SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Slight threadjack to address a threadjack about logic and the BS or R.

Logic 100% should go into R and D. Here's some logic that a lot of BS' need. If you leave someone and stay away from them, you will stop loving them and will no longer miss them. That particular pain is fininte. You never need to stay for love if the situation is toxic. You can feel all the feels you want and need to, but those aren't reason enough to R. Hope and faith and all that are well and good, just so long as it doesn't become hopium and keep you stuck in some form of love. Emotions matter, but I think logic matters more when it comes to deciding whether to stay or go. To R is a huge deal because we all truly could have left and done better after being cheated on. We could all have fallen out of love and moved on with our lives and let the ex fade into somebody we used to know. Those who offered R need to understand the tremendous gift they're giving a WS from a logical point of view too. That should help with not having low expectations of the WS.

I lost count of the logical fallacies I heard from my XWH in the months after DDay, but I did do a good job of calling him out on them and that helped me avoid being manipulated and kept me from losing any sense of rationality. This thread is important and I agree that it should be turned into a sticky of some sort with a list of these.

I lost count of the logical fallacies I heard from my XWH in the months after DDay, but I did do a good job of calling him out on them and that helped me avoid being manipulated and kept me from losing any sense of rationality. This thread is important and I agree that it should be turned into a sticky of some sort with a list of these.

Quoted and double-emphasized.

Thank you Dee.

[This message edited by faithfulman at 2:10 PM, April 27th (Tuesday)]

Devastated Dee - I definitely think logic is part of it, but here is where I am:

If someone betrays you, R is always going to be illogical because anything that happens after that is a gamble for some time. You are basically trusting someone who shot you not to shoot you again. I think you have to lead with your head (are they doing the work, are they showing remorse, are they still falling into the same traps as before), but anything past that? It's because you love them and you are willing to make a leap of faith.

As for divorce, I can't speak to that, but I do think for some people they divorce because of the emotion and that's still the right decision for them. I think of the long term posters here who are divorced - some of them report the WS was a model WS (not that entitles them to R), the marriage was good, the inner workings were good, the financial hit and lack of companionship was actually a detriment in their decision to divorce.

In your case, I personally think it was logical to divorce - the situation went beyond cheating and into addiction there was too much weighing against this person being a partner for you.

I think some people will choose their feelings about their WS regardless of some of the logical evidence, and some people will choose divorce even if it does go against logic.

Figuring out what is right for yourself is not usually black and white with anything. Yes, when you are overcome with emotion you have to lead with your head. But, if you lead only with your head, you may circumvent feelings of the heart.

That's kind of what I'm saying, Hikingout. Logically no one should R. Therefore, when you do offer that, it's such a big freakin' deal that a WS should view it as a darned-near sacred act.

Emotions tie into everything we do and that's good. Love does matter. I love my dogs. There's no logical reason I should take in little furry creatures who pee and poop and eat food and cost money, but I love them beyond all reason and cannot imagine life without them. It's a perfectly okay illogical decision to have them in my life. Now if one of them was 100lbs and liked to bite me, someone would need to take me aside and explain the risk that this is putting my life in and help me with some logic.

I strongly suspect I would have been one of those who didn't stay with a model WS, but I don't know that emotions would have played as big a part as logic for me personally. I loved that man so much I'd have died for him, but not two weeks after he started doing drugs, I kicked him out and changed the locks. It felt like pulling off all of my skin and setting myself on fire, but I did it without hesitation. Once he was clean and sober and I discovered the infidelity, I spent the months we were together planning my exit because I knew this wasn't going to work. By the time it all hit, I knew what house I could afford, knew the process of taking out my 401k funds and I hit the ground running. There wasn't ever a part of me that really wanted R because I couldn't make it a sensible decision even in his healthiest post-rehab straight and narrow walking months. I felt feelings for him, but those feelings couldn't compete with the logic.

If someone betrays you, R is always going to be illogical because anything that happens after that is a gamble for some time. You are basically trusting someone who shot you not to shoot you again. I think you have to lead with your head (are they doing the work, are they showing remorse, are they still falling into the same traps as before), but anything past that? It's because you love them and you are willing to make a leap of faith.

I think that it is much more than just a semantic difference between "leap of faith" and "calculated risk". I think that you can make an overall logical decision that R maximizes expected utility even while carrying forward appropriately weighted risks. The emotions certainly shape the utility function. What good is a marriage to a person you don't love? The behaviors shape the probability function for repeat cheating. Now, if you choose to go for R, when D maximizes expected utility. That's a sort of "risk prone" behavior that is perhaps akin to a "leap of faith".

Maybe I should share the decision tree I use for R vs. D, or maybe you would all just think I'm truly insane to apply this methodology to this kind of decision. Could just be a really complicated rationalized form of faith leaping, I suppose.

Share! It sounds interesting.

Yes, do share.

But know that you wouldn't do those calculations at all if you weren't being ruled in some way of the fact you love your spouse, or want to maintain your comfort zone, or some other non-logical component.

Without the emotions, there would be no risk calculations to do. Do you see what I am saying?

I think in some marriages the feelings have been gone long before discovering the infidelity. I think it's a rarer event that someone says "sure I have been unhappy with this person for a long time, but I am going to stay".

Generally speaking, some might still stay but they will show you they are pretty open to just being roommates. They need the other person's income or extra set of hands in parenting and other home related things. They really have no intention of reconciling, only staying married. Though, even some of them will find themselves reconciling despite even that.

So, let's talk about my situation for a minute as an example. When my husband found out about my affair, we had no kids at home, could separate with very little financial ramifications as we could have easily sold the house and each bought something different. Both could support ourselves and it would impact retirement zero percent. The cost analysis of divorcing really wasn't horrible to look at.

