SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

I posted a comment on Reddit the other day and I mentioned "as long as it is real abuse" and I got quite a bit of kick back. I know abuse is real, and that it is always unacceptable. Full stop. I wrote this today while I should have been working and posted it to elaborate what I meant, but it may have some use here as well.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what betrayal looks like when it happens to a man. Not because I think men hurt more than women do. I don’t. I think betrayal reaches into many of the exact same places regardless of gender. It destabilizes your reality. It damages your sense of worth. It leaves you replaying conversations, searching memories for clues, wondering what was real and what was simply something you were allowed to believe. You look at the person beside you and struggle to reconcile the person you knew with the person who was capable of creating a second reality without you. The wound, in many ways, is remarkably similar. What I think changes is how that wound is interpreted when it becomes visible.

I keep coming back to anger. When a betrayed man is angry, the anger itself can very quickly become the focus. He is intimidating. He is aggressive. He is controlling. He needs to calm down. Maybe she was afraid to tell him things because of how he reacts. Maybe this is why communication was difficult in the marriage. Sometimes those concerns are legitimate. Betrayal does not excuse violence, threats, coercion, or deliberately making another person afraid. If a man is doing those things, they should be named for what they are. But I also think we have become very poor at distinguishing between a man who is dangerous and a man who is devastated.

Anger is not abuse. Anger is an emotion. What someone does with that anger is where the distinction has to be made. A man can be furious and still be safe. He can swear. He can pace. He can cry. He can need to walk away because he knows staying in the room is not productive. He can ask the same question over and over because the answer still refuses to make sense. He can say, "What you did disgusts me," without that statement being a threat or emotional abuse.

There is something deeply unsettling about discovering that your spouse has betrayed you and then realizing that you may also need to carefully manage how visibly devastated you are, because your reaction can become part of the explanation for what happened to you. I think that may be especially amplified in me because of how my own story unfolded. I discovered afterward that there had already been years of character assassination happening behind my back, conversations where a version of me was being built for other people that I didn’t even know existed. Then D-Day itself unfolded in a way where, before I had even begun to understand the scale of what had happened to me, my reaction to it was already becoming part of the story.

That does something to you. You have just discovered that the person you trusted most was capable of lying to you, hiding from you, and making choices that fundamentally altered your life without your knowledge. At the same time, you begin realizing that people may already have been given a framework for interpreting your anger before you ever had a reason to be angry. Suddenly every raised voice, every breakdown, every desperate question risks being filtered through a version of you that was constructed while you were still completely unaware of what was happening.

Your nervous system is screaming. Your understanding of the past is collapsing in real time. You are trying to separate what actually happened from what you were told happened, while also discovering that other people may have been given an entirely different version of your marriage. Somewhere in the middle of all of that, you become conscious that if your anger is too visible, people may stop looking at what happened and start looking at you. In my case, I think that has made me almost hyperaware of my own anger, because there is this constant fear that even justified pain can be taken out of context and used to validate a story that existed long before I ever knew I needed to defend myself from it.

I think part of the problem is that anger is often carrying far more than anger. For a lot of men, we were never particularly good at identifying what is underneath it in the first place. Fear can come out as anger, humiliation can come out as anger. Grief can come out as anger. Feeling sexually inadequate can come out as anger. Feeling replaceable can come out as anger. Realizing that another man was invited into something you believed was sacred to your marriage can create a kind of humiliation that is extremely difficult to even put into words. Sometimes the anger is simply the outer shell of something much more vulnerable.

And there is a particular shame attached to being a betrayed man that I don’t think we talk about enough. Logically, another person cheating on you says something about their choices, not your value. I believe that. I would tell any betrayed person that. Emotionally, however, it is not nearly that simple. There is this ridiculous cultural message that if another man slept with your wife, somehow you were beaten at something. He was more attractive. More exciting. More masculine. Better sexually. You were naive enough not to see it. Weak enough to tolerate it. Maybe you failed to keep her interested.

None of those things have to be true for them to get into your head. Were you not enough for her? Did she desire him more? Did she do things with him that she stopped doing with you? Was he better? Was he bigger? Did she compare you? Did she laugh at you with him? Were there moments where everyone else understood something about your own marriage that you didn’t? Those questions are brutal to admit because they sound insecure and sometimes even juvenile when written down. But I suspect a tremendous number of betrayed men have laid awake in the dark asking themselves some version of them. You can understand intellectually that the affair was not a competition and still feel like you lost one.

