SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

We hear about their "whys" all the time.

The internet is flooded with them. Podcasts, therapists, forums, books—all dissecting the anatomy of a betrayer’s choices. We are told about the loneliness. The neglect. The mid-life crises. The coping mechanisms. The deep, unmet childhood needs. We hear about how they just wanted to feel alive, how they felt invisible, how they needed to feel seen, admired, and pursued.

We are forced to learn the vocabulary of their reasons just to make sense of the rubble they left behind.

But there is a massive, echoing silence in the conversation when it comes to the other side of the bed. Nobody ever asks about our whys. Nobody asks the betrayed husband why he stayed faithful.

Because let’s be entirely honest here, we had the same reasons to leave.

Do they think we didn't feel lonely?
Do they think we didn't feel invisible?
Do they think we didn't notice when the intimacy dried up, when the conversations became purely transactional, or when the person who used to look at us with fire in their eyes started looking right through us?

I knew what it felt like to sleep next to a stranger. I knew the heavy, suffocating silence of a house where the warmth had gone out. I knew what it was like to go to work, pour my soul into providing, and come home to a reality where I felt like a ghost in my own living room.

I had opportunities. The world is full of flashing screens, casual glances, and doors that are easily unlocked if you’re willing to turn the handle. I had moments where a cheap hit of validation would have felt like water in a desert. I too was dehydrated to the point of collapse.

So why didn't I take it? Why didn't I step over the line?

Here is the truth about our "whys."

1. I Refused to Turn Reality Into Fiction
The first why is simple, but it is heavy, Character isn't what you do when the lights are on and everyone is clapping. It’s what you do in the pitch-black dark when you think you can get away with it.

I stayed faithful because my integrity is not dependent on my wife’s performance. It is dependent on my character. When I stood at that altar and made a promise, I didn't sign a contract that had an escape clause for when things got difficult, boring, or lonely. I gave my word. When a real man gives his word, that word should mean something. Mine was the currency of my soul.

If I lie to her, I destroy my own reality, I have to wake up every morning, look at myself in the bathroom mirror while shaving, and know that the man looking back at me is a fraud. I stayed faithful because I valued my own self-respect far too much to exchange it for a temporary high. I wanted to keep the right to look my wife in the eye every single day with absolute transparency.

2. The Weight of Our Children’s Eyes
I looked at our children, and I saw the future. I knew that every single choice I made in the dark would eventually find its way into the light of their lives. I didn't want our son to learn how to compartmentalize a secret life. I didn't want our daughters to grow up thinking that love is something you cheat on when the weather gets rough.

I wanted to be a fortress for them. A fixed point. A man they could look at twenty years from now and say, "My dad walked through the fire, but he never burned down our home."

Their safety, their innocence, and their ability to trust human beings for the rest of their lives was a weight I refused to drop just because I was having a bad year. My temporary loneliness was nothing compared to the permanent wreckage of their childhoods.

3. I Knew the Math of the Exchange
I stayed faithful because I understood the catastrophic math of betrayal.

I knew that you cannot build a real life on a foundation of secrets. I understood that the thrill, the texts, the hidden meetings, they aren't real life. It’s a cheap, synthetic drug manufactured in a vacuum where there are no bills, no sick kids, no history, and no responsibilities.

It is a fantasy.

And I refused to trade a diamond for a handful of cubic zirconia. Like having a steady career versus a one time payday.

I knew that if I took that first step, I would be paying interest on that single decision for the rest of my life. I knew that a few minutes of relief, a few weeks of excitement, or a few months of feeling "seen" would cost me our home, our family structure, our peace of mind, and my soul. I looked at the trade-off and realized: it is never worth the price.

So to every betrayed husband out there who is sitting in the quiet right now, wondering how you stayed true while they wandered off: remember who you are.

You didn't stay faithful because you were blind, or stupid, or because you didn't have feelings. You didn't stay faithful because you lacked the desire to be wanted.

You stayed faithful because you are strong. Because you understand that love isn't just a warm emotion you feel when things are easy, it is a daily, deliberate decision to protect what you built. It is the choice to take your loneliness, your anger, and your hurt, and bring it into the marriage to fight for it, rather than taking it outside the marriage to destroy it. I tried to talk, I tried to explain, the best I could. Avoidance was her comfort disguised as a deflective shield.

