Smart Women Stay With Cheating Husbands

I’m a smart woman.

I’m a smart woman.

If you met me in real life, here are some things you might pick up about me:

• I’m intelligent. I’m university educated, pretty widely read and like to do my research on important issues before engaging in conversation about them.
• I’m successful in my career. I have over two decades of experience in my field, a strong professional reputation, and am generally pretty good at my job.
• I’m warm, caring, and compassionate. I am a strong believer in the power of human connection and its role in making the world go round. I put a great deal of energy into building those connections with most people I meet.
• I’m an engaged mother. I do work full-time and single-parent full-time, and that arrangement is by choice, but I am very conscious of the way I am raising my daughters. I’m by no means perfect, but raising strong, connected, and compassionate girls is very important to me.

Here’s one thing you probably won't pick up about me:

I stayed with my cheating husband after discovering he had been having an affair for the first two years of our marriage, including while I was pregnant with our first daughter together. I even had another baby with him. And yes, spoiler alert, he cheated on me again.

Infidelity happens. Despite what you may have read or seen represented in popular culture, it’s not just something that befalls relationships void of love, sex, or connection. There are complexities and nuances to why it happens and what form it takes. But, when you strip that away, the disorientation of discovering infidelity in your relationship is, I think, pretty universal.

And that is how I would describe my state after realizing, four months after the birth of our first daughter together, that my husband had been sleeping with someone else for the entire time I was pregnant, and for a short time after she was born. Completely disorientated.

One of the very first thoughts I had was ‘But, I’m a smart woman! How did I allow myself to stay engaged in this toxic relationship? What is wrong with me?’

I felt anything but smart. I felt really, really stupid.

The internet didn’t really help (shock horror). Comments on this piece I wrote to constructively express my anger towards my husband’s first affair partner (just FYI I am allowed to be angry with the other woman) include:

‘Pitying and condescending her only speaks of your own fear and insecurity. What does it say about you if your husband’s taste is apparently so bad that he is cheating with a bimbo…..’

‘How about blaming yourself? How about asking yourself what is it about you, that you attract dirtbags like your husband? And the joke is on you because you took him back, and you reckon you both ‘fell more in love’, f me you are a gullible, gullible fool! He WILL cheat again, and you will deserve it because you were the silly bimbo that took him back.’

‘Lady, your maggot of a ‘husband’ (I think the OW dodged a bullet there, and you are stuck with him, so she is the winner out of you 3) *WILL* cheat on you again. And you will DESERVE IT, for taking him back again.’

These comments, while not actually that hurtful at the time, demonstrate why it might be that smart women feel very stupid once they discover they have been cheated on. Because people tell us we are.

I get it, though. If I’m so damn smart, why did I stay? Why did I put the effort in to repair the marriage? Why did I put my own devastation aside to try and make way for love, and a relationship re-birth?

Because everything was upside down and I am smart enough to know not to make big decisions when I can hardly stand up straight.

Have you ever been really drunk and thought ‘yeah! now is an excellent time to quit my job and live off the grid for the rest of my life!’ Sure, I’ve been there. Now, have you ever gotten drunk and actually quit your job? Less likely. And that’s why I, as a smart woman, knew not to make huge decisions that impacted not only me but also my children, when I was impaired by the disorientation of it all.

I was just trying to find my feet.

And I kept trying to find my feet for two years. It worked for a while. We did get back on track. We had another baby. He did it again. I finally ended it.

But, still. I will not concede that I was stupid. I was traumatized. I was heartbroken. I was trying to do what I thought was right.

But I did not ever, ever stop being a smart woman. Although it may appear to strangers on the internet that I was an absolute fool, I was, in fact, balancing my intelligence, the need to provide for my children, my natural tendency to default to compassion for those I love, and making sure I did the right thing as a mother.

To this day I can’t say whether making a quick decision to exit at the first reveal would have been better. Less heartache? Maybe. Less judgment from others, and of myself? Definitely.

What I do know though is that not making that decision immediately, staying the course and giving everything I had one last chance, made sure that when everything fell apart again and I finally left that marriage, I did it with a very clear head and heart.

And it still feels like the smartest thing I’ve ever done.