And to make all of that harder, there really aren’t that many places specifically built to help men make sense of this. There is plenty of relationship advice out there, plenty written about infidelity, and plenty of genera trauma material, but comparatively little that speaks directly to the betrayed man and the particular mess of humiliation, anger, sexual comparison, identity, masculinity, fatherhood, and grief that can come with it. A lot of men are trying to navigate one of the most destabilizing experiences of their lives with very little language for what is happening to them and very little guidance that feels like it was actually written with them in mind. So they either suffer quietly, stumble into spaces that tell them to simply "man up and leave," "hit the gym bro" or try to translate advice that never quite seems to fit. I think that absence matters.

There is also a remarkably narrow range of reactions that seem acceptable for a betrayed man. If you become too angry, you are intimidating. If you need answers, you can become controlling. If you look through the evidence available to you, you are invading privacy. If you withdraw, you are emotionally unavailable. If you cry too much, you risk being accused of making your spouse responsible for your emotional regulation. If you stay, people tell you that you have no self-respect. If you leave immediately, people tell you that you are making an enormous decision while emotionally dysregulated. At some point, I think many betrayed men quietly begin asking themselves a fairly reasonable question. What exactly is the socially acceptable way to have your life blown apart?

None of this is meant to diminish betrayed women. Women are given their own set of deeply unfair labels. Crazy. Hysterical. Jealous. Bitter. Vindictive. Insecure. Obsessive. Their instincts are dismissed, their anger is mocked, and their attempts to make sense of what happened can be framed as emotional instability. In some ways, that similarity is what interests me most. Maybe men and women are not experiencing two fundamentally different forms of betrayal trauma. Maybe we are often experiencing many of the same injuries and simply being handed different labels for how those injuries show up.

A woman repeatedly asking questions may be called obsessive. A man doing it may be called controlling. A woman breaking down may be called hysterical. A man breaking down may be called angry. A woman becoming hypervigilant may be called insecure. A man becoming hypervigilant may be called possessive. Different language. Similar wounds.

And perhaps the more useful question is not whether anger, grief, withdrawal, questioning, or hypervigilance are acceptable reactions for a man or a woman. Perhaps the question should simply be, what is the person actually doing with their pain? If someone is threatening, call it threatening. If they are coercive, call it coercive. If they are violent, call it violence. If they are using fear to control another human being, call that what it is. But we should be equally careful about turning the existence of a powerful emotion into proof of a dangerous character.

Because sometimes a betrayed man who looks angry is not trying to control anyone. Sometimes he is scared. Sometimes he is humiliated. Sometimes he is grieving a marriage that, only days earlier, he thought he understood. Sometimes he is discovering that memories he treasured now hurt to look at. Sometimes he is wondering whether the woman he loved ever really saw him the way he believed she did. And sometimes he is simply standing in the ruins of a life he thought was safe, trying desperately to understand what happened to him. You can replace he with I in this paragraph, the whole post honestly.

That man may be angry. I think we should be very careful before assuming that means he is dangerous.

Sometimes anger is not the opposite of vulnerability. Sometimes it is what vulnerability looks like when a man has no idea where else to put it. Sometimes it is the only vulnerability I have left.

At this point, I’m not sure if what I experienced was bias against men (as you describe) or bias against the betrayed. I lean toward the second after hearing of BW experiences here. I think the problem is that we as humans like to find the middle ground. We have stupid fucking sayings like "the truth is found in the middle". And while there is often some truth to it, in this kind of betrayal that model is both spectacularly wrong and stupendously un-useful. But people seem very reluctant to assign the necessary degree of asymmetric blame. They feel better in hedging their bets, shared responsibility of some sort feels more natural to them. And it’s fucking wrong, utterly wrong.

I think there are gender specific flavors to this thing, and it is perfectly appropriate for you to acknowledge and explore that. I experienced a lot of that. I had my credibility undercut in a different way, but I sympathize with the effect. Act justly, that is the best you can do at this point.

But people seem very reluctant to assign the necessary degree of asymmetric blame.