They can keep their complex "whys" and their long lists of justifications for why they broke the world.

My why is much simpler, much quieter, and infinitely more powerful.

I chose honor over escape. Every single time.

Really interesting post Gemmy.

This bit caught my eye:

I stayed faithful because my integrity is not dependent on my wife’s performance. It is dependent on my character.

That’s very true. But for me at least, I do think there’s some component of external validation in it too. That is to say, I enjoy my reputation as being honest. (My name’s not really Frank, it’s just a nickname I got many years ago due to my penchant for being blunt.) I value the fact that others view me as a man of integrity. I’m not saying that I’m like that ONLY because I like being viewed that way. I’m just admitting that I do - it’s the honest thing to do

It’s easy to over-generalize about infidelity; obviously not all situations are the same. But people who have affairs…there just has to be some defect in their ability to feel empathy. It just has to be broken. My wife moved to a part of the country she wouldn’t have chosen to be with me, far from her family. She gave up her (very promising) career to raise my children. I don’t want to lose her because I love her to death, but also, I just couldn’t do it to her. I just imagine how hurt she’d be, having done what she did to her life just to be with me…I’m just not going to do that to her.

Gemmy, I really like your post. It's so true - everything is focused on their why, their pain, their problems. We are working on our marriage and talking a lot and I'm doing the vast majority of the of the listening. It's all about him. I have started talking about the consequences to me, but only what I think he's ready to hear. He's not fully understanding what he has done yet. It's all about them.

And, yes, Frank, I do think there is a lack of empathy. To do what he did for so long... My bed, my guest bed, my couch, my and the kids towels, my car, my shower and toiletries. Spending money while telling me we were in so much trouble that I cut my and the kids spending entirely and picked up more work. He took a woman to all of my favorite places. I told him I think he was pretending she was me. It is so cruel to do what he did. No empathy at all for me or the kids. I actually still can't figure out how my best friend, teammate, lover did this to me. How can they all do this and then lie and cover it up? Act like everything is the same when they just ruined everything?

Gemmy, your post reminds me to be proud of me and who I am. My integrity, my honor, my honesty, my dedication to my family. Thank you!

Gemmy

That was beautiful! Thanks for sharing.

My marriage was also not perfect. I had lots of reasons to cheat if I wanted to as well, and many opportunities if I had been open to them.

I couldn't do it for many of the same reasons you list. I try to be as honest and fair as I can. I hate the idea of living a lie, and I hate the idea of hurting the ones I love. Ultimately I made a vow, and it wasn't just cheap words. I meant it.

The difficult part about this situation is that marriage vows are two sided, and don't really make sense otherwise. So now where are we at?

Anyway.

I appreciate the post, and wish I was as eloquent with my words as you are.

I teach a class on Behavioral Economics, a field that focuses on what truly drives human choice, not the sanitary stories about rationality that we like to tell ourselves. A good look at how the sausage is really made is deeply sobering.
I’m a physicist by education, engineer by trade. I came up thinking that the way to make decisions was to be dispassionate, let the data do the talking. Turns out that was bullshit because all decision making is inherently an emotional process. To choose something a person has to feel good about it, or at least less bad than the alternatives. Our heart is our decision compass and we follow it.
I had to really wrestle with that because it did not easily reconcile with the pocket protector nerd whose identity is tied up with rationality. But reconciling them actually isn’t that hard. You just have to love truth, and you have to hate lies. I realized that I pursued physics not because I was dispassionate, exactly the opposite. I did it because it thrilled me to understand the truths of the universe. It gives me a revulsion in my gut when someone proposes something that violates reality.
I think this extends across our lives, and it’s just another way of saying what I understand you to be saying. Our "why’s" are that we valued truth. We loved goodness, honor, faithfulness. And people don’t write books about that because that is what is expected of us. People are fascinated by the dysfunctional and take for granted the expected. But when you realize just how common this bullshit is, maybe that definition of normal is unrealistic. Maybe your love of honor and truth is fucking heroic and worth celebrating.

