Lysistrata Walks

Response to Mr. Roland Warren, President of the National Fatherhood Initiative, on his Editorial in the Washington Post of Sunday, July 10, 2011, Regarding the Iconization of Women Who Have Affairs with Married Men

Dear Mr. Warren,

I find myself quite agreeing with you initially upon reading your editorial concerning women whose husbands have extra-marital affairs.
Yet since when did the full responsibility for holding a marriage together fall solely upon the wife? Isn't a marriage a partnership? Conspicuously absent in your editorial is the call for the mobilization of husbands. Shame on you: the president of the National Fatherhood Initiative. It is indeed revealing you do not assert that it is as much the man who needs to take responsibility for the sad and ever-increasingly frequent evolution of the "home-wrecker" to pedestal dweller as is the wife. Further, the lack of male solicitation for this cause in your editorial is likely as disturbing to me as is your purported concern with the violated wives' passivity.
Of course a wife should not let go of her husband. After all: she is his wife. Or is she? Once he's committed adultery, the converse stands to reason: when, and not if, she does let him go (to/for another woman, or in some cases, for another man), she chooses to no longer be his wife. This is the choice that she has once the husband has made the choice to violate his wife, and I emphasize, truly, it is her choice. Your logic is distressingly similar to that of radical individuals who would insist a woman who is impregnated by a rapist keep the baby with no regard for the will of the woman, the life of the baby, nor the soul of either being. For the woman, whom in your myopic view of this topic too easily capitulates and throws in the towel on the relationship, the adulterer husband isn't worth the fight, and it takes as much courage sometimes to admit this as it does to try to stay and tough it out. The wife may have low self-esteem, be experiencing emotional, mental, and/or physical crisis, and the husband's behavior only serves to further confirm the negative for her; and in such context, she rightfully wants and needs to choose her battle(s) carefully. If she is, in addition to trying to hold herself together, raising children, and/or is taking care of an elderly parent or parents, for example, why should she mobilize herself for a man whom she can no longer perceive to be a decent husband, let alone partner, if he consciously chooses to expend his affections upon another? If she is alone, then isn't she really alone? Why pretend? Why fight for someone that isn't even really there, isn't emotionally available, while one's heart is still beating, one is capable of loving, and the clock is ticking?
Your call for mobilization of solely women isn't as much a call for wives to fight for someone as a call for them to fight for something: the institution of marriage. And that, sir, with all due respect, is an irresponsible tautology. Until the day that husbands themselves mobilize to support wives, women will continue to walk. Or in the immortal words of D.J. Cee: "It take two to make a thing go right."