Infidelity - is it ever the betrayed's fault?

[googlecoffee]

Being on the receiving end of infidelity is an absolute bitch of a situation, but what made it worse for me was my partner telling me that if I had listened to his problems and not "shut the relationship down" it wouldn't have happened.

I've googled and read many a view/opinion on this and there seems to be 2 schools of thought;

1. A person is not responsible for the actions of causing another to be unfaithful. That a person is prone to being a cheat even when in a perfect relationship.

2. A person is responsible for causing the actions of another to be unfaithful. That if the relationship had been perfect it wouldn't have happened.

I suppose my question is - is everyone capable of being a cheat in a bad relationship?
Or are people prone to cheat regardless of the relationship or not?!!

People just kind of assume monogamy as the default position though whether theyre actually inclined to it or good at it. Its pretty shitty to expect monogamy from someone you have no intention of having sex with.

People just kind of assume monogamy as the default position though whether theyre actually inclined to it or good at it. Its pretty shitty to expect monogamy from someone you have no intention of having sex with.

Apparently it was all my fault .....just another boring ageing ft working mum who didnt post photos online, tweet and aspire to be the best I could be....and didnt dust behind the sofa enough. This is why people let rip on here about cheating...normally goes hand in hand with thinking life is hard but you are doing the best you can together..you suddenly realise you are on your own, despised and being taken advantage of...this is a abusive I think or on the spectrum but not in the same league as some abuse I know...not trying to minimise the absolute hell some women go through

Ok my husband and I were in a happy relationship. (I thought and he has said the same) He cheated on me- an emotional affair he says, he wasn't thinking of having an affair it just happened, he says. I think there's always a choice and a chance to walk away, he's normally a nice man, I don't think that now of course.
So we weren't having problems so lots of the above doesn't fit with my situation but u think if he was going to have an affair I agree he should have questioned why he was thinking about it and have either sorted things out with me first, it would have hurt to know he might not feel the same about me but not as much as the pain of knowing he's with another woman or he simply should have had the decency not to get involved. I know there's lots of don't blame theOW on here but they are 50% of any affair and I don't know how someone can bear the guilt of being part of wrecking a couple.i know peopl will say it's his fault and I know that but I sincerely hope that if I meet a married man I would say sort yourself out first So, no I don't think the betrayed should feel it's their fault but every case is different, it would be wrong to generalise. No one can know what goes on inside someone else's relationships even their nearest and dearest.

@googlecoffee You are not responsible for your husband's cheating. He made a choice. He had other choices. He could have drug you to marriage counseling. He could have just left. He could have bought a relationship book and said, "let's work through this together." He could have just stayed miserable, or drank, or something else. He made a choice to cheat and he is responsible for that choice.

However, it sounds like your marriage already had problems. I say that not because he cheated or because he said that you shut problems down, but because you ask, " is everyone capable of being a cheat in a bad relationship?" To me, that seems like you owning there were already problems.

Does he want forgiven, or does he just want out?

Marriage is very difficult. People stay together through hard times because of children, or finances, or because they deeply hope it will get better. I think that its actually harder to tell the difference between a rough patch and the relationship being dead than most people realize.

karma said Somebody once told me that women in unhappy marriages leave when they can't take it anymore, while men in the same situation leave when they find someone else. this has been born out in our circle of friends, but talking to women where the man was the one who cheated and left, they already knew that the relationship has serious problems, they were just more willing to stay and hope it got better than the man was.

I also think that the state of a relationship is seldom one person's fault. The dynamic in a relationship is created by the two people. (The exception is when one person has a personality disorder / is abusive / etc.). In normal relationships, it's an interplay.

It's much easier to leave when there are no kids...

Exactly. The MN rubric, 'If it's a shitty relationship just leave', fails to acknowledge this. It's a mistake to think that the main beneficiaries of a marriage should be the husband and wife: marriage is primarily for children.

No one would claim that Mum or Dad having someone on the side is ideal, but occasionally there are circumstances in which it's the best way of keeping a family together.

Yes.

Being married doesn't make you a nice or worthwhile person, as many other married people have found out.

Quite often the only way anyone can get out of a very bad 'relationship' is by getting someone else.

Quite often there's no point upsetting the apple cart unless you're sure you're moving onto better things.

People are quick to remember the 'forsaking all others' bit of the marriage vows and be outraged when that bit is broken but accept when any of the other are broken as being ok.
If your partner can't cope if you are physically or mentally unwell, or if they behave in a way that can no way be described as being loved or cherished, they all seem 'acceptable' but at the end of the day you said you'd accept all of these. If a partner makes you constyfeel second best, when you are giving your all and refuse to listen to me that's as bad or if not worse.

The Mumsnet ideal is that if it's a shit relationship, and you find yourself attracted to someone else, you should split up and finish everything before making a move on another person.

Sadly while this is the ideal, I suspect very few of us are capable of doing it in reality.

As a PP said, if you are in an abusive/poor relationship, you might find your only way out is via another - it might also be this new attraction that brings you to your senses about how bad your current relationship is.

But often you do get the scenario of the cheater rewriting history to say they were completely blameless, marriage had been shit for ages, in order for them to go off and follow younger model without them everhaving suggested to their spouse anything was up, they should go to counselling etc. They are just following the script.

The other thing I find really weird about MN is the line on 'emotional affairs' being basically as bad as the real thing. I've seen posts where someone seems to have tried to do the right thing - ended a relationships before starting a new one - where they still got pilloried for being emotional engaged outside their marriage before it ended.

I suspect the real answer is that a third party gives people a target for all that anger and frustration at the end of a relationship. It's a lot easier to be angry at OW than all the intangibles that can grind a relationship down.