As more and more information has come out about Tiger first let me say, what Tiger did was wrong. Cheating is never ok. Right now you are probably feeling torn by the love you have for him and the anger you feel toward him. Emotions run all over the place. The desire to hurt him like he hurt you has to be overwhelming. I’ve read that you want to stay for the kids. I commend that, but at the same time the kids will eventually grow up and then what?
I have sat in a very similar situation. While my husband isn’t world famous he did step outside our marriage twice. It is the most painful experience I have ever lived through, but today I would not give anything to change it. I am wiser and a better person for it.
People think marriage is easy when they first get into it. “Oh, I love them, we will never have problems.” This could not be further from the truth. As life begins to happen, human nature is to fall into routines. The problem with this is everything becomes predictable and that new exciting new love feeling fades. If we don’t choose to continue to love deeply and emotionally one or both partners begin to look for excitement elsewhere. That excitement isn’t always an affair. Sometimes it is a new sport, or a band or some other thing that brings something new into their life, without causing them to step outside of marriage and those are good activities to encourage.
The problem is for guys who played the field a lot before their marriage, the thought of that chase is hard for them to get past even once they say “I do.” The mistake we as wives make is thinking old ways won’t come back once things get routine. I personally thought it was better to not show jealousy when a woman was around my husband. I wrongly thought that showing jealousy would turn him off. Instead it made him think I didn’t care.
Another mistake I made was putting the kids before the marriage. I wrongly thought that since the children were helpless and my husband was not that the kids deserved all my attention and my husband got the leftovers. What man wants to come home to that? Again, not saying that it was ok for him to stray, but there are always two sides and we as wives have to look at what part we played in all this as well.
At this point, though, you are dealing with trust. Trust takes a long time to build, but only a moment to destroy. Rebuilding that trust takes even longer. You may be asking yourself, how do I ever trust him again? How can you let him out of your sight? The answer here is, you have to. If you live your life worrying about every moment he is out of your sight you will become the angry, bitter wife that he never wants to come home to. It is like a double edged sword. The very person you don’t want to be is who you can become if you hold onto it. Forgiveness is not saying what the other person did was ok, but saying I am going to let it go and let God deal with it. Holding a grudge does not hurt the other person, it only hurts those of us who hold onto it.
The Marriage Playbook
~where marriage is going~
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