Forget The Other Woman — Your Husband Is To Blame For His Affair
You might want to set her house on fire, but that's a terrible idea.
Gladskikh Tatiana / Shutterstock Ever been cheated on? The betrayal hurts right in your gut. It feels like you want to scream and cry and hit something. The betrayal is so visceral you feel like questioning everything while simultaneously screaming, "Why did you do this to us!?!"
It makes you wonder if your spouse ever loved you or if anything they said was true.
No one ever knows how they'll react to being cheated on before it happens. We may believe that we'd leave straight away, but that remains to be seen until it actually happens.
We may have suspected cheating for months. We may be on the verge of a breakdown, wondering if we're crazy and if all those late nights at the office meant something more. Once the truth appears, and our worst fears are realized, it’s hard to tell how to get over heartbreak and how we'll actually act.
We might think we'll leave him without a trace, but that's often easier said than done.
Will we go to the other woman's house and set her lawn on fire? We might certainly feel like it. Will we forgive? Does he even want forgiveness? Was it a one-time drunken mistake or a years-long romantic affair? Did he lie a lot?
There are so many potential situations and reasons why men have affairs. After the initial gut punch of shock, it's easy to start thinking about the other participant in the action: the other woman. Who is she? Did she know about me? Why would anyone tear up my family? Does he love her?
If he promises he doesn't love her, and it was "just a fling," we might feel hope, as though his affections haven't been transferred once and for all, away from us.
Then, with enough consideration and mental gymnastics, sometimes we transfer fault over to her. The other woman isn't always in front of us, after all; unless we catch them together, she's often a construct, an idea.
Sometimes, she is so very real to us: our best friend or our sister. Sometimes she was a random woman from a bar. Sometimes we feel compelled to search her out and tell her who we are and see what her reaction is like.
Is she prettier, smarter, or better off than us? Why was he interested in her? Does she have something I don't? Why her? There are so many questions.
Whoever she was, we take the responsibility squarely off our spouse's shoulders and spread it around like fertilizer. Some of it lands on us, and we think, "Maybe I didn't give him enough sex," or, "I've been distant lately; maybe this is my fault."
It's so easy to internalize cheating and make it somehow our fault. If we're particularly lacking in a healthy support system, our "friends" may actually say, "Well, it's your fault — you've gotten frumpy."
Ouch. No matter what anyone says, it's likely not as vicious as the thoughts that race through our heads about ourselves.
If our spouse wants to reconcile, we may want so desperately to believe our spouse's pleas for forgiveness are genuine and that he would never do it again. We would love to believe that he really was temporarily insane, and this other nasty siren was the reason why.
We want to think that it can't happen again — and that the mistress was a unique opportunity. So we pack up the blame neatly and push it over to the other woman, telling ourselves she is most certainly the real culprit. After all, how could anyone parachute into another woman's family like that?
The problem with blaming the other woman for our spouse's infidelity is that it keeps us stuck. Since we've subtly shifted the blame away from the person who was supposed to care about us, who promised to be faithful and never cheat, we remove his ability to show us who he is.
Good or bad, angel or demon, we take his responsibility away. If we delude ourselves into believing that he's a hopeless creature negatively influenced by this siren, the other woman, he can neither take true responsibility and repair our relationship nor own it and ride off into the sunset.
We've given his power away without his consent. After all, he was the adult who made the decision to stray.
Some women argue that if no women got involved with men in long-term relationships, it would "solve infidelity," and no one would be able to cheat. This is a silly notion since it leaves out the possibility that the other woman could have been lied to entirely — he could have never told her he was married or told her that you were a demon. The other woman, after all, is just a woman.
It's easy to believe that a man's marriage is "nearly over" and his wife "starves him for attention." It is also relatively uncommon for a man to announce to his mistress that he's perfectly happy with his wife and that he really wants to get his rocks off with different people under the veil of secrecy.
That's why placing blame on the other woman innately misses the point. Your spouse was the one who went outside the marriage. The blame lies squarely with him.
If it was him, and only him, moving forward in whatever way you choose — forgiveness or separation — is finally possible. Clarity is within reach.
If we keep blaming her, someone outside our marriage, someone else, the hard work of change is just that much harder, for if this magical creature could seduce him, couldn't he be seduced by any magical creature that comes along at any time?
If he's looking for forgiveness, we really can't give it if he wasn't to blame in the first place.
Elizabeth Stone is an author, dating coach, and personal development coach who helps women restore themselves in order to improve their relationships.