Harman - As I dont have sufficient data infront of me I will refrain from commenting on the specifics of your case. But I do want to say my best wishes are with you and I sincerley hope you will the answers and find the peace you deserve. I do have a generic commment, somewhat on the lines of what Simplegal alluded to, and with an emphasis of the emotional rather than sexual aspect of cheating. A lot of times when women cheat on men, there is tendency for people, both the man affected and others judging to think the man may not have been able to sexually satisfy the woman and therefor she chose to sleep with someone else. This may be true in some cases but not always so. It is also probable for a woman to "cheat" in order to get the emotional comfort that she may not find in the current relationship. It could very well be the woman was sexually satisfied with the man but she chose to have a relationshio of outside of marriage because her partner could not connect to her emotionally. So along comes this other guy who can. Because men tend to think about and desire sex more than women (the stats prove this out) , it is possible the other guy could have asked the woman for sex and she might have obliged, not necessarily becasue she was sexually attracted to him, but because she feared saying no would mean loosing the emotional support she had found. That's how many affairs start. Again, as I said at the begining, this is a generic observation and not specific to any example on this thread. But the key point here is men should not look at it as a sexual shortcoming on their part if the women cheats on them without making an effort to understand all the reasons. And as to why men might cheat, thats a topic for another time ;) As for forgiveness, to each his own. Whether you can forgive or not, besides being a personal choice, is often driven by circumstances. If you are 40 have two kids and your wife or husband cheats on you, some would argue your response might be different than if you were 25, not married, and your girl/boy friend cheated on you. You may need to be more forgiving and tolerant when the stakes are higher. I personally have a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to cheating. I'd argue the best way to forgive some one who cheats is to leave them - but thats just me. There is a quite a bit of litterature on this subject out there that I'd recommend people check out (googling being a great starting point) Finally, this quote from Hellen Keller: " When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us."