A reader posed the question, ‘What happens when cheaters marry?’ Since I don’t have a crystal ball or read the future, I can’t say for sue what will happen will specific couples. What I can do is make some observations about what statistics show.
First, most cheaters don’t view their lovers as suitable spouses. A recent Huffington Post survey found this number as high as 85%. (Although I don’t trust Huffington Post, it gives you a place to start). That means although your spouse is cheating, the odds are that they want to stay with you and not marry their lover, nor do they view their lover (or squeeze) as suitable for marriage.
So if you’re the lover just waiting for your opportunity of marrying someone, the odds are against you that they will.
In terms of their marriage being happy or surviving, the odds are against it. If it is a second marriage, the odds of success are 43%. If it is their third marriage, the odds drop to 27% (according to a Psychology Today study). If you are a person who plays the odds, marrying your lover is not in your favor.
To make things work, you’ll have to beat odds that are stacked against you. I wouldn’t want to fly on a plane with a 43% chance of success, much less one that only has a 27% chance of a safe flight. To be successful in marriage as a cheater, you will have to take BIG risks. I know that cheating itself involves taking risks, but these risks are larger and bigger.
I can tell you that when the cheater marries the lover, they take all their baggage with them. That baggage includes all their bad habits, insecurities, and inadequacies.
As a general rule, people continue making the same mistake over and over. They’ll likely make the same mistakes in the relationship with the lover, that they made with you.
You already know about the mistakes, the lover has yet to find out.
The cheater, on marrying doesn’t consider that the lover will change. The dynamics of the relationship changes when people marry. When cheaters marry, you start a marriage knowing that the person you married violated their previous marriage vows.
Starting a relationship with built-in insecurities makes it a ticking time bomb. Both parties start off being insecure about the relationship at some level. It is hard to have a solid foundation when you know that it started off by breaking their oaths from a previous marriage.
I often wonder what cheaters were thinking when they go into their marriage vows with a known promise-breaker. It is inviting trouble. It is hard to take two broken, dysfunctional people and make a healthy, functional marriage with them. When the family is blended, the forces working against the newlyweds is exponentially greater.
When cheaters marry, they also rarely consider that their sex life will change. The exciting sex of an affair does not continue into the marriage.
When a lover is seeking a spouse they are willing to be more adventurous. That adventurous side often goes away once they are married. It is not possible to maintain the adrenaline rush they had during the affair into the marriage, unless there is crisis after crisis after crisis.
The outlook for a cheater’s marriage is dubious at best.
We didn’t even begin looking at the financial statistics of marrying your lover, or the trust issues, or the family conflicts, or the damage to your reputation and many others.
Your safest bet is working things out with your spouse. The Affair Recovery Workshop provides valuable skills and interventions that help turn your marriage around.
Best Regards,
Jeff
