SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

It's fascinating to reflect on how perspectives evolve, and my own journey regarding marriage is a testament to that. Having once firmly believed I would never marry – fueled by a youthful, rather vehement atheism in the vein of Christopher Hitchens, where I viewed religion as a significant source of societal ill – I find myself now contemplating it with genuine interest. While I remain non-religious, I've gained a greater appreciation for the social cohesion and support structures that religious practices can sometimes offer.

Interestingly, the concept of marriage and its associated ceremonies predates the major world religions by a significant margin, likely aligning with the evolutionary explanations others have proposed. From a purely biological standpoint, the development of monogamous pair-bonding appears deeply rooted in our evolutionary history. The relatively short gestation period of human infants, compared to other species, renders them exceptionally dependent for an extended period. Unlike many animals that are mobile and self-sufficient shortly after birth, human babies require years of intensive care. This protracted dependency is a consequence of our significant brain development, which necessitated earlier births to ensure maternal survival. Consequently, raising a child effectively became a two-person endeavor. One parent, typically the mother, provided constant care, while the other, historically the father, took on the role of providing resources for both the mother and child.

While historical instances of polygamy are often cited, these arrangements predominantly arose in specific contexts where significant gender imbalances naturally occurred. The notion that polygamy was ever the norm throughout human history is largely a misconception.

So, given this understanding, why embrace the idea of marriage now, particularly as a non-spiritual, nihilistic atheist? For me, the absence of inherent meaning in the universe doesn't negate the power of assigned meaning. If someone deems marriage meaningless, I can't definitively argue against that subjective viewpoint. However, I recognize the potential utility of marriage in providing a stable environment for children, fostering personal growth, and strengthening the family unit. Ultimately, the significance of marriage is what you choose to imbue it with.

Therefore, my current perspective on marriage is that it represents a profound commitment to another person – a dedication to navigating life's journey together, through both joyous and challenging times, until death parts us. While I acknowledge certain fundamental boundaries, such as infidelity, criminal behavior, or severe mental incapacity, outside of these rare and extreme circumstances, my intention would be to embrace a lifelong partnership.

Just my views on it. I'm proposing next week on a holiday to Crete :)

[This message edited by DRSOOLERS at 8:29 PM, Friday, May 2nd]

If you intend to have children, marriage is essentially a necessity. Statistics of children from single parent households are pretty ominous. With rare exception, children of single parent households are at a statistical disadvantage in nearly every way. Children very clearly benefit from intact families.

A two-parent household does not require a marriage certificate.

slight t/j ****as someone who used to represent kids who were wards of the state (very PT pro bono), some of which were taken away from so-called 'intact' families, I am always troubled by these statistics as there are no studies that I am aware of that address the "how children do" (whatever that means) when they are in so-called "intact" households that are not great environments. It's not the fault of the person collecting the data - those families are less likely to provide information, nevertheless accurate info.

[This message edited by ThisIsSoLonely at 8:31 PM, Friday, May 2nd]

Just my views on it. I'm proposing next week on a holiday to Crete :)

I'll meet you there DRSOOLERS. We could talk about this for hours! lol

Inkhulk, not at all offended and I will do my best to answer given I can’t really know what others felt when compared to me. Make no mistake, the pain was excruciating, but I think a lot of it stemmed from fear and anger. Early on, like all I questioned everything and that was painful and scary. Did we really share the same goals? Was he working towards the "dream" so to speak or was my head in the sand? Did he want her instead? If so, I encouraged him to leave.

