Infidelity Articles By Katie Lersch

By: Katie Lersch:  I sometimes hear from people who are on the receiving end of a very infuriating excuse for an affair. Sometimes, the cheating spouse isn’t willing to take complete responsibility for his actions and shoulder all of the blame. Sometimes, he finds it preferable to shift at least some of that blame to his faithful spouse.

I heard from a wife who said: “I was honestly stunned to find out about my husband’s affair. I didn’t suspect anything at all. I honestly thought we were very happy. In fact, many of my friends told me that they wished they had a marriage like ours. Well, I guess it turns out that the joke is on me because I just found out that my husband has been cheating with the woman down the street who watches our children from time to time. I will admit that my words have not been kind and that my tone has been harsh when I have demanded answers from him. And the biggest question that I have is what made him betray me in this way. From day one, I have absolutely demanded answers about what would make a man with a good marriage and wife cheat. And last night, I was horrified and furious when my husband finally blurted out that I was partially to blame for his affair. He says that I have let our marriage go stale and that I have let myself go. He says I never laugh anymore and that I am no fun to be around. Also, he says that I am well aware that I don’t want to be intimate as much as he does. He says that we’ve had conversations about this and that I knew about his displeasure.  Even worse, he says that I almost gave him permission to get his needs met elsewhere. That’s only partially true. About a month ago, he told me that he felt he needed to have sex much more frequently or as much as once per day. I almost thought that he was kidding and I sarcastically told him that if he needed sex that much, perhaps he should go and find someone who was willing to go along with that schedule. But I was partially joking and I was partially trying to point out how impossible he was being. I wasn’t serious. And I refuse to take any of the blame. But at the same time, he is adamant that we share in the blame. What can I do? I will never admit fault. It was his affair, not mine.”

I could identify with this wife. And I agreed with her. But I also know from experience that sometimes, in order to heal, you have to step away from the subject of blame and to step toward what is needed to help yourself move forward. With that said, there is always a way to make your point even if you don’t allow that to keep you from getting what you need. I will discuss this more in the following article.

You Have To Decide If You Want To Debate This Further Or If You Want To Shelf It For Now In Order To Begin The Healing: Whether your husband will abandon this stance depends on how firmly he believes in what he is saying and on his personality. And some husbands are swayed by their wife’s insistence that she will not take an ounce of the blame while other husbands will just be inspired to continue to debate this endlessly.

In order to decide how to play this, you will often need to evaluate just how far your husband is going to take his assertions of blame. Sometimes, it becomes obvious that he’s going to cling to this excuse endlessly and if you are going to make any progress at all, you are going to have shelf this topic until you get some progress underneath you first.

Other times, you may notice him start to waiver on his stance and you might sense that he’s starting to see your point of view. Or he may sense that since you aren’t going to buy this excuse anyway, there’s no need to continue on with this stance.

Much of the time, you will have to watch closely to see which of the above scenarios is most accurate. And sometimes you have to realize that you don’t need to agree about this point immediately, although that should come in time. Sometimes, you are better off just worrying about where you go from here instead of how you got here (although that will eventually need to be worked through.)

Know That You Can Begin The Healing Even If You Don’t Agree On Every Variable: As I suggested, sometimes the best strategy is to try to make progress where you can. Often, as your husband sees that you just want to get your life back rather than to constantly punish him, he will realize that he has no incentive to keep playing the blame game. Often, this doesn’t happen until you begin to make a little progress. And you can’t begin to make that progress until you agree to at least some cooperation.

So you might want to make it clear to your husband that while his assertion makes you angry and that you feel it’s not accurate, you’ve decided that you just want to move forward and come back to that subject later. A suggested script may be something like: “I have to stress that I absolutely do not accept any blame in this. Regardless of the state of our marriage or of your satisfaction with it, there is never an excuse to cheat on your spouse. And I suspect that if the roles were reversed, you wouldn’t be very willing to accept any of the blame if I was the one who cheated on you. But it doesn’t appear that we are going to fully agree on this anytime soon. So I suggest that we agree to disagree on this topic for now. I suspect that we both might see things differently once we begin to rebuild our marriage and to heal. And we don’t need to agree on everything in order to do that. So let’s just place this aside from now and focus on where we go from here. Can you agree to that?”

People have told me that they feel as if this is giving in, but I disagree. Nothing says that you can’t come back to this issue later when some of the volatility wanes. And sometimes, you just have to skip an issue for a small amount of time in order to overcome it.

So while I absolutely agreed with this wife and I understood why she was angry, I also knew felt that as things got better between them, her husband might begin to take on more of the blame. Most people who cheat do know deep down that they are solely at fault. And claiming other wise is only posturing.

My husband tried to shift some of the blame onto me after his affair.  I made it very clear that I was never going to accept this excuse, but I also let it go because I wanted some progress.  After we rebuilt our marriage and the need to be so defensive was no longer there, he willingly took on all of the blame.  If it helps, you can read the whole story on my blog http://surviving-the-affair.com

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