Infidelity Articles By Katie Lersch

By: Katie Lersch: Many wives understandably want their cheating husbands to feel the pain, uncertainty, and loss that they feel. It is very normal to want revenge when someone cheats on you. Therefore, many people wonder about the “best” or “most effective” way to even the score. Many wives wonder if leaving their husband is the best way to accomplish this.

Someone might say, “To say that I am furious about my husband’s cheating on me is an understatement. He is lucky that I have not done anything very drastic. As it stands, I am thinking about leaving him. He is begging me to stay. He is spouting nonsense about how he can not live without me. So I perhaps I will make him do just that. Some of my friends say that he is just posturing about his love for me and that leaving him may give him exactly what he wants – the space and time to continue his cheating. This is the last thing that I want. What I truly want is for him to be deeply sorry for his actions and to realize just what he has potentially lost. Is leaving him the best way to accomplish this?”

Before I answer that, I want to tell you my theory on getting revenge after an affair. After you read it, you may think that I am delusional. But I promise if you give it some reflection, you might understand my thought process. I came to this conclusion after my own husband’s affair. And believe me, I too wanted revenge. I definitely thought about leaving my husband.

What I Learned About Revenge: It soon became clear that lashing out at my husband with the intention to hurt him only spread the devastation around. It did not make me feel any better in the long run. It made me feel like I too had committed a marital atrocity when I knew that I was better than this.

After thinking long and hard about it, the only thing that was going to make the aftermath of the affair salvageable was my own peace of mind. People who say that happiness is the best revenge are absolutely correct. I decided that how I was going to escape the situation with my own well-being intact was to focus on what was happening with me, not with what was happening with him.

I will let you in on a secret. One of the best things about this whole plan is that while you are busy with your own self-care and self-improvement, your husband will watch from the sidelines and wonder if the new, self-improved version of you is going to have any room for him in your life. That is up to you to decide.

Ask Yourself What You Really Want: As far as whether leaving is the best revenge, the answer depends on whether not being with your husband is going to make you happier or give you peace. If you are not invested in your marriage anymore and can’t get out fast enough, then leaving may devastate your husband. But honestly, that is not the point. It really comes down to what will make you more content with the situation as it stands right now.

If in the future you may want to try to repair or marriage (or see if this is even possible,) then leaving might actually add regret onto the feelings you are already struggling to deal with. If there’s even a chance that you want to see if your marriage is salvageable, then leaving means that you are hurting yourself as much as you are hurting him.

Instead, you are better off asking yourself what steps you can take to make yourself feel better rather than to make him feel worse. I did insist that my husband and I take some time apart because I needed time. However, I wasn’t leaving him because I was unsure about what I wanted at that time. If I had left him immediately, I would have closed off several options – and that may have made me felt worse in the long run.

Once I realized that hurling pain at him was like a boomerang that brought hurt came back to me, I began to think in terms of what I needed and wanted to feel better rather than what I could do to make him feel worse. Although my self-improvement path did make him insecure sometimes, this was not my intention, but it did have its benefits.

The Bottom Line: To answer the question posed, in my opinion, leaving is only a viable option for revenge if doing so will make you happy. If you make him miserable but hurt yourself in the process, what is the point? If you take the high road, make yourself as strong, as stable, and as superb as you can be, he will feel the full effect of EXACTLY what he has put at risk. In my experience, this is the best revenge of all because it strengthens you and it makes him see the truth of his mistake. I don’t know of anything that is better than this.

When my husband realized how valuable the woman and the marriage he put at risk truly were, I knew that I had won.  There’s more about that here: http://surviving-the-affair.com

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