Lived experiences of women living with their infidel husbands
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Date
2021
Authors
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Journal ISSN
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Publisher
UMT Lahore
Abstract
With the increasing rate of divorce and more empowerment of women, some women
still prefer to continue marital relationship after disclosure of their husbands’
infidelity, even though such relationships are responsible for considerable distress.
Therefore, the current study carried on with the objective of exploring the reasons
behind women’s decision of marriage continuation after disclosure of husbands’
infidelity, and the ways through which they were managing to survive in such a
marital relationship. Purposive sampling technique was used to select the five women
who were living with their infidel husbands. Semi-structured interviews were used for
data collection. Through Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), five
superordinate themes were emerged named external factors, personal factors, personal
strength, surpassing the betrayal, and relational strategies. The findings indicated the
major role of external factors especially the “influence of children” responsible for
marriage continuation as compared to personal factors. Furthermore, it was revealed
that women tried their best to overcome the interpersonal trauma of being betrayed
and found different ways to protect their marital relationships. The findings would be
helpful to the family therapists to understand the couples’ problem coming in session
with the issue of infidelity.