I Took My Unfaithful Wife Back
Would You Do The Same?
It’s 11 PM on an ordinary Tuesday, but time seems frozen in this moment as he confesses, through held-back tears, that he’s decided to forgive the betrayal of the woman he’s shared the last 12 years of his life with.
“Am I weak?” he asks me, eyes fixed on the floor. The answer isn’t simple, nor should it be.
There are situations in life that confront us with the fragility of our deepest convictions. As a sister, my first impulse would be to defend an inflexible position: “Kick her out! It’s over!” — which was, in fact, exactly what our entire family shouted in unison when we discovered the affair.
Four months of meetings with his best friend, in the house they built together, in the bed where their three children sleep.
The narrative seems pulled from a cheap movie about infidelity, the kind that makes us wrinkle our noses and judge the characters from the comfort of our certainties.
But real life is more complex than any movie. Love, that feeling we glorify so much, can simultaneously be our greatest strength and our deepest weakness.
“You know,” he tells me, breaking the heavy silence that had settled in, “sometimes I think I’m pathetic for taking her back.
