SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

After D-day, I found myself grappling with a question I had never had reason to consider pre-disclosure day. A silent, internal query that would continue to plague my mind and burden my soul for decades; "Was my wife’s infidelity proof that she did not love me?"

Many times, over the years post D-day, my wife, with teary eyes, has assured me that she loved me the entire 1 ½ years she was involved with another man. For decades it was hard for me to find comfort or confidence in her capricious assurances for my brain would become befuddled within the paradox. If she loved me, how could she push me to the margins, making me nothing more than an asterisk in her life? I used to believe love and betrayal were incompatible, opposing forces and yet, in my wife’s mind, they not only could run parallel with each other but also harmlessly function in a harmonious, dual dance.

As the years passed and the pain subsided into a manageable state where my mind is less muddled, I have come to understand that my wife did love me while at the same time betraying me. I have concluded that her love for me had nothing to do with her decision to bring another man into our bedroom, thus her love for me was powerless to impede her dreadful choice to cheat. Something else must be at play.

It took me a long time to detach from the concept that love is the gatekeeper against infidelity.

Asterisk

I think that love is such a broad term that it has very limited usefulness. You can love ice cream, travel and your dog. I love my kids and would suffer and die for them, but I wouldn't bother with their opinion about my sex life. I love my wife and her opinion about my sex life is in the center of my devotion to her. I'm sure my cheating ex loved me in some way, maybe like a dog lol, but it wasn't love adequate for our relationship.

So now we have a new term adequate love. If you hypothetically set your wife down, agreed on some discriminators that narrow down how her love for you should be to be adequate and then you asked her if she loved you adequately, the obvious answer would be no.

[This message edited by Itiswhatitis000 at 9:54 AM, Wednesday, November 4th]

I was listening to a clip by a woman who was imprisoned for 5 years due to some serious fraud. She was answering questions from viewers, and one question was if she had a "girlfriend" in prison. She said no and cited moral reasons. Mainly – that if her husband was on the outside holding the fort, tending to their children and supporting her, then she had the moral obligation to remain faithful.
[Have to say I sniggered a bit hearing someone that was sentenced for serious financial fraud talk about morals, but that’s material for a totally different thread… Suffice to say that I believe people can change and make amends to their lives].

She did say one thing I find deep and totally agree with: She said that she was 100% certain her husband had been faithful for those five years. Not because he loved her, and she had no doubt he did, but because he valued himself. His sense of self-value made it "impossible" (her words) for him to cheat.
I think there is a lot of truth in that. I don’t agree on the "impossible" part – values are only worth how much we hold on to them – but I do think spouses that don’t cheat despite opportunity or even wish to do so due to a sense of self-value. In some ways that self-value can be viewed as love – self-love.

I think that in the vast majority of infidelity the "cause" is within the WS. As in lack of self-worth or validation. Maybe not a direct "I’m worthless, therefore I need to cheat", but maybe more "I’m fantastic, and to confirm it this person is showing me romantic and sexual interest. I better confirm how great I am by jumping into bed with them".

So yes – she probably loved you. But something tells me she didn’t love herself.

The old rule "place the mask on yourself before helping others" applies here.

This is why I think it is important to distinguish between love[feeling, noun], loving behavior[action, verb], and the way one wants to be loved[infinitive verb]. They are definitely different things, and we can't say for sure what is or isn't happening in someone else's internal world because we aren't privy to it. All we can observe and directly experience is their outward behaviors and our own internal worlds.

ETA: and then there's the separate aspect of whether one feels loveable [feeling, adjective] and how that affects their behavior...

[This message edited by GotTheMorbs at 12:25 PM, Wednesday, November 4th]

self-value can be viewed as love – self-love.

100% Agree. IMO, people love others only as much as they love themselves.

SL

I like Alain de Botton’s view that love as a skill. A complex human skill that, like all skills, can be improved upon with effort, self-awareness and education. Also like human skills, it comes more naturally to some.

I think Bigger’s right, the issues the cause the infidelity come from within the WS. And one of those problems that those WS’s that cheat despite loving their BS’s have is that - and I’m not being facetious - they suck at loving.

