@Rose424 agreed, and everything you said still doesn’t mean the cheater had temporarily lost the ability to tell between right or wrong. Cheating is a choice. Do it or don’t, but don’t pretend it’s anything else than a simple choice: ‘but it’s not black and white’ ‘but life’s not like that’ ‘but it’s more complicated than that’ is just saying ‘I find it very hard to do the right thing, despite being fully aware that what I am doing is wrong, if doing the right thing thwarts my desires and means I don’t get to do what I want and I need to somehow justify this.’
As far as anyone really can, I got into the mind of my ex-cheating husband who knows exactly that, that he was a total arse who had lost sight of everything he loved and valued, including himself. The trip to the Land Of Oz continued as long as reality never intruded. Whenever it did, he felt guilty and shitty and so redesigned reality and everyone in it to make illicit trips to Oz, whilst knowing they were wrong, justifiable given his newly found victim status. My good points got minimised or ignored, my bad points got magnified, his AP’s good points got exaggerated, her faults minimised. The marriage he actually enjoyed coming home to, the wife he took out because he liked her company and still slept with and had sex with, whom at all times he thought was a good mother and good wife, became his tedious trap when he was with the AP. His wife became the ungrateful harridan he was forced by duty and because of his children to endure. The very much alive marriage at home became dead when he was in a hotel and he described it to his AP. Eventually he invested more in that relationship and less in ours, which was when he became moody and distant at home and I noticed and started questioning. My questioning and his distance at home became confirmation that I was interfering and even controlling, home was a cold place with a wife who wouldn’t leave him alone. Confirmation bias meant he actually started believing his own fabricated justifications and rewrote our relationship, rewrote me, reimagined his own future. Leaving me wasn’t a huge mistake, which would devastate everyone including his children, it was an obvious choice and final bid for freedom from this awful life he was trapped in. His AP was his light and saviour, ready to rescue this poor man-victim from the clutches of drudgery at home and a cold, ungrateful and neglectful wife. When I found out he admits that the thing he was most surprised by was this: he didn’t want to lose me. He admits that he thought it was dead between us, thought if I ever found out he would just leave and go to her. He was terrified that he realised that he literally in that moment didn’t know his own mind, couldn’t fathom why suddenly his light and saviour, the woman he saw as his bright shiny new future, morphed into a huge problem threatening his whole life. Where had the love he thought he had for her evaporated to? Why didn’t he feel relief that I finally knew and he could leave? Why did he no longer want to leave? He couldn’t believe it. Then followed the horrible realisation that he was a sham, a fake, a liar, had betrayed those he loved. It nearly killed him. And it was all his fault. Nowhere to hide, no excuses would stack up, he couldn’t look himself in the mirror any more.
It’s absolutely possible to love somebody and bury it to avoid horrible emotions like guilt and shame, to tell yourself and others lies to justify wrongdoing and get so carried away in your mindset that when you realise you’ve made a colossal error of judgment and compromised your own values and belief system, all your carefully self-justifying bullshit no longer stacks up and collapses when reality makes you stop believing it any more. Try a book called ‘Mistakes were made, but not by me’. It’s not about infidelity, it’s about bias and justifications and prejudices which shape our belief systems and show that many perfectly rational people are absolutely capable of ending up somewhere they never thought they would and can’t really explain why or how.
Every time we hear ourselves justifying our position or views or beliefs or words or actions, we all need to ask ourselves of they come from fact or opinions or outside sources, peer pressure, our upbringing. On what grounds are we basing our self-justifications? Many affairs would never get going of those involved examined their self-justifications which back up their excuses for their poor choices and behaviour. The worst lies we tell are those we tell ourselves.