Why I Cheated Despite Having a Perfect Marriage

Chapter 1: Cheating is choice

The hardest question my husband asked me was also the simplest.

“Why?”

He sat across from me at our kitchen table, his hands clasped so tightly that his knuckles had turned pale. The room where we had shared countless breakfasts, paid bills, and helped our children with homework suddenly felt unfamiliar.

I had expected anger. I had prepared myself for shouting, accusations, perhaps even the sound of a door slamming behind him. Instead, he asked that one quiet question.

Why?

There was no answer I could give that would make sense to him. There was no hidden problem in our marriage that I could point to. He had not ignored me, mistreated me, or made me feel unwanted. We had not spent years living like strangers beneath the same roof.

The painful truth was that I had betrayed a good man and damaged a good marriage.

We had been together for almost twelve years. During that time, we had built the kind of life neither of us believed we would have when we were younger.

Both of us came from difficult childhoods. We knew what it felt like to grow up without enough safety or stability. Perhaps that was one reason we understood each other so well. We did not have to explain why raised voices made us uncomfortable or why certain memories followed us into adulthood.

We promised that the family we created would feel different.