SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

You are correct, @hikingout, that so much of what I wrote, could be said for the Betrayed Women. But my passion is for the Betrayed Men on here. I am not minimizing anyone's pain on here, but that is just how it is for me.

My experience is close to what won’t get fooled describes. I thought my WW would be more enthusiastic and engaged in R. Although won’t get fooled put it inelegantly, the feelings our emasculation is real. There is a feeling of shame and I think society thinks that if a woman cheats her BH must not have what it takes in the sack, but if a man cheats, he’s just a dog and the abused spouse (by being cheated on) is the aggrieved one (and rightfully so). I am sad that I got cheated on, there is nothing I can do about that. My wife turning off to me sexually is also very sad, but it is something that I can do something about. She can turn off on me all she wants, but I don’t have to stick around for it. To Hiking outs point, I rarely post unless I’m in despair.

[This message edited by Gunnut at 1:28 PM, Sunday, April 14th]

but if a man cheats, he’s just a dog and the abused spouse (by being cheated on)

Wrong. The assumption is that is the man cheats the woman wasn’t taking care of him sexually and must be frigid, unloving, cold.

And we too worry about our performance, our shape, smell, preferences, and all the same stuff. They just don’t make a work like emasculation for women.

I don’t mind if ya’ll wanna support each other as men. I get what wontbefooled is saying, he is here to support other men. Nothing wrong with that.

I just object to it being worse for a man to be cheated on. It all fucking sucks and it doesn’t matter your gender. And to make it seem like one is worse than the other steps in the experience of the women who are here…and who are not claiming they are in more pain or having more or less shame than anyone else.

@ Hiking out. Double wrong no backs ! Cuckhold- a man whose spouse has committed adultery, often regarded as an object of scorn

In my experiences here and real life men who get cheated on are treated as less than and women who get cheated on are treated with sympathy. If you post, as a man, in just found out and your recourse is anything less than scorched earth divorce, you get message after message that "you must like other men fucking your wife" or "you have no balls". (Albeit it’s mostly from other men) a woman who doesn’t know what to do, seem to get a lot more sympathy and varying advice.

but if a man cheats, he’s just a dog and the abused spouse (by being cheated on)

the above quote is a fragment which is very unclear compared to my original entire sentence, which is slightly less unclear; oops. I will try to clarify what I think society thinks;
Man cheater=abusive pig(agree)
Woman cheater= a victim of the unmet needs fallacy and you start hearing all sorts of patter about, unmet needs, vulnerabilities in the marriage and frogs in pots of boiling water. My truth is people cheat because they couple bad boundaries with bad character. I don’t expect someone to wear a scarlet letter the rest of their life, people’s can change and redeem themselves. A lot of wayward here have and kudos to you Hikingout for being pretty much the fleets flagship example of what a repentant former wayward should be.

I want to support everyone, I’m not even sort of sexist and I’m certainly NOT saying being cheated on is worse for men. What I am saying, is men seem to get more beaten up in the forums and are more derided in real life, if they are uncertain about wanting to R or not. I think men shame men more than women shame anybody by a lot. I think we can clearly see that men and women can feel the effects Surrounding adultery differently and there may even be shame that is felt in a gender specific way.

OP, it's been awhile since you posted. You seemed to handle both DDays with firm resolution. You seemed to be on a positive path...as much as any of this can be positive. Forgive me for reading into your question, but are you asking because you're struggling with the choice to stay after all this time?

I think that while the percentages in these surveys are most likely not accurate, the sentiments in the results are true.

When I see/hear of people being miserable staying in a relationship that had infidelity, regardless of gender there is almost always an issue with low self esteem and/or codependency that keeps them miserable.

Lots of good stuff here.

As a BH, I understand the mojo thing. I had (and still do to an extent) the feeling I had been hollowed out.

In "After the affair", Dr. Spring says the BH wants to know about the sex, and the BH says "it’s over". (It’s been a while since I read it, so don’t torch me if I am slightly off).

Leaving is not a luxury everyone can afford-BINGO. In my case, in the 90s men’s rights were fairly new. Fighting uphill for custody of my boys, not to mention up to 25% of my income for child support (her equal income would not have been taken into account) was what I was looking at. Things are better for men today in Georgia, but at my time, the guys got hammered, first by WW, second by court.

