Your partner may be suffering immensely on the inside, or may be in a state of denial regarding his or her actions.
Heck, I’ve seen people here who swear that their spouse masturbating to porn constitutes cheating!
1. Your spouse doesn’t think they were really cheating. To me, this is more common than you think. But you say, “everyone knows what cheating is!”, but do they? I’ve seen it on the blogs. No doubt there. But what if it was one small, drunken kiss? Or an emotional sort of connection only? (that one is bizarre to me, and indicative of some other personal issue on the part of the “betrayed” spouse in this case). Another ran a blog for a year, whining about how less than two weeks of “steamy emails” between her husband and a woman constituted cheating and turned her life upside down and how she could never get past it, despite the fact that she admitted she was a workaholic, avoided sex and fully neglected her spouse. And for the record, yes, emotional only (non-physical affairs) are wrong and do constitute “cheating” to me, but in her case, most of us felt that she was engaged in a vast, vast overreaction to what had occurred, failed to acknowledge her own role in the neglect of her spouse, and frankly ruined her marriage unnecessarily. But that’s a different topic!
Sure, if you are balls deep inside a woman (or a man is fully engaged in your mouth or vagina), yeah you are cheating
5. They feel remorse, but are the type of person who can’t apologize. My father was like this. I don’t know if I ever heard him say “I’m ilmaiset Jamaikan treffisivustot sorry” to anyone. Not his wife. His kids. Close friends. Even when he was 100% in the wrong and it was obvious. It’s just not in his DNA. He would callously instead pass it off as a joke, or as if it didn’t matter. Or his usual response was to say something like there was something worse in life than what he just did. He wasn’t a bad person, I just don’t think it was in him. For people like him, admitting that they have done something wrong is too much of an assault on their self-esteem. Sometimes people who have trouble feeling remorse also have trouble saying “thank you” and experiencing true gratitude. Both remorse and gratitude humble us. But some people experience humility as humiliation – a feeling that is so crushing that it is avoided at all costs. So they probably are feeling great shame and remorse, but have a hard time expressing it as it feels like a reduction on their self-esteem and dignity.
So what do you do? Well, for some cheating spouses, they are already on the way out the door and you will never get remorse. For those that firmly believe that having an affair was justified, you’ll never get it either. Most of them are frankly very selfish, narcissistic people and honestly they won’t be a good partner for you or anyone. So you won’t get remorse there. All blame for their character flaws and poor choices will be fully shifted to you. They will not take shared responsibility for the affair ever, and thus, will never feel and show true remorse.
Sometimes, it is all in the way you say things. I know that it can feel unfair that you have to approach him or her in roundabout and gentle ways when this is all his/her fault anyway. But at the end of the day, does it really matter how you get what you want? If certain words, phrases, or approaches will get the remorse that you want, then to me, the end justifies the means.
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