The other day, I heard about a wife who had caught her husband having an affair. The signs were there and she couldn’t help but follow them, and she found what she had feared. She confronted her husband, but instead of getting the contrite response she expected, her husband was outraged at her. She expected him to beg her forgiveness and ask her to work to save her marriage. Instead, he was furious that she had been spying on him. And he seemed incredibly resentful of her wife’s need for answers.
The wife said, in part: “He acts like I’m the one who did something wrong. I should be the one who’s mad at him, not the other way around. What the hell is wrong with him?” I will talk more about this topic in the next article.
Sometimes a husband’s embarrassment and embarrassment contribute to his resentment after his affair: Please don’t think I’m going to make excuses for cheating husbands. It is not my intention to do so. But I find that sometimes, men act resentful or outraged when caught in this situation because they are trying to lessen the consequences. That they’re not sure what to do and think that if they beat you to the point of anger and indignation, maybe this will lessen or shorten your response.
That’s not to say it’s justified in this answer because it’s not. But sometimes that’s how you’ll react even if you’re not even fully aware of what you’re doing.
Sometimes men get angry or resentful when they are caught having an affair because now they have to deal with what they have been trying to avoid: Another possibility in this scenario is that when a man is caught, he suddenly has to deal with everything he has been putting off right away. In other words, you may have found yourself in a personal crisis and having the affair was your ill-advised way of getting over it. In a sense, an affair is a way to avoid dealing with things.
But, getting found out will often force your hand, so to speak. And suddenly they will have to do a lot of the self-examination and personal work that they have been avoiding in the first place. This makes them feel uncomfortable and frustrated. And sometimes they’ll direct this to whoever it’s convenient for, which is the person in front of them with all the questions they don’t want to answer (and it’s usually you).
This does not excuse their behavior. But understanding it can sometimes give you insight on how to best handle it.
Some tips to deal with when your husband is angry or resentful when he is the one who cheated on you: While these reasons may give you a better understanding of the behavior you’re seeing, they don’t make it correct. It’s not fair when you’re treated like you’re the one who did something wrong, even though it will often make you try to feel that way. Some men will even hint that if their wives had acted differently towards them, they wouldn’t have pursued an affair in the first place.
This is unacceptable and usually gets them nowhere. In my opinion, sometimes you have to address this directly, although sometimes you have to be careful with your tone. If you become equally resentful or accusatory, you will often just add fuel to the fire. But that doesn’t mean you can’t make your feelings and frustrations known.
There’s nothing wrong with saying something to the effect of, “You’re acting like I’m at fault or doing something to deserve your anger or resentment. Treating me like this is unacceptable and only makes a bad situation worse. We’re not getting anywhere by blaming each other or getting angry. I’m open to discussing this, but not when one or we are hurtful.”
Sometimes this kind of candor is necessary, and sometimes distance and a pause in the situation, as well as calling him out on his behavior, can help. Because sometimes, he’s being reactive in the same way that you are and it takes him some time to gain the necessary perspective for remorse to kick in.