SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

How people can see so much and perceive so little.

It's the Dunning-Krueger Effect.

"One of the great challenges in this world is knowing enough about a subject to think you're right, but not enough about the subject to know you're wrong."

- Neil DeGrasse Tyson

[This message edited by Unhinged at 9:45 PM, Thursday, August 27th]

InkHulk, post #77:

It’s love. We love them. I loved her. I had 20 years of love. It wasn’t immediately obliterated. The great stories of the world are written about this insanely strong force that drives people to do the near impossible. Do you seriously not know that?

I think this needs to be challenged. Did the WS really love the betrayed partner though? They ran into the arms of another person and lived a double life behind the BS's back. That's not my definition of love.

ETA: Challenged on whether this should be considered a virtue or not.

I'd even go so far to say that if someone views that as love, they need to be harshly disabused of that notion.

And in your particular instance, @InkHulk, your XWW's actions may very well have put you and your family in PHYSICAL DANGER. You're a high income-earner (if I am recalling correctly that is) whereas your WW's AP POSOM was a real sleazebag--above and beyond having an affair with your XWW and on his own family that is. There is no telling of the lows they would have stooped to, the access your XWW would have granted to POSOM. Definitely not love as far as I am concerned, and I was actually in the wrong for not bringing this up on your threads.

[This message edited by WontBeFooledAgai at 4:32 AM, Friday, August 28th]

I think this needs to be challenged. Did the WS really love the betrayed partner though? They ran into the arms of another person and lived a double life behind the BS's back. That's not my definition of love.

Inkhulk never mentioned his WS love in that post. It was his love for who he thought she was that kept him trying until she proved to him that the woman he loved never really existed. Love like that doesn't fade quickly for most.

I don’t know that my journey will end up in a romance novel anytime soon.

R is emotionally uphill both ways, it is a long, uneven path for the first several years.

I don’t think healing is especially romantic in and of itself either.

There was something unique about the moment where I had given up, and informed my wife that the pain of it all was just going to be too much. The farewell we had that day was both of us being okay with moving on. Maybe it was letting go of the outcome, letting go of the old M, I don’t know if I can define why we each of us kept reaching out to each other anyway. We kept being kind anyway. We kept talking about the kids, life and whatever else.

Maybe a spark of romance there that day kept us in this thing.

But again, there was still a ton of work we had to do.

Is it a romantic notion to give someone a last chance — who wasn’t expecting it?

I suppose it depends on the person being given the last chance.

As WWTL reminded me, no one is owed a final chance, and as Unhinged often said, infidelity is always a deal breaker.

I agree with those two sayings.

It is what we want and ask for in whatever deal we make to go forward is the start of R.

R isn’t enabling someone to continue to hurt or lie to you, it isn’t settling for less — to me, R is asking for more than ever (and if the M continues, it includes asking more of yourself as well).

I can say that ten years later, I think we found a way to always be who we were that day we thought it was over.

When I looked over my family, all together over the holidays last winter, I was really glad I found a way.

And these days, we got the romance stuff down.

I wouldn’t romanticize the concept of R — it is very hard work.

I’ll always understand why people walk away, and I can also understand the people who didn’t (as long as they built a relationship worthy of their time).

[This message edited by Oldwounds at 10:43 PM, Thursday, August 27th]

WBFA, you completely missed my point. Grubs, dead on.

I. Loved. Her.

I continued to love her after I found out about the affair.

It had to be ground out of me, with pain and time.

You don’t get talked out of love by Internet forums.

And yes, from where I stand now, uncoupled from the love bond, I can see that there are other options. But love by its very nature does not consider the beloved interchangeable.

Give people time. Let them find their path. Again, I just can’t believe that needs to be seriously debated.

@Inkhulk

I understand where you’re coming from, but this doesn't quite address the point I made.

And yes, from where I stand now, uncoupled from the love bond, I can see that there are other options. But love by its very nature does not consider the beloved interchangeable.

Unless you're implying I don't genuinely love my partner, I’ll restate my position: I love her deeply, but if she were to betray me, I am fully confident I could eventually find another partner to love—someone who might even be more aligned with my core beliefs and principles. I think this of the vast majority of people who go through infidelity.

You don’t get talked out of love by Internet forums.

I accept that love can blind some people to alternative possibilities, especially if they’ve only ever experienced love once. Teen sweethearts all the way through, type situations. But that isn't universal. Why shouldn't we represent the perspective to users on this forum who don't fall into that camp?

Ok, we understand that stating you could love someone else as deeply may not have helped you. But I don't think that claim can be made universally. I actually can imagine it would give some users great hope and optimism.

For the record, I don't think I'm alone in this. If I recall correctly (in one of our long running debates), Hikingout also mentioned that—since she doesn't believe in fate or single soulmates—she logically accepts she could have found a different partner to love just as deeply. I actually think it was her who put forth the shared history argument to me when I was looking to understand, none practical benefits to reconcilation. Which I think is powerful and fully accept. I actually think it was the only compelling none practical argument for why someone who doesn't believe in soul mates or have other religious beliefs to reconcile.

