SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Ok let’s assume your wife is a victim of a predator man who manipulated her into an affair. (A 3 years affair may I add).

What are your reconciliation requirements in this case?

If it’s true, then it would likely soften me towards R. And it would say that she needs to see that she was naive enough to fall for it and she would need to self identify boundaries to prevent this from over happening again. And she would need to work on the next level safeguards that were missing.

He did owe you nothing. She owed you love, honesty, fidelity and protection among other things. She failed you.

You are just coming to the realization that there are bad people in the world with bad intentions that do not give a F about you or your marriage? This is true, has always been true and will always be true. I figured this out when I was eight. I lock my doors at night. I own a weapon. You are actually angry about this? Well the world (people) are not going to change. Prepare to be angry at the world the rest of your life.

Gently, you seem incredibly naive.

There will ALWAYS be guys out there that will take free married puss if they can get it. Everyone knows this. And yes, they will try to manipulate women into giving up their orifices. Women know this. An adult woman is well aware that they have something that men generally want. They gatekeep this access and this is especially true if they are married.

For those with the infidelity is a drug addiction so they are the victim of an illness mentality, I don't know what to tell you. We can go down that ideological road where nothing is anyone's fault because society or biology made us do it. Perhaps there is no free will...idk. I personally do not subscribe to this. I suppose if you do it will make it much easier to get passed this.

You don't have your story in your profile,and again,I could have your story confused with another member..but didn't your wife befriend the OBS..pretend to be her friend,rather, and involve herself in the lives of the OBS's children, so she could remain closer to the OM?

That takes some serious manipulation. The sense of entitlement is off the charts. And these are NOT the actions of a woman who was victimized. These are the actions of a perpetrator.

Ok..let's say the OM targeted your wife for his pleasure,and she naively fell for it,because she didn't realize that kind of evil existed in the world.

What she did to OBS, and her children was no different than what you feel OM did to her.

She targeted that woman,and those kids, for her pleasure,and didn't give a shit about them. It was evil. And not something most OW do. And certainly not the actions of a naive woman.

FTR, I am not a BW who thinks all OW must burn in Hell. I ultimately hold me WH responsible. I was very "meh" about the OW. Until she contacted my oldest daughter, and graphically told her of the affair.

[This message edited by HellFire at 4:50 PM, Thursday, February 16th]

If it’s true it might be seen as seeing new BS’s as infantile needing to be lied to, but with the best of intentions.

- Bs's needing to be lied to by whom? Can you please elaborate on that?

Also, lets accept that you were abusive husband and there was a sexless marriage and they both made this marriage completely unbearable for her. But why did she have affair with a married man? Why did she chose to destroy a family of a woman she was friend to? Why didn't she have any empathy for the other woman? DIDNT YOUR WIFE OWN A THING TO THIS AP'S WIFE?? Why wasn't she fiercely loyal to this woman? Wasn't fierce loyalty her trait?

No matter who initiated the first move, your wife destroyed two marriages. She was responsible for inflicting immense pain to this OBS. Can you have this same argument with OBS and convince OBS that your wife had no control over her actions and it was OBSs husband that caused all of this?

[This message edited by Lurkingsoul12 at 5:09 PM, Thursday, February 16th]

I hear some responses that feel like taking dogma over data.

What data? Scribblings of aps? We know even less about aps as a class than we do about WSes and BSes.

BSes are faced with solving a set of problems after being traumatized. The way a problem is framed helps guide us to a solution. So far, the best way of framing the problem of recovering from an A is to place responsibility fully on the WS.

Hating the ap ... sure. Blaming the ap for one's WS's choices ... I don't see that as fruitful, even when the ap targeted one's WS. (My W was essentially blackmailed step by step into her A. Her ap acted evilly. I still don't care about that - all my W had to do was say, 'No.')

It's not dogma. It's a theory that works well.

If this model is correct, then part of what she needs to do to become a safe partner is become far more aware and wise to the intentions of men....

Well, I'll cop to wanting to get a number of women into bed, but I don't think I ever lied to further my plans/hopes. I'll cop to seeing women as potential sexual partners even now, but I haven't approached any woman with hope of sex since my W2b & I committed to each other. Like so many men here, I've refused opportunities, even as a road warrior. So the data I have says that all men do not have evil intentions, although some men do.

I grew up knowing that girls were prepared to fend off boys. It was common 'knowledge' in my teen years that boys wanted sex and that girls were better off not risking pregnancy. (This was before the Pill.)

I've known a few daughters of friends who talked about the way they protected themselves against ingesting date rape drugs, and they learned to do that from college acquaintances. I conclude, therefore, that at least some women of that generation knew that men want sex and that they had to protect themselves against unwanted sex.

So how did your W not learn that she had to protect herself?

