“If we stayed married, you’d always hold this over my head,” says Cheater.

Cheater Concern About You Never “Getting Over It”

What I find interesting about this response is how the Cheater shows he or she understands the infidelity has forever impacted the marriage. They understand that they cannot go back to how things were.

Now, such a cheater is mostly objecting about loosing the ability to hold the moral high ground in the marriage.

To them, the issue is less about your ability to forgive and more about their inability to look like the morally superior person in the marriage. It is a change in the power balance. They cannot abide humbling themselves.

A repentant cheater would never say such a thing. They would be more concerned about the damage they did to you than their forgiveness status.

You see, the entitled cheater who says such thing is speaking truth to some degree. The infidelity will forever impact the marriage.

He or she traumatized their spouse by cheating on them. A compassionate, godly person would not then demand their victim pretend such a thing never happened. They would understand part of repenting is living in a way that is gentle and healing towards the person they wounded.

Trust me, the faithful spouse did not wish to experience soul rape–i.e. being sinned against via adultery. They were not just waiting to get moral leverage over their spouse by surviving this awful trauma. Rather, they were sucker-punched and will likely need a lifetime to heal from that cowardly ambush.