It was after learning what she was to him and most importantly what she wasn’t. How easily he gave it up. His whys, etc was I able to commit to keeping it all going. Early on, when I posted here people would push back my values and thoughts and often tell me I was downright wrong. I don’t think one’s values can be wrong, different and unusual, yes, not wrong. Ultimately, even when he was cheating he was still working his ass off to provide to the family and remained present in all our lives. I think that is why he hid it so well. She happily took the backseat in all situations. Had she been important to him at all or had he wished to remain in her life I am certain things would be different now. So, if I was a romantic person perhaps my pain would have been different. I don’t know. Admittedly, I had to accept that the romance that did appear throughout our relationship may never come back or may always be less than it was before or perhaps less than what I could experience with a new partner. I certainly don’t question anyone seeking that with a new partner after being cheated on if it’s their thing or important to them. It just wasn’t/isn’t to me. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy romance, it’s just not the end all for me. What I have now and always had in my marriage is what I cherish most. Does that make the pain of infidelity less? I don’t know. I think the nature of my husband’s cheating and his why is what made it bearable for me. Had he wanted to or ever left for her I know it would have hurt more. People here have told me that shouldn’t matter which I though odd. No one should tell me what matters to me, but me! Anyways, I am
Not sure if I answered your question, but it’s the best I got since I only truly know how I felt/feel.

Given all that I want to say I can feel healing taking place in your latest posts and I am so happy for you.

Oops, also wanted to add that given the fact that what I value could not take place with anyone else (intact family with the father of my children), security, financial freedom, the ability to grandmother the way I want, etc… none of that could be found in another and he was still wanting and willing to be in it with me I am sure helped ease the pain and help the healing to some degree.

Not sure if I answered your question, but it’s the best I got since I only truly know how I felt/feel.

Given all that I want to say I can feel healing taking place in your latest posts and I am so happy for you.

On the one hand I agree that you can’t entirely know what someone else feels, you only have your own experience. But on the other hand, you can also "feel healing" thru the words of my posts. And I’ll say that in this instance, you perceive my inner state correctly. I’m not a finished work, but I’ve come a long way, baby.

Thank you, and TISL, for sharing. I guess the idea of guarding my heart with a shift in how I view marriage is out. 😔🥺😭

Marriage is a crap shoot. You are placing your trust in a person who can be untrustworthy. How do you know? You don’t. You hope, but you don’t know.
I look at the biology of a modern human. It looks exactly like the hulks dragging clubs around. That is the real problem. For the most part the male body is designed for action. To get the adrenaline flowing. To run, to throw, to kill. Civilization has curtailed that. You can play a contact sport, join the military and hope for war, you can drive your car 120 mph and feel the power of those hormones zinging through your body but you can’t beat people up or kill them.
I told my husband 35 yrs ago we were going to have real problems with young males. Hello, ISIS. Hello, Taliban. Hello every other terrorist group. Give a group of young men guns and they are going to shoot something, probably a living something.
Cheating, and the zinging hormones can be addictive to some people.
I can’t explain women. I have had several men make suggestions and never felt the slightest desire to cheat. I married the person love.

Our culture told us not to live together or have sex without M. We were enculturated(?) before the sexual revolution. We went our own way in many things, but I don;t think we would have violated those norms.

I have a lot of thoughts and feelings just around this topic. Opening this one feels like a hornets nest. I completely adopted this message. Virgin on my wedding night. Felt strong guilt for "going to far" before that. I have no interest in engaging in a religious debate on the topic, but I’ll say that I find it much less black and white than I did as a young man. I would not advise my children to marry just for the sake of legitimizing sex, I’ll say that much.

I’m someone who has zero regrets for getting hitched, despite the destruction and reconstruction of it.

What is my marriage? It is getting to share some of my best and worst moments — a relationship that can add meaning to those moments.

Looking back now, it has been several very different relationships over the years, from the happily infatuation days, to the misery of unmet expectations, to watching how infidelity burned it all back to the ground. Now it is something far more kind and evolved, and we both wish it didn’t include the horrors of infidelity.

On the flip side of the question, I’ve never needed marriage, never really expected it. That was actually one of my wife’s early rationalizations for pulling away from the M, she never felt I needed her (yeah, it is not any kind of excuse, but I understood why she would feel that way).

Although, one day I woke up and imagined a family and a house with the fence, and dogs and the whole thing. Ironically, it was my wife who pulled me back into my faith. She was the far more devoted of the two of us, and the moment she wasn’t was really the first red flag I missed.

