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Why women go back or never leave the husband who cheats is a mystery to those who don't know how it feels to be betrayed that way. Still, chances are that if you are married, you'll be cheated on some day. It's an ironic cruelty that too often goes with commitment. Men are not inherently monogamous and women intuitively understand the man who wants to have it both ways. It's the dream of what marriage should be that makes us stay, and not the reality, I'm afraid.

"I made a mistake," he'll say.

Forgiveness can be a strange thing. Women forgive too easily but we never forget anything. The cheater messed up our dream and that's an unforgivable thing. We stay with what remains of our dream, but it's never the same. The dream has changed.

When it happened to me, I had to rewrite my history. The vision of my husband with someone else wasn't pretty and the vision I could only see in my mind haunted me. I thought I knew everything about him and it was hard to admit that after all those years, I knew nothing of how my like was invisibly being damaged.

"She meant nothing to me."

To me it seemed that she had to mean something. I knew and believed that she had a lot to do with me, but I needed to stay married to him as a way to defend myself from the woman he cheated with. Staying with him was my way to say, "I win." Still, the victory was bitter-sweet and arrived at my expense. If men cheat once, they'll cheat again. History tends to repeat itself again and again, when it comes to cheating men.

"I already said I'm sorry, so why can't you get over it?"

I stayed as a way to punish him, again and again and again. After a while, it got too exhausting to seek revenge, so our marriage came to an end. It was ironic to me that he was shocked and surprised that I divorced him. After all, he'd apologize, hadn't he? I suppose the man didn't understand how much the dream meant to me.

Infidelity is like a homicide. It kills the blind faith we need to hold onto our dream. How sad it seemed to me that our dreams were completely erased by, "a mistake." Today I see she never meant anything to him, but we could never get past what, "she," represents. The mistake he made with someone who meant nothing to him, destroyed what might have been.

It's true that some women do stay with a husband who cheats. They move on and try to forgive what they will never forget, but there are just some things that can never be replaced. The dream has changed and been rearranged, so if a woman chooses to stay with

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