I will politely point out that those other things are not damaging in the same way. Not communicating doesn’t give your partner STDs. Cheating can. Some of those STDs, until relatively recently were a death sentence. If you happened to be pregnant at the time, those STDs could have also killed or harmed your child.

Cheating is especially provocative. Cheating can set off a sequence of events that sends your partner over the edge where he/she annihilates the family.

Cheating made public can make a family lose stature in the community, depending.

Cheating can lead to a loss of income, further stressing the family.

Cheating can lead to a spiritual upheaval.

Cheating separates families and harms children. It damages parent/child relationships in a particular way. Again, depending.

Cheating upturns and overturns lives in ways that other behavior does not.

I get what you’re saying. To be honest, when my husband cheated on me, I felt much the same as you, mostly relieved and grateful. I too, had shut down. But it wasn’t deliberate on my part, or revenge, or being passive aggressive, or any of that. I was just emotionally exhausted. Absolutely worn out.

That was a problem that needed to be addressed. It was nothing that justified him cheating. In all likelihood he would have done so eventually anyway and the one I caught probably wasn’t the first one.

Do I regret that it got that bad? Yep. Do I regret that I didn’t leave before? Uh huh. Frankly, I regret ever getting married in the first place. Do I regret the exhaustion and the shut down. Sure. Of course. I regret more that my partner lacked the fortitude to carry things for us both for a while when I couldn’t. Because I did that for him. Marriage isn’t an equal 50/50 split all the time. Sometimes you have to carry your partner for a while till they get their legs under them. That’s part of the deal. Cheating isn’t.

While I was happy for a reason to get out of that marriage, lots of other marriages are devastated by the list above. You and I were lucky in that the cheating wasn’t devastating to us, so it all resolved relatively quickly and benignly. That’s not true for everyone.

It hasn’t been true for most of the marriages I know of that ended sooner or later because of cheating. The ones that have decided to stay together are plagued by suspicion, mistrust, lessened enthusiasm and affection, and apathy toward sex and each other.

Other things wrong in a marriage don’t seem to have that kind of lingering baggage when they get worked on and worked out.

So clearly, those things aren’t an equivalent injury.

Thanks for letting me make my case and ramble on. I’m obviously very passionate about the issue.