I now wake up every day and choose my path — I choose my wife, she chooses me and I am grateful for how far we’ve come together.

On any topic, from the unique pain she caused, to our kids, to the area we grew up in, in the decades we lived there — all of those moments — she understands the good and bad of all of it.

We travel, harass our adult sons as often as they will allow and focus on the joy we’ve found in the now.

We are all flawed humans. The best of love happens when someone accepts us, flaws and all. That can be marriage too.

I’ll never suggest my path is better or worse than any other way through infidelity, I’m just glad of the life I have today, despite the pain of the past.

[This message edited by Oldwounds at 10:50 PM, Friday, May 2nd]

Why get married? Different reasons at different ages.

Obviously you marry for love (exclude the gold diggers here lol).

However there are societal norms that put marriage as "expected" if you want to have kids, etc.

I look at the 20 something generation and I think - good for them. They can have kids and careers and not marry and have good long term relationships w/out "religion" or "family" dictating what they should do.

And I am in the group that would definitely not remarry.

[This message edited by The1stWife at 11:15 PM, Friday, May 2nd]

And conversely, what are the risks to taking the plunge?

To review the stuff we already know: Every relationship we have is based on connection —- the bigger the connection and the bigger the investment — the bigger the risk.

We all get hurt, be it friends, family or romantic relationships.

However, for me, I can’t do fear based existense.

Whether we’re secular or people of faith, our time on the planet is very limited, and I’m going to get as many laughs, smiles, adventures as is possible.

If my wife bailed out on me tomorrow —- I’d find friends to hang out with and stay open hearted if another romantic partner happened along at some point. But I will continue to put my heart out there, in my current relationship or the next, because all in is the only gear I got.

I absolutely understand protecting the heart. I have those friends, got burned, built a fort around their heart and none of them is happy living a protected existence. None of them.

Six decades plus now on the planet and I hate that some people I care about are already waiting to for life to be done.

Some move from relationship to relationship — and they are far happier than my pals who live on an emotional island, because they feel like, at least they are trying.

Of my two sons, one is happily married 8-years now, and my youngest is happily single. He has had a couple serious LTRs, but not found someone who he would want to marry.

Here are my (conflicting) takes:

My initial reaction would be there are probably three logical reasons- you want to have kids, you want to simplify your legal rights to each others stuff, or religious reasons.

Personally don’t have a desire/feeling for any of those things and I likely wouldn’t marry again if he died.

But if someone provoked that need in me, I would never say never. I am a relationship person, and I imagine I might eventually work my way into a companionship. But that’s all I can really guess

I don’t feel you need to decide. You have no idea how you will evolve or what will come in to shape you. If it feels like the right person and the right step then you will be inspired, maybe even nudged by God to do it.

I am my husbands third wife. He told me a few months into our relationship he didn’t want to get married again. He had been left twice and obviously he wasn’t good at it.

I said well I do, and I would like to have one or two children. Two rational adults would be like "guess we are looking for two different things. Nice knowing you" or let’s be friends" I really at this point liked him a lot and was really enjoying our time together. I liked the sex a lot and didn’t want to go back to being celebite when that was going so well. I said "but I am not looking to get married right now anyway. There may come a time that life might start calling me in that direction so this relationship could come to a natural end." He agreed but felt the same way, we were both okay with "this is what I want for now" because we just really enjoyed being together.

And about a year later he proposed.

What changed his heart? He came to a point he didn’t want to be without me. And he knew I was as young and what I required.

Then later I twisted that into he only married me because I made him and I cheated on him.

And that’s a chance you take getting married. But guess what? It’s the chance you take in any relationship. I think it’s going to take a bit of time for you to probably make peace with that. And once you do, you may have come around a few more corners in this winding road of healing. I understand why this is where your head is at, so I am not saying it’s not something to ponder or hold that question moving forward. I just think life can set us back and it can sometimes delightfully surprise us with amazing gifts.

Here is to you being catapulted toward the amazing gifts because God knows that you have endured. Your time for joy is coming.

