Cheating - what's a dealbreaker for you and what could you forgive?

[tallielikesthesky]

Friend has just told me that 6 months ago she discovered her 'd'h had had some sort of 'almost affair' and it's shocked me how different our opinions on it are.

Apparently she found messages on his phone - OW lived in city her DH was travelling to a lot for work at the time and there were weeks worth of daily texts messages, talk about sex (likes etc, not sexting) , references to them meeting up, to ow being a good kisser and something about them sharing a bed but not having sex (OW had apparently broken it off saying she couldn't go any further than they'd gone with a married man but apologised to the wanker that he hadn't got what he wanted but she'd hoped he'd enjoyed spending the night with her).

Friend said she was upset but because she could tell from messages that they hadn't had sex and it was over she didn't really consider it an affair and had forgiven him. Apparently him performing oral sex on someone else or having full sex are the only dealbreakers for her.

I know it's easy to say things hypothetically but to me that's a proper affair and I just don't think I could forgive him. All the secrecy, kissing and sleeping in the same bed would be too much for me and would ruin any trust I had in him. I reckon I could forgive a drunken kiss with a stranger but nothing more.

Now I'm wondering which is more common. At what point would you be unable to forgive? Sexting? Kissing someone else? Sleeping in same bed? Receiving/giving oral sex? Full sex?

At what point do you think an emotional affair become unforgivable?

Surely you'd hurt your DDs more by making their dad live apart from them ... Especially if you still loved each other.

DH has never been unfaithful to me but I know I'd fight to keep my family together.

I'm someone who's forgiven a brief affair many years ago and contrary to what others think would happen to them/say did happen to them, I love my husband more than I did before it happened.

In terms of the effect on children, ours know about the affair and have learnt some amazing lessons about the importance of fidelity and the value of forgiveness.

For my husband, this provided a real wake-up call that although we'd always had a strong marriage, he'd been really quite selfish all his life. I had always known that, but his other qualities had made up for it; his kindness, his humour and his love for me and the children.

The post-affair period of individual counselling made him address certain ingrained personality flaws in a way he never would have, if not for that catalyst. My therapy gave me permission to be less tolerant of things I'd been making bargains with (e.g kind vs. selfish) and gave me the opportunity to hold out for what I felt I was worth.

The transformation in him as a person, husband and father has been astonishing. I wouldn't trade him now for the pre-affair model and neither would I trade our current relationship for what we have now.

As for me, I've gone from strength to strength. It's very hard not to take an affair personally, but a combination of my counselling, reading and most of all my husband's honesty helped me to realise that the affair wasn't actually about me, or even our relationship in the sense that it hadn't been an escape from difficulties within it. Some aspects of our relationship though had made the conditions for an affair more likely e.g. my acceptance of the aforementioned selfishness and neither of us realising the link between selfishness and affairs.

Like the other poster, I actually like myself much more now and my marriage is more grown-up, honest and mutually supportive than it was before. Also, seeing a man in his forties change incredibly ingrained habits and face his own demons has enhanced my respect and love for him. It's not easy to make such fundamental change to oneself, but only the potential loss of everything he held dear would have provided the motivation. As for my husband, he likes himself much more now too.

I'm not one of those people who says the affair was the best thing that ever happened, because patently it was not. It's one of the most gut-wrenching, painful things a couple and individuals can withstand. But it doesn't have to be the worst thing either and with enough determination, love and honesty, some enormous good can occur in its wake. We both feel much better prepared now to help our children face their own relationship dilemmas and because we've been very honest with them about our crisis, they have a far more realistic view of relationships and the challenges they sometimes provide.

Anything that made me feel like the object was to deceive me and keep me in the dark, if the deception assumed I was stupid.

family - your post made me well up, that's how I feel too.

This thread had been getting me down, as after the sheer gut wrenching pain of an affair, and the strength it took to turn our marriage around, I still leave the house every day knowing that the majority of women who know of me, rather than know me, think like so many of the women on here. Oh there goes that woman who's husband shagged someone else. How could she take him back? She must be living a miserable paranoid life. Obviously lacks self esteem. Bet it's the money....'

And do you know what, that is every bit as bad as the affair was. Rejection, judgement, and negativity at some level from your own gender is hard.

There are many couples who have not only survived but come out stronger. I love my DH now in a way I didn't before. It is balanced, even, I know he is flawed, but I know what we both went through to recover from it has made us better people.

Thank you family I needed to read that.

Good post Family.

Another one here who took her DH back after his affair. I had exactly the same views as laqueen etc and I have a very high self esteem - the reality is that you don't really know how you would react, especially when you have been together for over 20 years.

I don't think that many marriages thrive happily after an affair though as recovery is a very long and hard road - not many cheaters have the ability or want to address their own issues, flaws and coping mechanisms. Not many do all the things required to help their spouses recover.

I don't consider the affair to be the best thing that's happened to us but it served as a huge wake up call for me as well as my DH. I don't think he would have worked on himself otherwise as it was loss that motivated him to change. I had accepted his flaws but hadn't appreciated the link between selfishness and infidelity so I am now much more intolerant - he is a much better person now.