Exactly my point and spot on @inkhulk

I love this post because often in the abyss of navigating life post betrayal, most bs feel at least a hit to their self esteem, while many actually feel their worth decimated by the total disregard of the ws. They often feel foolish, like a chump, question what did they could’ve shoulda woulda to prevent this. When in reality the fabric of their character is often something others should aspire to, and the ws’s decision to cheat ultimately had nothing to do with them.

Ones value is not found by the judgment or disregard of a ws. In fact, most people’s measuring stick is based on themselves. If I don’t value my own integrity, I am far less likely to value my partners.

If I do value my integrity I am going to expect a lot more from my spouse should the attempt of reconciliation path be chosen. And regardless of some of the things that came later in my own reconciliation process, I do think that his stance was similar to yours and he held my feet to the fire, not as punishment but it was clear he wasn’t going to be dealing with half assed effort. That was a gift to me. And that may sound strange, but I could write a lot about why.

I don’t think it’s a bs’s responsibility to identify or have empathy for the whys of the ws. I think the reason there is so much out there in whys is because if you don’t know what contributed to the affair, you can’t fix those things.

A bs will want to know because they will want to have some sort of ability to judge did those things change properly. But empathy is not required for that. You don’t have to care why, nor should anyone suggest there is ever a good reason.

There isn’t a reason one could give on God’s green earth that makes it okay. The whys are a marker of progress in the case you want to see if you have a good rebuilder in front of you or not. Otherwise, I am not sure they matter at all. They do to the ws who decides this isn’t who they want to be in the future with any partner.

But to celebrate your own values as a bs that’s amazing given where you are in your journey. I continue to be impressed with your insights and stances. This is an awesome post and I think it offers a lot of wisdom and hope for your fellow bs’s.

I can’t predict the outcome of your marriage but you are going to land on your feet just fine. So remember that on your days where you feel this less.

[This message edited by hikingout at 5:45 PM, Friday, June 12th]

Great post!
Something your words made me think about, that wasn’t directly addressed, but to me, becomes the whole point.
If we talk about a couple and the reasons why they are together, there’s always talk about compatibility and things in common etc, once they cheat, the most important component of compatibility is lost forever. Loyalty. If you don’t have that in common, what do you really have left? I value loyalty above everything else. You can’t have love or even friendship without it.

I'm a reductionist. So I'm going to reduce all of the reasons I've never taken a stroll down Infidelity Lane to one very simple tenet: infidelity is a deal-breaker. The rest, to me, is window dressing.

Gemmy, this is an excellent post. Thank you.

@hikingout

I have tried to explain to my wife that exact sentiment. Her why means nothing to me but rather means everything to her. She didn't understand and seemed to lay off of it due to my statements. She has been trying I know but I still catch her lying over small inconsequential things.

I hope she realizes really soon that my well has a bottom, and bare minimums are unacceptable to me.

Hikingout noted:

I don’t think it’s a bs’s responsibility to identify or have empathy for the whys of the ws.

While I absolutely agree — I found that for R, for the rebuild into a better M — me offering some empathy and understanding helped our efforts.

I didn’t owe it, and there is never a real reason or at least not a good one to choose the destruction of infidelity.

That said, for me, looking at why my wife chose to betray her own standards was a step toward understanding her overall.

FOO reasons are powerful, but they don’t excuse her choices, postpartum depression isn’t a reason to do what she did, but it is real, etc.

In our case, me taking the time to understand all the things she went through seemed to inspire her return to empathy and her trying to understand the scope and scale of emotional destruction she caused.

Again, it is not on a BS to do any of that, it just really helped us to get the relationship we wanted.

As to the list of my own why — I realized that my own boundaries and FOO issues weren’t a whole lot superior to my FWS — I’m no Saint, I kept myself off the slippery slope, simply because I didn’t want to cause her any pain.

I mean, I like that I held up my end of the deal, I just don’t know that I give myself bonus points for doing what I promised to do in the first place.

I didn’t give myself easily because even though my previous trauma, I valued and respected myself.

When I gave myself to a woman, I stayed faithful because I valued and respected myself, and my woman is an extension of that sentiment.

I won’t betray myself, I won’t betray my woman.

I have no need to prove any insecurity I might have had, or might have in the future, anything. Not at the cost of my self love and self respect.

If I don’t have that I might own the world, but have just nothing at all.