Are You the Cheater?

Although she says without the affair, her marriage may have been salvaged; she does not blame the affair for its end. “Two years earlier had we had counseling, we could have worked through it,” she said. But in the end, the divorce has helped her learn things about herself she had never known before. It has also helped her be even more compassionate with her patients.  

According to Dr. Latz, the less the cuckolded spouse knows about the affair, the better. “It would only give them a film to play in their heads,” she says. “That is always disastrous.”  

She relayed one story of a man whose wife chose to come clean after a one-night stand. Although the husband stayed, he had monthly affairs for years, blaming her initial infidelity for all of his subsequent ones. “It was not fair at all,” says Dr. Latz. In that case, the truly sorry spouse should have just kept the secret in order to save the marriage.  

For Marisa of San Diego, that has been true. Married and divorced twice, she knows all of the details of her second husband’s double life — the girlfriends all over the state, one of whom he was with even before their marriage. Sometimes she wishes she didn’t know what she knows, she says. “It devastated me.”  

For years, Marisa believed that she had the perfect marriage. Her husband brought her flowers, complimented her and the two shared a relatively plentiful sex life, she says. “He acted like I hung the moon,” she said. It all changed in one day. Marisa discovered her husband’s infidelity because of his cell phone. He was acting suspiciously and Marisa investigated and soon discovered strange numbers at strange times. She confronted him and he eventually confessed. “He had been having a few affairs,” she says. “One of the women did not even know that he was married.”

To her knowledge, there were three women, but she says she is not ruling out the possibility that there may have been more. Although Marisa was shocked to find that her ex-husband was cheating and insists she did nothing to contribute to the demise of their marriage, there were parts of her own past that she admits may have contributed to her blinders. Marisa grew up in a home where her father cheated on her mother. “We are drawn to people who feel safe and familiar,” she says. “Most everyone is quicker to fall in love with people who are like their own parents.”  

In her case, it happened twice. Her first husband also strayed. But the damage he did was far less severe. “We were both just really young,” she says. The second time, it was devastating. “My body literally went into shock,” said Marisa, who believes it will be years before she can trust another partner with everything even though she currently has a boyfriend she describes as “wonderful.”  

“I no longer trust myself or my judgment,” Marisa said, wondering if she might have been better never even knowing the truth. “Honestly, I was very happy before I knew.”  

While Marisa would not agree that all men would cheat if given the opportunity, she does agree that a truly repentant cheating spouse should not come clean.   

She said she would encourage unfaithful spouses who are truly sorry to end their relationships discreetly, destroy all e-mail records, phone records and even change their cell number. She says cheaters should seek a clergy member or a counselor who can help them work through their guilt without telling the spouse. “The pain of knowing is beyond any pain anyone should have to endure,” Marisa said. “Honestly, I would rather not know any of it. This is the kind of knowledge that destroys people.”


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Sasha Brown-Worsham is a freelance writer in Boston, Mass. who has written for the Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, Technology Review, Babble.com and many other publications.