However, we had a long history together of a happy marriage. He was getting his needs met and felt content prior to my A. The only cost analysis he did was he didn't think he wanted to go back to trying to date. He figured he would take the risk of waiting to see if my work took me anywhere and then he didn't have to disrupt his life so much. That's it. Logical - yes. Am I glad there was that? Sure. But, there were far more things on the other side of the coin that wasn't logical. I had just betrayed him, I was deeply in the fog, I wasn't safe for a long time...all of that was the leap of faith.

Turning it around, I find out about his affair. You would think that someone who cheated first would have taken that as vindication, or maybe considered it as a way out without being totally the bad guy in the situation. But, I wasn't thinking like a wayward anymore and had worked hard to try and fix myself and repair our marriage. So, I did have a big investment there. He cheated on me for 18 months, probably had more sex with her than me during that time (and keep in mind we were having a pretty good deal worth of sex), he set our business backward because she was our employee, he had sex with her in my house on sheets that I washed or that our kids might have slept in without me even knowing they should have been washed. I nullified our prior divorce agreement which gave him our rental properties. There was really nothing logical at all about deciding to try.

But, at the end of the day, it's what my heart wanted. And, I will go in that direction until which time it's no longer logical to do so. Therefore, to me it's a leap of faith. I am going to continue to sink time, effort, money into this because despite all logic it's still what I want. There are limits of course - I would divorce him if I find more lies or anything further happens.

So, in my experience, R is something that maybe doesn't have a lot of good reason other than I want to because I love him. I might not have been so clear on that had this happened in reverse.

But know that you wouldn't do those calculations at all if you weren't being ruled in some way of the fact you love your spouse, or want to maintain your comfort zone, or some other non-logical component.

Without the emotions, there would be no risk calculations to do. Do you see what I am saying?

Sort of. My goal was not to be miserable and to have a life of peace and happiness. I used logic to get to that place. I had to take the love part out of my decision making because love can keep you miserable if you aren't careful.

Very true! I think we agree for the most part. My last response was really about what this is fine said.

Maybe I should share the decision tree I use for R vs. D,

Please share!

Without putting a label on any one particular lie or bullshit reasoning, I just intuitively knew my XWW was full of shit and so badly fucked up that I never bought any of her crap.

It helped that her entire family advised me to divorce her and assured me she was a liar and cheater long before I met her.

I, also, think it helped that I tried about 300 or so cases in my career and had a good nose for lying and obfuscating from that.

The full utility functions/assignments that I did come up with, I'm not actually going to include.

There were obtained from a pro-con list projecting 5 years. The upshot and approximate values are close enough and easier to figure and look at for how it works.

Interestingly with the values assigned in this specific example graph she would only have to hit 50/50 on false R to beat out D. I may have over-costed D, or assigned other utilities wrong. Rest assured I did more work and sensitivity adjustments on my more complete version of this.

She has to do a little better than that on my actual graph and assignment of values.

For those of you not quite following along, the value of the next five years without an A would be ~$2MM. Making the cost of the A $630k, which is lower than false R itself costing $1.1MM

[This message edited by This0is0Fine at 7:12 PM, April 27th (Tuesday)]

It helped that her entire family advised me to divorce her and assured me she was a liar and cheater long before I met her.

Say what?!?! What led you on the path to marry her?

I'm way behind in the thread here but just wanted to say, yes! to Sceadgenga:

If I may present an alternative view and quote both my psychiatrist (who also practises as a psychotherapist, just not in my case) and my therapist. They both complain that I intellectualise everything and point out that it's harmful in the long run, because intellectualising emotions is actually a sophisticated form of suppression.

As in yes, I think you correctly described what my late PhD therapist said, as well as made an accurate prediction about what happens when one suppresses emotions, unfortunately - both during the M (aka eggshell city) and since my therapist's passing.

This was after discovery, faithful. Her dad apologized for not warning me. Said he had hoped she had changed.

If you leave someone and stay away from them, you will stop loving them and will no longer miss them.

And yet we see A after A between former lovers who never could let go of their fixation on a partner.

Absence can make the heart grow fonder....

*****

Thanks for sharing your decision tree.

The things that always got me about decision trees are that emotions play unknowable parts in assigning values and probabilities. IOW, they may help understand what one wants more than they help one predict the future.

And yet we see A after A between former lovers who never could let go of their fixation on a partner.

Absence can make the heart grow fonder....

I'm not so sure that's love. Obsession and love aren't the same.

I "love" David Bowie. Never met the man. He's been dead for a few years now. I've been married twice, had a few serious boyfriends. I don't have romantic love for any of them anymore. But I still "love" David Bowie. See what I mean?

[This message edited by DevastatedDee at 11:02 AM, April 29th (Thursday)]

This0is0Fine,

I salute you sir.

Are the P-Values retrieved from general population data or are they guesses based on your situation?

The P values are estimates for my particular situation and current belief. They are informed by population studies in some cases. In others, I don't have much to go on.

The 15% chance of a new partner cheating is based on population wide data.

The 10% chance of not finding a new partner does come with some upside not quantified here. My goal for sharing this isn't to start a debate or justify every value input into the tree, or the translation of all utility to monetary values instead of monetary values to vague utilities.

It's to share a logical approach to making decisions under uncertainty with values assigned to emotional outcomes.

It's to share a logical approach to making decisions under uncertainty with values assigned to emotional outcomes.

I agree, TiF. I even think the decision tree reduces uncertainty.

It's just that every time I do one, I'm really hoping to eliminate uncertainty ... and that's impossible.