A Letter To The Wronged Wife
By: A. Nonymous
Tags: Life Lessons, Relationships, Marriage, This Happened To Me, Infidelity

A Letter To The Wronged Wife

Practical Advice from the Other Woman.

Photo by Kat J on Unsplash

Yep, I know this photo is how you’re feeling right now.

Yep, I know your life has just been shattered into a million pieces.

Yep … I know the news that the one person you trusted never to lie to you, has lied to you, repeatedly and in the worst way, has just blown away everything about your life you ever thought was true.

You can scream at me for being such a bitch later. You can tear into me for what a horrible person I am some other time.

Right now, you need to listen to me.

Because I’m about to give you the best advice of your life.

Right here, right now, here’s the one question you need to get the answer to, and you need it to be the right answer.

Why did this guy cheat?

Actually, we need to get more specific than that:

Did he cheat on me because he doesn’t care about me?

or,

2. Did he cheat on me because he does?

I know this looks like an impossible question to you right now. I know you are internally screaming and railing at me, saying, No one who cares about me could possibly ever do this to me!

The crucial knowledge I am trying to impart to you now is:

We need to divide the cheaters into two different groups, here. Deciding which cheater you have is going to decide the course of your life for the next few months … to years … to decades, even.

So, you don’t want to be wrong.

Group One: The guys who cheat because They. Truly. Don’t. Care. About. Your. Feelings. At. All.

We’re talking here about people with truly stunted personalities. People who grew up with basic deficits in the ability to care whether they hurt you or not.

People like narcissists, psychopaths, people with borderline personality disorder, or people who are so deeply into an alcohol or drug addiction that it’s running their whole life.

Some folks can be on a spectrum with disorders like this. They may not meet all the criteria for antisocial personality disorder, for example, but they still place their own wants and needs so far front and center in their lives that you aren’t really on the page at all.

Have you always felt like an accessory to this person? Is this the kind of person who’s always felt sort of shut down to you? Is this the kind of person who nags you all the time, about your appearance or weight, maybe, or who you can’t come to with any kind of problem you feel in the marriage and feel heard? Did it start out like a dream, and then — BANG?

How did this guy treat girlfriends you know about before you got married? Did he cheat on any of them? Have you found out that he’s been unlawful or dishonest in other areas of his life?

How does he treat your children? Is he a really caring and involved father with the kids, or do you sort of feel like you’re all there as part of his “show,” but emotionally he’s not really there for you? Have you felt like you could count on him in the past, or have you had this kind of I-can’t-reach-him, he-treats-us-like-we’re-not-good-enough kind of feeling? For how long?

If, as you look back, you’re getting this kind of vibe and nodding your head as you read, you might benefit from a few sessions with a counselor who can help you decide if you’re really with a jerk and should just bail out.

Some people have chronic problems feeling empathy with other people, even those who sometimes seem for all the world as if they can and do. I had a mother with serious borderline traits who had so much empathy with animals you would have thought her a deeply good and caring person. And, in truth, she was.

But she had a curious blind spot when it came to me. She let my kid brother pick and pick and pick on me, even though I was also getting hazed by cruel schoolmates at the time. Always she took up for him, no matter what he did, and called me a “touch-me-don’t.”

One day I realized that she would never let him pick on our cat the way she let him pick on me.

When you realize that someone treats a cat better than they treat you, you’re looking at one of these personality disorder spectrum problems.

Obviously, you can’t always make a snap judgment about this. Please go to a counselor and talk this over. But if you are with a person who has this type of problem, chances are this may not be the first time he’s cheated. It’s just the first time he got caught. It probably won’t be the last time he cheats, either.

These are the kinds of guys you need to bail out on. God knows what he’s told his mistress; he’s using the … out of her, too.

However, then there’s …

Group Two: The Guy Who Cheats Because He Cares About You

I know. This one’s tough.

This one is really, really difficult to understand.

How could he do this to you if he cares about you? Doesn’t the very act of cheating mean he doesn’t care about your feelings at all?

Here’s where you have to look, very, very carefully, at your interactions in the home. I know, because I was with one of these guys.

Did you think you were with the perfect husband and father? Is he great with the kids? Does he enjoy them and love to be with them? Do you have long, involved discussions about how they’re doing and what’s best for them?

Does he do what he can to please you? Have you been happy mostly? Do you feel secure, looked after, taken care of? Has he been your bulwark against a tough world? Have you been thankful you have him? Don’t know what you would do without him? Is he sweet, funny, kind?

This guy is cheating on you because he cares about you.

This guy is unhappy and doesn’t know how to talk to you about it.

He can’t even think of leaving and hurting you and the kids. But he’s grindingly, wrenchingly miserable, and can’t live this way anymore.