So now we have discussed this further, what do you think of my perception now? Do you still think I'm ignorant and trivialising things? FWIW I'm re-read this exchange several times and don't think I've said anything to warrant those claims.

[This message edited by DRSOOLERS at 12:32 PM, Friday, August 28th]

If your experience was that from day one that you were prepared to drop your wife (girlfiend? I don’t really know your story) then it’s nothing I can relate to. And I’ve not once come across a newly betrayed on these forums who talks like that.

I suspect that it would be different for me if it were to happen again, that the lessons of self respect and reliance would kick in and soften the blow. But I cannot imagine a world where I am immediately and definitively emotionally decoupled from the woman I love. My heart doesn’t move anywhere close to that fast. No-one I’ve interacted with here or in real life has that little emotional inertia.

Your comments about it only being about shared memories is trivializing, IMO. Even if you want to throw out long standing love as a consideration, there are enormous stakes in the balance with children, family, money, mental and physical health. Dreams die. New ones can replace them, but people still need time to grieve. This is such an emotional undertaking. I think you want to bring rationality to help people thru it, and that is admirable. But to say to a grieving mother who lost a child that she can have another is monsterous while she is in her grief, even if it is true.

e@InkHulk

If your experience was that from day one that you were prepared to drop your wife (girlfiend? I don’t really know your story) then it’s nothing I can relate to. And I’ve not once come across a newly betrayed on these forums who talks like that.

Before any form of infidelity ever occurred, I knew I was prepared to walk away. Given my childhood experiences, betrayal was always an absolute red line for me. In my situation, the main struggle was getting the truth. I suspected infidelity and broke up with her in a bid for honesty, but I never got it. (In an alternative reality where she confessed and begged for forgiveness, I imagine it would have been harder, but I still would have held that line). I had a wayward partner who never fully owned up—I don't think a mobster with pliers and a blowtorch could have extracted the truth from her. I had to piece it together myself, with the concrete evidence coming post-breakup. So my situation is a bit different.

But I cannot imagine a world where I am immediately and definitively emotionally decoupled from the woman I love. My heart doesn’t move anywhere close to that fast. No-one I’ve interacted with here or in real life has that little emotional inertia.

I am making no statements about immediacy. A bomb going off is still a bomb going off, and processing that takes as long as it takes. But the speed of that realization doesn't change the underlying reality: anyone has the capacity to find love again. So given that, why would one consider it romantic to cling to a relationship that, although may still have love, also has abuse / trauma / betrayal.

Your comments about it only being about shared memories is trivializing, IMO. Even if you want to throw out long standing love as a consideration, there are enormous stakes in the balance with children, family, money, mental and physical health. Dreams die.

I apologize if I sounded flippant regarding the practicalities. Setting those practical stakes aside for a moment, these are obviously serious, heavy issues. But they aren't romantic considerations—and they shouldn't be romanticized as such. Sparing yourself from cutting the kids in half isn't romantic, I don't think anyone would claim that. But its a powerful argument why some may still stay.

But to say to a grieving mother who lost a child that she can have another is monsterous while she is in her grief, even if it is true.

I would never say that to a grieving mother.

Furthermore, I disagree with the grieving mother comparison. A lost child is a tragedy; the child is gone forever, and there is no choice to be made. With infidelity, the betrayed partner is standing in the wreckage deciding whether to rebuild with the person who set the fire.

Reminding a betrayed partner that they can find a healthy, untainted love elsewhere isn't about trivializing their current pain. It's about offering perspective beyond the immediate fog so they don't make life-altering decisions based on the fear that they'll never be loved again. Grief is necessary, but remaining in a toxic dynamic simply because you believe you have no other options isn't grief—it's a trap.

I hope you this has been a healthy dialogue.

....betrayal was always an absolute red line for me.

There are few, if any, absolutes in life (beyond death and taxes).

I was 17 years old the first time I fell in love. A few months later, my girlfriend cheated on me with one of my best friends (who also had a girlfriend at the time). I kept dating her for the next year, stayed friends with him, and forgave them both. I chalked it all up to us being dumbass teenagers, knowing that soon enough we'd all be going our separate ways.

Sure, I could have dumped her immediately and dated someone else. I knew that there were other girls available, one in particular who knew the situation and saw it as an opportunity.

I don't regret it. I was madly in love.

I swore to myself that I would never, ever tolerate that shit again. Infidelity is a deal-breaker. It is always a deal-breaker. A wayward breaks the deal, pure and simple.

Thirty years later...

Within moments of reading the text messages between my ex-wife and the OM, that deeply embedded tenet kicked in. My marriage was over.

Principles are easy; real life doesn't give a shit about principles.

That's what you're missing.

[This message edited by Unhinged at 2:58 PM, Friday, August 28th]

First of all- I should have been clear. I do not believe reconciliation is romanticized here. I was saying that I understand how to some it might sound that way.