I am not paranoid and do not check his phone, emails etc - if he wants to cheat again, there is nothing I can do to stop it but he will be kicked out of my life without a second thought.

familyscapegoat, that was great to read.
thanks for being so honest and sharing.
I have been avoiding Mumsnet lately and I think it is because everyone goes LTB!
But all relationships, people, circumstances, histories are so different.
In my case I havent yet decided what to do, but this gives me some strength, so thank you

Surely you'd hurt your DDs more by making their dad live apart from them ... Especially if you still loved each other.

I'd have hurt mine much more if I'd stayed.
My boys were teens who would have never forgiven me for taking him back (and not showing them much about healthy relationships either)
My dd would have grown up with a nervous paranoid suspicious depressed and lacking self esteem parent.
Not something I feel is good for her.
With respect I'm not sure you can say what you would do unless you are I that situation.
My dh was shagging a frighteningly young girl and had been flaunting her around our town. My boys found out via face book as she was a peer if theirs.
I couldn't fight to keep my family together because he had already shattered it.

Btw I completely get why people choose to stay.
I just simply felt that I couldn't.
I don't feel smug or sorry for anyone who does and have supported friends to do so.
It entirely depends on the circumstances.
I had a good job and the boys were old enough to help with the baby.
For me personally it was not an option. We'd been together for 18 yrs and been though so much and I just couldn't love with his betrayal.
Equally unfair to suggest I compromised my daughters happiness by not staying though

I agree that this "you don't know how you would react until it happens to you" works both ways

I put up with some shockingly overt cheating and bad treatment in a long relationship once. Then one day, I woke up and completely surprised myself by deciding that was it. Finito. I don't know what flicked that switch on that day...nothing had really changed outwardly, but something inside me had very unexpectedly.

Ledkr - I totally get why you couldn't stay with him. I couldn't have coped if my DH shagged a young woman or flaunted his OW.

I didn't beg him to stay and I didn't commit to a long term decision about the marriage for several months. I had a lot of anger and outrage to work through.

Also when it happened to me I was 35 and had had breast cancer with a high chance of recurrence.
I really didn't feel I had the time or inclination to be putting any effort into counselling or self blame (although there was some) or working at things.
I just wanted to get on with getting on iyswim?
I have had a charmed life since. I'd been with him so long I'd forgotten what I was capable of.
With hindsight I'd say it definitely takes a lot of courage to stay and work it out.

I think the only really hard and fast thing is that we are all shaped by our experiences as children and later in intimate relationships. And while some of our relationships may follow a pattern there is also the chance one or two will not, will show us an alternative view and so we make different choices to the ones we might have made in other relationships.

I find it harder to post on relationship threads as I know my own experiences colour my view greatly and each situation has the baggage from the two people in the immediate relationship as well as that of the OW or OM so even or esp? in rl advice is not something I often get involved in. My opinion is only given as a marker for what I am willing to tolerate in my friendship with the person I am friends with ie you have decided to do this and, while I respect your decision, I do not agree with your choice this sets the parameters for that friendship.

Crap not sure that makes sense - what I mean is, stay, go, continue affair etc. I am happy to remain friends usually but won't be all listening sympathetic ear ad nauseum re that decision if I have stated I disagree e.g. Friend has affair with MM I disagree with that decision - happy to meet and chat with her about non MM stuff but not get involved in discussions about their 'relationship' including when she stays even tho it appears he is having an affair on her with someone else

I have grown to be more conservative as I have gotten older fragile rock t-shirts aside but don't totally agree on 'if you can't say something nice don't say anything at all' I think it is fine to state 'I don't agree with what you are doing and so refuse to get involved' but of course not fine to mither, mother or bully someone who has made their own choice.

This is a really interesting thread OP

I think most cheaters are self obsessed.

They do not become less so immediately after discovery.
I think a few marriages can reconcile, but it takes an incredibly strong betrayed spouse working out their boundaries and learning to police them.

It also takes a cheater who is willing to do the hard work.

That can not be a common combination.

Finally it takes some honesty from both that some thing was in fact lost during the cheating process, and won't come back. This applies, IMO, regardless of how much of a stronger relationship is built afterwards.

Yes that's true. It was another reason I chose to end the marriage. I felt that something had been lost and would never come back.
Intimacy and specialness are the two words that spring to mind.
That's why I think that splitting is the easy option.

I agree ledkr I found the splitting easier than the staying. It was hard work trying to unravel everything. I just couldn't see a way that I would feel the same again about him.

In our case, the gains outweighed the losses and the interesting thing is that after all these years, I had to think hard about what I think the losses have been. Loss of innocence, perhaps? Except even that's a double-sided coin because I'd rather be knowledgeable and informed in a way that neither of us was before.

I also wanted to say to Ledkr that of course you made the right decision for you. I can't conceive of doing anything different in those circumstances myself.

Which sort of brings me on to what worsestershiresauce said. I'm so glad my post helped you and I truly understand what you are saying about others being judgemental about your choices, or fearing they'll be so. It's a conundrum I haven't resolved myself yet either, but I've gone past the need to, for us and our relationship. I do worry about others though.