I stayed for the kids. Many of you guys and ladies think it was a mistake, and I understand that position. I detached from FWW. Was I happy in my marriage? NO. Was I happy being a dad? Best fucking job I ever had.

Today, I am fairly happy. IC over the past year has been great. A dead marriage came back to life. We are not reconciled-she will not do the work.

As a BH, I don’t really feel sad for myself. I had an unfulfilled marriage, that is for sure. But I have done the work on me (which can only go so far, I know I will never heal without her doing the work on herself). I feel sad for my FWW. She carries the guilt and shame, and refuses to deal with it. And she knows her unhappiness is on her, and has very little to do with me.

Maybe the real question on stats is how many WS are brave enough to do the work on themselves?

^^^

I totally understand why you’d stay, harming yourself in order to keep 24/7 access to your kids, but why now? They’re grown and probably out of the house now?

I think men shame men more than women shame anybody by a lot.

I think - but am not certain - that the 'grow a pair' shaming in JFO comes from men who have not processed their own shame.

The catch-22 here is that suggesting that can be taken to be just as shaming as 'grow a pair.' I don't think shaming a shamer is a good way to end shaming.

Also, BSes need to take responsibility for themselves. Whether you R or D, some people will be angry at your choice.

From Rick(y) Nelson:

And it's, all right now
Learned my lesson well
You see, ya can't please everyone
So you got to please yourself

There maybe more toxicity towards the betrayed men in the forum but it’s almost exclusively coming from other men who either haven’t processed their shame or divorced immediately and feel that is the best and only path.

This all comes from this history of how genders have been made to believe throughout society far before you and I were the apple of anyone’s eye.

Men dominated. They made the money, they were the providers and the protectors. Women weren’t allowed to vote, to own property, or to even have a bank account. Now that women earn, can own property, have bank accounts, the paradigm has shifted. And I really think by and large many men have not caught up from that mentality, and are unaware of it. This doesn’t make them bad or unintelligent. We all have programming we are largely unaware of.

Women are programmed still to be pleasing and submissive. Maybe not in the younger generations as much, but is genX and above still have a lot of this sort of stuff happening.and it’s evident in the rate of divorce initiated by women is at 70 percent. It’s because we can’t keep up with all the roles that have been added when many never were taken away. We have taken on careers in the midst of still being expected to do the things we took the largest percentage of domesticated chores and parenting tasks.

I don’t think any of the men here think of their wives as servants or chattel, but when faced with infidelity there is some lizard brain reactions (not saying dumb, but our actual instinctual lizard brain that takes over in crisis) and suddenly - it’s "you can’t control your woman, you need to demand respect" and suddenly the wives are talked about as these objects like we are living in 1920 or something. It becomes this weird discussion of how men are the providers and women don’t appreciate that, they use you for a wallets that is so bizarre to me when we have long arrived into a time where we can support ourselves.

When you are a betrayed woman, we have been dealing with this a lot longer. Sure women cheated throughout history but not at the rates of men. Not until women went into the workforce, no longer had to rely on men to live. So I think it’s also partially because women have been seen as the cheated on not the cheaters until a more recent point in time. And there are sahm’s that cheat, so this isn’t like I am trying to say this is all women or all men. I am not trying to make generalizations here. When men cheat it’s a little more "yeah I hear you my old lady doesn’t put out either" when women cheat we are whores and home wreckers. ( I don’t like using that language but to me these words should apply to both genders if they are to be used at all) There is a lot more shaming of female ws than male ws, and it stands to reason the there is more outward shaming of men who are cheated on because "that isn’t natural for women to cheat". There must be something wrong with your wife and with you for staying.

Women get the "you must not have been meeting his needs. You must be fridg or cold or unloving" and everyone accepts that because the thought is men only cheat for sex.

Which brings me to the other gender complication. Because people believe men only cheat for sex (which is not true, there are lots of reasons men cheat and it has nothing to do with their wife), then they have a hard time thinking a woman wasn’t looking for sex as the main goal in the affair. So then they pile on about not pleasing her. And let’s not even go into how a non-virtuous woman is viewed as damaged goods, that no man should or could actually still want.

