I understand what you mean. The emotions of the day rules the decisions made. That’s really tough because counseling might not even help. Have you thought her problems might be more than just emotional?

Thank you for the advertisement. I often fear that nobody reads anything I write on my blog outside of a small circle of regulars, so it is reassuring to hear otherwise. You should feel free to comment over there, though … it might liven up the discussions not to hear the same voices over and over again.

I’m not quite sure I understand your remark to Liza, however. On the one hand, I wasn’t looking for anyone to feel sorry for me even back when I first commented on this thread, way back in August. It was very sweet of Liza to say what she said, and I was touched by her generous remarks. At the same time, I had long since come to realize (and accept) that recurrent infidelity was just part of my wife’s essential nature, and that it had its roots deep in her personality. So I just accepted it (pain and all) as par for the course.

Has anything significant changed between August and today? My wife is still the most important person in my life, rivalled perhaps only by my children. Her heart still chafes under any kind of restraint, including the restraints of marriage. And yet she still desperately needs the security that only a stable marriage can bring her. She is still corresponding with (and mooning over) this barefaced charlatan on the Internet, who has persuaded her that he lives a romantic life in a foreign country when I have pretty solid evidence he lives in a dumpy apartment in the Midwest. And I am still watching her closely to make sure she doesn’t do something foolish for his sake, endangering herself or our family.

None of that has changed. In fact, the most significant change is that she seems slowly to be starting to doubt this fellow … she seems less ready to throw away everything she has to run off and be with him. This would be good news for me, VERY good news for our children, and even good news for her. I’m not sure we are out of the woods yet, but I am cautiously hopeful.

That’s all the big stuff in my life, and the changes between then and now are pretty subtle. Everything else — and yes, you can check out my blog for the details — is purely secondary, and is happening in the shadow of the big stuff. If all the rest of it vanished overnight, it would be too bad and all … but it wouldn’t be central to my life in any way. My priorities are absolutely unchanged.

Does this make sense?

Me, I grew up with an extended family of boys so we seem to just grunt and smirk in acknowledgement on most things.

So you can just imagine how our household is! Love the guy though and I’m trying my best to verbalize the reaction he needs from me.

Serial cheaters only take the “i’m sorry” approach to pacify, but once they don’t feel threatened…. they will just go ahead and repeat their appalling behaviour.

I do believe though, that some couples go astay because one pushes the other.

It’s true that there are men and women who will *say* they separate emotional love from physical monogamy. But in many cases I think they are fooling themselves. I follow a number of infidelity blogs — I mean, blogs written by cheaters about their lives. One of the biggest dangers they all describe is falling in love with the Other Woman or Other Man. So I think that physical infidelity can *draw* someone’s emotional love away from the spouse and towards someone else instead, even if the affair started out as a purely physical thing.

As for “reaping a benefit” … well, sure, in a sense that has to be true. Any time you decide to do something, it’s because of *some* benefit compared to the other choices. Staying in a marriage with a cheater is no exception. It is also true that you can never see inside somebody else’s marriage: I have friends who could never put up with the things I accept, and I could never put up with the things they accept. So it is no use making rules for someone else. That part is also true.

At the same time, you can decide to stick with something and still have it hurt.