Lots of CSA victims don't cheat, but lots do, because that's how they were conditioned. Abusers do terrible things ... but healing requires dealing with reality and not giving passes because a person wasn't prepared to say 'no'. WSes in R do get passes because their BSes give them some grace or mercy. IMO, to R and to recover, you need to see your W as a fully cognizant ap. I don't think you can give your W a pass on the basis of her being an unknowing victim. This is a very bitter pill to swallow. Sometimes truth hurts - but it's freeing, too, at the same time.

If it’s true, then it would likely soften me towards R. And it would say that she needs to see that she was naive enough to fall for it and she would need to self identify boundaries to prevent this from over happening again. And she would need to work on the next level safeguards that were missing.

Is your wife in IC?

Look, of course you need to create a narrative where you need to see your WS in a certain way in order to grant her a chance to reconcile.

My narrative was the fact that he wasn’t a serial cheater (although I did entertain that thought and started digging into information I had since we started dating).

No matter how many times I tried to take away some of the blame from him it became clear pretty quickly that there is no redemption without accountability. I truly do not believe my WH was cruel enough to set off to hurt me. But even more sadly, I don’t actually believe I mattered in any of those moments when he made those decisions to cheat again and again (for 6 months). I don’t think I was a fleeting thought at any point.

For me in order to reconcile I needed to see him not trying to shift the blame, I tried to do it myself several times, I even tried assuming some of it myself, but as I worked through the process it was clear that change can only appear when people are accountable. They need to recognise where they are lacking in order to change.

Most people in affairs have some FOO issues that supported their vulnerability to cheat. My WH cheated on me with a single mother of two who told him that the only reason she lives is to see him as her life was so dull. She stroke his ego until it exploded and by the end of the affair he was turning into a complete prick at home.

Now to the interesting part: WH’s mother was a single mother of two. She was the ow in her current marriage. Yes, basically WH could not resist becoming the centre of the universe of a single mother which was… exactly the scenario he grew up with, witnessing his mother treating another woman’s husband like a God until he left his wife. To the point where my WH had absolutely not image of what is normal in a relationship and every argument we had he interpreted as yet another sign that I don’t love him.

My WH grew up with bendy values. Neither I, nor him, realised this until the affair. And then we could spot it in day to day life too. His values were subject to certain exceptions. I will be truthful unless… I will be faithful unless…

But here is the crux of it: the fact that WH had FOO which made him vulnerable to an affair does not mean he shouldn’t be held accountable. He needed to recognise all this in IC and work really hard to show change including in his day to day life.

I wasn’t going to accept that this will go away with a slap on the wrist because he didn’t grow up with a high integrity driven parent. I wasn’t going to start holding my mother in law accountable for my husband’s lack of loyalty and respect. Ok, do I have moments when I want to shout at her from the rooftop? Yes! Did I challenge their little deceit habits that were staring me in the face all of a sudden? Yes! But if my WH wanted to remain married to me he needed to change big time and you can only change when you accept who you are and what is wrong with you.

Regardless what your narrative is, your wife needs to take accountability of her actions in order to work on everything that makes her open to cheating and deceiving you. For 3 years.

And on that note, I discovered the affair because my WH became tearful one night (around 5 months into his affair). My WH never cried before. He was telling me how miserable he was but refusing to tell me why. It was guilt eating him up. I started digging, I discovered the affair 3 weeks later.

Back to your story, somehow my brain cannot match the imagine of a naive, immature, easily led and manipulated woman and someone who can actively deceive you and betray you for 3 years. 3 years…

TOUGH ON CRIME! It gets the votes. But it isn’t a guarantee of good outcomes and it may be an axe where a scalpel is needed.

Aren’t you somewhat subscribing to the "TOUGH ON CHRIME" school of thought when you focus on the AP by saving vulnerable spouses via the eradication of predatory men? Isn’t that akin to the "War on Drugs". Stop drug abuse by the eradication of drug dealers.

Or, is it better to take a more wholistic approach placing our limited resources and focus on the end user, on the fundamental problem(s), on the problems we can realistically address?

Regarding the CSA contributing factors that lead to your WW’s predisposition to cheat, can you, can she, realistically fix these factors and become a safe marital partner? How much time and resources can you invest? How much are you willing to sacrifice? How much risk are you willing to accept?

This is a lot to figure out even when you’re not encumbered by displaced attention, anger, hate towards the dealer, the AP.

You don't have your story in your profile,and again,I could have your story confused with another member..but didn't your wife befriend the OBS..pretend to be her friend,rather, and involve herself in the lives of the OBS's children, so she could remain closer to the OM?

And if this is true, I truly think you need to have a proper reassessment and accept who the true manipulator was in this affair.

By the way: affairs by definition are manipulations. Both affair partners manipulate the hell of each other. But if your wife befriended the OBS that is one of the lowest thing a person can do and I say this as a BS. That poor woman….