In other words some people are going to blame a bs for ws behavior for all sorts of unconscious reasons. But the reality is it’s not the bs’s fault. They should not carry shame for their spouses affair. They are not responsible for the other person’s behavior.

So I would definitely agree that perhaps the men in this forum get shamed worse by other men. But in reality, outside the forum, people blame the bw as much as they do the bh.

Anyway, that wasn’t the point of my initial response. I didn’t do a good job of quoting what I was really objecting to- that there is an emasculation that men experience that women don’t. It’s just not true. We don’t have words like cuckhold or emasculation- because historically women were just kind of made to put up with it. They couldn’t live on their own as easily as they could stay with the man. So if the man cheated, she knew the only way to keep her children fed and a roof over her head was to brush it under the rug and go on.

Truth is any bs can feel emasculated or cuckholded. And the heaping shame is doused on both sexes, it just may not play out in the forum like that. What I would love to see is as these next generations of men come through that they can relate to each other more widely in a compassionate way. Until then I am thankful we do have as many men who are compassionate in this forum (if not more) than those that exhibit toxic male traits.

I do not disagree that men and women experience infidelity differently. We have different historical context that has fed into our programming. But without buying into that programming (women should be virtuous and men will be men) I think the genders actually experience infidelity very similarly.

Most bs experience major hits to their self worth, feelings of security, have the specialness of the relationship ripped out from under them, experience mind movies, sexual dysfunction, grief, pain, worry about their sexual prowess, etc. We are in the same boat.

I wasn’t accusing you of being sexist. I was just trying to say just that- it’s more similar than you think. And at the same time every situation has its own uniqueness and circumstance.

We all heal better when we aren’t blaming ourselves for our ws behavior. When we lose the illusion we ever had control over their behavior at all.

[This message edited by hikingout at 6:57 PM, Monday, April 15th]

My first post. This is a survey of the US general population, not just those who seek treatment.

EMS = extramarital sex

"Thus, for men who have had EMS, one can extrapolate that between 41% and
62% divorced or separated from that marriage. Applying the same logic to
women, for women who engaged in EMS, between 48% and 67% divorced
or separated from that spouse."

I'm not allowed to put a link into the post so here are instructions for how to access the study:
Go to the Google Scholar Website. (Search for "Google Scholar" within Google if you don't know the URL). Search for "The Association of Divorce and Extramarital Sex in a Representative U.S. Sample". Click on "PDF" right next to result that has the link to the article. That will give you a PDF copy of the study.

Notes:
* Every situation is different. You can't use this to reliably predict the outcome for any given situation.
* For those who enter therapy and are committed to working on the marriage the numbers are much better.
* The Oxford Handbook of Infidelity contains a summary of current research and that is how I came upon this study.

Hikingout,
I agree with 90% but Im going to, with all due respect, push back on a couple of the ideas that you have put forth in your last post…

I don’t think any of the men here think of their wives as servants or chattel, but when faced with infidelity there is some lizard brain reactions (not saying dumb, but our actual instinctual lizard brain that takes over in crisis) and suddenly - it’s "you can’t control your woman, you need to demand respect" and suddenly the wives are talked about as these objects like we are living in 1920 or something. It becomes this weird discussion of how men are the providers and women don’t appreciate that, they use you for a wallets that is so bizarre to me when we have long arrived into a time where we can support ourselves.

I think there are a couple of aspects of the male lizard brain reactions that you should also consider.

The first is that the male lizard brain is not about provision, or control of women, or respect, but about assured paternity. The most important thing to a male’s instinctual lizard brain is the idea of protecting his own bloodline and not raising another’s child unknowingly. Until recent history there has been NO way of KNOWING paternity so it was incumbent upon men to keep the very POSSIBILITY of another male’s seed impregnating from happening. Throughout the animal kingdom, males often kill cubs in the pride that are not their own which shows how serious this concept is to our lizard brain.

Women are programmed still to be pleasing and submissive.

The second is the idea that for a woman to have sex with another man is to in someway submit to him in the male lizard brain. This is seen by the male lizard brain as a form of conquest. While no one should give their bodies to someone other than who they promised to give their bodies to, it takes on a different connotation when viewed with the male lizard brain through the lens of these two concepts.