Decades of joint mortgages, family milestones, and inside jokes can’t be replicated overnight. But people conveniently ignore that preserving all that history means clinging onto the exact chapter where your partner set the house on fire. Doesn't seem romantic to me. if you were to torch the histor you'd torch the betrayal along with it. Seems like a cracking deal to me.

I believe everyone here agrees infidelity cracks the deal.

Over the course of our decades long relationship, there was empirical evidence that I loved him, prioritized him, we were deeply compatible. I had the affair and undoubtedly called it all into question.

Did the momentum of almost 20 years just stop for him? No, it didn’t. But the deal was absolutely broken.

I don’t see how in the face of that it wasn’t a sound decision to say "we share a family, history, I still love her, who I see before me is not who I have seen show up for me and our kids every day selflessly for half her life now. Let’s see what can be done before I pull the plug"

I personally wasn’t expecting that. I didn’t cajole him into it. I too was really unsure about what could be done.

Then there’s the rhetoric floating around about staying being a display of "extraordinary character" or "grit," or the grand cope that "the affair was the wake-up call we needed to rebuild better." Splendid. But wouldn't it be far more sensible to build a normal, non-rotten relationship with someone who didn't need to put you through nuclear fallout just to realise they should treat you with basic decency?Again, not romantic in my mind one jot.

You are twisting the narrative. this was said in rebuttal to another member who stated a bs who chose reconciliation are essentially foolish. Anyone who has tried to reconcile here knows it is as brutal.

And we will rally against the narrative that a bs is weak, unprincipled or a chump every time. Because we have watched so many bs get in their feet again and THAT is grit. And if they did it staying married it means they decided what they wanted, and what they stood for, despite the mockery society places on it.

At the core of it, surely every single person here would choose a relationship completely free of betrayal if given the choice. Nobody stands at the altar hoping for a soul-crushing affair just so they can experience the 'profound journey' of repairing the damage. If an untainted relationship is universally the gold standard, why would anyone romanticise an outcome that is, at absolute best, a silver medal?

Yes of course everyone would prefer for an infidelity free marriage. We prefer a lot of things in a marriage not to happen and it doesn’t mean moving forward things can’t be different.

A lot wives hope for their husband not to watch porn. While infidelity is a deal breaker so is a husband who can no longer get it up without porn playing. Not to mention how it can make his wife feel less than very similiarly to being cheated on. She is not special because she doesn’t have fake tits and look awesome in a g string. And it’s an epidemic yet the prevalence only rises and the justifications are ridiculous. I see it as impactful to the dying marriage out there as anything else.

Marriages aren’t fairly tales. Over the course of one’s lifetime your spouse can get sick, develop a gambling, shopping, drug problem. Succumb to alcoholism, emotionally or physically neglect you due to depression, menopause, pregnancy, job loss. Your spouse is going to lose loved ones and lose themselves, reinvent themselves through evolving numerous times. Your relationship eill change along with all of these struggles.

My point is even in a long term marriage where spouses are faithful you are still going to go through some horrendous shit if you are married for decades.

When we say that our marriage is sometimes better after infidelity, despite the infidelity, it’s because while it’s the biggest deal breaker it can also be a huge precipitous for growth.

Should we do it to grow —-hell no.

Are there guarantees the ws are going to do it? Hell no. Marriage doesn’t come with safety guards but let’s not pretend there aren’t rotten parts of most marriages.

When I read about couples who have "survived infidelity" and come out the other side, my brain doesn't register a triumph of the human spirit. I just think at it's worst, "Poor bugger. Should’ve got out while the getting was good," or in the best case, 'I wish it had never happened to them in the first place'

There are people who come here who have simply stayed married- and I think the exact same thing.

I don’t really default to the belief they should have gotten a divorce, but I do regret for them they have rug swept and now live with a ws who still denies intimacy. I am not meaning just a fullfilling sex life— but the biggest issue is they don’t share their inner worlds. They don’t have the connection.

However, I believe there are many couples, the rate may just be higher in this site, that through this issue learn truly how to be married. Be connected. Love. Learn to make themselves happy. Have a very fullfilling relationship with themselves and others. And I have watched that happen here about as much as any other outcome.

Having walked away from betrayal into a relationship that is actually healthy and untainted, I will never understand the romance of pouring endless energy into maintaining a partner who's demonstrated the aren't worth of the work to begin with.

It’s rare to see any long term relationship goes untainted. It just may not be through infidelity. It also doesn’t mean it can’t be really fulfilling for the majority of the marriage. But expect some painful years and lost years and everything in between because you are feeling with two people who are dealing with LIFE and at times will deal better with it than others.

That’s not to say some portion of people who are cheated on shouldn’t cut their losses. I told someone one this forum this week they should divorce. I have given that advice many times through the years

We are completely fine if you would never to it. I would never swim with sharks and hundreds of people do it and love it every day. I can’t relate but good for them! I can still abstain from believing there must be something wrong with them.