Yes. I think as a society we are scared to judge. Any criticism, no matter how valid, is turned around to "Fill-in-the-blank-Shaming". It’s so much easier, so much less work, and so much less costly, personally, to simply say "I don’t know everything that happened in their marriage, who am I to judge."

I guess Gemmy in a way you can see it as liberating. If every possible reaction is wrong, then you might as well react as you wish.

None of those things have to be true for them to get into your head.

Most of these things are not true and letting them get into our heads is all because of a bruised ego.

Does it feel humiliating? Absolutely. Is there a good reason why we feel that way? Nope. There isn't. Being betrayed by infidelity has absolutely nothing at all to do with the betrayed spouse. Nothing you ever said or didn't say, nothing you ever did or didn't do, would have made any difference at all.

It damages your sense of worth.

Yes, it does. Until one realizes that our worth was completely fucking irrelevant! Good or bad men (or women), good or bad husbands (or wives), good or bed lovers, good or bad communicators, or any combination or variations in between are completely and totally irrelevant.

Anyone can be be betrayed.

There is something deeply unsettling about discovering that your spouse has betrayed you and then realizing that you may also need to carefully manage how visibly devastated you are, because your reaction can become part of the explanation for what happened to you.

Fuck 'em all, man! Unless someone has BTDT, they have no fucking clue what it's like! None. Zip. Zilch. Nada.

Stop giving a shit, Gemmy. Just stop. For most people, surviving infidelity is the most challenging and painful experiences of their lives. It is devastating beyond comprehension. It strip us down to the core of our being and leaves us desperately seeking anything and everything to help us sift through the flotsam and jetsum of what used to be our lives.

This is why this community is so incredibly special. We ALL understand you, brother. We get it.

Yes, there are differences between how men and women react, because there are differences between men and women. However, I think the biggest difference are in our own unique experiences, personalities, situations and exigencies.

Personally, I think you're handling your situation relatively well. You're confronting all of this head on, with courage, conviction and a level of mindfulness and introspection that serves you well.

Remember, my friend, to be kind to yourself, to be gentle with yourself, to give yourself the grace to be thoroughly fucking unhinged.

You will recover from this. You will put yourself back together. You will heal. You will find peace. It takes time. Lots of time. It takes effort and a shit ton of processing and processing and more fucking processing until you're so sick and fucking tired of processing that there's nothing left to process.

"That which does not kill us only makes us stronger."

Hey Gemmy, your anger, pain, and rage is COMPLETELY understandable. Frankly, I admire how well you are handling it all.

Very well written Gemmy, thank you for expressing so much of what us betrayed men have to wrestle with. 💯

Divorce is effectively the only socially acceptable reaction these days, which makes R that much harder.

Gemmy, do you have anyone in your life who has known you for a long time, likes you, knows about the infidelity, and hasn't had their opinion of you poisoned by your WS? It sounds like you could really use some people in your corner who have your back.

Yes. I think as a society we are scared to judge. Any criticism, no matter how valid, is turned around to "Fill-in-the-blank-Shaming". It’s so much easier, so much less work, and so much less costly, personally, to simply say "I don’t know everything that happened in their marriage, who am I to judge."

During our attempted R, WX would often declaim that I was judging him or his therapist was judging him or someone else would judge him if they knew XYZ facts, and he would say this as if judging him was a bad thing. Of course we judge! Everyone judges people all the time. WX was constantly judging his colleagues, calling out their bad decisions. He didn't like it when the lens was turned upon him by others.

I've noticed this tendency recently to use "judging" as being a bad thing. Still can't wrap my head around it, and I'm generally a moral relativist, but everyone has their own moral code, and everyone will judge. Telling people that being critical or judgmental of others is in itself a kind of judging!

Gemmy,

I completely understand why you would constantly check yourself, your WW has done some major BS in that department but don’t hold any of that anger back, don’t let fear of judgment control your feelings.

At times Gemmy my anger scared me to death, I was terrified of myself. My H would tempt me whilst my eyes were glazed and I was in the midst of anger, he’d say that he could see I was in such pain and he’d say just let it out on me, hit me, grab something and beat me with it I deserve it, I’d sneer in his face that he didn’t have the power to turn me in to my father. I was right, he didn’t.

