by Jac Emma John

Created on: June 24, 2009   Last Updated: June 26, 2009

It is always very easy for women to tell our girlfriend, to kick out or dump that cheating husband/partner of hers. We argue: "This is common sense! Why stick with a man that is unfaithful? It's not like he is the one and ONLY man in the entire world." Our reasons go on... We also get really upset when our girlfriend refuse to leave the man. We wonder how a girl can be so shameless as to beg the man to stay and not leave.

I realised that many women use children as a reason to stay. Children undergo lots of stress and trauma when parents are divorcing/separating. We definitely do not want to traumatize our kids, do we?

However, if we are to be really honest, we will have to admit that women go back to husbands who cheat because there seems to be no other alternative at that particular moment. This is especially so for women who have very low self-esteem. Women with low self-esteem blame themselves when the husbands cheat, thinking that there must be something wrong with them that "push" the husbands into committing adultery. Instead of leaving the husbands, they end up asking the husbands for forgiveness and promise to strive to be better wives.

Mind you, a woman with low self-esteem is not necessarily an uneducated woman or earning a low salary. Even CEO's from a big company can have very low self-esteem. This really has more to do with the upbringing of the woman, as well as her family background. For women who grow up with submissive mothers, living with a husband that cheated is accepted as part and parcel of the relationship.

Then, there is this belief that all men cheat. If all men really cheat, why dump one man and go to another who will eventually cheats on you? It is easier to stay with the known and predictable, then venture into the unknown. Staying with the cheating husband is more manageable, he is predictable and he is our comfort zone.

Of course, more often than not, it is 'love' that keeps us from leaving. We love too much that we can't possibly live without our men. In the course of this, we let love blind us, and we let love push us to the background. We are no longer unique individuals but shadows of our men. A shadow can't exist without the "main body", so the women who become the shadows of their men can't exist without the men. The question therefore, should be:" How to prevent women from becoming shadows of their men?"

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