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Wednesday, January 19. 2011

Should she confess?

Schniederman: Should she confess to her husband?


What's your opinion?

Posted by Bird Dog in The Culture, "Culture," Pop Culture and Recreation at 16:31 | Comments (16) | Trackbacks (0)

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No. She should confess to her priest or minister. And not as a momentary aside after the service. Make an appointment and go see him or her so that he or she has time to concentrate and focus on the issue. If she's not a church-goer, she should go to some kind of professional - while finding a way to not have her husband notice the expense.

Give the guy a break. What she's looking to do is to make her problem her husband's problem. She feels better. He feels like $hit. So, no. Be a big girl, suck it up deal with your own sins yourself and forgive yourself. People make mistakes all the time. People do wrong things all the time. Resolve to be a better person, and then do it.
#1 RonF on 2011-01-19 17:20 (Reply)
Confess to a husband??? Never! Even if I were caught in bed with another man, I would deny, deny, deny. No man or woman should confess a blasted thing. That is why priests were invented.
#2 Cilla Mitchell, Galveston Texas (Link) on 2011-01-19 17:21 (Reply)
Making it unanimous (so far anyway), I agree. She should not tell him. My wife, who is a very wise woman, told me that if I should ever cheat on her that I am not to tell her. That is easy for me because I would never do that. As it turns out, she divorced her first husband because of infidelity. I don't know if that was part of the reason she told me that or not, but I think it is great advise as telling your priest or minister or a VERY trusted friend (but that is the last choice as anything could happen with that friendship).
#3 mudbug on 2011-01-19 17:46 (Reply)
RonF ... You called it exactly right when you said, "What she's looking to do is to make her problem her husband's problem. She feels better. He feels like $hit." Part of being a grown-up is to deal with your own sins yourself, and not darken your spouse's world by burdening him/her with your mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes. Everybody. So suck it up, dearie, and straighten yourself out.

Marianne
#4 Marianne Matthews on 2011-01-19 18:02 (Reply)
I think the husband needs and deserves to know who he's having sex with!
#5 Ratso on 2011-01-19 18:05 (Reply)
Don't tell the husband, or a best friend, until discussing it with a professional. Right now it's her issue and should she tell the husband or friend they'll have an issue they didn't have before but it will be an entirely different issue for them than the one she's got.
#6 Retread on 2011-01-19 18:14 (Reply)
How much do you want to bet that the husband in the first case already knows? Spouses usually do from my experience with friends who have strayed from the marriage - or at least suspect it. Having said that, I'm definitely on the side of keeping your own counsel in this case and get some professional confessors involved to salve the wounds.

The problem, of course, is will she do it again. Let's face it - the forbidden, once surrendered to, is enticing - the chances of her straying again are fairly high.

Interesting question. Good one.
#7 Tom Francis on 2011-01-19 18:32 (Reply)
An emphatic NO! in both cases. I certainly wouldn't want to be the recipient of said confessions. It would mess me up for quite awhile. "Ignorance is bliss," definitely.

Now, if there was continued sneaking around and lying, too much to ignore and probably known about, at least on a subconscious level, then... hmmm, not sure. I'd prefer repentance (on her own), and not "knowing," I still think.
#8 Big___Al on 2011-01-19 19:03 (Reply)
Why do you ask?
#9 marv on 2011-01-19 19:27 (Reply)
We all have stuff we have swept under the rug. Unless it is alive and moves around, let it be. Life is a struggle enough without watching the rearview mirror all the time. Sleeping dogs don't need to bark.

Have I mixed enough Minotaurs?
#10 Claritas on 2011-01-19 20:06 (Reply)
So she cheats on her husband, breaking the trust in their relation, then feels guilty but apparently is afraid of the consequences if she tells him she did so, meaning she questions his love for her as well.

Sounds to me like she doesn't think she's in a marriage that can survive, is living on borrowed time, and wants to milk it for as long as possible before getting out of it with a big divorce settlement.

Telling her husband she's having an affair might give him and his lawyers enough reason to deny her that settlement, and a judge may well agree.
#11 J.T. Wenting on 2011-01-20 00:54 (Reply)
What does it mean to be a wife or husband? It means putting the other person first 80% of the time in order to have a 50/50 marriage. As for woman #1, it's a bit late for her to worry about her guilt or her husband's feelings. The time to tell him that was before she took their relationship out back behind the shed to put a bullet in its skull. That she can't even contemplate what this confession will do to her husband but she is only worried about how it affects herself tells me that she probably isn't that great of a wife anyhow. She should tell him, and give the poor slob an opportunity to run away from her if he's smart. That's not the pattern in these things though; she'll tell him, he'll leave, and then she'll take the house and a nice support check going forward. I hope for his sake he doesn't have a professional license, because Trampy McTramppants now owns half of that, and it will be nice when she's looking to entertain her new boyfriend in their old house. Well played, Jezebel...

As for woman #2, she needs to get over herself and get a new job. Crushes happen. Doesn't have to do with the boss being a better man. It has to do with hormones and being close to somebody who's not terribly unattractive. I've gone through this with women I'm colleagues with, and although I could feel the heat I absolutely don't let myself even think about acting on the urge. I find that if you ride it out and deny your lower half the opportunity to be the master of your upper half, the object of your passing affection inevitably reveals a size 13 set of clay feet - a realization that is a sine qua non of true love in a committed relationship but which generally kills lust, which is an emotion based largely on wishes rather than reality. Hopefully, the discovery of clay feet occurs while the feet are sticking out from under the desk, and not from under the bedsheets. Wife #2 needs to be told to keep her damn pants on, polish her resume, get a new job and think about England for a while.
#12 Jim on 2011-01-20 05:36 (Reply)
Wife #1 needs to come clean with total candor. Her husband has made a vow to take her as his exclusive sexual partner for life, forsaking every other woman on the planet for as long as she lives. In exchange for that vow he has received a complementary vow which has been broken.

She is now relying on his ignorance of the facts to maintain her position in life. The technical term for a person who counts on the ignorance of others is "enemy."

Wife #2 needs to leave her current job, informing her boss that it is for personal reasons that she is not at liberty to discuss.
#13 John on 2011-01-20 08:06 (Reply)
My cousin was happily married with two young children. One day, she developed lesions on her genitals which turned out to be herpes. Her husband admitted to having several girlfriends. She was furious and divorced him. If he had told her what he was up to, she may have been able to avoid contacting this painful, incurable venereal disease.
#14 Reginald Manboobs on 2011-01-20 09:12 (Reply)
Confess and and move on, slut.

Don't ya love her madly...
#15 Leag on 2011-01-20 11:27 (Reply)
Don't even think about confessing, unless it fills a spiritual need big enough to make it worth what will happen afterward.

If hubby is so insecure that he cares about "infidelity", it's his problem and not one that you can cure. So forget about it.
#16 John David Galt on 2011-01-24 18:46 (Reply)

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