We aren’t trying to convince you it’s right for you. We are trying to get you to see there may be nothing wrong with the person who makes the opposite decision because that’s how you pretty consistently come across.

And as far as poor buggar, they should have gotten out sooner. Well I can tell you the gate is open in our marriage and if someone wants to leave they can. I don’t see anyone eyeing the gate with longing. We are too busy living a full and satisfying life together and happy. I don’t romanticize reconciliation, that shit is hard. But I do romanticize the relationship I am in and I am pretty sure I am supposed to do that.

Reminding a bs they can find love elsewhere is common here. I have said that exact thing when I think it’s necessary. But I also think that they can find deep love again with an unfaithful spouse in some circumstances.

[This message edited by hikingout at 3:45 PM, Friday, August 28th]

I have been defined as "pro-reconciliation" both on this site and other sites. Even sites I don’t participate in…

Yet I am an example of someone that terminated a relationship the minute I left our apartment after walking in on her. My story is in my profile.

I am 100% certain that I loved her to bits. I am 100% certain that AT THAT TIME she was the one I was destined to be with.

Yet I walked away…

Realistically – there were periods in the first weeks/months where I wanted back. I was offered a way back. She did show some form of remorse. She promised all sorts of changes. I had my doubts, but with time I was more convinced I was on the right track and had made the correct decision for ME at THAT TIME. I guess my initial decision based on anger and pain was reaffirmed by reality and logic maybe a week into the process. When I decided not to accept any of the routes back.

Some practical things helped: No marriage yet, so no complex separation of finances and assets. Yes – I lost what had been prepaid for the wedding, I didn’t get half of what measly IKEA furniture we had bought, and I never got some of my LP’s back (miss my Springsteen records more than her though…).

But emotionally it was tough. Like real tough. Like sitting on my bed holding my gun tough.

My reasons were that IF she was cheating with random men just four weeks and six days before our marriage, and IF this was something she had been doing for at least 3-4 years of the 5 we had together, then our relationship would continue into marriage, mortgage, kids… That all the time we had spent talking and planning our future was worthless gibbering, that meaningful conversations wouldn’t really have any value, that goals couldn’t be set and reached.

As a cop who was very risk-aware I also thought about the risk she was putting me and our future kids into. This was when the AIDS epidemic was all over. Made me think about how life would pan out with her, if she could both deal with her seeking crotch and her low-risk boundaries.

For ME – AT THAT TIME – this was the correct decision.

Didn’t stop loving her instantaneously or miss her less.

So why do I think others might have other options?

Well – I did have options. It’s only that I selected the path of D (actually separation).

We could have reconciled, and if done "correctly" and thoroughly she might have dealt with whatever issue made her sleep around. I haven’t’ really kept in touch or monitored her over the last decades, but it’s my understanding she had a period of substance abuse, abusive relationships, job- and career loss and so on. MAYBE none of that would have happened had she gone to therapy and dealt with her moms rejection, validation issues, or whatever. But I decided at the time to NOT be a part of that. Nor did she ever come to me sharing that she’s started therapy or AA or whatever.

My present wife? The moment I saw her – about 2 years after d-day – I KNEW she was my soulmate.

Of course that’s impossible, but that’s how I feel now nearly 40 years later.

I can’t say what would happen or have happened had I discovered her cheating. Possibly the early days (first 5 years?) divorce. But those were also tough years where we were adjusting to each other and finding the right division of work, goals, targets and such. At the 15 year mark we had a really tough time and nearly divorced. There are all sorts of infidelities other than sexual and emotional and marriages can face tougher issues than sexual and emotional infidelity as we see them here on this site. As many long-term married people might say: We have been married for 37 years, with 8 of them good…

Now – If my wife had an affair… Well… All I can say is that my resolve from when I was in my 20’s isn’t the same as now. Despite having more resolve, being more confident in who I am and (hopefully) being more mature now than then.

I don’t KNOW.

But I do know that I don’t want to be labeled as mentally ill, lacking self-worth, morally deficient or any other of the labels thrown around here so casually on those that want to explore if their relationship is salvageable.

I have seen instances here on SI where reconciliation works. I have seen where it doesn’t work.

I have seen too many situations where remaining married is seen as the definition of reconciliation, without any consideration for what else is required. In fact – probably a third the threads on the various forums here fall into that category.

What I have realized is that people aren’t perfect – although we should strive to be. We can all do the wrong thing, but what defines us tends to be how we react. Like my ex-fiancé. Irrespective of if we had remained together or not, I would hope and wish for her that she acknowledged that picking up random sex-partners while in a committed relationship is neither right nor healthy. That she had found her reasons, acknowledged her faults and made her changes. That she would apply that knowledge and change in her next relationship – had that been with me or someone else. I have no personal gain or pleasure from her ongoing misery – irrespective of OUR relationship.

