If a man cheats on the same woman twice, does that mean he loves her?
Sometimes I hear of wives whose husbands have cheated on them more than once. This is pretty bad. But sometimes, he cheats on the same woman multiple times. I recently heard from a wife who said in part, “I was beyond devastated when I first found out about my husband’s affair. I knew the woman he cheated with, so this made it particularly difficult to do everything I could to save the marriage. He insisted that the other woman meant nothing to him and I thought we had recovered. Eight months later, I found out he went back out with the same woman and started seeing her again. “I told my husband that obviously he must love this woman because he can’t seem to let her go. He insists that he doesn’t and says that her feelings for her are ‘complicated’ but they are not love. He says love is what he wants. He feels for me. I’m beside myself. How can he fool this woman twice (and probably still hasn’t let her go) and then claim he doesn’t love her? Silly as it sounds, she could handle cheating better if she believed he didn’t love her. But how can I believe this?” I will explore this more in the next article.
Many wives share her opinion. Countless wives have admitted to me that the fact that their husband is in love with another woman is their greatest fear. Yes, physical infidelity hurts, but emotional infidelity is almost unbearable. Is it possible for a husband to cheat on the same woman several times and not love her? I think sometimes he is and I’ll tell you why I feel that way.
Why it is sometimes possible for a man to cheat on the same woman several times and not love her: Before I begin to share my opinion, I must tell you that there is no way of knowing how the husband really feels in this scenario. I do not know this couple or the other woman involved. She may well have emotional feelings and she may not.
That said, I sometimes reach out to men in this situation on my blog. I have also done a lot of research on this topic. I think some men cheat because of the way the other woman makes him feel, rather than how he feels about her. He often reacts to whatever reward he is getting. And this reward may be that she makes him feel attractive, accomplished, powerful, or confident, etc. In other words, if she can cope with the insecurities he’s dealing with and provide him with some relief, often her “her feelings” for her come from the way she makes him feel better about himself. same. In fact, if you ask the same man what he finds so attractive, irresistible, or alluring in the other woman, he usually won’t list or mention reasons that have anything to do with her. He often won’t tell you that she is a good person that he looks up to.
The wife often assumes that she will talk about her looks or other talents, but this is not always the case. Instead, what you’ll usually hear is some of the effect of her hearing it. She gets it. She doesn’t pressure or question him. In other words, he feels some stress relief when he’s with her. So he’s not necessarily going to come back over and over again out of love for her as a person or a partner. He could come back again and again for love of himself.
Understand the most important problem at hand: I fully understand that the fear that your husband may be in love with another woman is probably what is driving you right now. But in truth, the most important thing is that you have not yet recovered to the point where you are not repeating the same behaviors. Because if he was able to successfully address what brought him to her in the first place, it wouldn’t be as likely that he would return once more.
And sometimes this is your own personal battle. You can support him on that, but you can’t necessarily fix it for him. You can strengthen your marriage and uncover any individual problems, but he must also be willing to act on any vulnerabilities you have found. So where does that leave the wife in this situation? Well, while he understood why she kept demanding answers about her love for this other woman, he didn’t think that continuing to ask her question would actually do him any good. Her husband was likely to continue to deny any love, and frankly, in her own mind, she might believe he was telling the truth.
The most important questions should be: are you willing to completely distance yourself from this woman, work through all the issues that lead to infidelity, and commit to your wife and marriage? Because if he was able and willing to do this and the marriage actually not only survived but grew stronger, then at the end of the day, this other woman would really just be a footnote in this couple’s history. But by continuing to bring her up and demanding answers about her, her wife was actually giving her more power and allowing her back in.
The best thing to do is try to remove her from the equation altogether and make marriage and recovery about husband and wife and no one else.