If you caught your spouse attempting to cheat on you, would you be willing to stay with them because their list of pros outweighs their cons?
This woman has spent the last 12 years with her husband, and she married him four years ago. They are both in their early 30s, and as they went along, they discussed buying a house, having kids, and everything.
She truly believed that her husband was an admirable man, as well as her best friend. For several years, her husband pushed back on starting to hit the milestones that they discussed, and she figured it was because he wanted to be as free as possible for as long as he could.
So, she gave him space. Now, her husband is obscenely wealthy because his mom and dad died when he was quite little. They bought a house with the money and have plenty left to live off of.
She’s from a very poor family, and they’re all in a lot of debt while working low-income jobs (she also does not have a high-paying job). She and her husband have separate finances, which has also added to the tension in her marriage.
She dealt with that, as her husband always treated her with love and kindness. But one day, they got into an argument about money, and she demanded that they go to therapy together to help them work through that.
Unfortunately, therapy made their marriage worse, and her husband turned ruthless and mean.
“In the span of one month, he told me my close friends were more attractive than me and that’s why they have better jobs, that he has not been physically attracted to me as long as we have been married because I’ve gained weight (which he did as well), and that if I care about our relationship, I need to lose it,” she explained.
“He threatened to divorce me during a fight and then took it back immediately…He has put me through the emotional ringer, and in the midst of all this odd behavior, I picked up that he was adding on social media/hitting up all of his ex-girlfriends, who thankfully live in different cities and are either married/away/won’t reply to him.”
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“He even opened a dating app. I didn’t even have to snoop because he aloofly was showing me something on his phone when I saw the confirmation email.”
She called her husband out about how he was trying to cheat on her, which he denied all the way. She’s crushed and can’t understand why he’s acting like this.
Her husband has always been her rock, and she’s constructed her whole life around him. She can’t leave him, as she did sign a prenup, which means she won’t get anything.
Additionally, she really wants to have kids and would hate to start over at the age of 30. So, she sat down and wrote out a list of pros and cons about her husband and made the choice to stay with him.
“I’m hoping someday he will go back to being the sweet man I fell for, but after this, I just don’t know how to pick up the pieces,” she concluded.
Well, her husband sounds like the last man she should have kids with, and I get that it’s scary to go back to square one, especially since she wants to be a mom, but I am not sure what list of pros her husband really has to offer her.
To me, he’s just a pile of cons. And because he’s denying his betrayal of her, I think that makes everything even worse. Why stay married to a man who’s actively trying to find someone else?
What advice do you have for her?
By Bre Avery Zacharski
Hi, I'm Bre, Chip Chick's CEO! I have a degree in Textile/Surface Design from The Fashion Institute of Technology, and... More about Bre Avery Zacharski