Words?, I’m not even ashamed to admit it! THE WORDS I have spewed out of my mouth. Once I told him that I could understand how he was susceptible to OP because she was a manipulative, morally bankrupt, filthy scheming ugly whore who wanted rid of me, she must have reminded you of your mother who was also a manipulative, morally bankrupt, filthy scheming ugly whore who also wanted rid of me, AND I was going to have his mother exhumed so I could drop kick her scull in to oblivion for raising such a pathetic weak little bitch. YEP. Not very nice is it?, I’ve just written this on a public forum for everyone to see, If people want to judge me weather I’m male or female then so be it, that’s entirely up to them. I was trying to survive something terrible that had happened to me, it’s as simple as that.

People are allowed to commit adultery, then call your reaction to their heinous behaviour abusive?, I’d say that in itself is actually abusive and a big fat fucking NO thank you from me!.

Dangerous?, my reaction is dangerous?, I won’t harm a hair on your head, but play with feathers my friend and you are going to get your arse tickled.

I agree with the premise of this post. I understand where Gemmy is coming from.

I also understand that infidelity happens in abusive relationships. Over the years here, we have had all sorts of cases that muddy this water for me, unfortunately.

We had a couple where both were active in the forum who the man went to jail for DV. And the narrative was she called the police for no reason.he had pages and pages of support and what a bitch she was for calling the cops and filing a false report. He should divorce her immediately was the declaration.

He finally admitted that it wasn’t true and that he did get physical. She had taken a lot of shit surrounding this, and it never really seemed there was any change in how many responded to either of them after that.

Oddly, that couple by both accounts are fully reconciled today and have had another baby. I don’t think DV was really his nature, people can get out of control in the face of trauma. It doesn’t make it right but I also don’t think she would write and tell me how happy she is now if he was a patterned offender either. They are good, stated publicly and privately.

I have had private conversations with other ws including one who was basically being controlled in every form you can control another person, to the point he found out and then started contacting me, and I found his messages to be polite but laced with intimidation. I believe her fully to this day, though at the time in the forum he was liked well enough.

I know there are men who are also falsely accused. But I also know that in reality when it truly is the case women really get laughable protection. Restraining orders are often in place when the lady gets murdered for example. It’s a piece of paper.

And I feel for betrayed men who get cast in that light when the narrative is largely changed or exaggerated because I do believe that happens too.

But toxic abusive relationships also are part of the infidelity club and honestly, the rate of that is likely high enough for it to be a true concern.

I have always heard, angry is sad’s body guard. And often it’s a default emotion for people who have been cheated on. Especially men due to the toxic way society has regarded men who are more in touch with a wider range of emotions.men are taught to throw some dirt in it and keep going. So I have great empathy for those who lose it in the wake of learning they have been betrayed.

But I would be lying if I said that if I saw or heard something like that, I wouldn't call the police first and ask questions later. We live in a society where 60 percent of intentional female homocides globally are people in the victim’s own families or intimate relationships.

Not all bs are good people, they simply have infidelity in common with good people. We have seen some hideous shit over the years—including a man basically describing raping his wife in a parking lot because he wanted to get what her ap got. He didn’t even see anything wrong with what he was telling us. He felt completely justified.

So, if it feels fucked up to you,, it’s a true fear of others who show concern because it’s so commonplace. I can see it through your eyes and have empathy for you too. But the reaction is there for a reason and it’s why a lot of women chose the bear in that survey which would they feel safer alone in the woods, a man or a bear. Write me down for the bear. Doesn’t mean I don’t think people are also falsely accused.

[This message edited by hikingout at 5:43 PM, Tuesday, August 25th]

Gemmy —

You can understand intellectually that the affair was not a competition and still feel like you lost one.

I did have a number of sleepless nights thinking the exact same thought.

I held on to that idea long after it was useful.

But it did have some use.

And I embraced my angry phase and I don’t regret a second of it.

Two or three full months of righteous, hate the world anger.

It was well earned.

Anger cleared my head and got me back on my feet.

Every action after that was seeking my best life, starting with what I wanted and needed going forward.

Years of processing all of it and I finally understood that original intellectual argument and believed it — I am not my wife’s failings.

Nothing she did reflects on me in any way.

The first reset was me.

Infidelity initially caves in anyone’s self worth, but for me, it was a fleeting moment.

My value is how I feel about myself, and not what ANYONE on the planet thinks of me.