--

Finally – I have sometimes compared reconciliation to recovering from a serious health scare where you are told that continuing with your present behavior or only slight alterations will lead you to death. So you get all the info on nutrition, buy a gym-membership, contact a personal trainer and get all the fancy sports gear… only nothing changes. It won’t change until you lay off the greasy deep fried chicken and start eating salmon and greens, when you actually enter the gym and start lifting weights, that you start following the trainers program and start wearing out that fancy sports gear…

Do this consistently and with intensity for an extended period of time, and you might end up in the best shape and health of your life. Maybe after 2-3 years you can ease off to two five mile jogs and one gym session per week, might be able to eat a hamburger or two and have some ice-cream… but you will always have your health and fitness in mind. Living healthy has become part of your lifestyle.

At that time you won’t be saying to yourself "it’s great I had that cardiac arrest because otherwise I would still be eating unhealthy", but rather "I could have lived this way all the time and probably avoided that health-scare".

Only here the health is your marriage. You might not have gotten it to the unhealthy stage, but you can be part of reclaiming and creating a healthy relationship – if that’s what you wish for and are offered.

[This message edited by SI Staff at 2:28 PM, Friday, August 28th]

If it's about the statistical odds of success, then should one also be against getting married at all? Perhaps certainly against 2nd+ marriages...

If it's about the statistical odds of success, then should one also be against getting married at all? Perhaps certainly against 2nd+ marriages...

Friends don’t let friends….

I already made that point early in this thread, considering he is about to be married or maybe has since gotten married. Didn’t seem to land.

Given the nature of this place, we naturally skew towards long-term reconcilers and reformed waywards, which can paint a picture of misplaced optimism that probably shouldn't exist.

Why shouldn’t it exist? Because you couldn’t cope? That’s not a compelling argument. Your personal threshold for discomfort isn’t a universal metric for what’s possible.

Either way, the concept itself is completely beyond me.

If a dynamic is genuinely beyond your comprehension, why spend paragraphs telling an entire community that their hope is misguided? If you don’t understand the concept and you’re not offering an informed critique, then you’re not contributing insight, you’re just adding noise.

Just because someone lacks the stomach to stay in the room when things get messy doesn't mean the people who do stay are delusional. Projecting your own low threshold for discomfort onto an entire community isn't deep or thoughtful, it's just rationalizing your own exit strategy. Fleeing is easy when you’ve never had real skin in the game. Romanticizing the ease of running away doesn't make someone a realist.

This community has decades of successfully helping people navigate infidelity, whether that ends in R or D. Your take isn’t blazing a new trail here, and it’s not going to have the sweeping effect you seem to imagine.

A support space doesn’t exist to mirror the statistical average of human failure. It exists to show what’s possible when people do brutal, deliberate work. Calling that "false hope" is like walking into an AA meeting and warning newcomers that long‑term sober people are misleading them simply because most people relapse. That’s not wisdom, it’s cynicism dressed up as realism.

I may be bias, but I’d actually feel safer with a fWS who has done deep, painful, sustained work than with someone who has never had their integrity tested. A partner who has confronted their worst self and rebuilt from the ground up offers a kind of grounded security that an untested "gold medalist" simply can’t. Pretending an untainted relationship is automatically superior relies on a fairy tale view of human nature. Human beings are complex, flawed, and constantly evolving. You can’t just swap out a human being and guarantee the next person won't have hidden, untested flaws of their own.

I have my own "safeguards" for deciding whether a potential partner feels safe and worth investing in, and none of them hinge on their past. Even then, those "safeguards" don’t predict future character, they only tell me whether I’m willing to take the risk of showing up. Because that’s the part people forget, every relationship carries risk. This idea that a "non rotten partner" guarantees future integrity is a complete illusion. Treating a lack of past mistakes as proof of future character isn’t realism, it’s optimism at its worst.

Betrayal isn’t about "basic decency." It’s about entitlement, coping mechanisms, boundary failures, and deep psychological patterns. Reducing all of that to "manners" tells me you haven’t spent five minutes trying to understand the psychology involved. You can dismiss it if you want, but oversimplifying complex human behavior doesn’t make your argument sharper, it just exposes how shallow your understanding is.

I will never understand the romance of pouring endless energy into maintaining a partner who's demonstrated the aren't worth of the work to begin with.

You’re building a convenient strawman where reconcilers are helpless doormats endlessly pouring energy into someone who is actively disrespecting them. Does it happen? Yes. Do we encourage it? No. Nobody here encourages people to pour endless energy into someone who is actively unsafe.

Show me where someone says their WS broke NC and the reply is "give them another chance," or where a WS is still lying and the advice is to "stick it out." You won’t find it, because that’s not how this community operates. SI says,  here’s the boundary. Here’s the consequence. Here’s the work required.Here’s how you evaluate whether R is still viable.

The actual advice is always conditional, accountability based, and never blind optimism. If anything, it’s those who are so strongly opposed to R who end up romanticizing it.

