SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Yes, I absolutely believe one can love more than one person at once, even romantically. But I don’t believe for a minute that one of them won’t, by necessity, be getting the short end of the stick at any given time.

I am in agreement with this. You can be "in love" with more than one person. It all depends on how much you want both of them. "Want" and not "need". Even then the falling out of love happens when cognitive dissonance aka "the fog" sets in. When in cognitive dissonance a person is facing conflicting notions - "being in love with two people is wrong and therefore, I must choose only one. I want the new guy more. So, I better rewriting my marital history so that I don't feel guilty for stopping being in love my BS".

Truth is they were probably in love with the BS. Not necessarily butterflies and sunshine. Good enough to enjoy occasional intimacy though. But then with the AP, the new relationship energy totally makes the "in love" feeling for the BS pale in comparison.

My WS and I have had this discussion multiple times. He will not back down from saying that he has “always loved me”. However, after a while he did admit that he was not acting like he loved me, was not showing love.

I personally think he made up the fact that I didn’t “love” him in order to justify cheating bc not having the same limerant feelings about me anymore (as is NORMAL when considering mature love but he had no clue that it was normal). And that he didn’t love me, respect me or honor me in the way that I deserved or in the way he promised when he married me. And TBH, I had no idea when I married him that he was so clueless about the reality of relationships (and the ebb and flow of intensity).

Can you love someone while punching them? While tipping over the porapotty they are in? While framing them for murder?

Why would a BS agree to play on the home playing field of a WS, which is words? BS love by actions. WS by words. I prefer actions.

A cheater like mine did NOT love me nor was he concerned with my health since he had unprotected sex (with both of us) for 5+ years with his trailer park twat who had HPV and had had cervical cancer nor was he concerned with our family’s financial future since he was too busy having sex at his workplace and they weren’t even co-workers.

I honestly don’t believe he has ever had the human capacity to love anything or anyone. EVER.

My H told me on DDay that he loved me like he had never loved anyone else...but he didn’t think he was IN LOVE with me anymore. I believe him.

The weird thing is...I told him it was alright...whatever it was...we could work through it. I had NO IDEA he would ever cheat on me. He then confessed to fucking another woman...and in that instant my love for him was GONE. I told him the M was over... and left the room. As soon as I left...my H’s heart sank. He told me later that he felt that the BEST thing that ever happened to him was leaving and ALL he wanted was to be by me because in that instant he knew without a doubt that he was definitely IN LOVE with me . There were a lot of LOVE definitions going on that day .

As painful as it is to write it say it think it... NO, YOU CANNOT LOVE SOMEONE YOU CHEAT ON.

This doubly painful for me bc it means my husband didnt love me. The 1 person i poured everything into. I mean everything.

And 2, bc as a MH, it means to my continued surprise i didnt really love my husband. Which still to this day baffles me bc i would have bet my life on both-withouth hesitation.

**disclaimer for both my brain and others, my act of nonmarital sex was open, no lies, no emotion. May mean nothing to some but to me it matters.

Love, without being accompanied by loving behaviors, is a moot point. It is a worthless premise. The value of love exists because of the reasonable expectations of respect, safety, devotion, selflessness, etc.

Love without loving behaviors is no comfort.

I struggled with this concept SO much- the fact that I loved my H was enough that I've never even thought about kissing someone else, let alone doing anything else. All I ever wanted was him, because I loved him. So the idea that he could love me and do what he did... it was confusing and painful. Especially because I wanted to try to R because I still wanted him, but I didn't want a marriage with someone who didn't love me.

Our MC helped me a lot with this one, with the idea that maybe different people have different definitions of love- or maybe that there are different levels/depths of love.

I loved my H with everything I had. He loved me, but in a different way. He told me that he had always thought he loved me and never thought he was capable of doing what he did. But after his ONS and DDay, when he realized that he might lose me, the way that he loved me changed. He doesn't know how exactly, but he knows that the way he feels now is different. Stronger, deeper. That now I'm literally always on his mind and his main concern is my safety and my happiness, whereas they were more of afterthoughts to his own needs before.

So he loved me before, but in an immature way- the way that he liked me a whole lot, loved spending time with me and having sex with me and planning our future, but not in that I was the be-all, end-all can't live without me way that I loved him. It took seeing me fall apart to realize how much he would do anything to never see that again- it took me being ready to leave to realize how much he loved and wanted and needed me and only me.

Dday was the equivalent of a near death experience to him and apparently unlocked levels of emotion in himself that he never had access to before.

You don't know what you got till it's [almost] gone.

I'm choosing to believe this in order to move forward. It is a choice that I have to make every single day- some days are harder than others. but time and consistency on his part help me to believe it more and more.

Edit: this current 'deep love' is the only thing I will stick around for. If he ever reverts back to the immature love, I'm gone.

