After a fashion, I suppose you could say that I only stayed because of the kids, although that's not entirely true.
When my wife and I got together, I was very clear with her that I did not want to be involved with someone who was involved with somebody else, and that I had absolutely no tolerance for cheating, no tolerance whatsoever. This conversation arose because I had had multiple married women approach me in the previous couple of years, two of them had approached me in just the six months before I met my wife.
Part of the conversation, she had just told me that she had something she "needed to tell me" and she was quite nervous about it, and I was expecting the bomb to drop and hear "I'm married" and we had just had sex for the first time, I had checked her fingers for rings, I had been in her apartment, and I hadn't seen any evidence that she was married, but one of the previous married women also had no evidence that she was married.
I told her at the time that if there was any cheating, I was out, that I wouldn't tolerate it, wouldn't be in a relationship with someone who was cheating on me or cheating with me. She said she felt the same way, this was very clear, there was no question about our positions.
However, she cheated on me after we had four children, dogs, pets, house, bills, tons of responsibility, and her oldest child was only eight years old.
No children = I would've walked out of there and that relationship with the way I was being treated without any hesitation. I didn't know the full extent of things for nine more years, but no way in hell would I have allowed what was going on at the time, if I did not have children who relied on me.
So regardless of who we are, unless we are entirely self-centered, having children drastically changes our decision-making when these things happen. I'm not saying that is right or wrong, it's just true for most of us. I would say our "freedom of action" is constrained by the very fact that we have children who depend upon us.
The other side of this is that I actually loved my wife, I would never treat her the way she treated me, and when the full extent of the cheating became known, it was hard to reconcile with the person that I knew.
I suppose most of us would put up with a lot of shit for a period of time from somebody that we really love, the more we love them, or the more codependent we are, the longer we would put up with that shit, but at some point, we all reach our limit.
The reality is that when she was cheating on me, I was in a no-win situation, and when she really confessed, I was in a no-win situation again, where there was just no really good answer to anything except to try to get through the situation and figure out what to do overtime, over years, and try to make things better. Partly that's driven by me. My general attitude in life is take what I have, try to make the best of it, without compromising my principles. I try to avoid making hasty decisions.
I suppose you could say that when I'm served a "shit sandwich" I eat it slowly, hoping that a very good dessert is served before I fill up with it.
It has now been 23 years since my wife's affair, my kids have all grown up, in the 12 years since her confession, things have been up and down, I never really got that really great dessert, I've never really finished eating the shit sandwich either.