Furthermore, I disagree with the grieving mother comparison. A lost child is a tragedy; the child is gone forever, and there is no choice to be made. With infidelity, the betrayed partner is standing in the wreckage deciding whether to rebuild with the person who set the fire.

Make no mistake, betrayed partners are grieving. Sure there are differences between betrayal and losing a child, I only mean to point out that telling someone in the agony of D-day that there are lots of fish in the ocean is about as tasteful as the maternal example. It is not hopeful, it is out of place.

If there are others that are kindred spirits to you and would skew towards your hard line, then I’m glad you are here to offer a message that they are attracted to. But doesn’t it obviously follow that a bloke who has been around for months and is now FIVE PAGES into his eighth (or so, who’s counting) thread maybe, just maybe isn’t your soul mate at SI? That maybe he’s got a different threshold than you? And maybe continuing to push that message is not particularly profitable?

@hikingout

I believe everyone here agrees infidelity cracks the deal... I don’t see how in the face of that it wasn’t a sound decision to say "we share a family, history, I still love her... Let’s see what can be done before I pull the plug"

You mention that the momentum of twenty years does not just stop. I agree that shared history is the one thing you cannot replicate overnight; I said as much earlier in the thread. However, I was talking about the romanticisation of reconciliation. I see a clear difference between acknowledging history as a practical tether and romanticising it. Staying to test whether a partner can rebuild after setting the house on fire is a pragmatic decision, not a romantic triumph. Burning the history down to eliminate the ongoing toxicity of betrayal remains, to my mind, the cleaner and healthier deal.

Then there’s the rhetoric floating around about staying being a display of "extraordinary character" or "grit,"... You are twisting the narrative. this was said in rebuttal to another member who stated a bs who chose reconciliation are essentially foolish... And we will rally against the narrative that a bs is weak, unprincipled or a chump every time.

My point is about how society and forums frame that choice. Labelling staying as "grit" or "extraordinary character" subtly reframes a terrible compromise into a heroic virtue. Enduring prolonged mistreatment or rebuilding from nuclear fallout should not be rebranded as noble; it is an agonising recovery process. This framing is precisely part of the romanticisation I am pointing out.

Marriages aren’t fairy tales. Over the course of one’s lifetime your spouse can get sick, develop a gambling... problem. Succumb to alcoholism... It’s rare to see any long term relationship goes untainted. It just may not be through infidelity.

Equating infidelity to life’s tragedies, such as illness, job loss, or ageing, simply does not work for me. Sickness, grief, and age are involuntary hardships. Infidelity is a deliberate series of betrayals. I will happily vow to support my partner through the unpredictable hardships life throws at us, but not if she is stabbing me in the back. Grouping a spouse’s cancer or depression together with their active decision to cheat conflates tragic circumstances with deliberate mistreatment. A relationship battered by unexpected hardships is fundamentally different from one where a partner chose to break the foundational contract. An untainted foundation remains the gold standard, and settling for a rebuilt silver medal should not be romanticised.

I don don’t romanticize reconciliation, that shit is hard. But I do romanticize the relationship I am in and I am pretty sure I am supposed to do that.

If staying works for you and you have built something fulfilling out of the ashes, that is your path. However, pointing out that an unfaithful partner has proven themselves unworthy of that immense effort, and that a clean, untainted relationship with someone else is an achievable and often superior alternative, is not "shaming". It is providing stark, necessary perspective to people sitting in the fog of betrayal.

I am getting married myself this October in Edinburgh, so I am certainly not anti-marriage. I simply believe in building on a clean foundation.

@foreverlabeled

If a dynamic is genuinely beyond your comprehension, why spend paragraphs telling an entire community

You are trying to have your cake and eat it here. Claiming this forum does not romanticize reconciliation while simultaneously declaring it a great failure of mine not to comprehend it—the very thing you claim does not exist—is entirely contradictory.

I'm not sure to what level of prevalence it does exist but outlined why it would be bizarre to romanticize reconciliation if one was.

you’re not contributing insight, you’re just adding noise

You appear to be defending a position you simultaneously deny, which sounds rather noisy in itself.

Projecting your own low threshold for discomfort onto an entire community isn't deep or thoughtful, it's just rationalizing your own exit strategy

What exactly are you projecting here?

Why shouldn’t it exist? Because you couldn’t cope? That’s not a compelling argument. Your personal threshold for discomfort isn’t a universal metric for what’s possible.

Refusing to tolerate betrayal is not a lack of stomach or an inability to cope; it is the enforcement of a fundamental boundary. Frame it as running away if you wish, but leaving a compromised relationship takes immense courage, emotional effort, and self-reliance. In fact, it has been stated several times on this forum that the default reaction for most people is to try to fix things. If staying is the default, it stands to reason that most people have the stomach for it. Walking away is choosing not to invest further energy into someone who chose to shatter your trust.

To answer your question, blind optimism should not exists if it not representatives of the likely outcomes. It just sets peoples expectations up for a further fall. I am pro-realism.

