What Happens When Somebody Gets Caught Cheating?

As all too fallible human beings, we are all too easily capable of failing, especially in our personal lives. Apart from ending your partner’s life, the absolute worst thing you can do is cheat.

Having suffered that indignity twice, ending both my first and second marriage, I know only too well what runs through a victim's mind. But before I go there, let me pass on what I have come across in terms of what passes through the person who’s doing the cheating’s mind.

As any mature adult knows, anybody caught doing wrong has a very strong tendency to deny, blame, and then punish. If you follow YouTube videos of people shoplifting, or stealing a car, they always say something along the lines of “I didn doo nuffin-ger,” excuse the accent, a result of watching too many videos of American thieves caught on camera. On very rare occasions, people own up. It is exactly the same set play when it comes to being caught cheating.

Many years ago a friend of my second wife told me about the time she caught her husband out. First, she went to his office, where he had already left, and then to his secretary’s house. Brenda knocked on the woman’s door and then stooped down to look through the letterbox, only to see her husband coming down the stairs doing up his trousers. Behind him, his sexy secretary was buttoning up her blouse.

Roger opened the door and said “Brenda, this isn’t what you think it is, huh? There’s your denial.

“Oh don’t tell me, it was all an innocent game of tiddlywinks, with your clothes off. More like a game of hide the sausage from what I can see,” replied Brenda.

A female friend of my first ex-wife was cleaning her house when she found a book called ‘Do It Yourself Divorce.’ When she confronted her husband about it he gave her one hell of a beating. He wasn’t angry with himself, he was angry with his victim. The poor woman was never the same after that. He was having a secret affair and blaming her for making him do it. Talk about perverse.

With my second divorce, my ex-wife to be declared,

“Well, the one at fault gets nothing and the other gets everything. I did not have an affair and you are causing this divorce with your delusional lies. So I get everything and you get nothing.” There’s your denial, blame and punishment all in one.

So what goes through the victim's mind?

Believe it or not, the victim too can go into denial, because the awful truth of the matter is all too painful to bear. For me, it was so painful that a part of me just wanted to turn a blind eye and let her get on with it. I can even recall at one point telling to her to just get on with it and not to rub my nose in it. That did not last long, not least of all because rubbing my nose in it was exactly what she wanted to do to me. Why? To punish me. She had convinced herself, and still does to this day, that I made her do it.

What else went through my mind?

I wanted to end my own life and very nearly did. Did I want to kill her or him? Yes, I did, thankfully for only a very brief moment. I decided that I was not prepared to spend the rest of my life in jail for those two evil swine, who intentionally flaunted their affair in front of me to hurt me very deeply indeed. What for?

To this day, I still do not know where that all came from. My best shot at understanding that is that she had convinced herself and him that I was the guilty party and had to be very harshly punished. So harshly, as I discovered in time to avert my own murder, that they wanted to end me. That shook me to the core and scared the living daylights out of me.

Thankfully I came through all of that and lived to tell the tale. What really saved me was my inborn intuition that something very nasty indeed was afoot. I learned a long time ago to always listen to my inner voice when it has something important to tell me.