Talk to anyone who has ever been caught in an affair, admitted to an affair, or seriously accused of being in an affair and one thing you will hear over and over is that nothing they do or don't do seems to make any difference. It is always hanging over them.
Talk to anyone who has caught their partner in an affair, had their partner admit to an affair, or who has seriously thought their partner was having an affair without being able to prove it or get a confession and the one thing that you will hear over and over is that there seem to be nothing that makes them feel safe again.
Apparently, how surprised you are by your partner cheating correlates directly with how bad it is for you, how hard it is to move on.
This is why finding out that your partner, lover, spouse has been unfaithful to you leads to a form of post traumatic stress disorder. The theory goes something like this - -
- We live in a very uncertain and dangerous world and there isn't much we can do about it. The incidence of bad things happening may be low, but it is always there.
- To survive and manage the uncertainty, we act as if it isn't going to happen to us. As long as it doesn't, this strategy works pretty well.
- When the unimaginable does happen to us or to someone close to us and this strategy is torn from us, our internal environment becomes very unstable. In other words our mind/body/emotional system freaks out.
- Getting back is possible, but tough.
Moral to the story? If you decide to mess around, if you allow yourself to be convinced to cheat, if you think that you are just too wonderful for only one person, if you find yourself slipping into infidelity and don't do anything to stop it, you are setting yourself for disaster.
You will probably blow your relationship up and if you avoid that you'll be taking on baggage that you'll lug around for a long long time. Ask anyone who's tried it.