Calling that "false hope" is like walking into an AA meeting and warning newcomers that long‑term sober people are misleading them simply because most people relapse. That’s not wisdom, it’s cynicism dressed up as realism.

Do you really not think AA or similar support groups hammer home the risks of relapse? Discuss the failure rate. Do you think they merely keep dialogue to blind optimism?

I’d actually feel safer with a fWS who has done deep, painful, sustained work than with someone who has never had their integrity tested. A partner who has confronted their worst self and rebuilt from the ground up offers a kind of grounded security that an untested "gold medalist" simply can’t.

Yes, I would certainly call that a bias. Having a basic baseline of integrity that prevents you from cheating on your partner in the first place is not an untested fairy tale; it is standard adult decency. Framing someone who broke their vows and then spent years cleaning up their own mess as superior to a person who never betrayed their partner turns logic on its head.

Every relationship carries risk, but there is a clear distinction between potential risk in a new partner and confirmed failure in an existing one. Choosing an untainted relationship is not about believing a new partner is infallible. It is about choosing to build a future with someone who has not already proved they are capable of deliberate deceit.

Betrayal isn’t about "basic decency." It’s about entitlement, coping mechanisms, boundary failures, and deep psychological patterns. Reducing all of that to "manners" tells me you haven’t spent five minutes trying to understand the psychology involved.

Understanding the psychological mechanisms behind why someone cheated does not change the core outcome: they failed at basic decency. Entitlement and boundary failures are precisely the breakdown of basic respect for one's partner. Explaining the psychology behind a betrayal explains the path to the act, but it does not erase the fact that a baseline standard of loyalty was breached.

Your argument is essentially the equivalent of someone calling an abuser an "abusive prick", only for you to counter that his deep anger issues manifested in physical violence due to his poor childhood and relationship with his father. To which I would respond: okay, but does that not still make him an abusive prick?

You’re building a convenient strawman where reconcilers are helpless doormats endlessly pouring energy into someone who is actively disrespecting them.

Does it happen? Yes.

Which is it then? Is it a strawman, or does it actually happen? You cannot claim I am inventing a fictional scenario in one sentence and then admit in the very next that it occurs.

I have my own "safeguards" for deciding whether a potential partner feels safe and worth investing in, and none of them hinge on their past.

This tells me you have not spent five minutes looking into basic psychology. The single best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour. I advise you to look into this, as it is a universally recognised rule of thumb across behavioural psychology.

@torso1500

If it's about the statistical odds of success, then should one also be against getting married at all? Perhaps certainly against 2nd+ marriages...

To me, there is a fundamental difference between taking a statistical risk on a clean slate and betting on a partner who has already betrayed you. Getting married in the UK carries a baseline divorce rate of roughly 42%, but that is a risk taken on a healthy, untainted relationship. Remaining after infidelity means staying in a dynamic with a known, proven defect. It's about caluclated risk at the end of the day and it is something I have considered.

Personally, I view divorce as a breakup with extra logistical headaches. Juxtapose that with the stakes of staying in an abusive relationship and opening yourself up to continued mistreatment, and I simply do not see the two as comparable. This is, of course, predicated on my view that cheating is a form of abuse, which I am aware remains a debated topic on these boards. I've got a similar set of assets to my partner, a clean split would leave me roughly where I am.

I don't anticipate that to happen of course and hope to live and long and successful life with her.

If there are others that are kindred spirits to you and would skew towards your hard line, then I’m glad you are here to offer a message that they are attracted to. But doesn’t it obviously follow that a bloke who has been around for months and is now FIVE PAGES shocked into his eighth (or so, who’s counting) thread maybe, just maybe isn’t your soul mate at SI? That maybe he’s got a different threshold than you? And maybe continuing to push that message is not particularly profitable?

Perhaps but you never know! We also have neutral readers to account for, I have said many times I write to help people who relate to my outlook because when I went through this, the outlook appeared under represented on more thoughtful boards such as this. Yes I could have went to other sites and just got 'sucks bro, go to the gym' and that's fine but not what I was after.

EDIT - WOW ok that was a lot haven't been gang banged that hard since colleague. Off for a hot bath.
(The above is just a joke! and for clarity I didn't get gang banged in college, we call it university in the UK Heyo)

[This message edited by DRSOOLERS at 5:03 PM, Friday, August 28th]

** Member to Member **

Odds are irrelevant to specific cases. If you think about odds as something significant, keep reminding yourself that they do not have any force on specific cases.

Odds simply mean something like: WRT a large number of cases, a certain percentage will probably fall within limits, BUT NO ONE CAN PREDICT HOW A SPECIFIC CASE WILL END. Just speak to someone who lost a large poker pot or 2 with quads (4 of a kind) or a straight flush.

It's been a long time since I looked a the General Social Survey, but when I did, if memory serves, about 14-17% of women and 27% of me admitted cheating at least once. I've read that women's numbers have gotten closer to men's, but I haven't read survey results in at least 7 years. But even 15% puts BSes who split at pretty high risk in their next relationships - especially since so many male BSes report multiple WSes.

