SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

I made the decision that I would certainly not stay for my kids. Before DDay, I was ready to leave, as WH was being so horrible to all of us as he invested his time, care and effort elsewhere. I had everything arranged to go, as the atmosphere was an unhealthy one for all of us.
Since DDay, WH has made huge changes (albeit short term at the moment), showing up for the kids as well as me, apologising to them for not being there emotionally and making much more time for them. At the moment, he is the partner and father he should have been and probably never learned to be. He has taken stock of what he wasn’t doing and is acting accordingly. He seems actively surprised and delighted that giving some love results in getting some back.
Should he return to behaving as he did, regardless of cheating or not, I shall not hesitate leave, but I feel we all deserve to give Life 2 a go and see if these much better days continue.
It’s early days!

I did (in part). Regret it to this day. Lasted about a decade before it all ended. Some of the darkest days of my life and the cost to my soul was huge.

After a fashion, I suppose you could say that I only stayed because of the kids, although that's not entirely true.

When my wife and I got together, I was very clear with her that I did not want to be involved with someone who was involved with somebody else, and that I had absolutely no tolerance for cheating, no tolerance whatsoever. This conversation arose because I had had multiple married women approach me in the previous couple of years, two of them had approached me in just the six months before I met my wife.

Part of the conversation, she had just told me that she had something she "needed to tell me" and she was quite nervous about it, and I was expecting the bomb to drop and hear "I'm married" and we had just had sex for the first time, I had checked her fingers for rings, I had been in her apartment, and I hadn't seen any evidence that she was married, but one of the previous married women also had no evidence that she was married.

I told her at the time that if there was any cheating, I was out, that I wouldn't tolerate it, wouldn't be in a relationship with someone who was cheating on me or cheating with me. She said she felt the same way, this was very clear, there was no question about our positions.

However, she cheated on me after we had four children, dogs, pets, house, bills, tons of responsibility, and her oldest child was only eight years old.

No children = I would've walked out of there and that relationship with the way I was being treated without any hesitation. I didn't know the full extent of things for nine more years, but no way in hell would I have allowed what was going on at the time, if I did not have children who relied on me.

So regardless of who we are, unless we are entirely self-centered, having children drastically changes our decision-making when these things happen. I'm not saying that is right or wrong, it's just true for most of us. I would say our "freedom of action" is constrained by the very fact that we have children who depend upon us.

The other side of this is that I actually loved my wife, I would never treat her the way she treated me, and when the full extent of the cheating became known, it was hard to reconcile with the person that I knew.

I suppose most of us would put up with a lot of shit for a period of time from somebody that we really love, the more we love them, or the more codependent we are, the longer we would put up with that shit, but at some point, we all reach our limit.

The reality is that when she was cheating on me, I was in a no-win situation, and when she really confessed, I was in a no-win situation again, where there was just no really good answer to anything except to try to get through the situation and figure out what to do overtime, over years, and try to make things better. Partly that's driven by me. My general attitude in life is take what I have, try to make the best of it, without compromising my principles. I try to avoid making hasty decisions.

I suppose you could say that when I'm served a "shit sandwich" I eat it slowly, hoping that a very good dessert is served before I fill up with it.

It has now been 23 years since my wife's affair, my kids have all grown up, in the 12 years since her confession, things have been up and down, I never really got that really great dessert, I've never really finished eating the shit sandwich either.

I think kids might make a great reason to do your best to reconcile.
Probably a better excuse than most other reasons given for remaining in a marriage.
But I think staying for the kids is a really bad idea...

But... I think there are some key-elements missing in the equation.
Like... you can stay for the kids, but that’s not reconciling. The Big R is a completely different ballgame. Reconciling is a whole process, and successful reconciliation is an ongoing process where your work hard and regularly at keeping your marriage safe. It goes way beyond infidelity-recovery.
I have used this comparison before: It’s like after a big, life-threatening health-scare you might start planning and reevaluating major aspects of your life. You buy and read all these diet and healthy-eating books, you read all these home-finances books, you get the new go-faster sneakers and the spandex chafe-eliminating running gear and even a membership at a gym. This is your DECISSION to reshape your life.
Nothing will change until you start cooking and eating those healthy foods...
Your financial stress levels won’t lower if you don’t apply the wisdom of those home-finance guides...
You wont improve your physical health simply storing that gear unused in the closet...
Driving past the gym won’t get you healthy...

Once you start applying the tools you have gathered, once you repeat your daily jog and your twice-a-week gym sessions, manage your stress levels, deal with your issues... THAT is when the effort starts kicking in. A year later you might be in better shape physically and emotionally, but you would realize a couple of things:
Number one – that you might be able to cut down the intensity of your work. Maybe have a burger every now and then, and maybe only jog 3x a week. But you would probably not want to leave your new lifestyle.
Number two – that you could have done all these changes without that life-threatening health scare.

In many ways reconciling is comparable: You do some serious changes to your marriage (those changes include what is required to work out the infidelity) and then you maintain what you learned to ensure that communications, life-goals, personal goals etc are known and shared within the relationship. Although the infidelity recovery is a major part of the initial steps then the ongoing work is what could make the marriage what it should be.

But then – The question asked is "how many stayed for your kids" and not "how many reconciled because of the kids".

The posters on this site tend to be those dealing with active infidelity. If we had more long-term posters we could ask the logical next question:
How many of you that stayed for the kids left your marriage the minute junior moved out?

I think we would get a depressingly low response to that.

Bigger makes, a really good point, in my language "stayed" = "reconciling" but that's a language issue, and they truly are not the same thing.

So for clarity sake, If I did not have children, I would have made no attempt at reconciliation.

The only reason that I made the attempt was because if it was successful, it seemed like it would be better for the all involved. My children are all grown now. Was it the right decision? I don't know, I don't know what would've happened if we've gone the other way. It was just the best decision we could make at the time.

Reconciliation also does not mean people stay together. You can reconcile and divorce. I think reconciliation just means that you don't hate each other, try to understand each other, and try to treat each other well making sure each person is made as whole as possible after this kind of shit.