How do you manage to remain loyal to a partner who cannot be loyal himself? A woman talks about how she dealt with his affairs.
Text: Evelyn Holst
It was the absence of smell that showed me when Georg came from another woman. Because, out of consideration for me, he always showered before going into bed with me late at night.
How my heart pounded when he fell asleep, usually at lightning speed, and I bent carefully over him to sniff out whether he smelled of nothing, that is, of cheating. Often I would then watch his peacefully sleeping face, while my heart broke and at the same time the hot anger rose in me.
He cheated on me countless times
How do you explain to other people the love you have for a man who has betrayed you countless times in a 27-year marriage?
Whenever I’ve even tried it, I’ve encountered absolute incomprehension. There are always sentences like “You don’t need that” or “That you let yourself be humiliated!” please.
I always felt really bad afterwards. So I kept the dark side of my marriage to myself and only showed the light to the outside world. The professionally successful architect couple with two well-made sons.
The hospitable, cozy house, the summer parties in our garden, yes, the facade is right. But, and that’s exactly where my dilemma lies, and not just that. Apart from the sexual, Georg and I are still a dream couple.
I know he won’t leave me
We talk, we laugh, we travel and cook together, we have never been bored together. “My man of life”, Georg calls me, and I now know with bone-deep certainty that he will never leave me.
He’s probably not cheating on me since his fourth bypass six months ago. But even if it did, that would no longer be a reason for separation.
“Monogamy is overrated” – when I heard this sentence for the first time, Georg was standing naked in front of my stove and showed me how to cook the perfect risotto.
It wasn’t the look that fascinated me about him, Georg is small and bald early and even then had a small tummy. But he had that “You will have fun with me” twinkle in his eyes, which all women simply “switch on” in his presence.
In his company they feel young, beautiful, desirable. Of course Georg is a gifted lover. Before I knew him, I never really enjoyed sex. The first months with him were therefore almost unreally beautiful.
Cheating in Marriage: When Did It Start?
But then I felt the need to loosen up our sexual intensity a little, to bring a little more everyday life into our lives. I just didn’t feel like having sex every night until the wee hours of the morning. And then I got pregnant. Limp and tired. Not in the mood for sex.
I noticed that Georg was getting restless, that the lightness between us was being lost, I suspected why it was, but I suppressed it. As long as we didn’t talk about it, my fear might just be a pipe dream.
Shortly before the birth, he didn’t come home until three in the morning after a business lunch. I was so exhausted that I made him a huge scene. And he appeased me with the usual “drank too much, forgotten time” lies.
I felt ugly
I believed him because I wanted to believe him. Of course it went on. He could not be reached, he was stuck in a dead zone, he came home late, and his “business appointments” piled up.
I was pregnant again, I felt fat and ugly, our marriage bed was slack. A couple of times I pulled myself up to what Georg then called the “marital frustration number”, which was also true, because it felt joyless. Shortly afterwards, like in a bad film, I found a bill for a double room and the corresponding restaurant bill.
It was clear that he was cheating on me. And the first and last time in our marriage that we talked about it.
“Why are you risking our marriage?”
I howled. And Georg took me in his arms and howled with him. But then he said: “You have to come to terms with the fact that I can’t be faithful. It’s not just sex, it’s hunting, conquering, this being alive with all your senses. A woman can do that for me Don’t bid alone. You get everything else from me – my friendship, my loyalty, my money. If you insist that I am sexually loyal to you, I will part with you. But if you can bear it, I promise you that I will don’t burden you with it. “
That was of course naive. And hard, very hard. During this phase I tried to talk to my friends about it and quickly realized that I was alone with the problem.
I knew of one that her husband had been secretly cheating on her for years – was that the better option? I knew I had to choose.
And in the first few years I was very often very close to parting.
Because I just couldn’t stand it when Georg played happily with the children, cooked something, took me lovingly in his arms, and I knew very well that he had just come from another woman. That he was all the nicer to me and the children if he had a good time in bed beforehand. Sometimes he was so energetic and excited that he wanted me too. And sometimes I even went into it. That has often pushed me to my limits. I didn’t want to go anyway.
Is cheating worse than indifference or avarice?
In the meantime we had set up a very successful architects’ office in which I worked part-time, the children absolutely loved their father, and most things were right between me and Georg – we were fine.
How many times have I listened to my friends’ conjugal lamentations. Someone drinks or smokes too much. One just lies on the sofa and watches TV, the other doesn’t take care of the children. Something is always. No marriage is perfect. And Georg just needs sex a lot more than I do.
Of course there were lows. Once it was something more serious, Georg was very far away, even when he was sitting at the kitchen table with us and playing Uno. That’s when I realized how scared I was of losing him. I took him in my arms and just said “stay with us” to him. Shortly afterwards it was over.
When I was sitting at his bedside after Georg’s fourth bypass operation, after a few minutes of silence he took my hand and whispered: “I’m afraid your old wolf has become toothless.”
Does it sound cynical when I say that for me this was one of the most beautiful moments in our marriage?