When you are a betrayed woman, we have been dealing with this a lot longer. Sure women cheated throughout history but not at the rates of men.

We have no real way of knowing this...it has just been accepted. However ancient societies always had punishments in place for female infidelity. The religious books, Bible, Quran etc, were harsh in regards to this. It should be 'considered' that maybe it was as big a problem as male infidelity if they were so adamant to protect against it.

Men dominated. They made the money, they were the providers and the protectors. Women weren’t allowed to vote, to own property, or to even have a bank account. Now that women earn, can own property, have bank accounts, the paradigm has shifted. And I really think by and large many men have not caught up from that mentality, and are unaware of it. This doesn’t make them bad or unintelligent. We all have programming we are largely unaware of.

This is where things get muddied. Yes women have been oppressed throughout large chunks of history. The problem is that it was not by "men" it was by POWERFUL men. Throughout most of the history of this country, men that looked like me could not vote, obtain property or have access to wealth either.

My point is not to have an "oppression Olympics" but to point out that the programming that you so eloquently speak of, has actually victimized the vast majority of men. Historically, only the top 10-15 percent of men could even have the opportunity to have multiple women. For the rest of men, they work hard to hopefully make themselves appealing enough to woo a woman and build a family. Most of those guys don’t have nearly as many opportunities with the ladies as some would think. Women on the other hand are propositioned sexually from puberty to menopause and longer, so there are ALWAYS available avenues to have sex if they want it. Meanwhile men generally have to work very hard to get sex. This is where men have hangups about the sexual aspect of female infidelity. Not because of ownership or provision, but because of the love and effort that men put in to get to that point.

As you have stated, we all have programming that we are largely unaware of, yet that programming needs to be explored in relation to what we learn about infidelity as much as infidelity itself.

I am not sure how to respond to someone stating I was emasculated because I stayed with my fWW, who I found out in discovery had a pattern of bad behavior.

But I do not feel emasculated. To suggest otherwise is a projection of your own feelings. What she did had little or nothing to do with me and my manhood. I know I would be a catch for many women, but I have never been so insecure that I needed to prove that to myself or anyone else. I am happily R'ed. Do I wish it never happened? Yes. Is there trauma in the marriage that has been addressed? Yes. Would that trauma be gone if I was with another wife? Nope.

I come to SI from time to time, because I feel some camaraderie with people who have been betrayed. I hope my experience can help. I love reading posts from Hikingout, and Sisoon. They are sage's of this site. They have level heads and offer real advice for those trying to make it after the trauma of betrayal.

OP, I don't know that you can find real statistics about who Rs and who Ds. I don't think you can find real statistics about who is happily in R, or who is happy in D. Here is just a little of what I have learned from my experience and what I have seen in 9 years of off and on involvement in this site....

Men who can't get over feeling emasculated rarely R. People who blame the AP instead of focusing on their WS, rarely find happiness even if they R or D. Overall, the people who figure out that the A had very little to do with them and maintain their own self-worth do better in R. People who have courage to give a WS who is genuinely remorseful, grace to do the work, do much better in R. And people who worry more about what other people think, don't do well in any situation whether it is betrayal or any other aspect of life.

[This message edited by woundedbear at 10:25 PM, Monday, April 15th]

Woundedbear...

But I do not feel emasculated. To suggest otherwise is a projection of your own feelings. What she did had little or nothing to do with me and my manhood. I know I would be a catch for many women, but I have never been so insecure that I needed to prove that to myself or anyone else.

This IMO is the key to navigating being a BS.

I quickly realized that it had nothing to do with me.

Strangely enough, in the two months following DDAY I had more women come on to me than the 20 previous years....it's like they somehow knew.

It served as a reminder that I could easily get another woman.

What that left me with is wondering what happened to HER that allowed HER to get to the point of an A.

I found out the she was more damaged than I even knew despite 25 years together.

Her thought processes and coping mechanisms had been warped for a long time.

However it is HER responsibility to address those things...not mine.

If she does the work to be better, I will give her the grace needed....if not.....oh well.

Wounded bear- 100!

The concept of it would mean that someone else holds your value. Each one of us is valuable on our own. Someone not recognizing it is a "them problem".

