When I was separated from my cheater, I made a list. It is humiliating looking back on it.
I wrote up a list of reasons for why I wanted to stay married to her (even though, I knew she was a cheater). As you might have guessed, she responded to it with contempt.
In part, I blame my therapists and Christian environment for thinking this was a good idea.
I had internalize a message that I needed to “win her back.” This is the opposite of what I see is the godly case when your wife is an adulteress (see Deut. 22:22, Mt 1: 19, Mt 19:9, etc.) Rather, she needed to demonstrate repentance from her cheating, lying ways for the marriage to survive.
Now, I do think lists can be helpful.
Listing what we lost is helpful in the grieving process. Listing the wrongs is necessary in the forgiveness journey as we cannot forgive and let go of what we can’t even acknowledge to ourselves was wrong.
Lists aren’t the problem.
The problem is writing a list to desperately hold onto a Cheater who needs the strong message of “Repent and Turn!” They don’t need a list telling them how “wonderful” they are. Their prideful entitlement is what led to this situation, after all.
I wrote a note to my cheater, before he left that I would always love him, and was sorry for anything I did.
I regret that so much. But to be fair, I was still confused, broken, still had hopes he would snap back into the person I knew. I had no idea at that point that we could never go back to what we had because what we had was a lie, he was a poser and I just bought into it.