[This message edited by hikingout at 11:48 PM, Friday, May 2nd]

It looks exactly like the hulks dragging clubs around. That is the real problem.

As a hulk, I take offense at that and I believe this is a clear violation of community guidelines. MODS!

So, my thoughts and feelings on marriage have really evolved over my life.

I was raised in a household where my parents werent divorced. They had strain in their marriage, but not working through it was never on the table. But nearly all of my peers were in separated birth parent situations. I was puzzled by that.

I bought into the sanctity of marriage, and felt it was an enviable thing to aspire to, as an adolescent. The culture of pre marital sexual expression and dating, and the juxtaposition of two expectations, one being that you not live in sin; next to the expectation that you play the field to find someone who will work for you as a longterm partner left me with too many cognitive problems to handle.

My first serious relationship shed light on the problems with modern dating and the compatibility of marriage with it. I thought I wanted to marry that person, she never thought that, and after what I went through with her(she was a serial cheater), my thoughts on the matter had been reconfigured to a new value set. I did not have anything in me to understand her diverse appetite for cheap sex. I was only truly turned on by people whom were very important to me, and finding out the rest of the world didnt work like I did inside broke everything I thought I was.

Essentially, I no longer understood why people needed their love officiated in ceremony by an authority to qualify as legitimate. Promises are words, and so are lies. If you love someone for life, live it. Prove it. Dont write a check you dont know you have cash for, hoping it will all work out. Thats stupid. I still think so.
God doesnt care if we marry, people do for some reason. The love of unmarried cooing doves is equally special and sacred, whether a judge or priest says so or not, in the eyes of their creator.

Also, as surely as God gave foxes teeth to kill and eat chickens and an irresistible urge to use them, he built us to kill, betray, cheat on our partners, and fight amongst ourselves over these things. And also to seize our ability to rise over those urges. And to fail miserably at that, sometime more, sometimes less.

So I looked at marriage as a sort of potential source of failure, when "castles made of sand slip into the sea, eventually".

When I met my wife, I saw the love coming and I thought, "Oh boy, here we go". I didnt want a repeat of previous history at all. I tried to express my feelings on my belief in people in love and not in institutions like marriage, which she felt rejected by. She always hoped I would change my mind.

I was fairly stubborn about it. I got a ton of pressure from social sources outside of our relationship to tie the knot. Females in our family shamed me, comments about us living in sin were overheard, and my wife had to endure much questioning about when, why not, and speculation that I wasnt truly committed to her. Sometimes she cried. Sometimes she was angry that she wasnt as special to me as she deserved to be.

It bothered her, and it bothered me that she wanted something that was a concept. A mere token, when I was giving her my actual life. I resolved to wait 8 years, the length of my previous relationship, and revisit marriage then, to see if I was in love with a mirage.

We still existed at that point, had bought a house, and I was still in love, so I relented, giving my wife what was a large gift to her and a small thing of me to do, an expression of love that, at the time, I felt was beautiful, special, and a healing return to my original values. I was quite proud.

I was deceived. 5 years into the marriage, I learned She had had multiple affairs, 5 years prior to getting married. History had indeed repeated, despite my best efforts. Imagine that. I had my suspicions then, but waved them off. I now feel quite tricked, angry about the pressures society and family heaped on me, caring that I wasnt married, but not caring about me or the kind of relationship I was in.

Prior to true discovery, the same pressures were attempting to get me to have children. I am thankful I did not relent to that pressure. Word must have gotten around. Noone has the nerve to suggest that to me anymore.

Marriage is just a word, a concept. Like the state lines, it exists in mans world of imaginary constructs, externalized into cultural reality. A bit of a golden calf.

Love however, preceded spoken word and abstract conception. Better for me to focus there.

....Plus my beneficiaries are my sons, which is as it should be, and another marriage could muddy those waters.

I'm currently riding this very rollercoaster (see today's post in Off Topic) and it's a scary place to be.

Do I regret getting married a 2nd time?

The jury's still out.