No more marriage investments, only withdrawals

May your fountain be blessed, and may you rejoice in the wife of your youth.

-Proverbs 5:18, NIV

When one partner refuses to do the things that both enjoy, you know this person is already gone.

Instead, this person seems fixated on berating the faithful partner about his or her “shortcomings.” This is NOT a good sign for the marriage.

You might consider this part of the cheater working on the “discard” phase of their affair. They want to make themselves feel less horrible for harming and discarding you, the faithful partner.

This is accomplished–in part–by only withdrawing from the marriage relationship and hardly ever doing things that might remind them of what they ruined. That is what doing things both enjoyed would do. It would remind them that they destroyed a good thing with their sins.

A cheater does not want such a reminder. They rather feed their fantasy that the marriage was always bad, and therefore, they were “entitled” to cheat.

I wonder how many of us had an explicit conversation about all of this with our cheater…

Did you ask your cheater to do things you both enjoyed? How did that go over? 

My suspicion is many of us tried saving the marriage this way. We were still willing to invest but our cheater was just into taking withdrawals. At some point, there was no more left to take!

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*A version of this post ran previously.