[This message edited by betrayalbrokeme at 8:41 AM, May 10th (Friday)]

In the words of Tina Turner, “what’s love got to do with it “

It took me a long time to grasp the concept that my wife loved me and did what she did to fill some kind of hole in her. She wasn’t going to ever end up with this guy.

Even though she thought so, I didn’t think the fact she loved me meant anything. In fact I was pissed off she tried to use it to mitigate her actions. it didn’t change that she brought this man into our bed and our life and caused massive destruction. I see so many WS hanging their hats on the thought that because they never loved their AP, it makes things less bad

On the same vein, I still in many ways love my wife. If she needed a kidney I would be the first in line. Yet love didn’t stop me from divorcing her. My love was never going to overcome the disgust of what she did and the humiliation she brought to me. It pains me to see how she is now a shell of her former self, but she brought that on herself. I’m damaged too

If your WS is trying to make what she did less bad, I would shut that down right now. She seems to make a habit of putting you on the defensive. Don’t let her do it.

I absolutely believe cheaters can love their spouse but only to the extent their brokenness allows. I think one needs to be mentally strong and healthy to love another and one self completely. That being said. Many cheaters (my husband) included absolutely treated me terribly as he carried on his LTA, but to my face spoiled me. He was generous, never missed an important date, family time, holiday, took care of me when ill, etc.... he was a great husband until he walked out the door each day and I never knew what else he was up to. Does that mean he didn’t love me? No, it means he was mentally weak, sad, and damaged and alleviating the pain he felt was more important to him than completely honoring me. So, did he love me all along? I say the best his damage, pathetic self could.

DFIM said it better and more succinctly than I did.

What definition of love includes lying and betrayal?

I don't know of one.

You can be infatuated with/lust after more than one person at a time, but that isn't love. Those emotions are selfish.

Love is action.

Are we not always talking about words vs actions on this site?

“Don’t listen to what they say, watch what they do.”

So, IMO, it does not matter what “love” a cheater professes to have. They have shown their truth with their actions.

My WS believed she loved us both... is there comfort for her psyche knowing "she never stopped loving me?" Can't answer for her... but of course the dissonance with the actions is so unloving. Well established answer here of actions vs. words.

A small subset of the population no only believes loving many is possible but thinks for them it's a better way to live, living that way through polyamory. Playing with fire but doesn't stop them from believing in it.

I'm in the 'how do you define love' category. Some people have that love that commits them 100% to one person til death do we part, no matter what, regardless of what happens to and around us I'm yours alone, type of love. They're the type of people who see love as something beyond just a 'feeling'. Cheaters tend not to have that. Their love changes over time.

Not the Haddaway song, which is now in your head...

Yeah...thanks!

Are we not always talking about words vs actions on this site?

“Don’t listen to what they say, watch what they do.”

So, IMO, it does not matter what “love” a cheater professes to have. They have shown their truth with their actions.

A million times this. Saying "I felt love" while betraying is just another of the mind's defense mechanisms for masking shitty behavior from yourself so you don't feel like a complete cad. Kind of like scarfing down 10 100-calorie packs of cookies and convincing yourself "I dieted today" even though your actions were anything but. Kind of like how the mind puts them in a "fog". How do they know their mind isn't still in some kind of minimizing fog?

I suspect almost everyone has the same definition of what love is, in terms of boundaries, commitment, loyalty, honesty, etc, until they decide to break the vow, then comes the concept of shifting definitions of love. How many newly weds on their wedding night are having conversations about the degrees to which they hold differing view of what love looks like and what it doesn't look like.

I rather think those shifting and newly found altered definitions of love are more rationalizations by the cheater and refusal to accept it could be true by some BS's. But I would imagine almost everyone starts out in an M with a pretty common view of what love is and isn't.

I doubt it is that love means something different during and post-A, rather it is the need to redefine it, on both sides, to rationalize how you stay together accepting an uncomfortable reality. Just redefine the parameters to fit an otherwise previously unthinkable scenario.

I would even wager that most waywards return to the definition of what love is after the A shitstorm, as they had before it.

Love, without being accompanied by loving behaviors, is a moot point. It is a worthless premise. The value of love exists because of the reasonable expectations of respect, safety, devotion, selflessness, etc.

Love without loving behaviors is no comfort.

Even dogs know this. You know they love you because of their actions. They can't speak the words and they don't need to. That love is worth a lot more than a bunch of words not remotely backed up by actions.

So many of you have made convincing arguments. I simply cannot disagree with the notion that love is action based, that the ability to have an affair is clearly not an action of love. I believe my wife knows that she simply didn't love me in the capacity that a wife should love her husband and thus allowed her to have the affair.

I believe it was Numb&Dumb (and if I'm incorrect, my apologies) who wrote about how he was capable of having an affair, she simply did it first. I can empathize with that, I had opportunities, I didn't always feel wanted by my ww and I often felt like she was done with the marriage, but it was my love for her that kept me on the path of fidelity. I'm not sure I could ever agree that love can also include the ability to cheat on your spouse. I appreciate everyone's insight.