Would your husband forgive your affair?

Guardian UK ^ | 23 June 2003 | Leah Hardy

[Lorianne]

Janet Reibstein and Martin Richards, authors of Sexual Arrangements: Marriage and the Temptation of Infidelity (Scribner), estimate 'between 50 and 75 per cent of men, and only a slightly smaller proportion of women, have had or are having affairs while married'.

[FateAmenableToChange]

Besides that it's a sin, an affair represents perhaps the largest failure possible in human relationships. Most of us take only a handful of formal oaths before witnesses in our lifetimes - marriage, government service, boy scouts, etc. If we cannot stand by those oaths, every other relatively minor promise is not worth the air it took to say it.

[7 x 77]

What do you guys guess are the percentages?

[Lorianne]

That's true. But there is also such a thing as forgiveness.

[FITZ]

Is it forgiveness or being a doormat?

[FateAmenableToChange]

But there is also such a thing as forgiveness.

Forgiveness is a decision not to harbor hate or anger in your heart for another's sin against you. But it is not the Clintonian definition which apparently requires the forgiver to ignore past failings and place the person being forgiven in the same position of trust that they have already proven themselves incapable of handling. Forgiving someone does not require you to allow them to pick up where they left off, or to place them in the same position of trust and responsibility they occupied before their betrayal and sin.

There are consequences to sin which must be borne regardless of whether the sinner is forgiven or not.

[FITZ]

In my opinion, the marriage vows are broken by adultery. A marriage must be based on love and trust and adultery kills both of those, it destroys the marriage completely. It's probably better to accept the adulterer is incapable of making a marriage work, move on, but forgiving is important in moving on, you don't need to carry a lot of bitterness and hate with you.

Since I believe the marriage is over when the vows are broken, you'd have to start all over if you wished to remarry a known adulterer -- remarry them ---and why bother.