When this happened to me I felt that my value as a person was diminished, but curiously this was less to do with my husband's actions and more to do with the impossibly old-fashioned views there were/are about affairs and why they happen. I felt that I'd be judged by others as lacking in some way, even though my husband was insistent that wasn't the issue. Ironically, if my husband had been knocking me about, I wouldn't have felt so fearful of others thinking I must have been at fault in some way.

I knew my close family and friends wouldn't judge me for forgiving, because they knew and loved my husband. Family especially would have exerted more pressure the other way. But yes, others in the wider world would I am sure have judged me negatively.

So we were very judicious about who we shared this with, but of course that doesn't help others to understand and shift some of these old-fashioned views or rushes to judgement. So couples in this situation can feel more isolated because they feel they can't talk about it.

A forum like this therefore has negatives and positives. I wish I'd had it when it happened to me, because it would have helped me to see how common an experience this is and actually, not unusual. The negatives though might have been feeling under attack for deciding to try again at a time when I was still in decision-mode and not knowing what outcome I was seeking. I know back then I would have been very vulnerable to opinions and it would have taken great strength of character not to have been affected by it or made to feel worse.

So people like Ledkr would have probably got some judgement about her decisions just as I would have had about mine. But I'm sure there would have been some posters at least who would have been able to tailor their advice to the specific circumstances and suspend judgement. The challenge would have been to sort the wheat from the chaff but that isn't always easy when you're vulnerable and scared, coping with a situation you've never prepared for.

LaQ, yes, you can find different things.

It isnt all bad. We have made some gains, too, which I wouldnt do without now.

I can say that as someone who was betrayed, and for a long time, and who has stayed.

I just wanted to make clear that staying is a much tougher option for both parties than many people assume. It probably wouldnt be worth it in many cases. And it is only worth it if both parties are willing to really shake the tree.

I've come to realise that knowledge is quite a different thing to belief and that on the balance of probability, there are millions of people who believe there has been total fidelity on both sides, but only the individuals can know because they were there.

It also depends on what you hold special. Sometimes I find it hard to recall what I felt back then, but I can't recall especially cherishing the fact that we'd always remained faithful to eachother. I think that's because I'm a pragmatist and even then probably realised I only knew about my own side of the bargain, but I don't recall especially celebrating that about myself, or deriving any huge comfort from it. It didn't make me feel special in any way that I'd managed to remain faithful. So that wasn't a notable loss to me, personally. I know my husband mourned losing his own fidelity, but that was all tied up with the self-recriminations and general guilt at the time and wasn't a discrete feeling.

Yes we've made so many special memories in the years that have elapsed since and the overall bond between us is the most special of all. I think building a new marriage in the wake of disaster is something we especially celebrate and rightly so. That for us was a far harder challenge and therefore more special than our ability to stay faithful to one another in the years before.

When my future ex husband told me about his love for another woman, his exact words were : "I need to tell you, because of my love for you, that I love someone else". He even told me that when I arrived home in the evenings he regretted that I hadn?t had a car accident?(nice).
I believed the bastard.
Cue, years (about 15 of them) of tearing myself into pieces to be the perfect wife. To watch him pine for her. Drink himself into oblivion over her.
Then he got over her (I think) and went on to have numerous emotional affairs, which I found out about. They were always ?just friends?. I used to have sleepless nights wondering what I had done wrong.
I had therapy, depression?. You name it, I had it.
Then all of a sudden I had a light-bulb moment.
AND, to cut a very long story short. Left.
He doesn?t understand why. He is heartbroken. Poor, poor him. Me doing this to him. The bloody irony.
I now sleep, have lost weight, glow (people tell me), have friends, a social life, enjoy life. I have even found a sex life again (that went missing years ago?.).
I now realize that I should not have forgiven. I should have had pride in myself. Put myself first for once.
Of course every situation is different. Every person tries to overcome the shock differently. My only regret : not leaving earlier.
OP tell your friend that the end of a marriage is not the end of the world. Life, perhaps an even better one, does exist afterwards. Tell her that you are her friend whatever happens.
She will most probably need one.

One - I agree too re losing something. For me it was blind trust and the almost childlike security that came with it - not such a bad thing to lose really. As a person I have grown a lot and my life is much richer now so that I am in a better position such one of us decide to end the marriage.

Spot on post familyscapegoat, I always said I would leave if my husband ever cheated , but when it happened although it was so terrifyingly painful when it came down to it we had too much to give up.
He's spent the last few years being the best husband I could have and I don't regret ever working things out,
If anything he's like a different man .
I still get so sad occasionally that things aren't untainted as they used to be but its worth for what we have now.

His betrayal came after his mothers death and 3 miscarriages we had including a late one and I actually feel so sad for the person he was at the time.

Just to point out if any of the above ever changed I'd be out of there like a shot.

It seems that all those who have stayed and got through this would end it if it ever happened again? Is that the case? Or do you think once you have been able to rationalise and work through something like this knowing it can be better you would be able to again?Or even expect the same if you had an affair yourself?