I’m sure it’s often the quest for validation, be it due to insecurity, vanity, emotional immaturity or just selfishness. And also agree with Bigger’s point that she may not have loved herself. When I read that, I take it to mean: she could not have, if pressed, identified some inner core that was her, some sense of herself that she knew who she was and was ok with it. Because if she could have, surely part of her inner core identity would have been Asterisk’s loving and faithful wife, and that, if we are to believe that she did indeed love you, Asterisk (which I take as given), that she would have liked that. (I’m not suggesting that we must define ourselves solely in relation to others, just that it does form part of our identities).

If you cannot see who that person is inside, it can be hard to know what to do or to refrain from doing. If I know that I am a Christian, as an example, then that comes with a particular moral code that I can refer to. If you don’t really know who you are, you don’t have that touchstone, and you don’t have the built in guidelines that says I won’t do this because it’s not who I am.

+++++++

I also like the take on love that it’s pedagogical, which is apparently how the Ancient Greeks viewed it. That love is fundamentally two people educating each other - " a benevolent process whereby two people try to teach each other how to become the best versions of themselves." I feel like that idea is kind of the Northstar for reconciliation.

Boy, this is a question that's been haunting me a lot lately.

How could she have loved me if she cheated on me?

She must not have.

But then everything she says and does now screams that she loves me. She didn't just snap back into love overnight. There must have been something there all along. But what was it?

I told her "I love you" one day and she said "I love you more." That actually kind of made me angry. I said that I think that's objectively not true because I at least loved her enough to remain loyal and faithful, even when I was also unhappy and presented with opportunity. More than once. I didn't cheat. She did.

So, what was it? She loved me the same way she loves ice cream? So since she has ice cream all the time that's why when she was presented with tiramisu she just couldn't resist?

I don't know. I'll never understand it. I wouldn't cheat on her. I know I wouldn't because I could have. I had a coworker, ten years younger than us and very attractive, literally throw herself at me at a bar one night when I was quite drunk. A group of us went to the bar around the corner from work after we finished our shift. She wanted to meet up somewhere that night. I could have gotten away with it that night. It might have blown up in my face later, but that night I could have totally gotten away with it.

I turned her down. I'm not going to lie and say I wasn't at least somewhat tempted, but thoughts of my wife, and my knowledge at the time that she would never cheat on me (yeah, right) combined with the fact that I actually do love her stopped me. I just couldn't do it. I just couldn't bring myself to cross that line. Even drunk.

That wasn't my only opportunity either, but it was the one time where circumstances were similar to my wife's circumstances. Another time was when one of my friend's girlfriends started hitting on me. She was a friend of my wife's, too. I turned that down also, and I told my friend about it. It didn't go over very well, but I think I did the right thing. I eventually told my wife about it, too. Tho that took a little longer.

And my wife doesn't even drink. Yet she still did what she did.

[This message edited by Pogre at 2:48 PM, Wednesday, November 4th]

Love wasn’t enough to stop infidelity, and love almost wasn’t enough to save us in R.

My wife and I decided our work to repair the M with love and more — be it love and listening, love and forgiving, etc.

What our M has become, is we both have learned it is all about how much we give of ourselves to each other, versus what can we take from the other (or the old what’s in it for me strategy we had before).

And as noted already in this thread, for my wife, her poor choices were not about me — it was a lack of love for her own self that opened the door to her fall.

The question understandably gets asked all the time, did my spouse love me DURING the A?

Maybe, but certainly not a HEALTHY love.

I also like the take on love that it’s pedagogical, which is apparently how the Ancient Greeks viewed it. That love is fundamentally two people educating each other - " a benevolent process whereby two people try to teach each other how to become the best versions of themselves." I feel like that idea is kind of the Northstar for reconciliation.

I like this a lot, it may be a better way to describe how my M is now.

Itiswhatitis000,

So now we have a new term adequate love. If you hypothetically set your wife down, agreed on some discriminators that narrow down how her love for you should be to be adequate and then you asked her if she loved you adequately, the obvious answer would be no.

I like the term you have added to this conversation "adequate love". At some point years removed from D-day while I was sharing my confusion over the issue that "If you loved me you wouldn’t have….." and what turned the tide on the "love" issue was when she restated she did love me during that time I quipped back; "You didn’t love me enough." To that, she agreed. I guess that was my version of "adequate love". When I set my statement " you didn’t love me enough" side to side to your suggested description; "adequate love" I confess that your version is more accurate than mine.

Asterisk

Bigger,

So yes – she probably loved you. But something tells me she didn’t love herself.