Traydee- I appreciate your comments and don’t disagree. My only reason for writing about that historical oppression wasn’t really about the oppression. More the conditioning that comes from it. Truth is the sexual revolution has changed marriage. Women being in the workplace is significant when some studies suggest that 90 percent of affairs happen in the workplace. And females today demand so much more out of marriage because they have their own means to live independently if they choose. It forces some men to come out of the provider role and they haven’t exactly had role models of what that means or where their true value to women lies.

Truth is when we marry we belong to each other. Therefore when someone cheats, that is breached and despite our gender programming, the pain of infidelity is deep and lasting in both sexes. I think there may be things from our programming that just adds to the pain and some of it isn’t even gender related. Things like religious beliefs, being firsts and onlies, cultural differences, etc.

But to say men have something additional is basically a blind spot to we all have conditioning. Many of us are humiliated when our spouse cheats. But at the end of the day, someone can not steal your masculinity- it belongs to you.

I personally think a man who calls another a cuckhold is only reflecting back their own deep insecurities. And the man susceptible to being shamed by that has beliefs about himself that needs to change.

I will use this as an example. When I got here, there was a male ws who would call the female ws whores. This touched my shame so deeply that I would fight with him about it. Just like men grew up hearing certain things they wanted to avoid at all costs, there is a lot of programming women go through in terms of the importance of maintaining their virtue.

The reality is, I determine my own worth. I do not have to accept labels other people give or feel shamed by them. If someone wants to label me as a whore, that is their own opinion or programming. I choose what I internalize about myself. So, I choose to see myself instead as a fallible human who has made some terrible choices, and to understand that my power is to keep making better choices. I do not have to be torn down by someone else’s labels especially in a forum where we are all strangers from all walks of life and backgrounds and experiences.

Healing is not about being torn down or shamed. It’s about walking our own path, doing what’s best for us. Getting our feelings processed and learning to love ourselves. Healing is about gravitating towards positive paths and methods. Internalizing that another man called you a cuckhold is not healing.

I personally think the people who come here to try to say a bh is weak or cuckholded or whatever have a certain vision of what a man needs to be. But it doesn’t need to dictate who that man is or what reaction he should have. True strength is thinking for yourself. You own your manhood, your wife doesn’t carry it in her purse.

Well, this is my take on shame. A lot of time we tend to look at blame for cheating as a sort of "either or" I am noticing. I think for many of us it feels like BOTH. Yes she cheated on me and that is 100% about what she did. That can certainly be true, and at the same time, I can feel that her cheating is at the same time about WHO I AM. And so as I feel that her actions really made me feel exposed I feel EVEN MORE rage, doubly, triply furious about her. Because I feel shame for who I am because of that.

I mean, from when we are in adolescence onward, I think we notice patterns in our relationships with other people and soon we know how persistent those patterns seem to be. If it feels as if we aren't all that valued in this social circle, then very often we feel that we aren't that valued in that next social circle too. And the one after that, and so on. On the other hand, someone who is popular in this social circle, has a good shot of being popular in many of the other social circles they are in, as far as what I've observed. For many of us, the specific other actors in our life come and go as we go through high school, maybe university for some of us, and then as we move through our working lives. But eerily enough, our experiences with other people hardly seem to change, at least, not until we take a good hard look at ourselves and make the change--and even then it sure seems damned difficult sometimes. At least that is how it has been for me. So when we are cheated on, it is internalized hard for this very reason, I believe.

(Something that added to my confusion was, growing up, good advice sure seemed hard to find. I was told by a lot of young women how much they liked nice guys but I saw a lot of them end up with the so-called player and bad boys. It almost seems as if the right hand has no idea left hand is up to, or I should not believe my lying eyes. Maybe this was true for a lot of the men on this forum. We (at the risk of making generalizations) do learn to make get past this as we get older and get a better idea of what is truly going on--and we have to, lest we end up hating the other gender. **I'd say more importantly, we learn that expecting others (i mean a random "others" not those who have earned our respect) to guide us the right away, may be a fair/understandable expectation when we are in childhood, but it is a sort of fantasy thinking when we become adults. We simply have to learn to take our own counsel and to take what others say with advisement. It is not on them (e.g., acquaintances, the media, the internet) that we figure stuff out to have a happy life, it is instead on us** But for me, this skepticism remains whenever I read advice from the fWWs on here that does not jibe with me, such as 'I did not really fall in love/trust my AP'. (And as discussed in other threads, that skepticism is just not going away for me.) Anyway some perspective on my posting style.)

