Infidelity

"When I found out that he had cheated on me, I felt sick. Then, something about the way he said it made me think, 'wait, I don't think this was the only time.' So I found my voice, and I kind of whispered as I asked him. And this wasn't the first time. Then I remembered what we'd learned in school, that when you make love to someone, you also make love to everyone that they've made love to before you, and you make love to everyone that each sex partner had had sex with too and I really felt sick. So now I'm going to my Doctor for tests that I never thought I'd have to take. I am so shamed and embarrassed."

"I won't date any guy who is only separated from his wife or is almost divorced because it always ends up being a lie. They're happily married, though if the wife knew what her dick of a husband was doing, she wouldn't be. Happy? She wouldn't be happily married. And where does that leave me? Once a cheater, always a cheater. A tiger doesn't change his stripes, ya know?"

"I Google every guy I meet. I have a blackberry, so I can do it from the Ladies room and they don't have any idea. That's how I decide on how the night is going to ...progress."

"If I ever found out that he was cheating on me, I'd KILL him. Not a court in the world would convict me."

"When he goes on business trips, I make him give me the Viagra before he goes."

"If he cheated on me, that would be the end. Right there, finished."

I've seen a lot of movies where a spouse cheats, and then despite all odds, they find their way back together and they live happily ever after. The divorce proceeding stop, dad moves back into the house, the kids are thrilled.

As they say, that's Hollywood. What I've seen in real life is just the opposite. If the infidelity doesn't kill the marriage immediately, the union limps along for a few years with no one looking happy and then dies.

A friend told me that she felt the infidelity was actually worse than if her husband had died because even though both scenarios would have ended with her alone and a single mother, she still had a living husband. That if she had been widowed, people would have given her sympathy and understood her grieving for however long it took. But with a divorce, there is no body. There is no funeral, there is no grieving. There is just the expectation that everything is divided in half (it isn't) and both parties snap into a new normal life and get on with it.

Speaking for my own marriage, I know that I could max out the credit card, use the household bill money to go on a shopping spree, total the car, do almost any awful thing, and Nate would forgive me. But one infidelity, and the marriage would be over. And I'd have to say the same goes for how I feel.