I cannot disagree with your statement above. I think that my wife would not disagree with it either. One of the good outcomes of her affair was it tore off the mask she had created that she thought would protect herself from her family of origin and from her (and mine) extremely conservative Christian faith’s teachings. Neither would allow her to own and love who she was then and, as we have both discovered, would fight tooth and nail to revert her back to what they had forced her to capitulate to.

It took years of hard work on both of our parts to detach from old belief systems giving my wife the freedom to be herself and I adore, admire and deeply love the real "Mrs. Asterisk". I just wish that we could have gotten there a different way. :(

Asterisk

GotTheMorbs,

This is why I think it is important to distinguish between love[feeling, noun], loving behavior[action, verb], and the way one wants to be loved[infinitive verb].

My goodness GotTheMorbs, this is a brilliant insight that I simply missed. If my English teacher mom were still alive, she would be horrified that I did.

I think you are on to something. It was "loving behavior" where the disconnect stimmed. She could hold in her heart the noun aspect (she loved me) while simultaneously betraying the action aspect (an unloving act). I appreciate the distinction for it really helps me wrap my mind around the false narrative that; "if she loved me she wouldn’t have…".

Asterisk

Still-Living,

100% Agree. IMO, people love others only as much as they love themselves.

I also agree with but maybe only with about with a margin of about 85% plus or minus. Thanks for adding to the conversation.

LetMeBeFrank,

I also like the take on love that it’s pedagogical, which is apparently how the Ancient Greeks viewed it. That love is fundamentally two people educating each other - " a benevolent process whereby two people try to teach each other how to become the best versions of themselves." I feel like that idea is kind of the Northstar for reconciliation.

"two people try to teach each other how to become the best versions of themselves" and that that "is the Northstar for reconciliation". Those two lines bring tears to my eyes. I will integrate that into my thinking when doubts leach into my thoughts. My wife and I have spent 35 years working at becoming the better version of ourselves and, I believe, have been very successful and have a marriage now that reflects that success. Sometimes I self-bleed from a wound long past healed. Thanks for the reminder.
Asterisk

Oldwounds,

Love wasn’t enough to stop infidelity, and love almost wasn’t enough to save us in R.

My wife and I had also concluded that "love wasn’t enough to save us in R". Again, as with the false conclusion the love will hold against infidelity, love alone will fail at reconciliation. That idea is too simplistic, it takes, as you so well put it;

our work to repair the M with love and more — be it love and listening, love and forgiving, etc.
What our M has become, is we both have learned it is all about how much we give of ourselves to each other, versus what can we take from the other (or the old what’s in it for me strategy we had before).

Asterisk

Glad it helps, Asterisk.

I got a lot of pushback on those distinctions in the past (I think because a lot of BS can't conceptualize separating the feeling and the behavior, because they've never acted in discordance with their own feelings of love for their spouse) and have even been told, insistently, that I could not have loved my BH [enough] if I could behave so unlovingly during my A (which triggered me a lot because who knows my own internal feelings better than I do? And I had zero doubt at all that I loved my H dearly) But if it helps even one person to think about the distinctions, it is all worth it.

ETA: I feel some annoyance at the implications that the spouse who is unfaithful must not have loved [feeling] their spouse "enough" to remain faithful, or that faithful spouses necessarily love [feeling] their WSes "more" than the WS loved them. Fidelity (or the lack thereof) [behavior] is generally dependent on a variety of factors: one's values, priorities, relationship with themselves, stress or marital conditions, opportunity, quality and fortitude of boundaries, trauma, willingness and/or ability to rationalize, the desire to escape or be someone else, the environment they grew up in... In combination with personal choice. It's not as simple as "if you love [feeling] your spouse in terms of sufficient quantity or intensity, you won't cheat."

There are certainly faithful spouses who don't love [feeling] their partners, unfaithful spouses who don't love [feeling] their partners, faithful spouses who love [feeling] their partners, and unfaithful spouses who love [feeling] their partners.

And all of that is independent of how a given spouse needs their partner to behave in order for them to feel loved, and what behaviors they will accept or won't in said partners.

[This message edited by GotTheMorbs at 4:07 PM, Wednesday, November 4th]

A couple of years after d-day, I read a comment from a WS that made me understand how a WS could love their BS even while cheating. It made perfect sense, but I wasn't ready to accept it, and I've forgotten what the WS wrote. I have, however, remembered that a WS may love their WS even while cheating.

