Infidelity Articles By Katie Lersch

By: Katie Lersch: When you are dealing with a cheating spouse, you are often hoping that the two guilty people in this scenario feel deep regret. You want your husband to feel these things because you want for him to end the relationship and vow never to cheat again.

You may not care if the other woman ever cheats again – as long as the person she is cheating with is not your husband. But in this instance, you want her to feel regret because you want her to leave your husband alone. And you hope that she has the decency to realize how destructive her actions were. You want her to feel badly about herself because she deserves it.

Many wives just assume that the other woman is going to automatically have these feelings. After all, what kind of cold and heartless person doesn’t care when they nearly destroy someone’s marriage? Unfortunately, what wives don’t always anticipate or understand is that the other woman has a strong interest in being in denial and repressing her feelings. In fact, she has probably already made this a habit because if she didn’t, it would be much harder for her to carry out her cheating. So she tries to make herself believe that if your husband is cheating, he has a good and legitimate reason for it. And she may think that your marriage is between you and your husband, so she’s just going to focus on her relationship with him and not worry or think about the rest.

A wife may be unsure about how to cut through this attitude. She might say: “I want the other woman to feel deep regret for what she did to my family. My husband broke off the affair and he seems to be legitimately sorry. But she continues to attempt to text him and send him Facebook messages. I think that she must be heartless because within the last couple of weeks, my husband has posted nothing but family photos on his Facebook. And yet, she looks at those photos and she still hits the message icon to try and get him to contact her. She has no shame. I have tried to call her and explain why she should feel deep regret and leave us alone. She informed me that she does not feel any regret. She told me that she would do it again in a heartbeat because she truly feels that my husband and herself are soul mates. And she feels that in time, they will be together again. This infuriates me. Does she have no conscience? How do I make her feel regret so that she’ll go away?”

She probably does a conscience somewhere, but she isn’t listening to it because listening to it makes it more difficult for her to get what she wants. Unfortunately, you can’t “make” someone like this feel anything. A person like this is only focused on themselves.

But what I suggest that you do instead is to set it up so that it eventually dawns on her that she is wasting her time. I would require my husband to unfriend her on Facebook and to change his settings so that she can no longer email or message him on this site. I would then change or block his email or phone number (at least as far as she is concerned) so that she truly has no easy way to contact him.

Then I would go on with my life and focus on my marriage. If she can’t get a reaction out of you and get in contact with him, she is going to have to eventually realize that she’s only wasting her time and energy.

And if you restore your family and move on, then that is the scenario in which she may eventually feel some regret. Because she is going to look around and realize that she put all of this time and effort into something that now does not exist. She may realize that the husband now is invested in his family and she is left with nothing. That’s enough to make any one feel regret.

It’s my belief that the best thing you can do in this situation is attempt to control what you can – and that is yourself and what you do with your marriage. You can’t control what the other woman feels and does. But you can attempt to make it so that she has no way into your life. Rebuilding your marriage is the most effective way of locking her out.

Once you and your husband are rebuilding and becoming stable and happy, there is no place for her. And she’s wasted all this time, emotion, and effort into a relationship that can’t possibly pay off anymore. That’s quite a waste and that is enough to make even the most stubborn person feel regret.

Beyond that, I firmly believe that you should turn your attention away from the other woman.  Because giving her your focus gives her power.  You don’t want that.  You want for the focus to be on you, on your family, and on moving forward.  I sometimes learned these lessons the hard way, but I learned them.  You can read more about this on my blog at http://surviving-the-affair.com

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