This guy perhaps has tried to talk to you and didn’t feel heard.

Or, he’s afraid if he tries to tell you what he’s unhappy about in your relationship, you will fall apart. You will get angry. You will attack him or ignore him, or call up your mother, your best friend, and two of your sisters and badmouth him.

Here’s where you need to get very still and be very, very honest with yourself.

You need to figure out whether you’re in Group One or Group Two without taking years about it because it’s going to affect the rest of your life in a big, big way.

Group One vs. Group Two is going to make the difference between wilting along in a sham marriage with a serial cheater who mouths all kinds of promises and then goes right along from chick to chick like a butterfly sampling meadow flowers … and then you find out about it five years later and here you are again …

Versus getting to the bottom of problems you didn’t know you had with a really good guy, and reestablishing your friendship and your marriage on a foundation that will never crack again.

A Group Two guy, you can do this with.

A Group One guy … you might as well forget it. These folks have deep-seated problems with empathy and with making other people a true priority in their lives. They will probably never change.

You need to know which group you’re in as soon as possible. Group One … split. Save yourselves.

And Group Two? This is the hard part.

Group Two? The most important thing you can do is figure out how to put your own pain aside enough to allow you to listen.

Listening, listening, listening, listening, listening.

That’s the most important thing you can do with a guy like this.

My guy talked to me because he couldn’t talk to his wife. He felt emotionally abandoned in the marriage.

He truly thought she didn’t love him, and because he was an adult child of an alcoholic and felt unlovable anyhow, he thought it was something he had done.

My guy used to tell me these bizarre stories about how shut down this wife was. I’m not kidding, half our time on the phone we would be puzzling over a tale like, “I just couldn’t seem to have this conversation with her. Her answers always seem veiled. I don’t know what she really thinks,” and we’d be telling each other: “Why would anyone do that? I don’t know!”

Other times he couldn’t talk to her because she would seize on a fault of his in a disagreement and shoot him down with it, or make fun of him in public. Needless to say, this couple had little connection in the bedroom.

I’ll be the first to say that this guy had low self-worth to begin with, so he was much less able than other men to go toe-to-toe with this wife and press to be heard, ask why she wasn’t in the mood for sex, or push for the connection he needed.

This was the kind of guy who was deeply concerned with whether everyone else’s needs were met.

His children adore him. His entire family looks up to him as a great husband and father.

But deep inside there was a sad little eight-year-old boy, hanging his head in his room alone, wondering why Mommy wouldn’t stop drinking and believing it must be him.

This is the Group Two guy.

If you realize you are with a Group Two guy, here is why listening is so important:

When Group Two guy realized he could talk to me and I didn’t treat him like this, he went off on a wild hair and moved out. We didn’t sleep together or speak more than once a month, but we made plans that we’d date once he was divorced.

Then Wife, shocked and stunned by his behavior, told everyone else in the family he was crazy and insisted on marriage counseling.

The second move was a good move.

(The first one wasn’t.)

I found myself summarily dumped when she got angry and told him all the problems in the marriage were his fault.

Two and a half years later, I heard from this guy again.

I heard things like, “She insisted on the marriage counseling, but then she acted like she really didn’t want to be there.” “She sort of slept through it.” “Things are going back the way they were.” “It was difficult to make any progress.”

And that was why I heard from him again.

Fortunately for this wife, I didn’t bite.

I could have. I could have sunk my teeth straight into this guy’s neck and dragged him right out of that marriage.

A lot of women would have. This was a tall, well-off, sweet, handsome guy.

My feeling was, this guy needed to learn to think for himself, and he wouldn’t if I stepped in and did it for him.

And I couldn’t do that.

Besides, a guy who underrepresents himself in his first marriage is a guy who will underrepresent himself in his second marriage.

One of the things you have to do in a marriage is, Present yourself accurately.

Even when you’re scared. Even when it’s hard. Even when your parents fought and fighting terrifies you.

Even when you think the other person will say unflattering things and you’re sure they’re true.

Presenting yourself accurately in a marriage means I know you and you know me. Arguing in a marriage means I know you and you know me.

It means we aren’t laboring for decades of our lives under a beautiful veneer of Things We Think Are True.

BUT: When one person has the courage to present themselves accurately, then the other person must listen.

Otherwise, two and a half years later, this is the situation. Two and a half years later, this is what I heard: “I made my bed, and now I have to lie in it.”

What’s the likelihood this guy will cheat again?

Group Two ladies, put your pain aside and get to work.

You have contributed to the problems in your marriage. This is painful to hear, but it is the truth.

Your willingness to get your mind around that now determines the quality of the rest of your life.

This ain’t the time to wallow in victimhood.

*My website.

*I write fiction based on this stuff. It’s free.