In RL people have affairs, marriages break up. People just get on with it, life goes on. Only on mn do affairs seem worse than murder and the perpetrators will never ever be forgiven and be condemned to live as an outcast for the rest of their natural. Rubbish.
People 'get on with life' because there is no other choice - they get up in the morning, take their kids to school, go to work. Most people recognise that 'getting on with life' is the only option open to them when their life implodes. I believe that I made being cheated on look 'easy' because I kept a sense of humour, had good, close friends who held me up when I felt I could no longer go on, and believed above everything else that the ONLY revenge I should have should be living well. It wasn't easy. It was hell. It was like falling down a hole for months on end - clutching at the sides but never being able to get a firm grip and I just kept falling and falling and falling. The crap just kept on revealing itself, day after day, week after week, month after month. Everything that I had believed to be true about my life just turned on its head in a way that was just impossible to believe. Every tender moment, every kind word, every kiss, every time we'd had sex, his being there at our children's births (finally realising he had walked out of the hospital so quickly when our second was born was because he ran off to spend the night with her as our eldest was being looked after by family), every weekend away, bottle of wine shared, pair of underpants washed.... EVERYTHING. Nothing was as it had been or how it had seemed - that's a huge thing for any person to have to deal with. And on top of that, the realisation that it's been going on for years. If you haven't been there, you can't even begin to imagine it. It isn't something you shrug off overnight.
Yeah, I 'got on with life'. But you have no idea whatsoever what I was going through underneath and the impact that had on me personally and on our children, close family members and friends. I am pleased to tell you that husbands's of close friends unfriended him - on Facebook (!!!) and in real life - not because I asked them to but because they're adults who were capable of making their own judgements about a man who left his pregnant, non-working wife with nothing and proceeded to live the highlife. He wasn't someone they wanted to be friends with. I can also tell you with some certainty that my ex, some 5 years later, doesn't mention his affair to any potential new partner (quite the opposite - I have it on good authority he says I had an affair for years and that he has no idea if our children are his!) so I can only assume that there are decent people out there who wouldn't want to be with someone capable of what he did otherwise, why hide it? He seems to have a complete new set of friends - which would suggest somewhere along the line, his 'old' friends decided he was no longer for them. He may not be condemmed to a life of misery but he certainly isn't living an honest life and is surrounding himself with a web of deceit and lies. Each to their own. It obviously works just fine for him. But please don't think that because I look OK that I haven't had to work incredibly hard to actually be OK and that I just 'got on with life' because the affair meant nothing.