He's Cheating on My Daughter

Should Mom tell her to wake up?

By Hara Estroff Marano, published on June 01, 2004

I was married to a man who cheated on me for 12 out of 12 years. I have forever thought that the worst thing I did was stay married that long. We had three daughters and I feared that they would grow up thinking that a marriage should be like mine—dad always gone in the evening with excuses why he could not come to school programs, scouting events, grandma's house.

Now I feel my youngest daughter is putting up with the same thing. Her husband is a manager in charge of salesman, but he “has to” go out Friday nights with his boss, Saturdays on sales calls, Sundays, too. He gives her the ole "do you want me to make more commissions or not" (I was always told, "What do you want me to do, quit my job?!!"). If he were really making those calls, they would be rich.

Cheating was what broke up my son-in-law’s first two marriages. Should I tell my daughter to wake up and pay attention? Should I hire a private eye to get the scoop?

It isn’t your job to call a private eye, to make your daughter see what you want her to see, to make her come to the conclusion she needs a divorce.

What you can do is tell your daughter about your own experience—what you thought was going on in your own marriage, what was really going on, what you went through. And why you regret having stayed in the marriage.

One of the reasons for regret is that it provided a terrible model of what a marriage is for your children. (And one thing is clear: children tend to set up similar patterns in their own lives, because they feel familiar, “right” and comfortable.) You should be talking to your daughter because it is time to unburden yourself about your fraudulent life and the mistaken messages it might have imparted to your children.

If you had direct personal evidence that your son in law were cheating—say you saw him sitting with and kissing another woman—then you would be obligated to gently share that information with your daughter. Gently, because such information is painful and humiliating and shakes the very foundation on which someone’s life is built.

But you have no such information.

The conversation you have with your daughter should not be approached as Something For Her Own Good. If you really want to help her, you will help by example—talking about your own experience woman to woman, friend to friend. You are confiding in her, discussing regrets about your own life. When she is ready to see, she may go back to the conversation and draw her own conclusions. That way, you’re not shoving anything down your daughter’s throat; if you did, anyone who has any backbone would resist.