My opinion is to ignore it since she is a great mother. Unfortunately, I was told that a lot of American women won’t cook, they won’t clean and they are lousy mothers. Some, for example, allow their teenagers to grow Mary Jane in the back yard. Actually, I did see this particular case.
No. There are three reasons that canon law gives to excuse a spouse from continuing the common conjugal life in a valid marriage: Infidelity, danger to the spouse or the children, or a level of conflict so high that the difficulty of maintaining peace in the home is beyond the spouse’s capacity.
Infidelity is a grave offense against your spouse. You don’t make it up with great meals, a clean home, or lots of money. More to the point, if you are cheating on your children’s other parent, you are not a “great parent.” Maybe you are excellent in a lot of ways, but to cheat on a child’s other parent is to cheat on the child. It is a grave betrayal of trust, and not just the trust of one person.
Having said that, a person who has fallen into infidelity can become like an alcoholic or a drug addict. They can become psychologically enslaved. That doesn’t mitigate the harm they do, but it does mitigate their power to control themselves without outside support.
This wife would appear to have a “friend” who is supporting her in her infidelity. Why, I cannot even guess. It is not unlikely that the “friend” is unfaithful herself or that she has been taken in by the rationalizations of the cheating couple that make the innocent spouse out to be the villain, never minding all the appropriate ways there are to cope with the stress of marital difficulties. If this “friend” is a Catholic, I would go to her directly and tell her I need her help in saving my marriage. I would not make accusations, but I would tell her I know my spouse confides in her in ways she does not confide in me. I’d tell her I hope she is strongly encouraging my spouse to be faithful, rather than encouraging her to do things that might leave her vulnerable to the temptation to cheat. The idea is to enlist this friend as a friend of your marriage, not to have her hating your guts when you walk away! Who knows? She may be able to frankly tell you things you need to hear that your wife isn’t telling you, such as the way your wife thinks you are failing. It is hard to hear, but it would help to know it and act on it. If this friend has been fed the lie that you are self-centered and only care about your career only to find that you love your wife and want to make her happy, that could be a shock to her that could change the way she acts in this whole situation.
Based on people I know, I’d say the most likely way out are these:
a) get help to strengthen the relationship between the two spouses, so they each see the other as being “on their side.” You don’t build love and trust by a “you against me” mindset or by setting up legalistic quid pro quo and scorekeeping ways of living the common conjugal life. The goal is to avoid looking at marriage as 50/50 or some sort of a business arrangement in order to embrace it as a single life lived by two people. Very often, this requires seeing to the individual emotional difficulties each is going through; that often takes outside help when the marriage hits the rocks.
b) impress upon both parties how awful divorce would be–not just how hard on the children, but how hard on each of the spouses, how expensive, how stressful, how upsetting. It is not a “freedom,” as our fantasies sometimes suggest. It sets up a cold chasm where true happiness would have unity and love. It also increases the risk that the children will have any number of psychological difficulties, including that they will be unable to maintain a lifetime marriage of their own. It also increases the chances of psychological harm and even harm to the health and longevity of the spouses.
I’d also say that it is prudent to be ready as a parent to defend parental rights in case your spouse decides unilaterally on a divorce or if a divorce becomes necessary to justly divide assets when the spouse becomes recalcitrant in infidelity. When a “great mother” decides she wants to divorce you, you had better get your ducks in a row as soon as you see it could be coming, or you could live to see some other man living in your house and parenting your children, largely without you.
Emerging from an infidelity with a stronger marriage does happen,
but not just by stopping the infidelity!! It is not a mere willingness to “move on” that improves a marriage! No! It is the work that the desire to rebuild spurs the couple to do for each other that improves the marriage. Get on with that work. No matter what you do, you first ought to be doing everything you possibly can to make your wife feel lucky to be married to you in every way. If you want to be secure in your marriage again, aim for making it a very high priority to attend to each other, be grateful for each other, enjoy each other, rejoice in each other. Aim a lot higher than “no more hanky panky.” Aim that low, and you will lose.
I guess, from my perspective, she’s a rational adult and if she were to choose infidelity I wouldn’t lay the blame squarely on him.