(DISCLAIMER: This post in NO WAY, SHAPE, OR FORM is meant to excuse husbands, boyfriends, or partners from their responsibilities regarding infidelity. This is simply another take on one of the reasons affairs are able to happen in the first place, along with a potential solution to the problem. Viewer discretion is advised)
Something is not right. And you can feel it.
You know the natural flow in your relationship is different, but you can’t put your finger on it. So you unpack your adjectives and start adding up the red flags:
1. He seems distracted and starts coming home from work later than usual.
2. He’s spending three hours at the grocery store when he only went to get ONE thing,
3. Suddenly his phone has a new passcode and is attached to him like Velcro.
After some very discreet detective work (every woman breathing is capable of becoming a 007 agent), you find out he’s been unfaithful. This is probably the most devastating bomb drop a woman faces in any relationship. Your heart does a nose-dive into your stomach, you begin to feel dizzy as the tears of either sadness or anger (or BOTH) start stinging your eyes, and one overwhelming question begins to ring relentlessly in your ears:
WHY???
Until you are able to talk to your significant other, it will be hard for you to focus or think of anything else. But before you enlist your sista-girls on a stake-out at your man’s job, let’s rewind all the way back to before you even got the earth-shattering news.
Wouldn’t it be great if he had never cheated in the first place? In a Eutopian society, men would fall for one woman and never have a desire for another one, but since we are all afforded a little thing called “free-will” the only person’s future actions we will ever be able to predict are our OWN.
Here’s how we can all do our part to make sure no one in our Sisterhood ever has to experience the pain of infidelity and as a result, lose a little piece of her natural ability to trust in the process:
We make a commitment to reject the come-ons and flirtation from married or attached men. PERIOD...no matter how fine or muscular he may be.
Some attached men can be really crafty with it, giving all kinds of sob stories like, “I love my wife, but I’m not IN love with her” or “We are only together for the kids” or “We live together, but she’s like a roommate.”
This man‘s marriage very well may be miserable. He could be co-habitating in the middle of a war zone for all you know. But ONE thing is for sure for all men who pull these rabbits out of their hats for sympathy and to get YOU into bed:
THEY ARE ALL STILL VERY MARRIED (or attached. All committed relationships deserve respect).
As women and as sisters, we can show our love and respect for each other by dismissing any advances from married/attached men, by sending them back HOME to their wives, and by moving away from them in the OPPOSITE direction. Not only does your sister deserve the respect of not having you as a third-party to her marriage, but YOU deserve the respect of not just having a “piece” of a man but instead, one of your OWN.
Full disclosure here...as a single woman, I have had countless married men approach me. Some knew that I knew they were married, some thought I didn’t and tried to hide it (by not wearing their ring, etc.), and some just didn’t care and tried offering me things to be a part of their “situation.” Anytime I turned someone away, my hope was that the next unsuspecting woman would do the same thing.
Let‘s stop competing with each other as women and let’s respect the Sisterhood by not doing to another woman what you wouldn’t want to go through yourself. With all the heavy baggage a married/attached man is capable of bringing into your life, it’s not worth the big mess he will create when he unpacks all his adjectives and leaves them for YOU to clean up after he’s long gone.
The destruction of a woman’s spirit caused by needless infidelity should be something none of us would want to participate in. If we all do right by each other, we can all help facilitate an unbreakable bond of protection between us, keeping our relationships healthy and our ability to trust on stable ground.