What Would You Do?

On Sunday morning, I had a wonderful talk with one of my closest friends and she asked me a question that I could not answer. Here’s the scenario she described: Your husband is cheating on you. He tells you the truth about it, but there was a reason why.

He found a rich woman, older than you probably, and all the money he got from her, he used to support you and your children because he loves you.

What do you even say in a situation like this?

I thought about it for a long time and honestly, I couldn’t even come up with a conclusion. It reminded me of a situation in the movie ‘Fences’. PS: A spoiler is coming up so I advise you to skip the next few paragraphs if you can.

In ‘Fences’, Troy Maxson (played by Denzel Washington) and Rose Lee Maxson (played by Viola Davis) are married. In fact, they’ve been married for years. They understand each other, they love each other and do all the necessary things that a husband and wife are supposed to do.

But then Troy cheats on Rose Lee with another woman, has a baby by her, but the mistress dies. And Troy more or less pleads with his wife to take care of the baby girl because she no longer has a mother and he needs help. One of the most powerful things she said was this: “From right now… This child got a mother. But you a womanless man”.

Honestly, that kind of situation breaks my heart. Because as a woman, you gave everything to your husband. You give your all. But he doesn’t respect you enough to say ‘listen, temptations are out there, but I’m not going to give in, no matter how much I might desire her’. I listened to the excuses Troy gave his wife: That there was a gap in their relationship and he wanted to fulfill it. He was tired of stressing about life at home, such as who’s going to fix the roof, making the payments for the family, the troubles their children were bringing them… and I just wondered why going to another woman’s bed was the solution.

I couldn’t have imagined what I would do. Because – cheating hurts! As much as we play it off as nothing and always have our own reasons for it, at the end of the day, it causes misery.

You give your life to someone, you become the best person you can be because of them. And next thing you know, they’re coming up to you, telling you that they ‘do not regret it, but the situation is here so how are we going to deal with it now?’ It’s infuriating!

No wonder people don’t want to get married any longer. No wonder everyone is so cautious about love and dating nowadays. These things happen – there are couples out there who even know that someone in the relationship is cheating but they stay for the sake of stability in the family. They don’t want their children dealing with divorced parents. They don’t want their children to ‘suffer’ for the sake of teaching them that marriage can be civilised, yet they sacrifice their happiness for it.

But back to our original question: What do you do? Give your person a chance and tell them to break up the relationship? Or do you walk away and never come back? I wish I knew.

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