. Affairs are always cruel.

Affairs are also nothing to do with being with who you love, or dead relationships, or anything. End the relationship you're in, then follow your heart, it's very simple.

Forget "humiliation", I wonder if we need to bring back punishments for affairs. Then people won't come and literally say it's better to cheat for 3 months than for a lifetime, as if that's an okay to thing to say, as if those are the options. Be a scumbag, or be a massive scumbag. Just don't have affairs. It's really easy. But if some people need legal encouragement to have the barest minimum of self control, we should give it to them.

Jeez, you are a compassionate soul Rinabean!

Sometimes life is not as easy as you would like to make out.
Sometimes it's only when people meet someone else it highlights how bad their current relationship is.

In an ideal world, people would always walk away from a relationship without another to go to. But it doesn't always work like that.

I find your attitude sickening to be honest because it's so harsh, unforgiving and shows complete lack of understanding for how life is sometimes.

Forget "humiliation", I wonder if we need to bring back punishments for affairs

Are you for REAL?

what do you suggest? Hanging? Flogging? Both.
Are you Jacob Rees Mogg perhaps?

Of course they shouldn't have stayed in relationships that weren't working or where they had fallen out of love, but having a prolonged affair rather than just leaving was utterly selfish.
For the woman to actually go through with a wedding, and all the expense and stress that entails, when she already knew she was in love with someone else is mind boggling. The time that both parties spent living their double life was time that their respective partners could have spent with new partners who actually loved them, instead of being lied to and deceived.
But I doubt DOMF or boss man will ever feel any true guilt over what they did, now they've got their little family unit. It's very easy to turn a blind eye to the harm you cause to other people in the pursuit of your own happiness.

Adults have the power to make some choices.

Life doesn't just happen to us, we have a hand in creating it.

There is always another side to people's behaviour.

For the woman to actually go through with a wedding, and all the expense and stress that entails, when she already knew she was in love with someone else is mind boggling.

Maybe instead of the above, you might consider..

She didn't want to let anyone down.
She felt it was too late to stop it all and upset her parents and all involved.
She didn't want to call of the wedding after all the prep and expense.
She was sure she could make it work and went into it ready to try.
She tried very hard to let go of her feelings for the other man.

Just saying- you need to see there is always another way of thinking.

Neither are necessarily 'right' but both are possible.

People can’t stay married to people they don’t want to be with, what a miserable way to live. They could’ve gone about things in a more delicate way but that’s just life.

It’s not a nice situation for the jilted spouses or the children but it’s also precisely none of your business and it’s a bit weird of you to be posting on MN about your mum’s friend’s daughter.

It sounds like both of them were in relationships which weren't working.

Leaving a bad relationship (even if it's because someone else made you realise it's bad and you can't bear it any more) does not ruin lives. Staying in a bad relationship "for the sake of the children" and so on does.

Obviously cheating while in a relationship is not good and people should ideally avoid it and get a divorce first. But staying in a loveless relationship because of money or logistics or the children or a lifestyle or because you're afraid of being on your own is seriously the worst thing you can do, in my view.

I feel most sorry for his children. They will now have to grow up with the effects of not only an adulterous Father who is now married to the OW but also the other child he has now created with said woman. They will most likely feel abandoned and as though he has replaced them.

They are incredibly selfish but him more so than her. He has given very little consideration to the children he already had.

Yawn. My husband and I were married to other people when we met. My then-husband had all but stopped speaking to me, never did anything with me, and had essentially checked out of our marriage a couple of years previously. He was also wavering on our previous agreement to start a family. Despite many attempts from me to save the marriage, he wasn't interested in making any effort.

DH's first marriage was incredibly unhappy, for reasons I won't outline here in case someone recognises the story. Suffice it to say that his ex had isolated him from his family and other support networks, and that, far from condemning his infidelity, his family were absolutely thrilled when he finally left her.

Neither of us felt strong enough to leave our first spouses without the emotional support that our affair provided. It's easy to judge us as "weak", but when you've been treated badly for years it has a real impact on your self-esteem and decision-making ability.

Only the people within a marriage truly know what's going on. Butt out and stop judging.

I'm just looking at it from the children's perspective. If they don't realise now, they will eventually, that ultimately their dad deceived and hurt their mum and put his own feelings and need for happiness above theirs. He then moved on and put all his efforts into creating a new family with the woman he'd left their mum for and the children have to be bit parts as he plays happy families in this new relationship which has produced a child who lives with him full time. Even if it all seems like happy families the children will be affected to some extent and it's sad. And yes, I do speak from personal experience. An affair in my family has led to several decades of issues for many people.

People often get married and have kids young and it doesn’t work out.

I got married at 21 to the person I thought I would spend my whole life with but we grew apart and it became apparent that we were not suited to each other at all, I didn’t have an affair but maybe I would have it someone amazing came along. We are now divorced and he has a new partner.

Yes they both cheated on their partners, both cheats so probably as bad as each other. They are still together despite going through ivf so many times and they now have a baby, so over all a happy ending?

punishment for affairs? Either that's a joke or I've fallen into a Margaret Atwood novel.
The person who I most dislike here is you op. Why do you care? You can never know what happens in other people's relationships.

Thing is with stuff like this, people always know, don’t they?

If you are capable of keeping an affair secret during the affair, why the hell aren’t you capable of keeping the origins of your new relationship secret when you do choose the leave / divorce?

Plan it. Plan leaving your spouse. Leave a decent amount of time between separation and new relationship. Have a pretend first date so you have a ‘how we met’ story. Sell it FFS so your kids never work out you cheated on their mum.

But no it’s always broadcast. Telling people as a balm for your guilt. Moving out and straight in with the other person with no care for how that looks or how it affects your spouse or kids.

That’s what I have the issue with. The desperate need to repaint an affair as ‘true love’ so people can make themselves feel better with no care for the impact on innocent parties.

It’s not the cheating exactly that makes me sick. It’s the selfishness.

I don't see why having an affair whilst still being sexually active with the wife wouldn't qualify as sex with deception and be punished that way.