Having someone you love break your heart and your trust is something incredibly difficult, if not impossible to recover from. This is especially true when it involves infidelity.
For this Redditor, it wasn’t just her husband’s unfaithfulness that ended their relationship. It was him moving his affair child into their family home that led her to seriously consider filing for divorce. Because of her husband’s actions, the OP had to move their daughter and all of her belongings to her parents’ place for the time being.
Scroll down to read the full story in the woman’s own words below, along with interview with relationship intelligence expert Railey Molinario, who answered a few questions on how a partner’s unfaithfulness can affect a relationship.
“Infidelity is one of the most profound breaches of trust in the minds of most couples,” says relationship expert Railey Molinario. Few things can turn one’s world upside down like discovering their spouse’s infidelity. While some relationships do recover from such a breach, often, it leads to their end. According to Gitnux, 30% of divorced couples cite infidelity as the primary reason for their split.
Discussing the importance of trust in a relationship, Molinario emphasized that it is the cornerstone of any healthy partnership. “Trust creates a sense of safety, allowing individuals to be vulnerable and authentic with one another. Without trust, a relationship lacks stability.”
Molinario explained that trust is built through consistent actions, open communication, and mutual respect. Maintaining it requires ongoing effort from both partners. Unfortunately, what takes time and effort to build can be quickly destroyed if one partner engages in an affair.
“Infidelity is one of the most profound breaches of trust in the minds of most couples,” Molinario told . “It often triggers intense emotions like betrayal, anger, sadness, and self-doubt. For the relationship, infidelity disrupts the emotional foundation, leading to questions about identity, security, and the future of the partnership.”
The relationship expert noted that repairing a relationship after trust is broken requires commitment and work from both partners. Molinario outlined several crucial steps for this process:
- Acknowledgment and Accountability: The unfaithful partner must fully acknowledge their actions and take responsibility.
- Open Communication: Both partners need to express their feelings and work through the emotional fallout together.
- Rebuilding Trust: This is a gradual process requiring transparency, consistent behavior, and time.
- Professional Guidance: Relationship intelligence coaching provides structured insight for healing and rebuilding the relationship.
If one partner is unwilling to take these steps, going their separate ways might be the healthier, though painful, option. “There are situations where moving on is the healthiest choice,” Molinario agreed. “If the relationship lacks mutual respect, willingness to work through issues, or alignment of values and expectations, it may not be possible to rebuild the connection. The decision to stay or leave should be made with self-awareness and clarity, focusing on what aligns with one’s values and long-term well-being.”
Being unfaithful to one’s partner is, unfortunately, not unheard of
As painful as it is, infidelity is not that rare of an occurrence. Statista’s data from 2021 revealed that in the US alone, over one-in-five adults admit to having cheated on their partner at least once in their lives. Unfortunately, the OP’s husband was also involved with someone outside his marriage, resulting in him fathering a child out of wedlock
A study delving deeper into how many children came into this world as a result of one or both of their parents being involved in an affair found that historically, the rates of extra-marital births are rather low, around 1%. However, these rates vary depending on social context and location.
Nowadays, despite a growing number of children being born out of wedlock, it’s difficult to determine how many of them are due to their parent’s involvement in an affair, as many people simply choose to create families without getting married.
Men and women tend to engage in infidelity in different ways. Discussing the results of an online survey answered by nearly 95,000 participants, Dr. Maryanne L. Fisher, a Full Professor in the Department of Psychology at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, noted that women and men tend to engage in infidelity for different reasons. In a piece for Psychology Today, she mentioned that women are more likely to engage in emotional or online affairs than their male counterparts. They are also more likely to become unfaithful when they have relationship problems or are bored with their sex life. Men are reportedly more likely than women to engage in sexual infidelity and to do it more than once.
Dr. Fisher also pointed out that the majority of people—just over half—who were unfaithful to their partners confessed about it themselves, while roughly a fifth were caught by their partner.
“These findings suggest that the majority of individuals are willing to confess voluntarily, indicating a level of remorse, a desire to clear one’s conscience, and possibly a desire to repair the damage inflicted by the infidelity,” the psychology expert wrote.
It’s unclear whether the OP’s husband confessed to show remorse and fix any possible damage his actions might have caused. However, coming clean about the affair and his daughter resulted in his other child being moved out of the house with all her belongings, and his wife planning to file for divorce. The Redditor spoke about her plans to divorce her husband in the comments under the post, where she shared more details with fellow netizens.
Many people didn’t think the OP was the jerk in the situation.