Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God.
Do ye think that the scripture saith in vain, The spirit that dwelleth in us lusteth to envy?
But he giveth more grace. Wherefore he saith, God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace unto the humble.
-James 4:4-6, KJV
Cheaters are entitled and arrogant.
And that is a not recipe that brings healing or godliness.
I say cheaters are entitled and arrogant because cheaters generally have no problem telling counselors and pastors after the cheating is even known that the faithful spouse must work to convince them to stay in the marriage. That is entitlement and very inflated sense of self.
Such cheaters are like a brazen embezzler. This embezzler tells the finance company he just stole millions from that he will not pay back what he stole. Further, he is only sitting in a meeting with management to explain how wrong they are and to see if they will make the changes he requires in order to stay at the company. Do you think management would tolerate that?
Cheaters do this all the time with pastors and Christian counselors. With their infidelity exposed, they come into sessions with lists of changes for their victims to complete in order for them to stay in the marriage. It is utter insanity!
Please do not enable such pride and entitlement! A cheater needs to be reminded that staying in the marriage is a gift from the faithful spouse. Like an embezzler who does not get fired by management, avoiding divorce is a gift. It is on the cheater to convince the faithful spouse that he/she is worthy of the gift and not the other way around!
Thank you for this! My former spouse acted like I was interviewing to be his wife after he announced he was going to divorce me… And I already was his wife. I jumped through all kinds of hoops trying to get him to not divorce me and it was all in vain. Very well said here.
Thanks and welcome to DM, Lisa! It’s a very common situation unfortunately.
I did everything to convince my husband to do right by me and our marriage. It was in vain as well because here I am facing divorce anyway. The bottom line is it did not matter what I did, nothing was going to fix our marriage. It was never for me to fix (I wish I had realized this a while back).He has a character issue that he needs to deal with. I can’t love or convince him into having decent character.