Sorry. I meant that the cheater is, usually, the one that caused most of the problems, including the cheater being an abuser or negligent spouse.
Agree with this most of the time from what I've observed in my own experience and the experience of others.
I've argued before here on SI that the general bromide "WS is 100 percent responsible for the cheating. You are each 50/50 responsible for the marriage" is probably not correct in most cases.
For one thing, statistically it stands to reason that adultery is happening most of the time in good marriages, not bad ones. If it were happening in mostly bad marriages, that would make a far too great a percentage of marriages bad, making marriage itself a very dubious prospect. If it's a good marriage, and the adulterer decided to risk a good marriage to cheat, that probably puts more of the onus for any "unmet needs" in the marriage on the adulterer rather than the faithful spouse.
For another, the therapeutic community seems to have awakened to the fact that wayward spouses have been selling a bill of goods about the state of marriages for many decades, rewriting the history of the marriage and so on -- and more and more good therapists are beginning to question these false narratives. Essentially, they are highlighting these as juvenile tall tales that unfaithful spouses have been telling themselves and others -- which accounts for many of the myths around infidelity in American pop culture.
In fact, several podcasts featuring betrayal trauma specialists make specific note of this.
And for yet another, given the set of toxic neuroses that enables adultery in a wayward spouse, again it stands to reason that it seems far more likely this same set of neurotic deficiencies and flawed worldview problems was probably a greater drag on the pre-adultery marriage than any deficiencies of the faithful spouse (not always the case, granted).
In fact, much of the time, truly remorseful wayward spouses begin to realize this years later and seem to cop to it more often than not (kudos to them for doing this, by the way). Some will even recognize and write about how they neglected the marriage for many moons or years as a precursor or pretext that helped them rationalize their desire to be unfaithful. Sort of "predictive programming" so they could find a reason to be unfaithful.
This probably accounts in part for the false cheaters handbook "I haven't been happy for years" cliche.
Lastly, I had another epiphany along these lines myself this morning. I was thinking of all the good things my WW has done since D-Day to demonstrate the kind of wife she wants to be going forward (juxtaposed with the set of things she refused to do or did far too late). I actually included a detailed list of these previously in my lengthy reconciliation thread, so no need to rehash them here.
But here's what I realized: I've experienced the past four years what I should have had in the previous 20 years. So ironically in trying so much harder and to her credit in acknowledging openly how "lazy" (her term) she was in the marriage previously, my WW has thrown in sharp relief the ways in which she was not bringing her A game to the marriage before. She's the only wife I've ever had, so I have nothing to measure it against. The epiphany this morning was that while I was content in the marriage previously, I was wearing rose-colored glasses and didn't realize that maybe I didn't have the wife I deserved in the first place.
I think a lot of faithful spouses begin to realize this as time goes on, and this may at least partially account for the phenomenon of BS's showing up here decades later filled with regret about staying in the marriage. In fact, just yesterday, a betrayed man showed up here on SI and expounded on precisely this phenomenon and how it made him hurt for both his WW and himself.
Food for thought.
[This message edited by Thumos at 5:16 PM, October 13th (Tuesday)]