[This message edited by WontBeFooledAgai at 10:17 PM, Tuesday, April 16th]

I can feel that her cheating is at the same time about WHO I AM. And so as I feel that her actions really made me feel exposed I feel EVEN MORE rage, doubly, triply furious about her. Because I feel shame for who I am because of that.

And that is completely normal, especially early on. It’s not a mystery- most of us carry shame through childhood and beyond and when someone disregards us, abandons us, and makes us feel like we meant noting it does sting in this way and make our shame swell up. I completely agree.

What I am talking about is the shaming in the forum that goes on with the new bs. They feel that way already, why add words that are unhelpful in moving in the direction we know they really need to go? Like focusing on self care, seeing the other person for what they are, etc.

The trust thing sticks in your craw a bit. That is a discussion I think where you and I clashed.

It isn’t that I don’t think that some we do trust their ap. At the very least, I can see how going into a hotel room with a man put them at a safety risk.

I personally just didn’t experience that. Most of my affair took place 1000 miles from the AP. It lasted two months and I was in his presence a total of 3 days in that time. We rarely spoke over the phone, it was mostly texting. I just made him whatever I wanted him to be. I didn’t need to trust him. That’s my experience. That’s not to say that wasn’t what happened in your situation.

What you may not realize is very little the ws does is logical. So it would be logical to think I trusted him. The reality is that O was incredibly reckless and really didn’t care about what happened to me. I was in the middle of a nervous breakdown (they call it emotional exhaustion) nothing I was doing was rational at that time. That’s just the unique part of my experience. I don’t blame the mental issues for the affair, I still knew it was wrong. But the situation is more complicated than trusting someone. I hope that puts that to rest. Saying I didn’t have that doesn’t mean there aren’t millions of ws who did.

[This message edited by hikingout at 8:18 PM, Tuesday, April 16th]

WBFA - I'm just trying to follow. What is the connection between your ex's decision to cheat and your popularity growing up? Are you saying that the cheating/rejection from your ex brought forward for you some of the same feelings of trauma/shame/internalized beliefs about inadequacy you may have experienced growing up when you were rejected by social peers. If so, that makes a lot of sense.

And because you believe you needed to make some internal changes in order to be popular/gain peer acceptance, it follows (in your brain) that the A must ALSO be about you to some extent? Is that what you're saying?

WBFA, that was a genuinely vulnerable and well said and helpful (to me) post. I fully understand the connection between feeling like a social outsider and the amplification and hurt and shame when betrayed.

I have been working thru EMDR, and alongside my parent’s divorce and the affair is that I felt rejected by my peers as a kid and even a young man, it was that impactful to me. Certainly that included my female peers, and when my wife and I fell in love there was a sense that my love with her resolved that, that I felt validated there. I know, I know, I’m not supposed to look to her, but 23 year old me didn’t know that and it just naturally felt that way. The betrayal re-exposes that and forces me to either resolve inside myself or look for a new person to do it for me.

I don’t know the female experience, if such a thing even exists. I can just say that I resonate deeply with the male posters here. I respect HikingOut and emergent and the other women here to listen and learn, but I’m not ready to dismiss that there are some gender differences here.

I’m not ready to dismiss that there are some gender differences here.

You probably didn’t read my novels in this post. The cliff notes are yes, there is different programming that each gender experiences that make up the lens in which you view the betrayal. Just like some have cultural, race, or other uniques lenses.

My proclamation is more about breaking through some of that programming.

Everything you just said in the post above I experienced in my youth. The difference between us is how our same gender peers helped shape what came from that. I have always been a bit awkward, you do not grow up in a dysfunctional family with emotional and sexual abuse and fit in easily. I still have feelings I do not fit in.

I think we all are souls having a human experience and our souls do not have genders. We share that in our experience regardless of gender, but certain things about our perceptions fall on the gender lines due to the societal programming that is present.

[This message edited by hikingout at 8:50 PM, Tuesday, April 16th]