Have you ever found about about your SO's infidelity and pretended you didn't?

Never had to deal ith that godawful problem, but I certainly would not act as if I didn’t know. I wouldn’t be able to.

I guess I wouldn’t confront them if the love was dead and I just didn’t care anymore.

nope I don’t believe in cheating in any form so I confront the person and then walk away. Its just not my style to stay with someone who obviously doesn’t think I am enough for them.

I think that most people stay in unfaithful relationships without confrontation for a few main reasons:

1. Finances (You cannot walk away if you have nowhere to go and all of your finances are entangled and not worth the mess it would create to disentangle them.)
2. You are at a point where a passionate relationship with your S.O. isn’t where you are. You breathe a sigh of relief perhaps. Basically, someone is taking care of their physical needs and you don’t have to be bothered. (They weren’t that great in the Serta anyway.)
3. You are tired of all drama (if he is a serial cheater) and just give up. You settle into an uneasy/easy acceptance.
4. You have children and you don’t want to break the family up.
5. You are having a relationship with someone outside the marriage/primary relationship yourself.
6. You have a mother or father who also looked the other way and feel that if your parents did it, you can too. (A sense of nobility and strength of character, so to speak…yes, I know…ridiculous to a lot of people…but not in some cultures.)

You cannot ever judge a person for staying in a relationship with someone who cheats. There are a lot of other deeper psychological reasons…one of those being that the one being cheated on….feels that’s all they deserve and decide to stay as a sort of self-punishment. I’ve known people (both women and men, mind you) who stay because the lifestyle they have is comfortable and it is better to deal with a cheating spouse (which is known) than to go back out into the great unknown and start over again.

There is not one easy answer….except that to have a cheating spouse….is hell on earth…no one ever really wins.

(I myself could not leave things alone….without confrontation. Not my style. But I have known those who have let things stand as they are and said nothing to their partners. And I must say, often the sense of underlying heartful sorrow becomes etched onto their faces.)

There is no circumstance that would cause me to look away from a blatent trust violation in any type of relationship.

I’ve dropped friends for not being able to take responsibility for relatively modest inconsiderations.

If you want to live in truth, and I do, there is no way I would turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to unsavory character flaws.

I haven’t had that happen to me, but I don’t see anything wrong with working past infidelity to make a relationship work.
However, I think ignoring it would be bad. You should definitely communicate, you have to get things out on the table and find out what it will take to strengthen your relationship.

I have never been in this situation, but I definitely agree we can’t judge others who make decisions we find hard to understand. Also, it’s like asking what would you do if you knew you were going to die tomorrow or something else that’s so hard to imagine – it’s really hard to say what you would not do or would do unless you were in that specific situation. I would imagine there may be some spouses who have a lifestyle that they would not come near to affording without the offending partner, so that might help them to just look the other way. That might be one circumstance that might make someone just deal with it. There are probably people who deal with it because their facade of a home life is so happy and they may be staying together for the sake of the kids.

How about this? They found out about the infidelity or were even told about it, and yet they still chose to be with their spouse?

I think that at a certain point, people have too much invested in a relationship, even if there are no kids, to let it fall apart. If you are older, you may feel it is too late to ever find someone again, and it is preferable to live with someone you know well who is spending a lot of “quality” time with someone else, than to divorce them and be alone in a house you can’t afford the payments on.

Then again, a lot of guys, when they find out, will threaten their wife that if they divorce, the husband will fight the wife tooth and nail for as much as they can keep.

Perhaps they think that eventually the affair will blow over and the spouse will come back.

It’s hard to confront someone, especially someone you’ve got so much invested in. That’s what gets marriages in trouble in the first place. People are afraid to talk to each other. Maybe they believe their partner will leave if they confront them. Indeed, a lot of people will not want to deal with sorting something out. It’s a lot easier to leave with no fight.

The unexamined life is not worth living.
Sad that so many choose to live already dead lives, devoid of truth, courage and passion.