"I am sure you are meeting with another woman when you are on your business trips."
"I know you are cheating on me."
"You're late again, I am certain you were with another woman."
When you hear these definitive statements from your wife, day after day, night after night, I can understand why you would become concerned and even exceedingly worried. You know that you haven't done any of what you're being accused of. You haven't been with another woman or done anything that should make her so suspicious. You absolutely know it. Your mind would spin all sorts of questions.
"Why for god's sake is she making such unfounded accusations?"
"What on earth have I done that could give her that impression and raise her suspicions?"
"Have I done or said something that made her feel insecure or unloved?"
These and so many other questions along those lines.
Your days become hell and your nights turn into nightmares as you struggle to find something to reassure her, appease her anger and dispel her groundless accusations. But nothing you could say or do seems to works; not the 'I love you', not the 'I would never do such thing to you or our marriage'; nothing would change her mind or make her refrain from regularly accusing you and throwing those determinate statements at you.
You suspect she loves you. Hell, she says it often enough. Some days or sometimes it's said in a skewed way, something like:
"Is my love for you not enough? Why are you interested in other women?"
It's like two opposing magnets trying to mate.
Your gray cells start working overtime trying to find answers to the multitude of questions and conflicting thoughts going through your mind.
If this is something you are experiencing my fellow married man and you are asking yourself those very same questions, the answer is really simple. Take it from someone who's been there. She is having an affair. A very serious affair, not a simple fling. Believe me, the fact that you don't know about it doesn't mean it didn't or won't happen.
A loving faithful wife doesn't make that sort of accusations unless she has absolute proof of your affair, and such accusations are usually substantiated and followed by a separation or a divorce. You, first among all, would know when you've stepped out of line.
In all my personal observations since then I noticed that, in most cases, a cheating husband is usually more circumspect and avoids confrontations. But with a cheating wife it's different. A cheating wife often reverts to accusatory approaches and tactics to hide her own affair. It's a smoke screen. The more time you spend on justifying yourself and finding excuses for things you haven't done, the less time you will have to notice her unusual and often suspicious behavior. It also makes her feel less guilty. In her mind she cannot be a lesser person than you are. Au contraire, she convinces herself, almost to the point of absolute certainty, that you are doing exactly what she is doing, if not worse.
I hear every now and again about people separating or divorcing because one of the two got caught cheating. I read stories and articles in magazines and newspapers about people getting caught cheating, there are often statistics associated with those stories.
I know the signs and the classic, and sometimes comical, scenarios; like the repetitive and unmentioned phone calls to unfamiliar numbers, or the suspicious car in your drive when your wife is supposed to be at work, or the sudden urge to take her cell phone to the toilet, or the phone conversation or email you weren't supposed to hear or read.
In my case, it wasn't any of that. I never noticed anything that could give me reason to become suspicious. In less time that it takes to say it, one morning you are a happily married man and the next morning you're considering divorce and wondering what the hell happened.
* * *
After my divorce, I became curious about infidelity and how other people perceive it and deal with it. You know the sort of questions that trot through your mind, and you try to find some logic and also some comfort in the collective wisdom of our society.
I had dealt with my situation the best I can, I think, but I wanted to do a 'professional' analysis, what I always do at work when a project goes up shit creek. I wanted to do a 'Post Mortem'. In the criminal and medical profession they call it an 'autopsy'. I find 'After Death' more appropriate, more accurate, and yet so much broader in scope.
I tried as much as possible reading scientific, social, and medical/psychological research. Hell, I even read some poetry and philosophical thoughts written as far back as Adam and Eve. But there were so many conflicting views and flawed analysis methods, like the one used by Sheree Hite, that it was hard to get a conclusive perspective on the topic.
The subject seemed to be an uneasy one to analyze, regardless of nationality, culture, and religion, and that for a very simple reason: most people lie about sex. One of the interesting and amusing works I read is a book called 'Lust in Translation: Infidelity from Tokyo to Tennessee' by Pamela Druckerman.
I read another 'research' document by Buss and Shackelford where it is stated that the 'Estimates of the combined probability that at least one member of a married couple will have an affair over the course of a marriage range from 40 to 76%' (Thompson, 1983). Yep, take your time to digest it. The report is definitely worth reading and very enlightening.
Morton Hunt wrote in Playboy once that 42% of men and 25% of women he interviewed admitted that they engaged in adultery. I guess men brag and women are coy!
In Cosmopolitan, Linda Wolfe wrote that 54% of women had engaged in at least one extra-marital affair.
Don't ask me why in one case it's 25% and in the other 54%. I just read them and try to figure out what they mean.
Whatever the percentage really is, do you understand the implications of these statistics? In your own street, between your house and the houses of your two immediate neighbors on either side of yours, assuming that all occupants are married couples, at least one has, is, of will be cheating. In a ten apartments block, again assuming that all ten apartments are occupied by married couples, that's a total of 20 people, between 6 and 12 of these have, are, or will be cheating. I love statistics! This kind gives you a completely new perspective on your marriage and your neighborhood.
Consider now that most people would not admit to their infidelity unless caught or forced into admitting it. Assuming that statistics have a 20 or even 10 percent margin of error, you still have to factor in that, considering the inherently secretive nature of infidelity, most cases of cheating are never discovered or declared and hence will not be included in any statistics.
'The percentages are actually higher than this because there are many men and women involved in affairs about which their partners have no knowledge. They may also have had affairs in the past and ended them before anyone found out. Marital infidelity is another term for adultery, which is regarded as a crime in some locations.' says another report.
