Am I crazy for considering to be with husband after his affair?

[DreamKiller]

We have two kids. Obvs if we didn't it would be a no brainer. But I want the best for them and the lifestyle we can offer then will be so much better than us splitting. He's willing and eager to do couples counselling and wants us to rekindle things and be a team again.
Has anyone got through it and come out the other side together?

How long was the affair?

You won’t be the first or last. I suspect you may even feel ok for a while but you won’t trust him fully again, if you can both live with that.
Also depends on what kind of affair he had- one night stand I’d probably survive, a 6month- many years relationship= no chance.

That’s your choice to make
do want to stay married?

Some couples manage it. Why did he have an affair, is he selfish, narcissistic, depressed? Is it something that can be resolved?
Did he have the affair with someone you both know?

There are so many variables but if I was in this situation I'd want to be so so sure it wouldn't happen again!

My dad cheated on my mum. They’re still together about 10 years later. Me and my sibling were both adults when it happened so by that point they had been married for over 20 years. Dad’s not allowed to have overnight travel now but otherwise they got over it fairly quickly and still seem fairly happy together. They’re of an age and culture where divorce is frowned upon though, and mum was SAHM for many years so financially dependant on dad.

Depends why he cheated

How did you find out about the affair? Did the affair only end because you caught him cheating?

Depends on so much. Did he confess and ask for forgiveness? Or did you find out, confront and THEN he asked for forgiveness? If you hadn't found out, do you think it would still be ongoing? Did his affair partner threaten to tell?

Although if you are both determined to make it work, you can at least try.

Yes , but have plan B and save for a rainy day in case you find you can’t move on .

Mine left me after 10 years for another woman. Our children were 6months and 2 years. He asked to come back after 8 months and against much opposition from friends and family took him back.

I did it for many reasons. I still loved and missed him. The children missed him and I worried they would miss out on daily contact. I would not be able to provide them with as good a standard of living. There are many others but you get the gist.

I don’t regret it to this day. I got over it and our marriage survived it.

The best y I was given was to not listen to anyone else and make the best decision for you. Don’t worry about saving face or letting people down.

Big hug

He must have done a lot to regain your trust and been willing to accept he fucked up and that you had a right to be disappointed in him

I’m not sure you should sorry! but I’ve currently just left my best friend who’s husband of 20 years attempted to cheat on her. She only found out as the idiot tried it on with another mutual friend of ours who had the guts to tell her, all so messy and then she let it all out today to me that it wasn’t his first time he did it 12 years before nothing since then bam he’s at it again. This time she’s reckons she gonna leave him and I’ll be support her with that as she deserves way better.

Sorry about spelling mistakes on the school run for my friend.

I don’t think anyone is crazy for trying to save their marriage or keep their family together.
However, it depends on a great deal, and the great deal has to come from him. Only he can prove to you this was a one off affair and it’s completely done with.
No contact plus absolute no-complaints commitment to give you honest answers to any questions you have is a good start. Willingness to be transparent and show you anything you need to see, whenever you need it. He has to show you through his actions (he rendered his word meaningless) that you and your marriage are his top priority.
Gently though, if you would walk away if it wasn’t for the children as a no-brainer, I wouldn’t try it. This only works if both of you want to give it a shot and are invested in the marriage for the same reasons, whether that’s both for the kids or for rebuilding your relationship between the two of you, which will obviously give the kids a stable family life as a by-product.
He duped you in the worst way and shouldn’t have cheated, obviously, it’s horrendous and an understandable deal-breaker for many. However rebuilding is about trust and honesty on both sides and however unfair this sounds, he shouldn’t be duped by you into thinking he’s working on reconciling with you as his wife in a loving marriage, when the truth is you sound as if you don’t think it’s possible to have a loving relationship with him any more due to his cheating and you’d make an easy decision to leave him in a heartbeat if you had no children. You sound as if you want to keep your family unit intact, but not like you actually want to rekindle anything with him as your husband.
Family life and the kids’ wellbeing will improve as a by-product of your relationship becoming loving and stable again, but that really would mean you wanting it too, not just him. It wouldn’t work because eventually you’d resent and hate him and be unhappy.
If what he did would drive you away because there’s actually nothing left to mend between the two of you if you had no kids, then cheating is actually a deal breaker for you. You both need to have an honest conversation about what you both want from the marriage going forwards. His keenness to ‘rekindle’ suggests he wants more from you than just contributing to a better lifestyle. You understandably might not be able to give that. Both of you need to be brutally honest with each other about why you want to stay together if you want any kind of rebuilding and staying together to work.
What’s a big risk to me, is even contemplating putting yourself through the very hard and often long slog of reconciling if you already know you’re on different pages from the start.
You need to really want it, for the same reasons, and ‘better lifestyle for the children’ whilst an honourable motive, won’t be enough on tough days when you already know you can’t get past what he did and would leave if the kids didn’t exist.
I’m so sorry you are here, why stupid men do this when they have a loving family at home is what’s crazy.

