To Catch Your Cheating Spouse

Infidelity continues to ravage through marriages year after year and the letter sent to Dr. Miriam of Mirror.co.uk only proves this further. One husband’s letter discusses how his wife cheated on him by sleeping with his past best friend. He stated that he only learned about the infidelity when his former best friend’s son told him that he saw the two sleeping together.

The letter goes on with the husband stating that he has long suspected that something fishy is going on except that he thought that his wife could not meet up with the guy because he moved away. It was also noble of him to say that he longs to stay with his wife even after the affair. He thinks that they should start over and forget what happened.

Dr. Miriam’s response was wise. She said that it is best to discuss the infidelity issue with the wife, first, before heading on to other things such as starting over. She further admonishes the husband to openly share how he feels with his wife especially when the wife slept with another man. The bottom line is, the husband should let go of all his bottled emotions and allow his wife to come out in the open before they could work on rebuilding what was destroyed.

As it is true that marriages can recover from infidelity, the process that the couple has to go through can be harrowing. First, the admission of guilt, then the process of forgiveness. It takes time—much, much time and love for the couple to come out of the ashes and move on with a fresh life. The only way sure way to finally let go of the bitter memories is to forget that they even occurred—and this is difficult.

It would also help if the spouse who did the cheating would start to account his/her activities outside of the home. This does not mean incomplete trust from the honest spouse but this would help in establishing the broken value of trust. Also, it would help if the couple would spend more romantic moments together (going out on dates such as watching movies or dining out). There are so many other ways to conquer the obstacles of a ‘near-divorce’ and yet, what remains to be the most important would always be—love. This is the single ingredient that should not be missed on the process of recovery.

Valentine’s Day was not a good one this year for Basanti, an Indian woman who was found murdered, and allegedly because of her supposed infidelity. Basanti was found near a petrol pump. She was a resident of a slum, mother to three children, and wife to Narasingha Jena, a man who is now under suspicion for her murder. Jena, age forty-three, is said to have dumped the body of his dead wife near the area before he burned it. Basanti’s remains have now been sent to a lab for a post-mortem review.

According to the preliminary investigation, the husband killed his wife, and then tried to burn her body afterward. The man is an auto-rickshaw driver, and he married his late wife almost a decade ago. A daughter and two sons completed their family. A few months ago, he had rented out part of his house to a man named Balakrishna; this man then had an illicit relationship with Basanti. Narasingha Jena had been hitherto unaware of the affair, until he caught Basanti and Balakrishna in the act only on the night before he murdered her in anger.

Both Balakrishna and Narasingha Jena are now missing. Balakrishna, moreover, cannot be traced (http://www.telegraphindia.com/1080215/jsp/nation/story_8903059.jsp).

There are very few statistics that deal with crimes of passion, and often, people think that such crimes exist only in the movies. Sadly, the human heart being what it is, crimes of passion are still quite replete, and many persons all over the world find themselves acting crazily after witnessing their spouses committing the grave, sometimes unforgivable act of adultery. Sometimes, even suspicion can drive a good many crimes to completion.

According to the National Center for Health Statistics (available through its official website at http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/), about half of the marriages in 2001 ended in divorce. It would be wrong to assume that all these marriages ended because of cheating, but it is tempting to impute such knowledge given the abundance of cheating cases.

If you are suspicious about your husband and wife cheating on you, start looking for telltale signs first before you jump to any conclusions – and keep your temper in check or you might end up behind bars for the rest of your life! Watch out for Valentine’s Day, when your spouse might have to find dozens of excuses to meet up with his or her lover. If you confront your cheating spouse about the issue of cheating in other couples, watch for his or her reaction: supporting cheating and its different permutations might be a sign that your spouse is trying to find justification for his or her actions.

Cheating is certainly not the way to go in any relationship, and it certainly isn’t the right thing to do. But according to an article, if you are a middle-aged woman who is trying to cope with a dry or unexciting marriage, then you may as well be having an affair; and if you are not giving it some serious thought, or if you do not have one already, then your behavior is unnatural.

The article mentions the case of a woman who, once her children were old enough, left her marriage and filed for divorce, and then started online dating through a special website. The article, however, qualifies that it is not praising infidelity – rather, it is seeing infidelity as natural when a marriage is dried out, and when a woman is forced to compromise her happiness in favor of security and obligation. The website itself, RSVP, has quite a number of older women looking for a second chance at love after having lived through bad marriages.

Other women in the article are truly having affairs and not filing for divorce. One is annoyed with her husband’s couch potato lifestyle, and went out to have an affair, which ended disastrously. Another woman was disappointed in her husband, and, with separate rooms from each other, she decided to revive her sex life, but with someone else. Another woman has dumped her boyfriend, leaving his cynicism behind to take up with another man. What this shows, the article says, is that women need intimacy and romance, not sex.

The article contends that women have their own mid-life crisis, in which they finally find that the children are able to fend for themselves, but they, as women, have not yet grown fully or experienced their life to the fullest. Of course, not all women are the same: there are those who are in fulfilling and happy marriages, and there are women who age well, finding ways to mend their marriages or cope with potentially dry and boring lives. And still, there is another group of women that will resort to dealing with the situation by escaping into different hobbies, such as plastic surgery, parties with friends, gossiping, and the like. The insights in the article, therefore, should not be thought of as applicable to all women.

According to the National Center for Health Statistics about half of the marriages in 2001 ended in divorce – an alarming number that is not necessarily reflective of any signs of cheating, but one that is frightening all the same.

Movies, books, songs, and other forms of art often portray man as the unfaithful lover and woman as the betrayed and jilted partner. Their roles are, however, found to be virtually interchangeable today.

Accord, a Catholic marriage counseling service, saw 10,000 couples sign up for their help in 2006 as an active bid to save their relationships and marriages. More than one-tenth of that figure encountered trouble due to a single or multiple acts of infidelity of a partner.

Eithne Kellegher, one of Accord’s marriage counseling specialist, reveals that one of the most surprising results of their surveys was the likelihood of women cheating their husbands were fairly equal with the possibility of men cheating their wives. She believes that changes in society could be one of the major reasons behind this unexpected trend with more and more women working longer hours, having more career opportunities as well as greater degrees of independence and financial power.

Kellegher also cited technology as another possible reason for the surprising ratio of infidelity for women. Feelings of betrayal when their husbands participate in chat rooms or visit pornography websites could incite wives to return the favor.

Then again, a journal Hormones and Behavior made the previous year how women may be more prone to committing infidelity simply because of hormonal changes. This may seem preposterous but if temporary insanity could be an acceptable defense then who knows if hormonally driven impulses of sexual infidelity could be deemed legally acceptable as well?

Going back to the report from Accord, it further revealed how women are also more inclined to confess about their acts of marital infidelity than women. In the study, forty-five percent of unfaithful spouses, majority of them women, had heeded their guilty consciences and confessed to their sins.

Ultimately, Kellegher declared that women are the ones who decide the fate of their marriages. Which way the wind blows would depend greatly on various factors such as the feelings of the couple, type and degree of betrayal, how it was discovered, the condition of the marriage and relationship prior to the betrayal and its discovery, and the presence of children.

If two married partners desire to save their marriages in spite of former mistakes, they should be prepared to make difficult adjustments. Partners who had committed adultery should not be constantly raked over the coals for past transgressions. And lastly, space must be provided when needed.