Infidelity Articles By Katie Lersch

By: Katie Lersch: It’s no surprise that emotions run very high after an affair. It’s normal for the cheating spouse to feel shock, anger, sadness, or even hate. You’d expect these things because the faithful spouse is the wronged party.

What you might not expect is that many cheating spouses claim to have these same exact feelings. They, too, may claim to feel anger and hate – but it is supposedly aimed at themselves.

A faithful wife might say: ” To say my husband’s affair blew me away is an understatement. I feel like an idiot, but I didn’t see it, and I should have had some suspicions now that I look back on it, but I didn’t. I’m also floored by who he cheated on me with. These were both people in my life that I trusted, so it is a double betrayal.”

“Unfortunately for me, I have a lot of challenging things going on in my life right now. So my husband’s affair isn’t all that I’m struggling with. It’s just another terrible thing in a long line of them. And my husband knows this. So when he’s trying to apologize to me about the affair, he tells me that he knows I hate him for what he did. Because he knows that he’s added strife to my life at the last time I needed it.”

“He admits his behavior was immature and inexcusable. I responded by asking him how he knew I hated him. I’d said no such thing. Honestly, I haven’t said much because I’m still processing. But my husband said he knows I hate him because he hates himself. He says there is no way to avoid hatred on all sides after what he’s done. I don’t know how to respond to this. Why would he be so dramatic? Why would he say this?”

I can only speculate, but there are common reasons that men say targeted things after an affair. I’ll go over some of them below, as well as offer some suggestions on how to handle this. 

He’s Posturing and Trying to Get You to Say that You Don’t Hate Him:  What I’m about to say is going to sound a little weird – especially since I was the faithful wife. But a cheating husband who has recently been exposed is in a difficult situation – from a strategic point of view. 

If he throws himself at your feet, takes all the blame, and apologizes profusely, he may fear that you’re always going to think that you’re perfectly in the right so you can endlessly tell him what an awful person he is. As a result, he’s now looking at a lifetime of being the spouse who will never be able to live normally again.

On the flip side, if he acts indignant and puts up at least some defense, there is the hope that you’ll eventually back off – or at least partner with him since marital issues take two people to solve.

And then he could try a middle-of-the-road strategy – he could try to feel you out first to see where your head is. Knowing where you stand allows him to come up with the most effective strategy.  

By saying he knows you hate him, he’s inviting you to tell him whether you hate him or not.

This allows him to gain more information about where he stands while also appearing to confirm that he’s fully in the wrong. It’s a way to get you to show your hand, while painting him in a more remorseful light.

He May Legitimately Hate His Behavior: People often assume that spouses who cheat are heartless. After all, they’ve betrayed their spouse in such a brutal way. They’ve lied. They’ve been sneaky. They’ve shown a lack of respect for their spouse. They’ve exposed their spouse to unknown and potentially unsavory variables. 

Again, I’m not trying to defend anyone because I have been there. But, I’ve done much research and therapy around this topic. And many cheating spouses are living in a fantasy world. They compartmentalize because they must to carry out their cheating. Therefore, they aren’t thinking too deeply about how their actions might hurt their spouse. They are living in a reality where no one needs to know. So their spouse won’t be hurt and they won’t have to deal with the aftermath.

When they see your pain, it is almost a shock to them. Their alternative world comes crashing down, and they must now face a very painful and harsh reality of their own making.  

So yes, they can genuinely hate their part in this. They can hate their own actions and their own poor decision-making. They may hate that they can’t take any of this back, and they have to look into your hurt eyes every day and know they can do nothing about it.

What’s the Best Way to Handle This?: The optimal way to handle this depends on your and your husband’s temperament and how you communicate with one another, but I believe a straightforward approach is a good option. Try very hard to remain calm and not to feed into the drama.

Focus on what you want and what you need, not on what he’s saying to try to get a desired response. He can say and claim whatever he likes. But right now, you also need to take care of yourself. Try something like: 

“This situation is so fresh and so painful that I am going to take my time in deciding how I feel and what I want. Of course, I’m shocked and disappointed. This is a large and unexpected betrayal. But how I choose to feel or what I want to do moving forward remains to be seen and will largely depend on your actions and our ability to heal.”

That’s probably all you really need to say. Give yourself the time to watch what happens and reevaluate without allowing someone to force you to define exactly how you feel before you’re ready to do so.  

He may well hate himself, but your feelings are your own until you are ready to or want to share them.

I don’t think you can ever go wrong by focusing first and foremost on what you need to heal.  In the beginning of the aftermath of my husband’s affair, I thought about everyone else.  That was a mistake.  The real healing didn’t occur until I focused on healing myself first.  You can read more of that story at https://surviving-the-affair.com

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