- Share This Post
- submit
- 13
-
Sparkle (0)
As Oprah did on her recent show on why men cheat, I acknowledge that some women also cheat on their husbands. I think the figure is 1 in 4, but as Oprah clarified for her show, this post is not about women who cheat. It's about men who cheat, and what, if anything, you can do about it. Shall we begin?
If you discover your husband is cheating on you, the question you must ask yourself is do you care? Do you want to save the marriage and keep the man?
I didn't. More than likely I didn't want to keep him before he had the affair I knew about, and I recognize he may have had others but I wasn't paying attention.
And yet, if I had to advise a woman who is married and unhappy because her husband had an affair, my advice would never be, "Girl, dump his behind and move on." Why? Because she's not me.
I believe that if you've made a commitment, you need to have a better reason for leaving than simply I'm unhappy because happiness is a state of mind, and if you really believe your spouse stumbled and you have the strength to overcome distrust, go for it. You must know your own mind, of which fleeting emotions may be only fragments. Circumstances don't automatically dictate staying or leaving a marriage. Our levels of pain and desire do that.
I could write this topic from personal experience, and as a a result, this post has become a skeleton of what it once was. I've decided that if I get comments that warrant my saying more about my personal experience, I will do so as my heart leads me. Otherwise, I'll stick to Dr. Gary Neuman's appearance on Oprah.
Neuman is the marriage counselor who wrote The Truth About Men Cheating, and the Queen of Talk is promoting the book. From what I've heard and read, some of Neuman's study results support some of my beliefs about how to make a marriage work. I believe that in order to keep a happy home and to prevent cheating, a woman must be willing to cater to the male ego, which means living at the expense of her own ego more often than women are willing to admit.
But what can you do to prevent your husband from cheating or what will you do if the cheating's already done? That's what Neuman declares is at the crux of his book:
Gary says his work as a marriage counselor inspired him to write this book. "For over 20 years, [I've been] living along with women, counseling, seeing the devastation and how overwhelming it is when they are cheated on and what it subsequently does to the children and the family," he says. "You want to help children of divorce? I said, 'Well, let's get really down and dirty and find out what we can do to save marriages and make them better.'"
Although Gary discusses how wives of cheaters can factor into affairs, he says he wrote the book to empower women. "It's not about blaming the wife. It can't be. I mean, cheating is ridiculous. It's wrong. And you can't justify it," Gary says. "My book is about one thing. It's really about empowering women. If I can give you knowledge that says that I could have proof that if you do certain things, you can lead your relationship to a better place, that will be much better for you as well because it's not just about stopping tragedy. It's about building a much more mutually beneficial relationship." (The Oprah Show)
This idea that the power to save a relationship belongs to the woman? I've heard it before in different words from a male writer online who hasn't done any studies on the matter. It's all his personal observation. He's not talking about cheating, however. Additionally, he's a liberated man giving women lots of power, even saying one of the needs a woman may meet for a man is financial. Still, he seems to be making a case that power to maintain a stable relationship rest with the woman more than the man.
What is it these men are telling us, we have the power to save them from themselves? As I've said before, I may not be suited to marriage. Do I want to do all the heavy lifting of making a relationship