I went with the path of assembling an entire narrative — and I think it was a way find some empathy for my wife, trying to understand her fall, her fail.

AP and OBS were the first to greet us in our new home out of state, they were 5-7 older, their kids a bit older, and they had moved their 6-months before us. We had dinners together, watched each other’s kids, they were our only pals there for the first year. And by the end of that first year, AP, a serial cheater, took the EA to full on PA.

I only know about the serial cheater part because he was eventually caught and joined a 12-step program, and did the apology call to my wife years after the fact.

I contend he is still avoiding taking any responsibility for his actions, he isn’t an addict, just a dude who loves the chase.

There were a bunch of other factors a defense lawyer may have utilized in my wife’s defense — like postpartum depression —which she was diagnosed with at the time. AP played on that too. Not exactly a bro looking out.

Anyway, there are several encounters my wife described that were far closer to assault than fun — but she only ever blamed herself.

She didn’t accept the apology on his apology call, because she fully owned her part in all of it.

Now, none of this was confessed to me until 18-years after it was over. It was the literal take it to grave scenario until she saw that no matter what we did, the secret limited our relationship.

This gets to one reason I know how my wife became a safer partner on her own — after the A, she didn’t trust anyone, ever, including me. She simply assumed all men were like AP, out there with a checklist or an agenda. I’m not sure how I was initially included in that conclusion, but she withdrew from me and the world. She learned to build co-worker relationships with strong boundaries, etc. — but again, more for trust issues than anything else, which worked fine.

Here is the thing: even if we have an inner compulsion to save them, we can’t ever save them. They have to save themselves first.

Was AP in my case a predator? 100 percent. I’ve left out all the creepy grooming lines he used to keep the secret a secret.

Was my wife a victim?

No.

She could have turned him away. She should have turned him away. But damn that attention felt great in the moment.

All that damage for shitty, temporary validation.

That said, so many WS never own it all. It helped our R a great deal that she never blamed me or our M (she did during the A, not after, but moral justification is extremely common along the way).

Or, we can ask the big scary elephant in the room question: Is our WS just the victim of not loving-desiring us enough?

Oh man, going for the heart here. Yes, this is a question that looms large. And you have keenly seen that I’m basically assuming for the sake of this conversation that the answer is yes, she actually cares about me. That is what she tells me. And I read a lot of wayward stories where they are aghast at what they’ve done and do in fact still love their BS, on this site and others. But if in fact she is a complete sociopath and is still playing me, this could be false and all these words are wasted bits from a duped fool.

But at the bottom line, he did not truly BELIEVE his own rhetoric when it came to his values. He was capable of producing circumstances in which disloyalty, infidelity, and lies were acceptable. It just made sense to me that his boundaries weren't there because the values themselves were not there, and what are boundaries anyway but behaviors which spring up in protection of our truest beliefs? We protect what we value. That doesn't mean that a WS can't change and grow, but it does mean that at the time of the cheating, those values weren't there. If they had been, the cheating couldn't have happened.

I hear this, but it doesn’t comfort me. 5 years ago my wife would not have believed she would cheat. What values do I have then that I can consciously ascend to but have a disconnect with my heart? How do you find those out?

I notice that you keep avoiding your wife's role in the OBS's betrayal, particularly Hellfire's comments about how she insinuated herself into OBS's life. Why?

You are just coming to the realization that there are bad people in the world with bad intentions that do not give a F about you or your marriage? This is true, has always been true and will always be true. I figured this out when I was eight. I lock my doors at night. I own a weapon. You are actually angry about this? Well the world (people) are not going to change. Prepare to be angry at the world the rest of your life.

Gently, you seem incredibly naive.

I may be naive. A few years ago I didn’t know that 25% of women will be sexually assaulted in their life time. I guess I should have locked away my daughter because now she’s a statistic. And I didn’t know that something like 30 to 40% of marriages experience infidelity before this shit storm hit my life. I guess I should have locked up my wife too.

Do you believe you have all of life’s risks well calculated and you are prepared for them? If so, I tip my hat to you.

For those with the infidelity is a drug addiction so they are the victim of an illness mentality, I don't know what to tell you. We can go down that ideological road where nothing is anyone's fault because society or biology made us do it. Perhaps there is no free will...idk. I personally do not subscribe to this. I suppose if you do it will make it much easier to get passed this.

I’m not sure how to balance it all either. But hurt people hurt people, and it’s worth considering to me. It definitely makes it more complex than just saying "you are bad, I am good".

Your argument is along the lines of the oft researched question of whether the German people, cultured with strong values and a strong moral core were victims by being duped by a master manipulator. Thus, it was an aberration.

The opposite argument is that if you look at them as a people historically, their crimes were part of who they are as a people, culture, etc. Thus, it was not an aberration.