I think you need to act for you. You say he wants to stay together, and that it would be better for the kids. But YOU want to end it. On this I think you need to put yourself first. Kids can cope well with materially less, what they can’t cope well with is an unhappy mum.

This would be an absolute no for me, kids or not.

The reason for the affair wouldn't matter. This is their nature when the going gets tough and they'd have had to lie to me to carry it out.

I also wouldn't trust any attempts on their part to fix it either. It's not that difficult for them to take steps/measures to try and prove they'd never do it again and rebuild your trust...but as they are a liar by the very fact they had an affair at all, it's likely pretense. Been there, divorced that.

And how would I know they're not just putting on this act to 'save the marriage' solely because they don't want to be kicked out of the house, pay child maintenance etc?

I'm speaking from my own experience, it's how my exH was. It was all an act, he repeated the behaviour after a period of faking.

I left for my kids so they didn't have to be exposed to the effects of a permanently damaged relationship and for them to have a happy and healthy mom. Best decision I ever made, hard as it was.

But everyone has to navigate their own feelings, what they believe is true and ultimately what is best for you. Don't factor anything else in. Kids will adapt if you break up. Decide based on what you can live with for yourself/how you feel.

I don't think anyone can answer this question for you, really. It's going to depend completely on you, him, your relationship, the nature of the affair, how/why it happened etc.

The default response to affairs on Mumsnet is 'he cheated, dump him' but that's very easy for people to say about a relationship that isn't theirs and has no impact on their life. I honestly have no idea what I would do if were you, but I certainly know couples who have got through this sort of situation with relationship counselling etc and with a genuine will to fix things.

I stayed. It's really sad. I love him but I don't think he loves me the same way, I'm not sure he can love like that. I wouldn't ever hurt him the way he's hurt me. I don't want to leave but that doesn't mean I'll always stay. If he did it again I would absolutely have to leave.

Like you OP one of my reasons to stay was the kids and how just awful it feels like it would be for them - leaving their home, their rooms that we've just re done.. sounds stupid but I can't bear for his shitty behaviour to make them sad. If we didn't have kids I'd force myself to leave but to be honest I'd be heartbroken as I do love the stupid fucker.

I think I could forgive a one night stand or a brief fling, but not a long affair. And I'd need to feel that he was genuinely sorry and making an effort to get our marriage back on track.

No. I wouldn’t be able to forgive him enough to forget what he had done or forget enough to forgive
I also wouldn’t want to teach my Children that’s it’s ok to stay in relationships where you aren’t respected

‘Staying for the kids’ never works long term. Just call it what it is which is fear and denial.

I definitely wouldn't be staying for the kids. I would be trying to make the relationship work with the motivation of making it work for the sake of the kids. In my eyes that is a very different dynamic.

The affair started when his mum and sister died in a car accident, he doesn't have any other family. 8 months into the affair we broke up but stayed in the same home as we worked through the divorce then 2 years when I was about to move house he tells me all about it.

We had some intimacy issues before the affair and now he's willing to work on them.

That is the very definition of staying for the kids, but you seem determined to make excuses for a man who was so upset about his mum and sister’s death that he needed to put his penis is another woman, so I’m not sure why you even posted.

I have two sets of friends who survived affairs. On couple had children, the other didn’t. Many years later they both have good, long standing marriages and are happy. No more affairs have happened since.

It was a ‘moment’ and there were lots of other factors which came into play. Both couples wanted to make it work, spent a lot of time on analysing the whole picture and made changes. That isn’t to say it was easy and there wasn’t a lot of hurt and recrimination.

I think it really depends on how strongly you feel about your partner, what the context is and whether you want to try. However, it is survivable in my opinion.

He told you just as you had done all the massively hard and miserable work of divorcing—two years worth of self doubt, living together but separated, supporting him through his grief, co parenting without real love and intimacy? Then: just as you are about to break free and perhaps find the love of your life he blurts out “I had an eight month affair, lied to you, treated you like shit for two years, gaslit you about there being no OW, and now I want you to forgive me and stay and take care if me? And in return I am now, possibly “willing to work on intimacy issues.”

Well if that isn't the biggest load of covert abuse I don’t know what is. Utterly selfish behavior. He isnt even pretending to remorse. He’s just a dog in the manger.