My W claimed to have loved me all during her A. Neither her IC, who was also our MC, nor I bought it. An A is simply not loving behavior. But the fact that so many WSes make the claim says to m that miscommunication is more likely than lack of love.

The fact that a WS loved their BS during the A doesn't do much, if anything, to mitigate the pain.

Perhaps a corollary of Oldwounds's statement is: love is essential to R, but it sure isn't sufficient.

*****

I spent a long time and a lot of effort learning to love myself. My W's A made me question that. It took longer than I liked to get back to loving myself whether my W loved me or not. I wonder if A BS's focus on whether one's partner loved the BS is connected with the attack on self-love that is launched so effectively by an A, whether the WS intends that or not.

GotTheMorbs,

I got a lot of pushback on those distinctions in the past (I think because a lot of BS can't conceptualize separating the feeling and the behavior, because they've never acted in discordance with their own feelings of love for their spouse) and have even been told, insistently, that I could not have loved my BH [enough] if I could behave so unlovingly during my A (which triggered me a lot because who knows my own internal feelings better than I do? And I had zero doubt at all that I loved my H dearly) But if it helps even one person to think about the distinctions, it is all worth it.

GTM, I am sorry you received some painful "pushback". I want to share something with you that might help.

I have read a lot of the things that you have written, many on my threads, and I have valued them in ways that I can’t value words spoken by other betrayed spouses. It is not that I don’t think highly of what my fellow betrayed's have to say, I do immensely. But I am aware that I am more in line with the pain and perspectives they feel and have, which colors my perspective. It is in the listening closely and with an open heart to waywards thoughts have helped me to offset. Oddly, it is reading thoughts from wayward’s that gives me some missing pieces of the puzzle and that helps me understand and empathize with where my wife’s mind was at, at the time she chose infidelity. That knowledge that you and some others here have given me over the past 1 ½ years has provided me untold peace and comfort. Thank you.

Asterisk

Sisoon,

The fact that a WS loved their BS during the A doesn't do much, if anything, to mitigate the pain.

True, but not all of my questions are about relieving the pain caused. In fact, I know when asking, that many of the answers will serve to create more pain. My goal is to try to understand, absorb, accept, and defuse my judging of my wife as a person. The voids make that much harder for me. However, if there is one thing that I have learned from being on SI is that I will never have the full story and I am in the process of making peace with that fact. I am not fully there yet, but that is not my wife's fault. That important result falls fully on my shoulders.

I spent a long time and a lot of effort learning to love myself. My W's A made me question that.

Lose of self-worth of a betrayed spouse is one of the worst results caused by a wayward spouse. Anybody that has been at this for a length of time knows that it is a false conclusion and must be addressed. Thanks for the reminder.

Asterisk

I can only speak for me.

The affair was a way to escape pain.

And before that, I felt emotionally numb.

And if you numb yourself long enough it does strange things like disconnects feelings of love, or caring about what happens to you personally.

There is often the thought that if you loved me you wouldn’t have been able to do it. And I would say that’s true to me. But I didn’t not feel love for things that belonged to him, my numbness would have existed no matter what he was presenting. I didn’t feel a lot of anything.

To me, ironically not having affairs is not a sacrifice or an obstacle. I did choose to have one but I never went looking for one or felt I was lacking in anything that I had to find elsewhere.

And then I found out I was lacking something that I was finding elsewhere but it was an artificially induced. The ability to feel something again. But it wasn’t the man, it was the adrenaline, dopamine, and validation that was making that numbness go away in favor of getting high. That’s what the affair was to me, getting high.

It’s not hard to understand when someone has a gambling addiction, it’s often the same way. Ignoring all the destruction and responsibilities by getting large hits of adrenaline and dopamine. And the contrast of the facing your reality is worsening so you keep doubling down on the thing that is making everything worse.

It may not be everyone’s experience but my affair was my darkest chapter. It is a time when I lost control of my life.

I think I have stronger gatekeepers than just love these days. Not only do I not ever want to feel the lows that I did, but I have a stronger relationship with my morals, a new perception of sex that no longer is shallow, and a new love and respect of myself.

So it’s very complicated for me, but certainly it’s not proof of my capacity to live my husband today. I can not change the rest of it, I just have to believe he is capable of grace.

[This message edited by hikingout at 1:29 AM, Thursday, November 5th]

I've ranted on love enough.

Suffice it to say love is far more likely to be used to justify infidelity than to prevent it.