Your argument goes that your WW was a victim of a master manipulator, snd her actions were not in line with who she is. Thus, there is room to excuse her culpability. It was an aberration.

Had your WW been a serial cheater, terrible wife all along, abusive, poor boundaries, unremorseful, etc, then you would not have made this post. I think this is what you’re saying.

There are plenty of WS’ who cheated who are of the former as well as the latter. I think the question is not about morals as much as it is about the action that was perpetrated.

Intent is relevant to some betrayed and those who believe intent is irrelevant. I don’t think it will benefit you to ask the people here which is the right course of action for you, because each betrayed already has an established point of you.

You’re asking a question that can only be answered subjectively. You will get as many answers that support your position as the opposite (actually, I would think more would fall in the former camp).

Ok..let's say the OM targeted your wife for his pleasure,and she naively fell for it,because she didn't realize that kind of evil existed in the world.

What she did to OBS, and her children was no different than what you feel OM did to her.

She targeted that woman,and those kids, for her pleasure,and didn't give a shit about them. It was evil. And not something most OW do. And certainly not the actions of a naive woman.

Apparently this is the rumble everyone is waiting for. I still have to eat and work while fielding all your comments.

First off, you have my story correct.

These are really good questions, I have them myself and I don’t have answers yet. For the sake of this conversation I think the best I can say is somehow it was a complete system failure. Got past the unlocked front door and it exposed a completely unguarded home, and that bothers me. In for a penny, in for a pound. I don’t know, this part of the narrative is still open.

InkHulk, I may be in the minority, but I am with you that sometimes the AP is the greater evil. I still believe my WH was the predator in all of his As, but once the single APs got a taste for destruction, they were hell bent on contributing to and reveling in the explosion of my world. The married APs are different, in my opinion, in that they are not looking to blow up my life, as it would in turn blow up their own. The single ones, however, want my life--and it's not good enough that they "win," but I must "lose."

So rankings in evil:

1. Single APs

2. WH

3. Married APs

Many may disagree, but let's compare Single APs vs. WH.

Single APs want me to find out about them; WH does not. Single APs want my life to be shattered; WH does not. Single APs want us to D and share custody of our very young babies; WH is equally as terrified as I of not being able to see his kids every day. Single APs lie to me to make it worse; WH lies to protect his ass, and the byproduct of this is that he attempts to make it less bad for me. Single APs do not have to face the music with me; WH has to be in the receiving end of my wrath for however long I wish to dole it out. Single APs are furious that my WH is desperate to R; WH is thrilled I'm giving him the opportunity. Single APs create justifications for their actions and blame the BW; WH has several therapists, recognizes his flaws, and works every day to become a better all-around person. Single APs don't apologize; WH apologizes, sincerely, daily.

I could go on, but you get the idea. I think you have a right to be angry with the OM for what he did to YOU. I'm sure he fantasized daily about you finding out he had your WW wrapped around his finger (oh, how macho of him).

But I still don't buy all the WW passes you're handing out. She has a lot of work to do. But telling her anything is not her fault is just a form of rug sweeping. R is probably not possible unless a WS takes full responsibility for their actions and recognizes how they rewrote history to be able to betray you so badly.

As the years have gone by and WH and I have delved into his whys (spoiler alert: mommy issues), I become more patient and understanding. But we went through a lot of hard love to get here. If I had been this patient and understanding during the first year, he would never have been motivated to change as much as he did.

[This message edited by Revenger at 6:34 PM, Thursday, February 16th]

You may not have known the statistics of sexual assaults and martial infidelity before, but you did know sexual assaults and infidelity do occur, right? Your wife too knew about this. It's not your job to lock her away in your house to prevent her from committing affair. It's her job to build strong boundaries and value system to not fall for infidelity.

But hurt people hurt people, and it’s worth considering to me. It definitely makes it more complex than just saying "you are bad, I am good".

This applies to ap too. He too was hurt. So he hurt you. This should make your stand against him more complex. So, he too doesn't come under you are bad, I am good" logic.

For the sake of this conversation I think the best I can say is somehow it was a complete system failure. Got past the unlocked front door and it exposed a completely unguarded home, and that bothers me. In for a penny, in for a pound. I don’t know, this part of the narrative is still open.

The phrase you're looking for is cognitive dissonance.

If it’s true it might be seen as seeing new BS’s as infantile needing to be lied to, but with the best of intentions.

- Bs's needing to be lied to by whom? Can you please elaborate on that?

I’m saying that if this forum is intentionally pushing a message that may or may not be true (WS may have been duped) in a given circumstance in order to avoid a problematic outcome (rugsweeping) then that is the forum treating new BS’s as people who can’t handle the full truth and need a cultivated message to go where we think they should.