Infidelity Articles By Katie Lersch

By: Katie Lersch:  When it appears to you that your husband is actually happy with the other person in the affair, you can begin to feel fierce resentment.  Because from your perspective, they are getting everything.  They seem to be in love, they can move on with their life, and they may well live happily-ever-after why you are left to clean up the mess.

Because of this, it is normal for the wife to wonder if there will ever be any price to pay for the people who cheated.  She wonders if this is ever going to come back to haunt them. She wonders if they are ever going to feel regret or if their relationship is ever going to suffer because of the way that they met.

Someone might say: “from my perspective, my husband and the other woman have it all.  They claim that they are very much in love.  Her family seems to have welcomed my husband with open arms.  He gets to leave all his responsibilities behind and go and play house with her. It just isn’t fair.  When I talk to some of my friends about this, they tell me that karma will take care of this.  They tell me that their relationship is doomed to fail – or at least to be very negatively impacted by their actions.  Are they right?  Will the other woman and my husband suffer in any way for what they have done?”

Statistically Speaking, Their Relationship Is Up Against Unfavorable Odds: You are assuming that this relationship is going to make it.  Statistically speaking, most relationships that start as affairs fizzle out.  Sure, some people who cheat with each other do get married.  But the baggage from this situation usually follows them.

Here’s a story that might give you some perspective. I have a very good friend who cheated on her husband with an ex-boyfriend. Because of the affair, she later divorced her husband and married the ex-boyfriend. The affair started when she “reconnected” with the old boyfriend on Facebook.  They had an online affair and then they eventually started meeting up in their old home town.  My friend would tell her husband that she was visiting family when in fact she was carrying on the affair.

This was a touchy subject between us because she knows that I have strong feelings about cheating because of my own background (more on that below.) However, we have been friends for a long time.  So I was not going to abandon our friendship just because of some choices that I didn’t agree with.  And, over time, it was clear that she needed my support.  She knows how I feel about her actions and we leave it at that.

While it appeared that my friend and her new husband were blissfully happy in the beginning, they certainly have their problems now.  They have serious trust issues.  Because they cheated with each other, they are always worried that the other is going to cheat again.  They fight constantly – mostly about money.  Their divorces were financially costly for both of them and so they struggle to make ends meet, which causes conflict.

Blending their households also has caused conflict.  Understandably, their children have not taken kindly to the situation.  They feel resentment that their lives were turned upside down because one parent cheated.  And so they take it out on the new spouse.  The new husband’s kids are pretty nasty to my friend.  And her kids are pretty nasty to the new husband.  My friend resents that her kids did not just accept this with open arms.  But I can understand their resentment.

One day, after my friend had just had a fight with her new husband and her children, she confided: “If I would have known how this was going to turn out, I just would have tried to make my first marriage work. I would have stayed off of Facebook and put my focus on my kids.  This is not worth it.  I love my new husband, but this is just too hard.  The price was too high.”

Of course, the next day, she was in love again and trying to work things out.  But I hope you see my point.  Relationships that start out as affairs carry a lot of baggage.  And if you have ever watched the episode of “True Tori” where Tori meets with Dean’s ex-wife, you know that eventually, there is often much regret and remorse.

So my answer to the question is that from my observation, yes, there is a price to pay sometimes.  Yes, there is sometimes suffering from every one involved.  There can be a perception that the cheating folks go on and live charmed lives, but in my experience and observation, this is rarely the case.

In their hearts, both people know that what they did was wrong.  And of course this is going to weigh on you.  Of course this is going to affect your relationship.  You are unlikely to feel very good about yourself or about the relationship, even if you initially tell yourself that the end justifies the means.  Plus, you have to look around and face all of the people who you have hurt.   That causes a lot of pain and guilt to carry into your next relationship.

And, the affair relationship doesn’t always progress to the next level.  I was lucky that my husband’s did not. And we eventually healed our marriage.  There’s more about that on my blog at http://surviving-the-affair.com

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