It turns out I’m awesome.

I always was, it just took longer to shake this punch off than other hits in life.

@hikingout, I fully understand what you are saying here, and honestly, it hits me pretty deeply.

I have never done anything in our marriage other than love my wife with everything I had. We rarely fought, and on the rare occasions we disagreed, I never yelled at her or called her names. I believed that even when you are angry or frustrated, you protect the person you love. That is exactly why discovering that I had been described to other people as angry, volatile, and borderline abusive was so soul-crushing. It wasn't simply criticism of me as a husband. It felt like my character had been rewritten in conversations I didn't even know were happening.

At the same time, I completely agree with you about how seriously domestic violence has to be taken. Being a BS does not automatically make someone a good person any more than being a WS automatically makes someone irredeemably bad. Betrayal happens inside healthy relationships, unhealthy relationships, and genuinely abusive ones. If I witnessed something that made me believe somebody was in physical danger, I would rather have someone call the police and be wrong than ignore it and discover afterward that somebody was seriously hurt.

Where it becomes incredibly complicated for me personally is what happened after D-Day.

I absolutely became angry. I yelled at times. I said things designed to cut because I knew exactly where the words would land. I have a very quick tongue when I am angry, and sometimes I could dismantle her argument before she could even formulate a response. Whether what I was saying contained truth or not does not make the delivery healthy, and I own that completely.

That has almost completely stopped now, partly because of what it did to her but also because of what it did to me afterward. I would feel terrible about how I had spoken and essentially retraumatize myself replaying it. I also understand that responding that way pushes her back toward shame rather than accountability and makes meaningful communication almost impossible.

But there is another layer that I have struggled enormously with.

Because I discovered that versions of me as angry, volatile, or abusive had been circulating for years before D-Day, any time I become angry now and she doesn't give me space, my mind immediately starts interrogating my entire history. A biproduct of 18 years of gaslighting I am sure, but disorienting none the less.

Was I abusive?

Did she actually experience me that way?

Am I remembering our marriage incorrectly?

Is my reality wrong again?

That is probably one of the most destabilizing parts of this whole thing for me. I am trying to hold two truths at once: I am completely responsible for the things I have said and the ways I have reacted since discovery, while also refusing to let those reactions retroactively prove allegations that were being made about me years before I had anything remotely resembling this level of anger.

I have talked about this extensively in therapy and with the two friends who know the entire situation. They have helped ground me when I start questioning myself. I am also strangely grateful that I have fifteen years of texts and people who were physically present during some of the periods she described, because without those external points of reference I think I would question my own reality far more than I already do.

So I understand why the caution exists, and I actually agree with you that it needs to exist. I just think there is another very painful side to it when you genuinely were not that person and suddenly find yourself trying to prove your own history to yourself.

Yes I totally get this was your post, your situation, and I completely understand the spirit of it. I debated on responding that way, as it may not be fair to put all that in a post that the situation was clearly distorted by the ws. I personally do not think you should or any other bs should have to have that layer and then monitor themselves.

This site is a lot more friendly these days to ws than it was when I got here. The spirit of my reply was really to say there has been a spotted past here for me in what would be said in various scenarios. Not really to disregard your feelings or what has happened in your case.

It may not have been the right move to respond that way given the personal reason you posted. I didn’t have any other motive other than to be weary what others may twist for their own situation. We have way more people who read than post and I wanted to offer the distinguishing difference because there are people who will fuel their rationale on how they are treating their ws with a twisted view on what you are saying.

And it’s completely normal to not be rational when finding out you have been cheated on. A lot of bs who are not abusive and react badly say the same thing you just did—-that you realized some of what you were saying didn’t feel good to you—and isn’t helpful in her healing. That’s a normal theme I hear here often.

My apologies that you felt you had to explain it again. I understand why you are angry about this and am empathetic in how much more of a betrayal it is to have your wife lying to the peoooe in her life to help justify her bad decisions.

[This message edited by hikingout at 7:09 PM, Tuesday, August 25th]

No worries at all. I am just a little sensitive these days. You have nothing to apologize for, DV is real and way too prevalent. I think it was important to put in this post if even one POS was going to use it to distort reality and use it as any form of justification.

[This message edited by Gemmy at 7:27 PM, Tuesday, August 25th]