Should I tell him?
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Should I tell him?
| Fri, 04-16-2004 - 3:38pm |
Hi Everyone,
I recently ended a 1 year affair with a man who has been my friend since 2000. I was overcome with guilt. I am doing fine (surprisingly). We have decided to remain friends, I called him today to see how he was doing. He says he's doing ok, keeping himself busy.
My question is, now that I have ended the affair, should I take the chance to tell my husband or should I just keep it quiet and try to work on my marriage. I know that telling him will put our marriage in great danger. Should I take that chance?
Will appreciate lots of replies. Thanks

But he must know that your M needs work right? Maybe you can suggest that you are not completely happy and need to work on it. Try to make some positive things happen, telling him just to assuage your own guilt will only hurt him and he may not recover, neither may your M.
No. Only if you're tired of being married.
rain
(my shortest post ever)
I've been reading (and posting) on this site off and on since 2000. And almost without exception, the answers to this frequently-asked question are overwhelmingly the same: "Don't Tell Him!!!!!"
As a man and also a husband in a long (29 years) marriage, I take the opposite view. Here's my rationale.
Finding out that his wife has cheated on him is so overwhelmingly devastating for a man that...well, I can't quite finish the sentence. I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's much worse for a man to learn his wife has been cuckolding him than the other way around. It just is, that's all. Call it due to being hard-wired that way. Anyway, the husband will demand to know if there are others. The wife will be peppered with questions for years. And the marriage will suffer, but it stands a better chance of surviving than if she's found out and has to fess up to her perfidy.
The chances are quite dim that the marriage will founder if the man does not learn about it from her. Why? Because cheating is the ultimate betrayal. A lie, or the similar aspect of it--keeping the truth from him--will add to his well-founded feeling that she can NEVER be trusted. If the marriage goes on after that, the marriage is likely to be a sham with the husband losing not only love but also respect for his spouse.
Let's put it in the cold, hard light of mathematics. If the wife didn't cheat on him, the odds of the marriage surviving until a death of one of the spouses is 50%. That's the background from national statistics. I'd say if she told him she cheted and then remained faithfuol after that, the failure rate may go from 50% to, say, 70%. But if she is caught and has to confess, then the odds of the marriage failing will go up much higher.
Not telling is the easy way out. But it carries with it a very high price. The burden of guilt will start to weigh on her like Herter Prynne's Scarlet Letter.
I'm not being a moralist here. Au contraire. I firmly believe that those without sins should be the first to cast stones and write pissy emails.
JMHO.
Steven