How do you manage to remain faithful to a partner who cannot be faithful himself? A woman talks about how she dealt with his affairs.
Text: Evelyn Holst
It was the absence of smell that told me when Georg came from another woman. Because, out of consideration for me, he always showered before climbing into my marital bed late at night.
How my heart was beating when he fell asleep, usually in a flash, and I carefully bent over him to sniff out whether he smelled of anything, i.e. of cheating. I often watched 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 your love for a man who has cheated on you countless times over the course of 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 “You let yourself be humiliated like that!” please.
I always felt really bad afterwards. So I kept the dark side of my marriage to myself and only showed the bright side to the outside world. The professionally successful architect couple with two well-off sons.
The hospitable, cozy house, the summer festivals in our garden, yes, the facade is right. But, and that’s exactly where my dilemma lies, not only that. Sexually apart, 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’ve never been bored together. “My life,” Georg calls me, and I now know with bone-deep certainty that he will never leave me.
He probably won’t cheat on me since his fourth bypass six months ago. But even if they did, that would no longer be a reason for separation.
“Monogamy is overrated” – when I heard this sentence for the first time, Georg stood naked in front of my stove and showed me how to cook the perfect risotto.
It wasn’t his looks that fascinated me, Georg is small and bald at an early age and even then had a small tummy. But he had that “you’re going to have fun with me” sparkle in his eyes that just “turns on” all women around him.
In his company you 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 unreal.
Cheating in marriage: when did it start?
But then I felt the need to relax our sexual intensity a little, to bring a little more everyday into our lives. I just had neither the desire nor the strength to have sex every night until the early hours of the morning. And then I got pregnant. Limp and tired. No desire for sex.
I noticed that Georg was getting restless, that the lightness between us was being lost, I suspected why, but I suppressed it. As long as we didn’t talk about it, maybe my fear was just 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 a huge scene for him. And he calmed me down with the usual “drank too much, lost time” lies.
I felt ugly
I believed him because I wanted to believe him. Of course it went on. He couldn’t be reached, he was in a dead zone, he came home late, his “business appointments” were piling up.
I was pregnant again, felt fat and ugly, there was a lull in our marriage bed. A couple of times I pulled myself together for what Georg then called the “marital frustration number”, which was true because it felt joyless. Shortly thereafter, like in a bad film, I found a bill for a double room, along with the matching restaurant bill.
It was clear he was cheating on me. And the first and last time in our marriage that we’ll talk about it.
“Why are you jeopardizing our marriage?”
I howled. And Georg took me in his arms and cried with him. But afterwards he said: “You have to accept that I can’t be faithful. It’s not just the sex, it’s the hunt, the conquest, this being alive with all your senses. That’s what a woman can do for me I can’t bid alone. You’ll get everything else from me – my friendship, my loyalty, my money. If you insist on my being sexually faithful to you, I’ll break up with you. But if you can stand it, I promise you that I will don’t burden yourself with it.”
Of course that was naive. And hard, very hard. During this phase I tried to talk to my friends about it and quickly realized that I was the only one with the problem.
I knew from one that her husband had been secretly cheating on her for years – was that the better option? I knew I had to make a decision.
And for the first few years I was very often very close to separating.
Because I just couldn’t stand it when Georg played happily with the children, cooked something, put his arms around me lovingly, and I knew very well that he had just come from another woman. That he was all the nicer to me and the kids if he had a good time in bed beforehand. Sometimes it was so full of energy and excited that he also wanted to meet me. And I sometimes even responded to it. This has often pushed me to my limits. I still didn’t want to go.
Is cheating worse than indifference or stinginess?
In the meantime we had set up a very successful architect’s office, in which I worked part-time, the children adored their father, and between me and Georg most things were actually right – we were doing well.
How many times have I listened to my girlfriends’ marital lamentations. One 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 low points. Once it was something more serious, Georg was very far away, even though he sat with us at the kitchen table and played Uno. That’s when I realized how scared I was of losing him. I put my arms around him and just said “stay with us”. The matter ended shortly thereafter.
When I was sitting at his hospital bed 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 lost his teeth.”
Does it sound cynical to say that this was one of the most beautiful moments of our marriage for me?