*****

This is a forum that is based on the written word. There are no non-verbals. If you have a question about what someone means, you need to ask.

If you read a statement of fact and assign emotion to it, it's probably your own emotion, not the writer's.

*****

When I read about couples who have "survived infidelity" and come out the other side, my brain doesn't register a triumph of the human spirit.

I think you may have a double standard here. Do you believe wwtl has survived and come out the other side, because he D'ed, but that hiking, Oldwounds, The1stwife, me, et al do not, because we R'ed?

There are many ways to come out the other side in triumph. Wwtl certainly qualifies; so do Ink, leafields, forever labeled, hikingout, and hundreds of people I've come in contact with over the years but whose names don't come up any more.

I just think at it's worst, "Poor bugger. Should’ve got out while the getting was good....

You can doubt what people say about successful R. Some folks certainly doubt that you know yourself as well as you say you do.

I'll say this: we have a few members who comment on R is without having any first hand knowledge of R. IMO, they do themselves and readers a disservice.

[This message edited by SI Staff at 5:19 PM, Friday, August 28th]

@DRSOOLERS
"Refusing to tolerate betrayal is not a lack of stomach or an inability to cope; it is the enforcement of a fundamental boundary."

I'm confused, DRSOOLERS are you against reconciliation in all circumstances, or against reconciliation when it is clearly not working? Because refusing to tolerate infidelity is actually part of reconciliation. Reconciliation doesn't mean tolerating ongoing betrayal. It means the betrayal stops, boundaries are established and accountability is taken, and both people decide whether the relationship can be rebuilt.if infidelity is still happening, then I would agree that reconciliation isn't happening — someone is simply remaining in a relationship where the fundamental boundary is still being violated.
So I'm struggling to understand how enforcing that boundary is an argument against reconciliation itself. Surely it is one of the foundations of it? I understand your view point of helping those you felt were under represented but can that not be done while still holding space for those attempting reconciliation, without implying they are weak etc

You can doubt what people say about successful R.

I am not doubting anyone. If someone claims to have achieved a successful reconciliation, that is fantastic, and I am happy to take them at their word. In that case, they simply fall into the second category I mentioned: I genuinely wish the betrayal had never happened to them in the first place. Still not romantic.

I think you may have a double standard here. Do you believe wwtl has survived and come out the other side, because he D'ed, but that hiking, Oldwounds, The1stwife, me, et al do not, because we R'ed?

There is no double standard here, but to understand my view, you have to look at how my statements connect.

When I wrote:

When I read about couples who have "survived infidelity" and come out the other side, my brain doesn't register a triumph of the human spirit.

That statement is directly tied to the core premise of my argument:

At the core of it, surely every single person here would choose a relationship completely free of betrayal if given the choice. Nobody stands at the altar hoping for a soul-crushing affair just so they can experience the 'profound journey' of repairing the damage. If an untainted relationship is universally the gold standard, why would anyone romanticise an outcome that is, at absolute best, a silver medal?

If you concede that you would prefer a relationship completely free of betrayal, then it follows logically that the only true triumph is building a life and a relationship where betrayal has no place. If that is the ideal, this is what we should romanticize.

I fully accept that people can recover and go on to achieve a very comfortable, pleasant silver medal through reconciliation. However, settling for a silver medal after your partner breached the foundational contract is not something I will ever choose to romanticize.

However if someone was to disagree with the core premise of my argument, this wouldn't follow. So I suppose that's the question

@Drowning45

My position is that choosing to remain in a relationship after infidelity occurs is, by its very nature, tolerating the betrayal that has already happened.

There is a difference between enforcing a boundary before an act occurs versus managing consequences after it has been broken. A boundary defines what you will not accept in order to remain in a relationship. If the boundary is "I will not be cheated on," and your partner cheats, choosing to stay and rebuild means that the breach of that boundary did not result in the end of the relationship.

You may enforce new conditions going forward, such as demanding the affair stops, establishing transparency, or requiring therapy. However, the initial, foundational boundary was breached, and staying means you have accepted that breach as a survivable event rather than a definitive deal breaker. That is where our definitions diverge. To me, true enforcement of that specific boundary means ending the relationship.

In other words, reconciliation is inherently enforcing the boundary of: "Now that I know you have cheated, you must never cheat again." To me, that is fundamentally different from enforcing a zero-tolerance boundary against cheating in the first place

Reconciliation requires the betrayed spouse to absorb, process, and ultimately tolerate the fact that their partner chose to betray them, in the hope that they will not do it again. I am not saying people who choose that path are weak, nor am I suggesting they should be barred from trying. What I am arguing is that we should not reframe the willingness to absorb that betrayal as an act of moral heroism or "grit", while painting the decision to walk away as a lack of stomach or an inability to cope.

[This message edited by DRSOOLERS at 5:33 PM, Friday, August 28th]