From lack of love to dealing with low self-esteem, there are many reasons behind cheating. If you have your spouse cheating in a relationship, here’s why…
In retrospect, I know that, in many ways, I set the stage for my spouse’s cheating.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t blame myself for his cheating but I do know that, in many ways, my actions made it so that our relationship was vulnerable to one of us stepping out.
I have a tremendous amount of regret for the things that I did that made our marriage susceptible to infidelity and I want to share them with you today so that you don’t make the same mistakes I made over the course of my marriage.
Here are 5 ways I set the stage for my spouse’s cheating.
5 Causes Of Spouse Cheating: The Infidelity Stages Explained
1. I took him for granted.
When we first got married, my life was all about us as a couple.
We worked together and played together and life was grand.
And then we had kids and everything changed.
The kids and their activities became the focus of my life. Whatever they needed took priority over anything else. I had wanted to be a mom my whole life and having kids meant all of my dreams had come true.
Unfortunately, I think the arrival of the kids were my spouse’s nightmare.
I am not saying that he didn’t love the kids. He loved them madly. I am saying that my focus totally turned away from him and towards the children and I am sure that must have felt horrible for him.
And, not only did I focus on the kids, I expected him to focus on the kids as well, to make them the center of our family and not us.
As a result, I just expected him to be there when I needed him. I expected him to pick the kids up if I needed him to. To take them away on Saturday mornings so that I could get things done. To coach soccer and to go to races. Etc.
And I am not sure that I ever asked him to do those things – I just assumed that he would.
I am hoping that I said thank you for the things that he did but I am guessing that I wasn’t so good at doing that which probably left him feeling unimportant and invisible.
Perhaps, if I had made him more a part of the team instead of this person who would do my bidding, I wouldn’t have left him feeling this way and, when someone else came along who might actually see him, he might have been able to resist the temptation to stray.
Related: 10 Things No One Tells You About Cheating
2. I treated him with contempt.
This is the thing that I regret the most.
I know that, in spite of everything that he did for me, everything that I took for granted that he went along with, with no complaints, I treated my spouse with contempt.
The definition of contempt is ‘the feeling that a person or a thing is beneath consideration, worthless, or deserving scorn.’ And this is exactly how I treated him.
When he came home late from work and missed dinner, I said that I would ‘fire’ him. When he did something, but not the way I wanted him to, I would passive aggressively say something demeaning.
I criticized the way he did everything – telling him what he was doing wrong. I didn’t support his dreams and hobbies but brushed them off as pipe dreams that he would never achieve.
There is nothing that will kill a relationship quicker than contempt. Why? Because with contempt comes feelings of anger and resentment. Of self-doubt and low self-esteem. Of not trusting your partner to care about your feelings. Of believing that not only do they not love you but that they don’t even like you.
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