Want to have sex with cheating DP

[Bublicious]

As the title suggests I found out my DP 46M cheated a month ago, and I'm incredibly horny (44F) and I just want to have sex and a lot of it. This is usually a coping mechanism for me with trauma. Due to our kids and financial circumstances we have decided to work through things.

Would it be stupid for me to sleep with him so soon?

I earn over the threshold to get any sort of benefit help. And, despite this he is a good man (until now), and father. I definitely am not letting the kids guilt me, though their opinion matters as well because it's their dad and family unit. Him seeing the devastation this has caused to them has really made him take a good hard look at his actions. He knows they're angry, hurt and disappointed in him. He broke last week whenever the kids actively avoided him and told him outright.

I don't know if I want to throw 20 years away, just yet but I know there needs to be changes from him and even from me if it is to work. It won't go back to how it was before because that's gone.

The threshold will be higher if paying huge amount of rent, worth checking. I don’t get any help, but my rent is only 1/3 of my income. 2/3 seems excessive if you don’t qualify for help.

They always feel guilty when caught, and promise the world. Maybe some men stick to their promise to change, but we see it time and time again on here when men cheat again and again. Few only do it once. If you have daughters i’d be making sure they understand that this isn’t the norm or acceptable way to be treated in a marriage, you get cheated on and then kids make you feel like you should stay. Not blaming them by the way, they are just kids and for them of course they don’t want to uproot their lives. But I do hope you chat it through with them to explain you might have decided to give it another go, but there are other options and it’s not just what women have to accept, and then move on. I hope he sticks to his word, but just be mindful many don’t, so wouldn’t hurt to get your ducks in a row if you do need to leave in the future.

Did you seriously just roll out the “good man & good father” trope?

Suiuuuuuure he is…..

Your bar is low AF.

Well, she’d also have 65 million (or a very big multi-million number at least) reasons to divorce him.

Never understood this logic when it comes to women staying with abusive or cheating spouses who are super-rich, as any divorce would mean you were completely set up for life, wanting for nothing! So what that you have slightly fewer millions!

Unhelpful…

People are complex. Cheating is bad, but it doesn’t follow that someone who cheats is awful in all aspects of their life.

I just don’t think there’s enough here to warrant staying together apart from the sunk cost fallacy, kids putting pressure on and financial reasons.

@Bublicious I don’t hear you saying you love him, fancy him ect. I just wonder if you want to have sex with your husband to “reclaim” him? Or have you already had sex since finding out about the affair.

Yes like a pp suggested, humans are complex. Is he showing any remorse, any signs he wants to have sex?

I'm in N.I. and our threshold for any assistance including housing is around £24,995. It hasn't changed in decades. Rent prices here are just going through the roof but our wages are lower than anywhere else in the UK.

He's showing lots of remorse but I'm not willing to brish everything under the carpet and move on. There needs to be lots of changes, on both our parts. The kids will be ok if I choose not to move forward and our daughter knows this is not normal or to be accepted ever. It's incredibly difficult to know what to do.

He is those things despite him cheating. My standards aren't low, but 20 years is a lifetime together, our kids wellbeing and happiness are important and things to be factored in.

I do still love him. I really don't like him right now. Sex was always a healing thing for me, especially whenever I was younger. Yes, he would have sex with me right now if I said.

Finances are a massive factor for me. Living separately would be cost far too much, plus trying to get somewhere to live on our individual wages for either us in our city would be a nightmare. In N.I. we don't have LHA's so we have a flat rate for help and neither of us would qualify so unfortunately it is not a fallacy. I earn significantly less than my GB counterpart in the same role.

I don’t think you’re going to get good advice about how to stay together after your husband cheats on mumsnet.

Esther Perel is a psychotherapist and has really good advice in “State of Affairs “. She isn’t saying that cheating is ok but she does think it’s something that many marriages can and do recover from with work and that they can sometimes be stronger afterwards. Her stance is that, as a society, we put too much emphasis on sexual infidelity as the ultimate sin in a marriage when there are a lot of other ways a marriage can go wrong. People are complex and reasons behind why people have affairs are varied - I don’t think cheating once in a long marriage necessarily makes someone a bad person or father overall even though their actions were wrong.

Not to say that anyone has to or should try to stay in a marriage after infidelity if they don’t want to (infidelity was one of the many things which ended my own marriage) but there seems to be pressure from other women to leave (e.g “have some self respect “), which I think is wrong. Not many people talk openly about staying and making it work.

I don’t know if it will helpful or not for you to have sex now but it’s pretty common to have an affair spark a better sex life. I don’t think you should leave it so long that it becomes awkward if it’s already something you want to do. But you could try just talking openly about it - I don’t like you right now and I don’t forgive you but I do want to have sex with you “.

It’s a decision only you can make, on a personal level, if DW cheated I absolutely would not want to have sex with her, no matter how bad the itch. Only you know if the relationship is bigger than the sex alone and thus worth saving

It's such a personal choice op.
My dh and I carried on having sex soon after he cheated. Sex had always been good between us, it had always been regular and has stayed that way and even got better for me as I've found my self worth in the recovery journey. It's been a bit of an anchor for us in working through things.
That said if we'd have lost the sex before the affair then I might have felt different about reintroducing it after.
You'll get lots of people here suggesting you have no self esteem, that you shouldn't 'give' him sex, and that they could never do it. But it's about you. You know yourself and him. If it's what you want there's then do it. There's no definitive right and wrong way to handle this.