Infidelity Articles By Katie Lersch

By: Katie Lersch: Some wives very much want to manipulate the woman whom their husband has been cheating with.  Usually, their goal is to find some way to get her to leave the relationship.  Very often, the wife has tried almost everything to get the husband to break things off, but, for whatever reason, he has not been able or willing to do that.  So, the wife will turn to the only other person who has the ability to end things – the other woman.

One of these wives could explain: “my husband has been having an affair with a woman at work for seven months.  At first, I thought it was nothing serious, but it has gone on for much longer than I thought.  I have threatened him that he must end it, but he won’t.  No matter what I do or say, I always catch him still being with her.  At this point, it’s clear that there’s nothing I can do to get him to be the one to end things.  So I figure I have to come up with a way to get her to be the one to leave the relationship.  I have thought about bringing my kids to the office so that she will see them and feel guilty enough to end things.  I have thought of threatening her.  I have thought about asking her to lunch and just appealing to her sense of decency and hoping that she’s a compassionate human being.  But I don’t know if any of these things are going to work or are the right thing to do.  How can I make her leave the relationship so that my husband has no choice but to save our marriage?”  I’ll try to address these concerns below.

Making Either Party Do Anything Through Manipulation Can Bring About Insecurity And Doubt:  I think one of the key points here is that the wife wanted to “make” the husband or the mistress end the relationship.  She didn’t really care which one ended the relationship as long as one of them did. The whole idea was that as soon as one of them ended things, the husband would have to come back to the wife because he didn’t have the option of the other woman.  And, of course, this sounded tempting to the wife because she just wanted her family back.  But, what she probably wasn’t counting on was the insecurity that comes with this scenario.

I can not tell you how many wives email me once they’ve finally got their wish and the relationship ends through force.  They often just don’t know what to do once their husband mopes around and isn’t as committed to the marriage as they hoped because he seems to be missing or even pining for the other woman.  Not only is this hard to watch, but it makes the wife wonder if she hasn’t made things worse.  Because now that the other woman is out of the picture, this suddenly seems to make the husband want her that much more.  This is a real risk.

Often, the husband feels resentment.  It often makes him want the other woman that much more. And it makes the wife worry that the only reason that he is with her is that she made it so.  This is no way to save your marriage.  I know that you want the relationship to end.  But you also probably want to save your marriage in a healthy and lasting way.  To that end, you will often need to look at the long-term rather than the short term, which I will discuss right now.

To Give Your Marriage The Best Chance, You’ll Need For Them To Make Their Own Decisions.  But You Can Set It Up So That The Right Decision Is More Likely.  I know that this is hard.  But in order for you to have the confidence that your husband truly wants you and the marriage, it’s best to let him decide to leave the mistress on his own.  If you force his hand or give him ultimatums, he may momentary break things off.  But you will both know that his heart is not really in it and this is going to severely cripple your ability to rebuild a healthy marriage.  But once he makes his own decisions, he will likely be truly committed to seeing it through.  That’s not to say that you can’t nudge him to make the right choice by making it clear that you will not continue to be intimate with him while he’s seeing someone else.  You can make it clear that once the affair is over, you two can attempt to pick up the pieces but until then, you’re going to move forward with your own healing but are holding off on the marriage.

At that point, you need to show him that you are going to live your life.  It’s important that you don’t display weakness by begging him to break it off or by pointing out how much he is hurting you. As appropriate as this might be, it puts you in a position of weakness and it doesn’t give him much incentive to end things.  But if he knows that he must give up his marital or intimate relationship with you while he’s making up his mind, he will have more incentive to come to a rapid decision.

As far as the other woman goes, I believe that you should have as little contact with her as possible.  Believe it or not, knowing that you are dependent upon her decisions will sometimes actually make her happy or give her a sense of power.  You don’t need that in your life.  I firmly believe that the less contact you have with her, the less power you give her over you.  And resorting to threats is something that you will likely later regret because nothing good will typically come out of this.  And you run the real risk of the threats only making things worse.

As hard as it was to let my husband come to his own decisions about our marriage, I knew that if I didn’t, I would always wonder if he truly wanted to be with me.  So I picked myself up and I waited.  And when he chose me, I knew that it was an authentic choice, which made saving our marriage easier. If it helps, you can read my story on my blog at http://surviving-the-affair.com

 

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