Infidelity Articles By Katie Lersch

By: Katie Lersch: People who have affairs often truly believe that they are at least partly justified in the same. Many feel that they acted because they were somewhat unfulfilled in their marriages or they needed “something else” in their lives.  (I believe that this is sometimes a mistaken belief, but that’s beside the point.)  So when they are caught cheating, they will offer up these justifications in the hopes that their spouse can see their own role in it.  The hope is that there will be a realization that it takes two people to put a marriage is in jeopardy. The problem with this though, is that most of the time, this just sounds like excuses and refusing to take responsibility.

A wife might say: “I know that cheating is wrong. I do. But I am absolutely convinced that if my spouse had been a better husband to me, we would not be where we are today. For the past several years, he has given me no emotional support or affection. I’ve had a rough time of it health wise and he acts as if I am a burden to him. He never remembers things that are special to me. I met the other man at our doctor’s office. We share a doctor. He gives me the emotional support that I do not get from my husband. He shows me attention and care. I am not proud of cheating on my spouse but most of my friends understand because they see the void left by my husband. Of course, it wasn’t long before he found out. I was very honest with him and said that if he had been the husband he should have been, I would not have cheated. He rejects this and says that it is absolutely crazy. He says there is no one to blame but myself. He said that he will never share in the blame of my decisions. I know that this is going to sound weird, but I don’t want a divorce. I never intended to start a new long term relationship. I just loved feeling understood and supported. However, if my husband will never share in the blame, then I do not see how I can save my marriage.”

I understand where you are coming from, but perhaps you can see this from your husband’s point of view also. I can tell you, as someone who has been cheated on, that when your spouse starts listing the ways that you fell short in your marriage, it seems like what he is really doing is trying to deflect the blame. It seems like he is refusing to take responsibility for what was, essentially, a choice of his own making.

I am not saying that the faithful spouse never has a role to play – because they can and they do. (I did too.) But ultimately, it is not your spouse who made the decision to cheat. It was you who did that. Again, I can tell you that although I did eventually come to see the role I played in the entire mess, I wasn’t able to do this until enough time had passed for me to see it a little more objectively. And I believe that counseling helped with at least this part of it. Because I was able to accept it coming from someone else. But from my husband, it just sounded like lame excuses.

And, even though I eventually saw the places where I allowed our marriage to be vulnerable, this never meant my husband wasn’t culpable for his own actions. It most certainly did not excuse him or change my anger. It only made me see that, should we end up saving our marriage, we (and I as an individual) were going to need to make some changes.

Here’s another thing to consider. You probably don’t want to bring this up when you are discussing the reasons for the affair. You want to bring it up when you are talking about ensuring that it doesn’t happen again. Speaking from my own thought process, I believe that shared blame is easier to accept from you’re looking at it from a place of prevention instead of from at a place of who is most at fault. It was easier for me to think of changing the vulnerabilities in my marriage than thinking about how I was falling short. Because it’s just very hard to make that leap when your spouse is the one who took the action in the first place.

I know that it probably makes you feel better to know that your spouse’s actions contributed to the affair. However, your spouse is not the one who cheated. You have to accept that because it is the truth. Would you allow your child to hurt their sibling because that same sibling did something that the initiator did not like? Probably not. You’d encourage your children to talk it out and work through their problems instead of just reacting to them with actions and hurtful things that can’t be taken back. The same holds true here.

Because yes, some aspects of your marriage may have contributed to this. But you chose your own actions. If you want your spouse to see how their behavior played a role, the best way to do it isn’t to criticize or blame them, it’s to get them to a place where they are open to saving your marriage and then explaining what left your marriage vulnerable so that you can fix it by changing both of your behaviors.

I’m not saying you don’t deserve a more sensitive husband.  You do.  But you aren’t going to make him more sensitive by telling him that his insensitivity was why you cheated.  Instead, you want him to change his insensitivity because he wants to make your marriage better as a willing participant. My husband eventually learned this lesson and stopped playing the blame game.  When he did, I was more receptive to what he had to say. There’s more on my blog at http://surviving-the-affair.com

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