@Disco-Johnson: Usually if I show up with a piece of chalk it gets them in the sack.

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This is even slimier - being a "sugar daddy" to a younger girl. Appalling.

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I think lots of spouses make the decision to keep things as they are.

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Rather than spend the next 25 years of my life wondering if every time my husband is on the computer, or at work, if he's shredding hundreds of thousands on paid sex? Or whether he'll give me a disease? Or that he'll risk my reputation and my children's (the humiliation they must feel!) for a quick poke?

Or the example it sets for those children, that "go ahead and break those vows, or do something illegal, there's no repercussions".

Do you really think your social life is the same? Hardly. you don't get invited to the same parties, you know people are whispering about you, and it's awkward to run into them at the local restaurants. IT's not a blip and things go back to normal. It's a big bang and your life is an awkward, please-let-this-go-away, pas de deux with a partner you no longer trust.

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And there are differing degrees of how much you lose, too. I think that cheating can be a symptom of a bad marriage or it can be the disease itself. I've known couples whose relationships were so awful it's no wonder one of them started cheating. And others whose relationships were so good I envied them, but it happened anyway. And it's not always the husbands who cheat first, so I'm not taking sides here or trying to apologize for men.

But I can see you're a hardliner on this. I'm not arguing it's wrong to be. I think I am too, in theory. In my experience, though, fewer people than you'd imagine are hardliners when it actually happens to them.

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